Month: September 2021

Australia’s corporate sector has finally had enough of the ongoing lockdowns that have left the country’s economy hobbled and its people cut off from the rest of the world for months.

Increasingly frustrated by a slow vaccine rollout and the ongoing lockdowns, the leaders of many of Australia’s biggest companies, including BHP, Macquarie and Qantas have signed a letter demanding that the government acknowledge it’s time to “learn to live with the virus,” as many other countries have done, since “COVIDZero” has finally been exposed as an impossible dream.

In the letter – which was reported on by the FT – the signatories allege that Australia is making “big mistakes” in failing to reopen to the world. By making the lockdowns so severe (and so unceasingly long), the Australian government is putting politics before the well-being of the Australian people ahead of the federal elections that must be held by the end of May – when the Senate’s present term is slated to expire.

The companies that signed the letter “…employ almost one million Australians” and warned that lockdowns were having “long-lasting” effects on the economy. However, this shouldn’t be news to Australia’s political elite: Economists at Australia’s central bank, the RBA, already lowered their growth projections after a stronger-than-expected Q2 GDP print.

But all the incremental data seen so far suggests that Q3 could be a disaster – well that, coupled with the intensifying economic pressure from Beijing, which is trying to win a geopolitical stare-down contest with the Australian government by blocking a growing number of imports.

As for Australia’s infamous “drawbridge” border policy, the letter’s signatories insisted that the decision to close Australia’s borders was a colossal mistake. 

“The borders should have never been closed,” Graham Turner, chief executive of travel company Flight Centre, told the Financial Times. “We’re making some very big mistakes here.”

“It’s time for corporate Australia to turn its disquiet and rumblings into a roar,” said Greg O’Neill, the chief executive of Melbourne fund manager La Trobe Financial, one of the signatories to the open letter sent by the Business Council of Australia. “It is time for courage and honesty. Not politics.”

Australian COVID cases have finally plateaued…

…Yet, the country still has among the lowest vaccination rates in the developed world. Only 41.4% of the population is fully inoculated — well behind the UK (66.7%) and Canada (70.4%) and below the US, where 54.7% are inoculated.

In the letter, the Business Council of Australia also warned about a quiet “mental health crisis” plaguing the country, a result of the lockdowns and other anti-COVID measures – “some of the impacts of current lockdowns are hidden, and the effects will be long lasting.”

Corporate behemoths aren’t the only ones struggling with Australia’s COVID rules. Groups representing small businesses have made similar complaints. Alexi Boyd, CEO of the Council of Small Business Organizations, said the refusal to reopen internal and external borders has hampered the country’s economic recovery.

Anti-lockdown protests have flared in Melbourne in recent weeks, leading to hundreds of arrests and chaos like protesters shutting down a major highway. The government in Victoria tried shutting down construction sites in the area after workers participated in the protests. Unsurprisingly, this only made demonstrators angrier. 

In recent weeks, the Aussie government has shown some acknowledgement that they might have chosen the wrong course. But with his conservative Liberal Party trailing the Labor opposition in the polls, PM Scott Morrison is under a lot of pressure to stay the course and pray that the latest delta-driven wave finally subsides.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

Watch it slip
Watch it slide
I bet $10 on the losing horse
Feel the grip
Of my bride
Watch me do it again

Where’s my dinner?!

– Short Lip Fuser, Rocket from the Crypt

Empty Stomachs

Evergrande’s going down.  And it’s taking the life savings of countless good people down with it.

But while Evergrande’s going down.  Food prices are going up.  Moreover, they’re going up a lot.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food prices were up nearly 33 percent year over year in August.  Vegetable oil, grains, and meat all cost more.  Unfortunately, rising food prices – and empty stomachs – often presage social chaos and revolution.

If you recall, a decade ago food inflation triggered the Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.  And food shortages were commonplace in Communist Romania in the 1980s.  That was before the country’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown, tried by a kangaroo court, lined up against a wall, and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day in 1989.

Rare is the revolution ignited by a populace with a full stomach.  Historically, surges against an oppressive regime are sparked by a steep and extended rise in food prices.

Leading up to the French Revolution, for example, famines were frequent.  In one instance, when Louis XVI’s clueless wife, Marie Antoinette, learned the peasants had no bread, she remarked, “let them eat cake.”

What followed were the Flour War riots.  Not long after that, Louis XVI’s head rolled off the guillotine chopping block.  Then things really got bad.

The Reign of Terror, led by the woke Jacobins, reigned over the land.  And the assignat currency, backed by land seized from the Catholic Church, blew up in a destructive episode of hyperinflation.  Before it was over Napoleon had channeled the discontent of a generation into a damaging misadventure to invade all of Europe.

If only there had been a little more bread to go around.

“I Don’t Eat Bread”

When adjusted for inflation and annualized, the cost of food is higher than nearly anytime in the past six decades, according to FAO data.  Alastair Smith, senior teaching fellow in global sustainable development at Warwick University in the United Kingdom, recently noted:

“Food is more expensive today than it has been for the vast majority of modern recorded history.”

Governments officials from Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Romania, India, Turkey, Russia, and many more, are working overtime to somehow combat the menace of rising food prices.  Price controls, export taxes, fines, subsidies, trade restrictions…you name it.

With a little luck, these efforts will support lower prices in the short-term.  But these failed policies always make things worse in the long-term.  When government officials artificially set the price of something below what it costs to produce they guarantee that supply will disappear.

The Prime Minister of Romania, Florin Citu, is taking a more pragmatic approach.  He’s determined to avoid Ceausescu fate.  Thus, he wants to reduce his country’s dependence on imported processed foods.  He thinks this will reduce costs and narrow the trade deficit.

We wish him well.  When recently asked about the rising cost of a loaf of bread, he remarked: “I don’t eat bread.”

Does he eat cake?

Yet it’s not just developing countries that are feeling the pinch…

In the United Kingdom, for example, rising natural gas prices are threatening the food supply.  Several fertilizer plants in the UK have had to suspend operations because of soaring natural gas prices.  And now carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fertilizer production, is in short supply.

Carbon dioxide, if you didn’t know, is used to stun chickens and pigs before slaughter, and for packaging and dry ice to keep meats frozen during delivery.  Without carbon dioxide, the food supply chain breaks.  Already, deliveries of frozen food to customers have been halted.

Who would have thought that carbon dioxide, something world improvers consider a poisonous greenhouse gas, was so valuable?

President Biden’s New Plan to Tackle Rising Food Prices

Here in the USA rising food prices have Whitehouse staffers working overtime too.  Their primary purpose at this point is to assign blame to someone else.

Government lockdowns and the resulting supply chain breaks and labor shortages are mysteriously overlooked as causes of rising food prices.  The creation of upwards of $4 trillion in printing press money is largely ignored…other than noting that government stimulus kept per capita demand for meat steady.

No, in the eyes of Whitehouse staffers the government can do no wrong.  Instead, these scholarly elites have come up with a real boogeyman for people to rail against.  In their very own Whitehouse blog – chock-full of bar charts, line graphs, and infographics – their culprit is explicitly identified.

According to President Biden’s underlings, rising food prices in America are the direct result of “pandemic profiteering” by the four large meat processing companies.  Here’s their rationale:

“Four large conglomerates overwhelmingly control meat supply chains, driving down earnings for farmers while driving up prices for consumers.  The meatpacking industry buys cattle, hogs, and chickens from farmers and ranchers, processes it, and then sells beef, pork, and poultry on to retailers like grocery stores.  The industry is highly consolidated, and serves as a key choke point in the supply chain.

“That consolidation gives these middlemen the power to squeeze both consumers and farmers and ranchers.  There’s a long history of these giant meat processors making more and more, while families pay more at the grocery store and farmers and ranchers earn less for their products.  Absent this corporate consolidation, prices would be lower for consumers and fairer for farmers and ranchers.”

To be clear, we have little inside knowledge of the meat processing industry.  From what we can tell it’s likely just as corrupt and crooked as the banking industry, the auto industry, the oil industry, the retail industry, the healthcare industry, the high-tech industry, the mining industry, the entertainment industry, and every other industry out there.

Quite frankly, there’s no industry left that hasn’t been spoiled and besmirched by one fraud or another.  But no industry is more crooked than the U.S. government.  And like most policy reports outlining the case for ramping up government intervention, the argument is incomplete.

Do the authors know why the meat processing industry consolidated in the first place?  Do the authors really know that absent consolidation prices would be lower for consumers?

In truth, they care little about the answer to these questions.  What they care about is that consolidation in the meat processing industry makes a good story for why food prices are rising.  What’s more, this story provides justification for the government to spend gobs of money that isn’t theirs for the noble purpose of making the world a more comfortable and agreeable place.

Per the Whitehouse blog:

“As we restart the world’s largest economy and make great strides in the economic recovery, the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to restarting right for the American people—consumers and producers alike—by transforming the food system.  This is a pivotal moment of opportunity to build back a better food system that is fair, competitive, distributed, and resilient.”

Hence, President Biden proposes to tackle the meat processing industry head on.  He plans to funnel $1.4 billion in COVID-19 pandemic stimulus money to small meat producers and workers.  He promises to “crack down on illegal price fixing.”  He’s also formed a new White House Competition Council to “make the food system fairer and more equitable.”

Without question, anyone with half their marbles already knows how this story ends…

Government intervention discourages production, inflates prices, and, if pushed far enough, leads to empty shelves at the supermarket.  After that, it leads to empty stomachs…and the social chaos that follows.

America’s working-poor, or put another way – whatever is left of the middle class – continue to get screwed by the Federal Reserve and their easy-money policies that have inflated both home prices and rents to unaffordable levels. 

For the average person, saving 10% of monthly income towards a 20% down payment on a median-priced US home has jumped one year, from seven before the virus pandemic to now eight, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from Tomo, a real estate startup.

The Fed buying $40 billion per month in MBS has kept mortgage rates pinned at ultra-low levels; and combined with extremely tight housing inventory, this was the perfect trigger to spark bidding wars that pushed home values across the country to record high levels. 

Renters who had hopes of living the American dream by owning a home have become shocked by the surge in home prices over the last year…

Skylar Olsen, the principal economist at Tomo, said the people who save for a down payment “are the people who can. Folks who have a lot of rent burdens tend to save nothing, and there’s always a fairly sizable share of the population who have a pretty substantial rent burden.” 

Tomo data showed the highest years-to-save on a per metro basis. The highest was Los Angeles at 19.2, San Francisco at 17.9, and San Jose at 18.2. In Seattle and New York, it takes about 12.3 years and 11.9 years, respectively, for the average person to save for a down payment.

Even then, waiting more than a decade indicates prices will continue to go higher unless the Fed reverses course on easy monetary policy. 

Recent data from the National Association of Realtors shows first-time buyers’ share of existing- home purchases declined to 29% last month. 

At some point, people will figure out The Fed is the root cause of the housing mania, and most importantly, why they can no longer afford a home and are stuck in ‘renter nation’ where they can hardly build any savings.

As Ron Paul recently noted, this is the biggest lie of all – while The Fed was taking extraordinary efforts to ‘stimulate’ the economy, the unelected officials in the Marriner Eccles Building enabled the impoverishment of ordinary Americans, enrichment of the elites, and facilitated unprecedented government debt and deficits.

Authored by Andrea Widburg via American Thinker (emphasis ours),

Whether one agrees with David French or not, he is a bright man.  When he writes about alternative approaches to treating criminals, given the unprecedented rise in crime over the last year, perhaps it’s worth paying attention.  Or perhaps it’s not.  A brilliant Twitter thread exposes facts that French conveniently ignores.  More than that, the thread reveals that soft-headed criminal justice reform is incredibly cruel to the communities most affected by crime.

After a wordy introduction meant to prove his woke bona fides, French gets to the point: there’s been a 29% increase in crime over the last year.  French skips completely over the “why” of this increase (hint: “defund the police”) because he wants to discuss a more Sunday sermon point, which is that the system has been riven in the past with injustice, and we now have the opportunity to change that.

French accurately says there is no justice when criminals or police get away with violating the law.  Under-policing is also a form of injustice, he says, although how he manages to say this and then takes eight paragraphs before mentioning the defund the police movement is beyond me.

That’s just a warm-up, though. The real point French wants to make is that “vengeance is unjust” and that “proportionality is an absolutely indispensable element of justice.”  May I quote my kids from their teenage years here?  “Well, duh.”

And that’s when French falls into the fallacies every leftist does, which is to point to the fact that lots of people in America are imprisoned for having committed crimes.  And of course, he castigates Three Strikes laws, which are easy targets (although I’m betting a lot of people in Chicago who are preyed upon by people revolving through prison doors would love a little Three Strikes justice, or any justice, for that matter).

And then it’s all about over-incarceration, and the 2021 Brennan Center for Justice study, and, of course, “the vast racial disparities in both incarceration and sentencing.”

But you know what?  According to Delano Squires, who, like French’s adopted daughter, is Black, that’s a gross over-simplification that leads to policies that harm people in those neighborhoods most affected by crime.  Let me turn this post over to him and his powerful, fact-based, very polite tweets:

As is often the case in this area, David never says WHY people in this country are incarcerated. Before I do that, it is helpful to know what the ecosystem of confinement looks like. There are about 630K ppl in local jails.

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) September 26, 2021

The largest part of the confinement ecosystem is the state prison system. This is where over 1.2M people are incarcerated. If you let “criminal justice” reformers tell it, you’d think most are there for low-level nonviolent drug crimes. But that is simply untrue.

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) September 26, 2021

And lest you think there is some hidden racial disparity that explains this, please note that there is a higher % of whites (16%) in prison for drugs than blacks (13%). The unfortunate fact is that violent offenses are what drive the racial disparity in incarceration.

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) September 26, 2021

All of the available data (CDC, FBI, local crime statistics) supports this claim. We never hear about it because the people who write about these issues are long on rhetoric about justice and “mass incarceration” but short on actual data.

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) September 26, 2021

Continued:

As is the case in many other areas of American life, the people with the loudest megaphones have NO IDEA what they are talking about. They make arguments based on well-worn talking points, euphemisms, and a desire to look like compassionate, empathetic people. This inability or unwillingness to deal honestly with the data causes the second problem—misplaced sympathies. You hear it even in how the issues are framed—CRIMINAL justice vs. PUBLIC safety. So French and others think America has an “over incarceration” problem.

But he never says what the appropriate level of incarceration should be. Reformers never do. They note a disparity and assume the main problem is the effect, not the cause. He also notes that prison doesn’t have the rehabilitative effects many citizens desire. But what people who live FAR from belly of the beast fail to realize is that while it is amazing to see a person turn their life around in prison, the main point of removing ppl from society is to PROTECT the law-abiding and innocent from the law-breaking and guilty.

I highly doubt French would argue that we should rethink prosecuting hate crimes because perpetrators may become even more racist in prison. And I certainly don’t see him writing an article in The Root explaining to black people why such a move would advance the cause of justice.

Lastly, there is the issue of policy trade-offs. If reformers think that theft under $1000 should not be prosecuted, they should be prepared to speak honestly about the effects that decision will have on the victims—whether CVS or the mom-and-pop store—and the community at large. Same with other offenses, including violent ones. When order declines—often abetted by bad public policy—the slide into chaos is quick and costly. Reformers talk a good game until the first shot pierces their window or until their child is the one who is carjacked at gunpoint.

The truth is, given the right circumstances, we ALL desire vengeance. Prioritizing the guilty over the innocent is not a standard of justice I recognize, whether from the Bible or or any other source.

Source data: https://t.co/Nwf4P3pxov

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) September 26, 2021

*  *  *

When Dennis Prager played on my local radio station, I remember him saying, quite often, “Being kind to the cruel means being cruel to the kind.”  David French, like so many White liberals, has let his condescending biases and inaccurate facts get in the way of advancing policies that will genuinely help crime-ridden neighborhoods.  His view will simply perpetuate a system in which well-meaning, racist, and uninformed Whites push for policies that are indescribably cruel to the poor people of all colors trapped in neighborhoods affected by those bad policies.

A nonprofit organized by a loose network of veterans and current service members to help evacuate vulnerable Americans and Afghans from Kabul is seeing a chartered flight with more than 100 Americans and green-card holders being denied entry to the US by the Department of Homeland Security, according to a Reuters report.

Bryan Stern, a founder of non-profit group Project Dynamo, which organized the flight, told Reuters during a call from the plan that they are being held up in Abu Dhabi after arriving from Kabul with 117 people including 59 children. The flight includes a mix of American citizens, green card holders and SIV holders.

“They will not allow a charter on an international flight into a U.S. port of entry,” Stern said of the Custom’s and Border Patrol, which is part of DHS.

Stern spoke to journalists from aboard the chartered plane, leased from Kam Air, a private Afghan airline. Stern said the group had been sitting for 14 hours already with no clear resolution in sight.

Stern’s Project Dynamo is one of several groups working on organizing these types of flights, aimed at getting those who have been approved for entry into the US out of Afghanistan.

It’s not clear why the Biden Administration would bar entry to the flights. A DHS official hasn’t commented on the situation to the press.

An official who spoke off the record to Reuters said they weren’t familiar with the situation, but that the US sometimes takes time to review flight manifests before allowing chartered flights into the country. After all, Biden has repeatedly said that repatriating Americans and Afghans in danger is a top American priority.

According to Stern, 28 Americans, 83 green card holders and six people with SIVs.

Stern expressed his frustration with both the delay and the radio silence from the Biden Administration.

“I have a big, beautiful, giant, humongous Boeing 787 that I can see parked in front of us,” he said. “I have crew. I have food.”

Stern said that he had planned to transfer his passengers to a chartered Ethiopian Airlines flight that would eventually get the to JFK. Customs had cleared the trip, but then suddenly changed the clearance to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, before denying the plane landing rights anywhere in the US.

Stern said he had received approval from local Afghan Aviation authorities (controlled by the Taliban government) before organizing the chartered flight.

While there of course might be legitimate reasons for the holdup, going this long without any kind of communication seems like a screwup, or maybe something worse.

We can’t help but wonder how the Trump Administration would have handled this.

By John Kemp, Reuters energy reporter and columnist

China is in the grip of a severe shortage of both coal and electricity as the economy has resumed strong growth after the coronavirus recession but coal mine output has failed to keep up, leaving generators short of fuel.

Reflecting a booming economy, China’s electricity generation increased by 616 Terawatt-hours (13%) in the first eight months of 2021 compared with the same period last year.

Consumption growth has been led by the service sector (+22%) and primary industries (+20%), with somewhat slower but still fast increases from manufacturing (+13%) and residential users (+8%).

Most of the increase has been supplied by thermal generators, principally coal-fired power stations, which increased output by 465 TWh (14%) in the first eight months, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Hydro-electric output has actually fallen slightly this year and is running at the lowest level since 2018, intensifying pressure on thermal generators to make up the shortfall.

Thermal generation units ran for an average of 2,589 hours in the first seven months of the year, up from 2,321 last year, an increase of 12%, according to the China Electricity Council, which represents power producers.

Confirming the increase in thermal generation, freight movements on the national rail network were up 11% in the first eight months of the year.

Coal is the most important commodity hauled by rail, accounting for 50% of the tonnage loaded and 42% of the tonne-kilometres. Rapid growth in rail freight so far this year is consistent with heavy demand for coal from power generators and industrial users.

But coal mine production has climbed by just 6% compared with 2020, according to monthly reports from the NBS.

The result has been a severe depletion of coal inventories which has contributed to low stocks at many power plants and upward pressure on coal prices.

Coal prices have more than doubled to almost $210 per tonne, up from just $90 this time last year, based on the most actively traded contract on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange.

Responding to the shortage, top regulators at the National Energy Administration and the National Development and Reform Commission have emphasised the need to increase domestic coal and gas production to secure energy supplies this winter.

The largest and most efficient coal mines in the provinces and autonomous regions of Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi have been instructed to boost output urgently to help replenish coal stocks.

Provincial governments and power generators in northern provinces and on the east coast are also trying to buy additional supplies from Mongolia, Russia and Indonesia, which is pushing up international prices.

As the crisis has intensified, China’s State Grid, responsible for transmission across most of the country, except for the far south, has pledged to maintain electricity supplies to residential customers and an all out fight to meet basic power needs this winter.

But the fact so many organizations and senior officials have felt the need to emphasize their determination and plans for ensuring winter fuel supplies is an indication of how serious the coal and electricity situation has become.

In a world where the biggest asset bubble in history means home prices are now rising at a never before seen 20% pace, dooming tens of millions of of potential homeowners to a life of renting, Democrats have had another glorious solution how to “fix” the problem of unaffordable housing, which may help in the short run only to lead to an even greater crisis a few years down the line. It is, of course, even more market-warping subsidies.

As part of the raft of new legislation designed to spur first-time homeownership in America, a remarkable bill has joined the fray: its sponsors propose creating a new subsdizied 20-year-fixed-rate mortgage program through Ginnie Mae, HousingWire reports.

According to the bill, Ginnie Mae in tandem with the Department of the Treasury would subsidize the interest rate and origination fees associated with these 20-year mortgages, so that the monthly payment would be in line with a new 30-year FHA-insured mortgage. The move – which is an explicit subsidy of one share of the population by another – could, in theory, “allow qualified homebuyers to build equity-and wealth- at twice the rate of a conventional 30-year mortgage.” Instead, what it will do is lead to is an even bigger housing bubble.

The legislation, dubbed the “Low-income First Time Homebuyer (LIFT) Act,” would create a program through the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would sponsor low fixed-rate 20-year mortgages. The bill is sponsored by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), and Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

To qualify, one would have to be a first-time, first-generation homebuyer, with an income equal to or less than 120% of the area median income.

An example of how the subsidized mortgage would work:

• Today, a first-time homebuyer of modest means purchasing a property for $210,000 is likely to put down $10,000 and take out a $200,000 mortgage. In today’s market, a lender would offer this borrower a 2.75% 30-year FHA-insured mortgage, for which the borrower would pay an annual 0.85% FHA insurance fee and a 1.75% up-front insurance fee, which would be folded into the mortgage. The borrower would have a monthly payment of $970.
• Under the LIFT program, the lender would instead offer this homebuyer a 1.50% 20-year FHA insured mortgage, which would include a 4.00% up-front FHA fee that would be folded into the loan and no annual FHA premium. The borrower would have a monthly payment of $1,004.
• By paying roughly the equivalent monthly payment, a borrower with a LIFT loan would build equity twice as fast.

• Furthermore, because LIFT rates are tied to the FHA 30-year, even if mortgage rates rise, a LIFT loan would continue to pay down – and build wealth – at about twice the rate of the 30-year mortgage.

“The number one way that middle class Americans build wealth is through homeownership, an opportunity that due to racism and structural inequality has been denied to too many families of color,” Warner said in a statement. “Today, Black families in this country have an average net worth just one-tenth the size of their white counterparts.”

In the past couple of months two versions of the $15,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit and Rep. Maxine Waters’ (D-CA) Down Payment Towards Equity Act of 2021 were introduced as alternatives for addressing housing inequity.

The response from some fair housing advocates to the LIFT Act has been lukewarm so far. Some sources expressed worry that if significant money is allocated to this program, funding for Rep. Maxine Waters’ down payment assistance bill – a favorite among fair housing advocates – might not come.

Former FHA commissioner, Dave Stevens, said that Warner’s bill has the potential of getting traction in Congress.  This first-time homebuyer bill has a “unique combination of Republicans and Democrats that have aligned on how this thing can work,” Stevens said.

Additionally, the legislation is “very limited” and specifically geared towards first-generation homebuyers, addressing worries of a bill being too broad, resulting in minority homebuyers getting pushed out of purchasing a home.

“In Congress right now, and I would guess the White House, they would like to see both Maxine Waters down payment assistance bill and this one make its way to the reconciliation process,” added Stevens. “If you could get a modest amount of dollars for both Chairwoman Waters’ piece of legislation as well as for the LIFT bill, you get some really good dollars targeted for first time homebuyers.”

Dave Dworkin, CEO of the National Housing Conference, said that down payment assistance is still the number one option for increasing homeownership: “[The LIFT Act and Waters’ down payment assistance] have to go together,” he said. “Our first priority is creating homeowners and our second priority is to accelerate wealth building.”

Dworkin added that NHC “would like to see at least $20 billion to $50 billion go to down payment assistance.”

Meanwhile, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, commented that there are upsides to the bill, mainly that it “preserves affordability and supports homeownership” while also allowing homeowners to rapidly accumulate equity.

“LIFT is among the most effective ways policymakers have to address the nation’s pernicious problem of large and widening economic disparities,” he said. The only troubling language with the LIFT Act, said Stevens, may be the attestation clause.

“I mean, the real question is how do you prove that you’re a first-generation buyer,” said Stevens. “As long as a borrower attests to the fact that they’re first generation, they technically are able to apply.” As a reminder, the 2007 housing crisis was in large part the result of tens of millions of Americans lying about their income and their net worth on (multiple) mortgage applications. Everyone knows how that ended.

“That’s the only area where I think there could be some moral hazard,” Stevens concluded as if that wasn’t enough. .

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Republicans have warned that according to an insider at the Department of Homeland Security, the agency’s head Alejandro Mayorkas plans to FIRE border agents who are unvaccinated.

The whistleblower claims that the DHS will off a significant potion of the border workforce if they do not comply with the vaccine mandate and get the shots before November.

🚨 #BREAKING: Whistleblower alleges that Border Patrol agents have been given official notice that they must be fully vaccinated by November 2021 or face termination. pic.twitter.com/5OytCtebe4

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) September 29, 2021

The ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan wrote to Mayorkas asking for an explanation.

“While our border is facing this serious crisis, we have learned that you are threatening to terminate a significant portion of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) workforce,” Jordan wrote.

Jordan added “On September 9, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 14043 requiring federal employees to fully vaccinate against Covid-19 or face termination of their employment.”

“It has come to our attention that the men and women of CBP have been given official notice that they must be fully vaccinated by November 2021 or face termination,” Jordan further stated, urging that “It is simply unbelievable that the Biden Administration will allow Covid-positive illegal aliens to surge across the border but will terminate dedicated law-enforcement officers who do not comply with Biden’s mandate.”

The development comes after Mayorkas declared that the flood of illegal migrants at the border, and the subsequent release of thousands of them into the U.S. is “one of our proudest traditions.”

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked why the Biden administration hasn’t erected a “wall or a fence” in response to the crisis.

Mayorkas responded “It is the policy of this administration: we do not agree with the building of the wall.”

When asked exactly how many migrants have come into the U.S. from the latest wave, Mayorkas said “I think it’s about ten thousand or so, twelve thousand,” adding “It could be even higher. The number that are returned could be even higher. What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it.”

Wallace also noted that almost half of the migrants are never seen again, failing to appear at asylum court hearings.

“There are more than 11 million people in this country illegally. Clearly, despite your best efforts, millions of people end up in this country and don’t – just disappear,” Wallace noted.

Watch:

DHS Secretary Mayorkas: “it is the policy of this [Biden] administration, we do not agree with the building of the wall.” pic.twitter.com/ksZn1o6Fn0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 26, 2021

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As evidenced by Goldman Sach’s decision to cut its growth outlook for China to zero in the face of the unfurling energy crisis plaguing the world’s second-largest economy with unexpected blackouts, the coronavirus is no longer the single biggest threat to global growth (particularly as Europe faces a potential energy crisis of its own).

That being said, gauging the global population’s present (and projected) immunity levels is critical to an investment bank’s broader global economic forecasts (along with being the subject of frequent client inquiries, we suspect). And so, after assiduously monitoring the global delta wave (with forecasts that have been mostly accurate with a few exceptions) Goldman’s team is taking on the task of gauging global immunity. It’s a hefty undertaking: after all, plenty of Democrats refuse to even acknowledge natural immunity, even as some studies have shown it might be even more effective against delta than the Pfizer jab.

Goldman’s forecast relies on a few critical assumptions that are at least partly borne out by “the science”:

• Vaccine efficacy against hospitalizations remains close to 90% for most vaccines six months after vaccination.

• This implies elevated effective protection rates against hospitalizations across most major economies, at around 70% in the US, the UK, and the Euro Area, 60% in China and India, 50% in Japan, and 65% on a global GDP-weighted basis, nearly 50pp higher than six months ago.

• Presently, 80% of the American population now has some immunity through either vaccination or infection.

• We find an effective protection rate against infections of around 60% in the US, the UK, and the Euro Area, 55% in India, 45% in Japan, 40% in China, and 50% on a global GDP-weighted basis, all below the theoretical herd immunity threshold required to eliminate the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Goldman points out that recent studies confirm that vaccine protection wanes over time and the rate varies by vaccine. But Goldman calculated an average rate and charted how odds of infection vs. hospitalization and death (which are much, much lower) decline over the first few months after vaccination.

Exhibit 2 shows Goldman’s latest US immunity estimates. The analysts estimate that 80% of the American population now has some form of immunity through either vaccination or infection. Combined, that leaves us with an effective protection rate against infections of 60%.

Looking at the emerging world, immunity rates are understandably significantly lower – by roughly 20% on average compared with the US.

Here’s how that breakdown looks for the developed world.

According to Goldman, their analysis effectively comes with some good news, and some bad news. The bad news is that, since herd immunity is effectively out of reach for humanity at this point, reviving certain types of economic activity like nightclubs, concerts, and other live events to their pre-pandemic levels will be difficult. The good news is at least humanity’s resistance to COVID is improving, not degrading.

Authored by Conrad Black via AmGreatness.com,

Anti-Trump and NeverTrump Republicans won’t help Democrats. America and the world should start preparing for Donald Trump’s return…

As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics.

This, of course, is Donald Trump. 

The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), even as she finds the ground shifting beneath her feet over the administration’s incontinent spending ambitions, is seeing her effort to promote the January 6 trespass at the U.S. Capitol as an outrage on the scale of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 overshadowed by the Afghanistan disaster and the cascade of other blunders and improvidences of the Biden Administration.

Apart from a few veteran and some recently recruited NeverTrumpers joining in the tired pieties about the regrettable January 6 episode, the Democrats appear to be repeating the mistakes of 2016. They hope formerly mainstream Republicans who failed to repel the GOP base from supporting Trump will have better luck this time. 

It remains true that a large group of Republicans (and no small number of Democrats) basically agree with most or all of Trump’s policies but regard the man as a distasteful carnival operator whose “Trump University” and health care plan (consisting of urinalysis and vitamins for a healthy quarterly fee) are simply not acceptable for a holder of the great office of president of the United States. Many have implied by their ambiguity that they could live with Trump again if his manners improved and his tactics became less bombastic. The acid test being unwisely applied to Trump’s acceptability as a rehabilitated candidate is his humble acceptance of the legitimacy of the election of Joe Biden as president.

There are two serious problems with this criterion, which even the Wall Street Journal seems to embrace. The first problem with the requirement of a full recognition of the unassailability of Biden’s legitimacy as president is that former President Trump and his scores of millions of supporters don’t accept that that is true. The second problem is that it probably is not true.

There are more serious concerns about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election than any in the history of the country except the Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876. That controversy was addressed by a bipartisan commission voting on an exact party split, which was accepted by the candidates under three conditions posed by the Democratic candidate, Governor Samuel Tilden, and which were accepted and honored by General Rutherford B. Hayes. 

No one knows who really won in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Nixon declined President Dwight Eisenhower’s urging that he demand a comprehensive review of the many extremely close states. Nixon has received little credit for taking the position that such a state of uncertainty could be destabilizing to the country at a critical moment in the Cold War.

A similarly uncertain situation played out in the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. That year, the U.S. Supreme Court shut down the decisive Florida recount and the state officially went to Bush by 537 votes out of 5.8 million cast, but no one will ever know whether he was the real winner or not. In 2020, there were more than 40 million mailed or harvested ballots usually mixed in after the polls closed with normally cast ballots and, therefore, unverifiable. About 45,000 votes in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan would have flipped the election to Trump.

The former president was foolish to claim that he had actually won a majority of the popular vote, which is nonsense. But no fair observer can begrudge Trump his severe state of irritation at the extremely suspect abnormalities that afflicted the vote in six states that were clearly targeted for unusual alterations of voting and vote-counting procedures ostensibly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It is also easy to identify with the ex-president’s profound disappointment that the judicial system declined to judge on their merits any of the 19 lawsuits that specifically challenged the integrity of the voting or vote-counting process, as opposed to taking up an individual or a small number of apparently improperly treated ballots. 

Moreover, it appears to have been the political decision of the Supreme Court not to put itself in the position of having to try to reel back and possibly overturn a presidential election. In doing so, the justices may have spared themselves a full-on assault to expand the court. They remain fully armed to deal with unconstitutional legislation, which seems to be the core of the radical Democratic program that the administration hopes to jam through on a strained reconciliation bill as the window narrows before they likely lose their paper-thin congressional majorities next autumn. Again, Trump is to blame for warning of the problems of ballot harvesting but having no adequate team on the ground to record and film its operation and to launch legal challenges forcefully starting on the day after the election.    

All of this leaves the Democrats relying on anti-Trump or at least non-Trump Republicans to impose upon the Republican presidential candidate selection process for 2024 an unacceptable condition.

Despite the gathering chatter that Trump’s base support is receding and that too many Republican officeholders are afraid of his ability to make or break their performance in the midterm elections next year, the obvious but rigorously unrecognized facts are:

1) Trump can take the nomination of his party easily if he so wishes, and

2) the unspeakable shambles of the incumbent administration is making his return to office simpler and more probable every day.

In the early blush of optimism that the dreadful Trump meteor had passed, the Democratic character assassination squads inside the docile media outlets set upon Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as Trump’s most likely successor . As it dawns on the always losing NeverTrumpers, an angry and unscrupulous minority within a minority, who see the strength of Trump within his party every day, some are trying to build back DeSantis as someone who would enact most of Trump’s policies, enjoy Trump’s goodwill, but who is not Trump. Others, like Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) are alienated, seeing, as former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake did, that “it’s the president’s party now,” that is, it’s Trump’s party and seems likely to remain so.

The great effort to stamp out any questioning of the legitimacy of the last presidential election has failed. The attempt to perpetuate the Trump-hate smear and legal harassment campaign is sputtering to an end, even as the John Durham inquiry, advancing at the speed of wet cement on a slight grade, has begun its indictments of those responsible for turning the intelligence services and the FBI into arms of the Democratic National Committee-Clinton campaign dirty tricks division. The fantasy that Trump’s support is eroding or that his comparative silence does him anything except good, will probably be vaporized at the first encounter with the voters. 

The daily failures of the Biden Administration show no signs of letting up, nor does the damage from unsustainable levels of illegal immigration, intolerable levels of urban violent crime, aggressively rising inflation, the COVID Tower of Babel, and constant pressure from America’s foreign enemies as the Biden regime stumbles from continent to continent. Such an inexorable procession of failures drives masses of voters into the arms of the chief political alternative, with increasing disregard for the fineries of the alternative president’s sense of etiquette.

Unless the administration has a miraculous infusion of competence and aptitude, or some alternative Republican appears as a messianic deus ex machina, or a relatively silent Donald Trump commits an act of electoral suicide that is a hydrogen bomb escalation on his most egregious faux pas to date, then America and the world should start preparing for Trump’s return. As Bismarck said of Disraeli, “Das ist der Mann.” He is not easily recognizable as the standard-bearer of the Grand Old Party, but in these steadily more distressed circumstances, he is the man.