Month: October 2022

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

Everybody was stunned on Friday morning when news broke that the 82 year old husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had been assaulted inside of his home early in the morning with a hammer.

The shock and awe grew after it seemed to become clear that the assailant was looking for the Speaker of the House herself – the third in line to the Presidency.

An assailant broke into the home and asked “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”, according to NBC in the Bay Area.

San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott called it an “intentional” attack:

“This was not a random attack. This was intentional. And it’s wrong. Our elected officials are here to do the business of their cities, their counties, and their states, and this nation. Their families don’t sign up for this — to be harmed. And it’s wrong.”

As such, DePape is now facing charges of attempted murder and other felonies.

I wholly condemn the attack, as I do all violence (especially political violence).

“This is an outrage and our hearts are with the entire Pelosi family. ⁦We pray Paul will make a full recovery,” former VP Mike Pence Tweeted this weekend.

And though I am hardly a fan of Ted Cruz, I think he said it best when he wrote on Twitter this weekend:

“We can have our political differences, but violence is always wrong & unacceptable.”

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It is not in any way in dispute that Pelosi was attacked violently and wound up in the hospital as a result of his injuries.

It is also not in dispute that 911 was called and dispatcher Heather Grimes had the intuition to order a wellness check at the household based on what she heard. Her intuition may very well have saved Pelosi’s life, and she should be commended for it.

Politicians on the left wasted absolutely no time attributing the Pelosi attack to “The Republican Party” and “far right white nationalists”.

And, as Glenn Greenwald writes on Sunday morning, it’s “very possible that the instantly formed media narrative…will be proven true”.

For example, Hillary Clinton said on Saturday:

“The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar Tweeted out on Saturday that the attacker, DePape, was a “far right white nationalist”:

“A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.”

President Joe Biden, with seemingly little to no evidence, attributed the attack to 2020 election deniers

“You can’t just say, feel badly about the violence, we condemn it. Condemn what produces the violence.

This talk produces the violence. The generic point I want to make is it’s one thing to condemn the violence but you can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen.”

While these politicians may ultimately prove to be right, it’s worth noting that there are some basic journalistic gaps in the story that need to be answered.

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The first question we are left to wonder is the obvious: what was DePape’s true motivation?

Both sides in the media have painted the assailant in different lights. For example, Politico wrote that “he subscribed to the discredited narrative that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate and espoused a range of bigoted and radical beliefs. He expressed anti-Semitic views and appeared to embrace the QAnon movement, which posits a secret cabal of pedophiles has been protected by people in power.”

But then there was this NY Post opinion piece (and Substack post) by Michael Shellenberger, which noted that “DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree”.

DePape’s neighbors said of him:

“What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists. They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride. But they’re very detached from reality. They have called the cops on several of the neighbors, including us, claiming that we are plotting against them. It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”

Finally, on Sunday it was reported that DePape’s ex and purported former life partner Oxane Taub, told Fox News that he used to be left-leaning:

“When I met him, he was only 20 years old , and he didn’t have any experience in politics, and he was very much in alignment with my views, and I’ve always been very progressive. I absolutely admire Nancy Pelosi.”

Possible explanation: It is possible that these leaders on the left are correct. There is also the possibility that DePape’s mental faculties were lacking – or that something entirely different was taking place. We should know when DePape enters his defense what his side of the story is.

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The second question is: who is the unidentified person that let law enforcement into the home the morning of the break-in?

Politico reported early this weekend that there was apparently a third person in the home at the time of the incident:

David DePape forced his way into the home through a back entrance, Scott said. Officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer, and after they instructed them to drop the weapon, Scott said, DePape took the hammer and “violently attacked” Pelosi.

Possible explanation: Was it a housekeeper? Live-in staff? Body cam footage should make this clear.

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A third question relates to whether or not it is normal for glass to be on the outside of the home due to a forced entry into the home.

It was reported that the suspect, not law enforcement, entered through the sliding glass door. ABC News wrote:

“The break in at Nancy Pelosi’s house is suspected to be targeted, law enforcement sources tell ABC News. The suspect allegedly entered the house through a sliding glass door, carrying a hammer, and was apparently looking for the House Speaker herself.”

Putting aside that these appear to be french doors, and not sliding glass doors, one must then ask if this is the point of entry in question.

The opinion of D. W. Wilber, who has “over thirty years of experience in Security and Counterterrorism as a former Intelligence Officer serving with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and law enforcement,” was that the glass on the outside of the door was an anomaly.

“As a cop for 11 yrs in St. Louis I never once worked a burglary where the broken glass and debris at the entry point was OUTSIDE the residence,” he wrote on Twitter. 

Possible explanation: Perhaps these weren’t the doors in question during the attack, or perhaps the door was broken from the inside out during the struggle and was not the point of entry.

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Which brings us to the fourth unanswered question, which was whether or not there was security in, or around, the house the night of the incident.

Lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillion wrote on Twitter this weekend that there were “multiple law enforcement officers” on the perimeter of Pelosi’s home when they tried to serve a lawsuit there.

“My firm served a lawsuit against Paul Pelosi one time in SF after attempting to serve at other residences—Napa, Georgetown. They weren’t home, but staff were, & multiple law enforcement officers were on the perimeter. Break-in is odd given this level of security.”

Possible explanation: Is it possible there was no security because Nancy Pelosi wasn’t on the premises?

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And as Glenn Greenwald pointed out this weekend, there’s also the fifth question of how Paul Pelosi was able to take a bathroom break in the midst of an attack.

Greenwald is right when he says it “requires more scrutiny” after Politico reported that Pelosi told the intruder “he had to go use the bathroom” in the midst of the break-in. From there, Pelosi was apparently able to dial 911 from a phone that he had left charging…in the bathroom.

Possible explanation: Your guess is as good as mine.

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The very same Politico article that pointed out the bathroom break also noted that the 911 dispatcher thought there was “something more to [the 911 call]”.

You can listen to the call here and decide for yourself. Was Pelosi speaking in code to try and get a message to the operator – and not DePape – that he was in distress?

Or, when the operator said there was “something more” to the call, was she referring to something else?

There’s a good chance the media and politicians are right and this attack was an abhorrent, politically motivated violent act and, again, I strongly condemn violence of all types, especially political violence.

But there are also several gaping holes in the story that I think good ole’ fashioned journalism – and probably some police body camera footage – will shed some much needed light on.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Elon Musk, who noted on Sunday morning in response to Hillary Clinton that there’s “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye”.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

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The European Union has frozen assets worth around 17 billion euros from Russian “oligarchs and other entities,” EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said in a Saturday interview.

The figure is roughly 3.2 billion euros higher than in July, when the EU had seized around 13.8 billion euros, primarily across five countries, the Sun Daily reports.

Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, say the funds should be used to rebuild their country after the Russian invasion.

Reynders said that if the frozen assets are “criminal money confiscated by the EU” that it could be transferred to a Ukraine compensation fund.

“This amount is far from being sufficient to finance reconstruction,” he added.

“So far, the assets of 90 people have been frozen, more than 17 billion euros in seven member states, including 2.2 billion euros in Germany,” Reynders told German media group Funke, including the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung daily.

The sums totalling 17.5 billion euros were chiefly frozen by Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Ireland and Italy, a spokeswoman for the European Commission told AFP, without giving further details.

Reynders noted that Western sanctions have also led to the “freezing of 300 billion euros” of Central Bank of Russia foreign exchange reserves around the world, saying this could be used as a guarantee. -Sun Daily

“From my point of view, it is at least possible to keep these 300 billion euros as a guarantee until Russia voluntarily participates in the reconstruction of Ukraine,” he said.

Authored by Dr. Sean Lin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The creation of a new recombinant COVID-19 virus at Boston University, viewed as a “Frankenstein virus” by many, has raised a public uproar. This is not merely a risky gain-of-function experiment on “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs)”, it is a creation of an enhanced pandemic pathogen.  NO “potential” here.  

What is the rationale for this statement? What is the chimeric virus that we talk about here? 

A team of researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories posted a paper on October 14, 2022, on BioRxiv, a preprint server for biology, revealing that they had created a lab-made COVID-19 chimeric virus with reverse genetics technology. 

Specifically, they’ve swapped the S gene of the spike protein in the original SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain with the corresponding S gene from the Omicron variant.  So, the lab-made Chimeric virus (Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus) has all the genes from the Wuhan strain, which is much more pathogenic than the Omicron strain, except the S gene, which is from the highly transmissible yet relatively mildly pathogenic Omicron strain. 

According to the preprint paper, the Omicron spike-bearing virus is able to effectively and robustly escape vaccine-induced humoral immunity just like the Omicron variant. In addition, unlike the naturally occurring Omicron variant, the Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. 

Furthermore, it has killed at least 80 percent of infected K18-hACE2 mice (a type of transgenic mice expressing human ACE2 receptors), whereas the mortality rate of the Omicron variant was zero while the Wuhan strain caused 100 percent death in two weeks in control experiments in the same transgenic mice. This 80 percent mortality in the mice model by the Wuhan-Omi-S chimeric virus was observed in a two-week period.  The paper did not provide any further observations on whether the surviving 20 percent of mice eventually died faster than the control mice group infected with Omicron variants.  

The defenders for this risky study stated that the chimeric virus product showed reduced pathogenicity (100 versus 80 percent mortality) when compared to Wuhan strains, so it is not a gain-of-function study.  However, this is an unjustifiably optimistic statement. The study did not provide any detailed or comprehensive pathology exam of different organs in the transgenic mice infected with the Wuhan-Omi-S virus. For example, do we know that this chimeric virus has the same neuropathogenesis as the Omicron or Wuhan viruses?  This study did not provide any data on that. 

In addition, although this experiment was presented as a swap of the S gene on the backbone of the Wuhan strain, it could also be viewed as swapping other viral genes on the backbone of the Omicron strain, considering the overall high genome homology among different variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Rather than study individual gene motifs that might have influenced the Omicron variant’s pathogenicity,  researchers at Boston University instead swapped all the pathogenicity-related viral gene motifs/sites from the Wuhan strain into the Omicron strain.

Then, this study is a bonafide proven gain-of-function study: it makes the Omicron virus obtain more virulent factors, enhancing its infectivity and pathogenicity in in vitro and in vivo experiments.  And this publication did not reveal any study to test the transmissibility of the chimeric lab-made virus in animal models. Is the Wuhan-Omi-S virus more or less transmissible in animal models?  Can any of the researchers in this study 100 percent guarantee that this new chimeric virus is not more transmissible in different animal models, e.g. golden hamsters, ferrets, and primates?  

This study presented the main conclusion: “while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by 53 mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.” However, it is a known fact that other genes outside S are involved in viral-host interactions at different steps of the viral life cycle and many genes outside S are relevant to viral pathogenicity in different tissues, organs, and animal hosts. So, by combining the pathogenicity-related components of the ancestral Wuhan strain and Omicron’s spike protein, the researchers would surely expect to create a virus that’s both highly deadly and highly transmissible. Even though it might be lucky that the final chimeric virus strains are less deadly and/or less transmissible than the Wuhan and/or Omicron strains, there is no guarantee that the degree of the risks or threats cannot be precisely controlled or assessed. The researchers at Boston University are intentionally playing with fire with clear knowledge of the risks involved. 

So, in essence, Boston University researchers created a lab-made Omicron variant with enhanced pathogenicity. As Omicron is a clear pandemic pathogen, taking over Delta and other COVID-19 virus variants, this study has created an enhanced pandemic pathogen. Not an “enhanced pandemic potential pathogen.”  

It is true that we don’t know whether this lab-made chimeric virus can out-compete natural omicron variants when co-circulating in human society. And defenders of this gain-of-function study also argued that similar recombinant variants existed early this year, the Deltacron, which contains a Delta variant backbone with an Omicron S gene. They argued that the Deltacron did not generate a pandemic wave and was quickly replaced with Omicron variants, and therefore, this experiment at Boston University did not generate additional risk. So, are these defenders arguing that humankind was simply too lucky and we need to create additional risks ourselves?  

This study is absolutely playing with fire and should be totally forbidden. It is unbelievable that Boston University allowed this research to be carried out. It is an ultimate failure of the bioethics committee that evaluates biomedical research projects at Boston University. 

Furthermore, this gain-of-function research project is partially funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has denied its knowledge of these experiments. As the related grant documents and the communication between Boston University and NIAID are not currently released to the public, it is surely unverifiable whether NIAID was aware of these experiments during the whole process. Nevertheless, it suggests that the oversight mechanism to review grants related to “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs)”, set up by NIAID after the 2014 pause of all gain-of-function studies, did not work at all in this incidence. 

Read more here…

Western sanctions against Russia have been considered a powerful foreign policy tool by the US and the EU to paralyze Moscow back to the ‘stone age.’ Though sanctions against Moscow have entirely backfired, sparking the worst cost-of-living crisis for Europeans in a generation. 

In early September, we first noticed a wave of discontent sweeping across Europe as tens of thousands of people took to the city streets to protest soaring electricity bills and the worst inflation in decades. Some countries delivered relief packages to citizens to tame the anger, while other countries did not have the financial capacity to hand out checks. 

Tens of thousands of people have marched across metro areas in France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Germany — many of them are fed up with sanctions on Russia that have sparked economic ruins for many households and businesses — but also very surprising, support for NATO’s involvement in Ukraine is waning. 

There has been increasing awareness and dissent among Europeans about their countries’ leaders prioritizing NATO’s ambitions in Ukraine over their own citizens. The prioritization has been in the form of sanctions against Moscow, sparking energy hyperinflation and supplying weapons to Ukraine, which has made Moscow displeased with any country that does so. Some Europeans are now demanding NATO negotiate with Moscow to end the war so that economic turmoil can abate. 

Here are the latest protests across Europe of tens of thousands of people (if not more) frustrated with high inflation and crying out anti-NATO slogans. 

Otra multitudinaria Manifestación sucedió hoy en Francia 🇫🇷.
“Let’s get out of NATO!”

Another massive protest against NATO and the EU on the streets of Paris, France today. pic.twitter.com/1CRwhzBhzx

— Joel la Rosa (@Pedrola51624238) October 23, 2022

Another massive #protest against #NATO and the #EU on the streets of #Paris, France today. #MSM pretend it didn’t happen. pic.twitter.com/XPHqKRve5V

— Axel Le Reer (@AxelLeReer) October 22, 2022

Mass protests continue in #Moldova calling for the removal of the pro-EU regime of Maya Sandu.

The Western media has completely blacked out these mass protests in Moldova. They are peddling the CIA nonsense instead blaming Russia for this. pic.twitter.com/kpvPQEk0aZ

— UkraineNews (@Ukraine66251776) October 28, 2022

On October 28, local time, Czech people took to the streets to protest and demonstrate, advocating to withdraw from the European Union and #NATO: “Russia is not our enemy, the belligerent Czech government is” slogan!#Russia #Ukraine #NEWS #新闻 #World #UN #Asia #Europe #EU pic.twitter.com/0ihSnJJLuN

— China-News (@China_News12) October 29, 2022

Mass protest in Prague, for Peace, elections and the right not to freeze for NATO. https://t.co/4SuAfzHnvz

— Caractacus Mann (@CaractacusMann) October 29, 2022

🧵Thread of protests that are erupting all over Europe against EU, NATO, inflation, politicians, governmental control, arm sales, etc about which mainstream media is completely silent 🧵 pic.twitter.com/U8BK2veelm

— mohamed.emam (@mohamed42811653) October 26, 2022

Thousands of Germans in Dresden to end sanctions on Russia, they want to remain neutral. Europeans don’t want to starve and freeze for Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen. EU media censor these demonstrations, they want war. pic.twitter.com/Lio07Yx8NG

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) October 30, 2022

Post by Juan Sinmiedo on telegram. Rome, Italian’s protest Nato and their sanctions on Russia pic.twitter.com/sWUxnbGN0B

— Monet Van Gough (@GoughMonet) October 30, 2022

Germany 🇩🇪 HAMBURG Peace and Freedom Demonstration 🔥🔥🔥 in Protest against the Governments Restrictions, Mandates, Anti-NATO, Inflations cost of Living and Energy (29/10/2022) pic.twitter.com/EMcEruW9Ww

— Holy Troller (@IscoPar5) October 29, 2022

WSJ pointed out that a majority of Germans strongly support Kyiv and Russia policy of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, though the popularity of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has been increasing as they benefited from the souring mood of the people who have been crushed into energy poverty. AfD has called for the lift of sanctions against Russia. Their popularity has risen from 10% to 15% in 9 months. 

“This is merely the silence before the storm—the discontent is great, and people do not have any sense that the government has a plausible strategy to master the crisis,” said Manfred Güllner, head of Forsa, a pollster.

Worse, the sanctions have sparked a further weakening of the economy where a recession might not be avoided this winter. Efforts by the European Central Bank to rapidly tighten its monetary policy and increase interest rates to quell inflation also have their risks. 

We recently penned two pieces, the first “”Worst Has Yet To Come”: Civil Unrest Set To Surge Worldwide As Socioeconomic Pressure Builds, Report Warns” and “IEA Head Warns “Wild West” Energy Scenario Could Unravel Europe” that both outline the rising risks of social unrest in Europe if inflation remains high and the energy crisis doesn’t abate. 

By Nick Colas of DataTrek Research

“Money always goes somewhere” is one of our core beliefs about capital markets. Capital is clearly fleeing US Big Tech. That is because earnings growth for these names has slowed dramatically from the 2020 – 2022 pandemic era. Capital continues to embrace Energy and Health Care, however, our 2 favorite large cap sectors. A lower Big Tech weighting is ultimately good for the S&P 500, as it allows other sectors to have more of an impact on index returns.

One of our core investment mantras is “money always goes somewhere”. Aside from market crashes, when value literally evaporates, capital simply sloshes around. It moves to assets where investors see a potentially better future return from assets where they see diminishing opportunities.

For this week’s Story Time Thursday, we have 2 related examples of this idea and a summary thought at the end of this section:

#1: Let’s start with the elephant in the market’s room – the terrible performance of US large cap tech stocks. Only Apple has outperformed year to date, and just barely (+1.6 percentage points). The rest are lagging the S&P 500’s 20 percent YTD decline, and badly so: Microsoft (-33 pct), Alphabet/Google (-36 pct), Amazon (-33 pct through today’s close, more after hours), Tesla (-36 pct), Meta/Facebook (-71 pct) and Nvidia (-55 pct).

Even with this terrible YTD performance, however, almost all these names are still beating the S&P since the start of 2020:

• S&P 500 since 2019YE: +18 percent
• Apple: +97 percent
• Microsoft: +44 pct
• Alphabet/Google: +38%
• Amazon: +20 pct (note: AMZN is back to flat vs. 2019YE after hours tonight)
• Tesla: +70 pct
• Meta/Facebook: -52 pct (the one egregious exception)
• Nvidia: +124 pct

A substantial increase in earnings power explains why most of these names are still so far above their pre-pandemic levels (save Meta, of course, and now apparently Amazon). The companies of the S&P 500 improved their collective earnings per share by a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent/year from 2019 – 2022 ($163/share to $223/share).

The Big Tech names mostly did much better:

• Apple: 27 percent 3-year CAGR
• Microsoft: 19 pct
• Alphabet/Google: 25 pct
• Amazon: earnings power reduced to zero in 2022 from $1.17/share in 2019
• Tesla: swung to profit in 2022 ($4.00/share estimate from a 2019 loss of $4.92/share)
• Meta/Facebook: 15 pct
• Nvidia: 14 pct

The problem markets have been seeing all year, and why capital is flowing out of these names, is that their expected future earnings growth is typically well below the CAGRs of the last 3 years. Here are the earnings per share growth rates Wall Street analysts expect over the next 12 months:

• Apple: +6 percent
• Microsoft: +6 pct
• Alphabet/Google: +14 pct
• Amazon: not meaningful (a return to modest profitability, $2.26/share)
• Tesla: +37 pct, below Elon Musk’s target of 50 pct growth in unit volumes
• Meta/Facebook: +7 pct
• Nvidia: +37 pct

Takeaway: US Big Tech’s 2020 – 2022’s pandemic era earnings growth rates are proving to be unsustainable, so markets are revising their estimate of fair value for these stocks. That may not seem fair since these companies are all expected to show bottom line growth in 2023, but that’s how markets work. Accelerating growth earns higher valuations, and decelerating growth forces valuations lower. Wall Street has a very short menu.

#2: Now that we have discussed where capital is leaving and why, let’s look at where it is going. Our approach will be to look at YTD changes in S&P 500 weightings by individual names. Here is the change this year in index weightings for the Tech names discussed in the prior point:

• Apple: +0.15 points in S&P 500 weight YTD (positive, since it has outperformed)
• Microsoft: -0.90 points
• Alphabet/Google: -0.82 points
• Amazon: -0.41 points
• Meta/Facebook: -1.17 points
• Tesla: -0.27 points
• Nvidia: -1.0 points

The total here is 4.42 points of S&P 500 weighting, and by our mantra (and simple math) it must have gone somewhere else in the index. It has, and mostly into stocks in our 2 preferred sectors, namely Energy and Health Care:

• ExxonMobil (+76 pct YTD): +0.74 point increase in S&P 500 weighting YTD
• Chevron (+52 pct YTD): +0.43 points
• ConocoPhillips (+76 pct YTD): +0.26 points
• Occidental (+148 pct YTD): +0.11 points
• Schlumberger (+73 pct): +0.13 points

• Johnson & Johnson (+1 pct YTD): +0.46 points
• UnitedHealth (+8 pct YTD): +0.40 points
• Eli Lilly (+29 pct YTD): +0.33 points
• Merck (+30 pct YTD): +0.29 points
• Amgen (+19 pct YTD): +0.13 points
• Cigna (+38 pct YTD): +0.11 points

The new generals pic.twitter.com/zv89gCVVZW

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 27, 2022

Takeaway: These 11 names have soaked up just over three quarters (3.39 points, 77 percent) of the index weighting lost by the 7 US Big Tech names this year. Energy is still just 5.2 percent of the S&P 500, less than either Apple (7.0 pct) or Microsoft (5.3 pct). Health Care is 15.0 percent of the index currently, below the 16.0 percent that represents the upper end of its historical band. We believe both sectors can continue to take index weighting “share” from Tech and, by extension, outperform going forward.

Final thought: The only investment positive behind Big Tech’s ongoing declines (such as Amazon after hours tonight) is that they reduce these names’ impact on future S&P 500 returns. That has two benefits. First, it gives other stocks and sectors a better chance to affect overall index performance. Second, it makes the S&P 500 less leveraged to interest rates since it reduces the index’s price/earnings multiple. Bottom line: the S&P 500 doesn’t need Tech stocks to rally to show reasonable gains between now and year end. It does, however, need them to stop falling.

Critics of the massive US weapons pipeline to Ukraine have long pointed out there’s no accountability or appropriate tracking once those arms enter the country, presenting ripe opportunities for criminals, terrorists, or lucrative black market arms sellers to take advantage. 

So it was perhaps only a matter of time before headlines like this began showing up in international publications – “NBI: Arms sent to Ukraine in criminal hands.” The NBI is Finland’s federal National Bureau of Investigation, and the report is from Finland’s national public broadcasting company Yle, and provides confirmation that arms intended for Ukrainian forces are going outside the country.

The recovered weapons featured in the weekend national police statement include assault rifles which were meant for Ukrainian forces. Further neighboring countries have recorded instances of West-provided arms proliferating from the Ukrainian battlefield and into the hands of criminals in neighboring Sweden and Denmark as well.

“Weapons shipped [by various countries] to Ukraine have also been found in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands,” NBI Detective Superintendent Christer Ahlgren was quoted in the Finnish publication as saying. 

“We’ve seen signs of these weapons already finding their way to Finland,” Ahlgren added. Some of this illicit arms trafficking is being brokered in online forums frequented by criminal gangs. According to more from the NBI lead investigator: 

“Three of the world’s largest motorcycle gangs—that are part of larger international organizations—are active in Finland. One of these is Bandidos MC, which has a unit in every major Ukrainian city,” he explained. “We know that contacts and routes are being warmed up, so that they’re in place.” 

“Ukraine has received a large volume of weapons and that’s good, but we’re going to be dealing with these arms for decades and pay the price here,” Ahlgren added. 

“Criminal organizations have their networks in Finnish commercial ports. Stopping this is in everyone’s interest,” the detective continued, underscoring that police work and investigations have been greatly ramped up since the start of the Ukraine war, especially when it comes to monitoring the nation’s points and ports of entry. He declined to provide a detailed list of the types of arms which have made their way into Finland, however.

Washington and NATO countries have over the past eight months since the Russian invasion began pumped tens of billions of dollars in light and heavy weaponry into Ukraine. From the start, Pentagon officials as well as media pundits have warned of the likelihood that many of these weapons would end up outside of Ukraine. 

#NATO funnels weapons into a ‘black hole’ in #Ukraine as #German troops again gather on the borders of #Russia. Excerpt from a withdrawn @CBS doco which carried an estimate that only 30% of NATO weapons arrive at their destination. Full doco here: https://t.co/B9PEDRhsNg pic.twitter.com/HSUk2S11CR

— tim anderson (@timand2037) August 12, 2022

All the way back in April, one White House official even warned in speaking to CNN, “we have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero. It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”

The question remains, who could have seen this coming? The answer is everyone with common sense. 

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“Taking into account the terrorist act by the Kyiv regime with the participation of British experts against the ships of the Black Sea Fleet and civilian vessels involved in ensuring the security of the grain corridor, the Russian side suspends participation in the implementation of agreements on the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports,” announced Russia’s Ministry of Defense on Saturday.

Sixteen aerial and maritime drones had attacked Putin’s Black Sea fleet.

“The preparation of this terrorist act and the training of military personnel of 73rd Marine Special Operations Center were carried out under supervision of British specialists in the city of Ochakov, Nikolayev region in Ukraine,” continued the Ministry, further accusing the British Navy of being behind the September Nord Stream pipeline attacks.

The British Defense Ministry responded with the following:

“To distract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale.”

Video of the drone attacks went viral, but unsurprisingly provided no direct evidence of UK involvement.

We may never know whether the British were involved.

Just like we may never know whether Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab.

At the time, it seemed to many reasonable people to be the most likely explanation.

But we were told that it categorically was not.

Until this week, when a US Senate report confirmed that, “It appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

Naturally, none of this matters to the millions who died of Covid.

Or to the millions who will die of starvation due to the Ukraine conflict and its associated supply chain disruptions.

It will only matter in a year or two, when starving refugees flood into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.

And for those of us paid to invest, the thing that matters most is that the world’s most heavily armed governments are becoming explicitly hostile toward one another.

Stirring up their citizens, who no longer know what to believe.