Month: December 2023

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Bidenomics In Action

“We are at an inflection point, a threshold, where weak, brittle, effete personality structures are a threat to human civilization.”

– JD Haltigan

If you’re troubled at all about the state of our country, and even your own small role in it, you might be asking yourself whether the people running things have any idea what they’re doing. Some of these doings happen in the metaphysical realm of finance, for instance America’s national debt ($34-trillion and going up like mad), and the death of the US dollar, along with the bonds that underwrite it. Or the game of hide-the-salami with the repo and reverse repo markets played between the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to give the broken banking system the appearance of stability when it is actually in deepening ruin.

Did you understand any of that? Probably not, but not because you’re dumb. It’s because all that action is meant to be incomprehensible even to people who went to grad school. The news media only amplify the mystification. The net effect is that increasingly nothing in the life of our nation is real. Every action taken is a swindle of one kind or another, a cavalcade of switcheroos aimed at zeroing out the consensus about reality.

What trickles down from all this cosmic activity is the dwindling possibility of a fruitful life for most Americans. You cannot make a living. You can’t fix all the machines in your life or get new ones. You can’t get married because there’s no way you can fulfill your end of the contract. You search in vain for something purposeful to do. You are eventually faced with the choice: surrender to depression and hopelessness, or revolt against a ruling blob that is only good at one thing: depriving you of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What also trickles down from on-high is the increasing dysfunction of all the systems that evolved to serve American life on-the-ground. For instance, the supply chains that stuff the gigantic merchandise marts from sea to shining sea. The trucking industry is falling apart. The industry can’t find enough workers to load the trucks. They call them “lumpers” in the trucking biz. United Parcel Service (UPS) is hurting so badly for lumpers that they now make the drivers load and unload the brown trucks and have to pay them double overtime for it. The fruit and vegetables that have to make a truck journey thousands of miles from the sunshine lands to the icy north sit rotting in the warehouses because there aren’t enough lumpers on the loading docks — in case you’ve noticed that the produce in your supermarket is looking wilty and gross.

All the systems that move stuff around this big country are wobbling. Many trucking and logistics companies went out of business in 2023, led by Convoy’s bankruptcy in October due to a “an unprecedented freight market collapse” and inability to get financing. UPS has not recovered from the big drop in shipping that followed the end of Covid lockdowns — 1.2-million packages per day in lost volume — nor adjusted to its new contract with the Teamsters Union, a 46 percent cost increase for drivers in the first year. UPS CEO Carol Tomé even took a pay cut: $19 million this year, down from $26 million (including stock packages) in 2021. Federal Express also saw a sharp drop in package deliveries and in September yanked its full-year profit guidance. The FedEx share price dropped 20 percent in one day. Consider, too, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations aimed at a “zero carbon emissions” goal in 2035, legislation guaranteed to first paralyze and then kill trucking in that state, including trucks delivering into and out of California. Good luck with that.

Then there is the good US Postal Service, a crypto-public/private corporation cobbled together back in the 1970s supposedly because mail delivery was losing money. While our Constitution stipulates that the government “establish post offices and post roads” with the implied authority to carry and deliver the mail, the Constitution never said that the post office had to show a profit any more than the Army or the Navy does. These days it looks like our country is just about done with the mail business. Been to your local post office lately? Ours is looking like an old soviet DMV. . . a few part-timers on duty. . . mail delivered when they feel like it. . . an odor of rot in the building. . . . Consider that the post office is one of the few places where we citizens actually interface directly with the government’s workings. So, how does it look like it’s working to you.

Christmas, 2023, will be a test of how all these crumbling services and wobbling business models are affecting the people who live in the outfit known as the USA. Initial reports of empty Walmarts and maxed-out credit cards don’t paint a pretty picture. The Yuletide potlatch will not look like it used to.

At some point, the activity on-the-ground — or eerie absence of activity — might ordinarily be expressed in the stock indexes — but these strange days the markets seem to be hostages of some algorithm cult that operates in a mystical vacuum where nothing matters.

When it gets to the point where famished Americans start eating each other to stay alive, will we see another S & P record high?

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The parents of a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan falsely accused of wearing blackface by a race-baiting Deadspin reporter have lawyered up and have threatened to sue the outlet, publishers G/O Media and Great Hill Partners, and the reporter, Carron Phillips – who wrote that the child, Holden Armenta, had “found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”

Shannon and Raul Armenta have hired Clare Locke LLP to demand a retraction, and have threatened further legal action. The firm previously won a $787.5 million settlement against Fox News for Dominion Voting Systems (resulting in Tucker Carlson’s ouster).

“These Articles, posts on X, and photos about Holden and his parents must be retracted immediately. It is not enough to quietly remove a tweet from X or disable the article from Deadspin’s website. You must publish your retractions and issue an apology to my clients with the same prominence and fanfare with which you defamed them,” reads the letter, obtained by News Nation Now.

BREAKING: The parents of 9-year old Holden Armenta are threatening to sue Deadspin for slandering their son by saying he wore “Black face.”

Do it! 🔥

Shannon and Raul Armenta have hired Clare Locke LLP, demanding that they issue a retraction of the viral story.

It gets better:… pic.twitter.com/gJShq1MFKW

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 4, 2023

Shannon Armenta had posted on Facebook that her son Holden is Native American himself, and that his grandfather serves on the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.

“He is Native American — just stop already,” she wrote.

As News Nation Now notes,

The picture of the boy was taken on Nov. 26 at the Chiefs-Raiders game in Las Vegas. Holden was shown on national TV and was also videoed doing the “tomahawk chop” along with tens of thousands of fans in attendance. Even some Chiefs players were doing the gesture on the field.

But after the image of the boy aired, Phillips, a senior writer with Deadspin, wrote the scathing article about the boy’s “racist” and “disrespectful” actions.

“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate black people and the native americans at the same time,” Phillips wrote in his story.

He continued, “Despite their age, who taught that person that what they were wearing was appropriate?”

Phillips also called out the NFL, calling on the league for “relentlessly participating in prejudice.”

Phillips has doubled down, meanwhile, updating his original article to include a statement from the Chumash Indians which “does not endorse wearing regalia as part of a costume or participating in any other type of cultural appropriation.”

Holden’s father told Fox News‘ Jesse Watters that it’s been “a little scary,” adding “It’s been a lot. It’s been a pretty crazy couple of days. I was mad, upset for him. I’m mad that he’s upset.”

“The damage is already done. It’s, you know, worldwide. Now there’s comments all over, there’s, you know, disrespect towards Native Americans and towards my family. We never in any way, shape or form meant to disrespect any Native Americans or any tribes,” he added.

EXCLUSIVE: The 9-year-old Chiefs fan, who was falsely smeared as a racist for supporting his team, speaks out on Primetime.

Holden Armenta says this whole thing has been scary and overwhelming. His father, Bubba, says it’s too late for an apology- the damage is already done. pic.twitter.com/8T4WsMsvm6

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) November 30, 2023

Let’s see how this goes.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Measured by the purchasing power of our wages/work, we’re definitively poorer, as it takes far more hours of work now to pay rent.

Let’s not over-complicate what’s straightforward: we’re becoming more prosperous when our wages / labor buy more goods and services, most especially the essentials of life: shelter, food, energy, utilities, transportation, higher education, healthcare and childcare. If the money we have left after paying for essentials buys more discretionary goods and services, we’re getting a lagniappe of prosperity.

If the non-discretionary essentials are consuming a greater percentage of our earned income, we’re becoming less prosperous, i.e. we’re poorer. Those tasked with persuading us that gradual impoverishment is actually soaring prosperity have near-infinite statistical means to obscure this straightforward measure of prosperity: the purchasing power of labor / earnings.

If our hours of work buy less non-discretionary goods and services, we’re getting poorer.

That software, TVs and airline fares are cheaper is meaningless because they are occasional discretionary purchases that make up a tiny slice of total cost-of-living expenditures. The status quo cheerleaders in the Ministry of Truth ignore the $5,000 annual cost increases in essentials while trumpeting the $100 decline in occasional discretionary purchases.

Your vacation cost you 100 more hours of work, but you save $50 on airfare, so it all evens out. Um, no. The only metric that is an accurate measure of prosperity and impoverishment is the purchasing power of your labor / earnings. Everything else is noise designed to obscure inconvenient reality.

Not surprisingly, it’s difficult to get accurate data on past real-world costs of essentials. What we hope to find is the actual prices paid in previous years and the median wages paid at the same time.

This data gives us an accurate measure of purchasing power: how many hours of work did it take to pay rent, pay healthcare insurance, buy a used car, etc. This is the kind of table we hope to find: rents paid in Hawaii by decade.

Since I lived in Honolulu, the home of the majority of the state’s population, and actively sought rental housing in the 1970s, I have knowledge of actual rents, and can attest these numbers are in the ballpark for one-bedroom apartments.

But what we often get is data that’s been adjusted and is difficult to align with real-world costs. Here is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) chart of consumer price index for urban rents of primary residences, which includes everything from a shabby studio to a sprawling single-family dwelling. That range makes it less useful than specific numbers for specific classes of rentals.

The data isn’t actual rents paid; it’s an index that’s arbitrarily set to 100 in summer of 1983. So if your rent was $500 a month in 1983, the equivalent rent today is 4X or $2,000. Additionally, data can be scarce, as in this chart of rents in the high-cost San Francisco Bay Area, where I also sought rental housing, so I know actual rent costs from the 1980s on.

Fortunately, there’s a simple chart of median weekly earnings for full-time workers from the first quarter of 1979 to the third quarter of 2023. Now we can make very simple calculations of purchasing power: how many hours of median-wage work does it take to pay typical market-rate rent? To keep it simple, let’s use total earnings before taxes and deductions.

In 1978, I was earning $300/week as a young construction worker, somewhat above the median wage of $232/week. I rented a small, shabby studio for $135/month, well below the average rent of $250/month for a one-bedroom apartment. The market included a wide range of rental options, a big difference from most markets now, in which there are few low-rent options even in not-so-great parts of town.

It took 18 hours of work to pay my rent for the month– 2.25 days. If I’d paid the average rent of $250/month, it wuld have taken 33 hours of work, or about 4 days to pay rent. If I’d earned the median wage and paid the average rent, it would have taken 43 hours or about a week’s earning to pay the rent.

In 1987 in the high-cost S.F. Bay Area, my wage had dropped to around the median and I was paying $550/month for a one-bedroom apartment, about $100/month below market. It took 55 hours of work to pay the rent, or about 7 days of work.

Let’s stop for a moment and ask where in the urban U.S. can a 22-year old worker making a bit more than median wage pay the monthly rent with 2.25 days of work? In today’s economy, my wages in 1978 would translate into about $1,400 per week ($35/hour), and so my studio apartment’s rent would be 2.25 X my daily wage of $280 or $630/month.

I submit there are few urban areas in the U.S. where young workers with average skills and experience can earn $35/hour and rent a studio apartment for $630/month. What we find instead are rents in places like the S.F. Bay Area that average $2,400/month for one-bedroom apartments, so those earning the median weekly wage of $1,120 must devote 2.15 weeks of their earnings to pay rent–11 days of work, more than half their earnings.

This is almost triple the days of work needed to pay rent with a median wage in the 1970s, and 60% more than the days of work needed to pay rent in the 1980s and 1990s in two of the most expensive urban areas of the nation.

Measured by the purchasing power of our wages/work, we’re definitively poorer, as it takes far more hours of work now to pay rent. If you need more evidence, consider the cost of decent (no deductable) healthcare insurance. In 1986, I paid $50/month each for my young, single employees, about 5.5 hours of the median wage.

Now the equivalent insurance costs a minimum of $350/month, or 12.5 hours of median-wage work–more than double the hours needed in the 1980s. I could go on, but isn’t rent and healthcare insurance enough to prove that the vast majority of wage earners are far poorer now than they were two generations ago?

Over time, the decline in the purchasing power of our wages has stripped away hundreds of thousands of dollars of value over a lifetime of work. Rents that now require twice as many hours as they did 40 years ago mean we’ve lost $1,000 a month of purchasing power. Sorry, pundits, saving $20 on a low-quality toy or $100 on a low-quality TV or $100 on airfare doesn’t offset $100,000 lost each decade in the purchasing power of work/wages.

Let’s not overlook the fact that the median wage is skewed by high-wage workers. Tens of millions of workers earn far less than $1,120/week for full-time work.

Yes, the top 5% (which includes all the economists and pundits claiming we’re all doing great) that collects almost 25% of all income are doing just fine, as their incomes have more than kept up with the staggering declines in purchasing power. The next 5% collect 15% of all income, so they’re doing fine, too.

The rest of us–not so much. The bottom 80% of us earn less than half of all income. Factor in the dramatic loss of purchasing power, and we’re much poorer.

*  *  *

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Another day, another set of shitty data dragged US macro surprise index down to lowest since May…

Source: Bloomberg

And before today’s surge in the dollar and bond yields, financial conditions had dramatically eased to their loosest since early August…

Source: Bloomberg

But – the big story of the day was bitcoin and bullion.

Bitcoin ripped back above $42,000 for the first time since April 2022 – erasing all the TerraUSD/3AC crisis losses from last year…

Source: Bloomberg

That pushed Bitcoin’s market cap above that of Berkshire Hathaway (as Munger turns over in his grave)…

Source

Gold hit a new (nominal) record high overnight at $2135…

Source: Bloomberg

…but shortly after that the selling began as Benoit was called in…

It’s 830pm in Basel and he is still in the office.

They are not happy with what happened. pic.twitter.com/zeUHmoWd6a

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 4, 2023

…within the next 8 hours, spot gold prices had dropped $115 from its intraday highs…

Source: Bloomberg

…that is the 6th biggest absolute $ intraday drop in the history of spot gold trading (9/23/11 & 9/26/11 (SNB intervention as gold soared near $2,000), 04/15/13 (taper tantrum), 3/16/20 (COVID lockdowns), 08/11/20 (vaccines))…

Source: Bloomberg

Bonds dumped most of Friday’s pump with yields up across the curve. The short-end underperformed on the day(2Y +11bps, 30Y +4bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

2Y yields are up around 14bps off Friday’s lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Huge divergences in equity-land as long-duration (tech) underperformed as yields rose but Small Caps soared (short-squeeze) with The Dow scarmbling to unch on the day and S&P weak…

Unprofitable Tech stocks continue to outperform the Magnificent 7, with the latter now back at support levels seen in the early summer relative to the unprofitable names…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ripped higher today (no manipulation of gold of course) for its best day in almost two months…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices were lower on the day (as the dollar soared) with WTI finding support around $73 and chopping around there all day…

Finally, after spending July thru Oct starting to recouple with liquidity’s reality, US equities exploded divergently in November…

Source: Bloomberg

What happens first – major central bank liquidity expansion… or a crash in stocks?

Submitted by blueapples on X,

It’s long been said that the greatest trick that the devil played was convincing people he didn’t exist. While an increasingly secularized world seen through the lens of moral relativism and away from the stark juxtaposition of a Manichaeistic duality of the struggle between light and dark has obfuscated the evil omnipresent in our lives, the wanton abandonment had for touting demonic forces may ultimately lead to a regression to the mean causing more people to resist the darkness so brazenly embraced as commonplace. From symbolism ubiquitously sewn into pop culture to outright advocacy for Satanism itself — it’s clear that humanity has never stopped fighting the battle between good and evil. While many chalk up the pervasive use of such symbolism as ironic and not to be taken literally — Cosmopolitan Magazine’s latest instance of promoting Satanism has swept the rug from under that juvenile and dismissive argument.

Last month, the popular magazine tailored toward the vanity of naive young women recently shared instructions with readers on how to perform a Satanic abortion ritual via its Instagram account. “What’s it like to have a Satanic abortion? For Jessica, a 37-year-old mother of three who received abortion medication via Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Clinic, ‘the experience was just very supportive,’” Cosmo opined. The magazine’s Instagram post went up just 2 days after the magazine published a piece on The Satanic Temple’s abortion clinic which was named after the mother of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in response to his penning of the majority opinion on Dobbs v. Women’s Health, the case which overturned the long-standing precedent set forth by Roe v. Wade.

Cosmo went on to laud The Satanic Temple as a vanguard fighting for women’s rights for operating out of New Mexico as a telehealth venture that prescribes abortion pills within the state. Throughout the piece rife with Crowlian language compelling its audience do “do what thou will”, the magazine deludes readers into believing that The Satanic Temple doesn’t actually worship Satan (you know, the literal entity it’s named after). Instead, the article takes the tenor that Satanism is a nontheistic faith that promoted the values of self determination and rationality. This deluded ideology was first put forward by Anton Lavey during the formation of the Church of Satan and has been a stalwart in the propaganda acolytes of Satanism have used to promote their ideology.

Those tenets were taken up by Satanists following the Dobbs decision on the basis of arguing for a legal appeal against the precedent set overturning Roe v. Wade on the basis of it violating their first amendment right to free religious exercise. The same argument was made on appeals challenging Dobbs by several synagogues throughout the country. In contradiction to this claim, Lavey’s Church of Satan has itself opined that it does not consider abortion to be a Satanic sacrament.

Abortion is not a Satanic sacrament. https://t.co/YZckmAOQZi

— The Church Of Satan (@ChurchofSatan) October 27, 2020

However, one does not need to possess more than a neophytic understanding of constitutional law to know that first amendment protections of freedom of religious exercise are not extended to the premise that argument makes. In 1990, The Supreme Court examined the very issue or religious freedom within the context of laws governing the public interest in the case of Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith. In a 6-3 decision from the Rehnquist-era court in which each of the dissenting Associate Justices also joined parts of Sandra Day O’Connor’s concurrent opinion to the majority opinion written by Antonin Scalia, the SCOTUS held that first amendment protections do not extend to neutral laws made in the interest of preserving an underlying public interest.

In fact, The Satanic Temple’s lawsuit on this basis challenging Indiana’s ban on abortion was rejected by a judge with the United States District Court of the Southern District of Indiana in October. The basis for the dismissal of The Satanic Temple’s case was that the temple had no standing to file suit given that it didn’t operate any abortion clinics in the state and thus could not demonstrate any of its 90 members in the state of Indiana had their first amendment right infringed upon in line with their argument. The judge ruled, that without presenting specifically what members were affected that The Satanic Temple ultimately “failed to meet its burden to prove that there are actual or potential Indiana patients at all.”

Despite demonstrating a less than competent understanding of how the law works, The Satanic Temple is still marching on with its legal challenges to abortion bans in states throughout the country. As part of a multi-faceted strategy, the temple has also apparently enlisted the multitudes of liberal-leaning publications to be foot soldiers in the culture war its waging. Cosmopolitan Magazine is just the latest example of how Satanism uses pop culture as a means of brainwashing the masses.

Ironically, the feeble attempt to inherently align abortion advocacy with literal Satanism further undermines the moral grounds pro-choice advocates have. Of course, one would be more naive to expect than the average Cosmo reader to expect that they would have the self-awareness they’d need to see the mistake being made by associating abortions with Satanic rituals. However, if the axiom that the enemy or one’s enemy is one’s friend proves true, the off-putting optics of Cosmopolitan Magazine’s lately satanic endeavor to gain allies will ultimately arouse more opposition than support of its cause in the “fight for bodily autonomy.”

Subitted by Paul Kupiec, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

The Secretary of the Treasury and the Financial Stability Oversight Council would like you to believe that climate-change and unregulated non-bank financial institutions are the biggest threats to financial stability. If financial regulators were actually safeguarding the integrity of banks and financial markets, they would recognize, and do something about, the largest immediate threat to financial stability: the nearly $1.3 trillion of unrealized interest rate related losses in the regulated banking system.  This is the real systemic risk today.

The $1.3 trillion is my estimate of the banking system’s total unrealized interest rate related losses as of June 30, 2023. Using bank regulatory data, I estimate that the banking system has total unrealized losses of about $548 billion on bank-owned securities and about $726 billion in interest rate driven losses on bank loan and lease portfolios.

These losses are important because they are not recognized in the value of banks’ reported regulatory capital. Regulatory capital is the buffer that is supposed to keep banks from failing and imposing losses on the FDIC insurance fund. Banks’ need sufficient capital to keep their incentives properly aligned. When banks have little capital their shareholders keep gains generated by their risky investments but off load losses to the FDIC when their risky investments sour.

If unrealized interest rate losses were realized, they would consume more than half of the banking system’s $2.3 trillion in total equity capital. And the loss absorbing capacity of the system’s equity is already reduced by the almost $800 billion in intangible assets and goodwill counted as bank equity. These assets historically have had little loss absorbing capacity when a bank fails. Taking these factors into account, the banking system is not nearly as well capitalized as our regulatory leaders claim.

Coincidently, the banking systems’ unrealized interest rate driven losses are roughly equal to the $1.3 trillion unrealized mark-to-market interest rate losses on the securities owned by the Federal Reserve.¹ Given the Fed’s own reported unrealized interest rate losses, we can be sure that the Fed and other FSOC banking regulators are well aware that the banking system has a similar problem.

How did this happen? Between the Fed and Congress, COVID19 stimulus injected trillions of dollars of new deposits into the banking system. Between 2019/Q4 and 2022/Q1, total banking system deposits grew by more than 37 percent. Banks had to put these deposits to work earning enough interest to cover deposit insurance premiums, examination and other regulatory costs, service depositor accounts, and earn a return on shareholders’ investment. Under the Fed’s COVID-era zero interest rate policy, banks were unable to cover costs if deposits were invested in in short-term Treasury securities and deposits at the Federal Reserve.

To earn a positive margin, banks invested deposits in longer-term securities and loans with low or no credit risk and favorable regulatory capital treatment. The yields on these investments, while low by historical standards, paid an interest rate premium over short-term instruments by virtue of their longer maturities.

The strategy of investing demandable deposits in long-maturity fixed rate instruments with low regulatory capital requirements was profitable as long as inflation remained low and deposit interest rates were close to zero. The onset of unexpected inflation eventually forced the Fed to change monetary policy. The Fed increased short-term interest rates and started draining bank deposits from the system causing interest rates at all maturities to increase, raising banks’ cost of retaining deposits, and creating market value losses on bank’s long-maturity fixed-rate investments.    

For accounting statement and regulatory capital purposes, banks value their loans, leases and held-to-maturity securities at historical cost. The largest banks have to include market value losses on their securities designated “available for sale” when calculating their regulatory capital, but most smaller banks are allowed to ignore these losses.  As a consequence, banks’ regulatory capital ratios claim that bank asset values are approximately $1.3 trillion larger than the current market value these assets would command if they were sold or pledged as collateral.

Regulators measure banks’ capital adequacy using several different ratios that involve some measure of bank regulatory capital divided by some measure of bank assets. I focus on bank regulatory Tier 1 leverage ratios, the ratio of bank total Tier 1 regulatory capital to a bank’s average quarterly assets. All banks are required to report this measure but nearly 1700 smaller banks do not report any of the risk-weighted capital ratios reported by larger banks.

As of June 30, 2023, only 8 banks had a regulatory Tier 1 leverage ratio below the 6 percent threshold that regulators use to designate a bank as “well capitalized”. No bank has a ratio below the 4 percent threshold that designates an “undercapitalized” institution. By this regulatory measure, the banking system appears to be well-capitalized, but this regulatory ratio ignores the actual market value of bank assets.

Adjusting bank Tier 1 regulatory capital ratios by the unrealized mark-to-market losses on bank securities reported by banks, and by a reasonable (likely low) estimate of the mark-value losses banks have suffered on their loan and lease portfolios, gives a radically different picture of the banking system’s capital adequacy. Out of the 4697 insured depository institutions, 2372 have market-value adjusted Tier 1 leverage ratios smaller than the 4 percent “undercapitalized” threshold requiring regulators to take “prompt corrective action”.  This number includes 1790 banks with ratios below the 3 percent “significantly undercapitalized” threshold. Undercapitalized banks hold more than 54 percent of the total assets in the banking system including more than 46 percent held in significantly undercapitalized institutions.  

The Treasury Secretary and FSOC members are well aware of the danger posed by unrealized interest rate related losses in the banking system, but you would not know it from their public statements. Regulators should be using prompt corrective action powers to restrict under-capitalized banks from paying dividends and require them to raise new capital. Instead they have allowed banks to pay out almost $96 billion in dividends in the first half of 2023 and focused their regulatory efforts on imposing new complex capital regulations for the largest banks that would not address this real systemic problem.

Federal bank regulators are hoping that if they ignore this problem, you will too, and the problem will go away when the inflation genie is back in the bottle and interest rates decline. But this may not happen soon. Core inflation is still running at nearly twice the Fed’s target rate, unemployment is low, economic growth remains stronger than many anticipated, and Congress remains on a massive deficit spending spree.  Hoping for a speedy return to a near zero environment before there a run of costly bank failures is not a sound regulatory strategy.

[1] www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/files/quarterly-report-20231117.pdf Table 3.

Hunter Biden sent monthly payments to his father out of a bank account he used to receive money from Chinese business associates, according to newly released bank records revealed by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who shared a Monday video on X detailing redacted bank transfers to Joe Biden from Hunter’s Owasco P.C. bank account.

“Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” Comer says in the video, adding that the payments began in September 2018 – six months before Biden announced his candidacy in the 2020 election.

“Payments from Hunter’s business entity to Joe Biden are now part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco P.C., made DIRECT monthly payments to Joe Biden.
@RepJamesComer explains 👇 pic.twitter.com/7bXyGYmWVZ

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) December 4, 2023

“Payments to Joe Biden from Hunter’s Owasco PC corporate account are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes. As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” reads an accompanying release from the Oversight Committee.

See the records below via the Daily Caller;

Hunter and his uncle James’ personal business records were subpoenaed by Comer in September following the first impeachment hearing for President Biden.

He released bank records Nov. 1 showing how funds originating in China resulted in a $40,000 check to Joe Biden in September 2017.

A Chinese firm sent $5 million to Hunter Biden’s firm Hudson West III in August 2017, shortly after he established the business entity with a Chinese business associate. Hunter Biden proceeded to wire $400,000 to his Owasco P.C. account and over $130,000 to another one of his corporate accounts, according to the bank records.

Next, Hunter Biden provided $150,000 to the Lion Hall Group, James Biden and his wife Sara Biden’s business account. James Biden and Sara Biden put $50,000 into their personal account and then sent a $40,000 check to Joe Biden, the bank records show. -Daily Caller

And of course the big (rhetorical) question – what services were Hunter and pals providing for such exorbitant sums?

Hunter and James will appear later this month for closed-door depositions.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

There is “no science” that says the world should phase out fossil fuels to curb global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate summit, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting report.

“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” Al Jaber said in an online event last month, the remarks from which the Guardian reported on December 3, days after the COP28 summit in Dubai began on November 30.

Al Jaber made those comments in response to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change.

[ZH: Additionally, The Guardian newspaper published video from the call on Sunday, which included al-Jaber off-camera sounding increasingly frustrated, at one point telling three leading women involved with climate change and gender: “I am telling you I am the man in charge.”

“You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuel,” al-Jaber said.

“Please, help me, show me for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Responding to the remark, U.N. Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said she lives in Kenya with solar power and clean electricity from the local utility.

“I’m not living in a cave,” she added.

“That’s all I can say.”

The remarks from Al Jaber draw criticism from scientists and are in contrast with the view of Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who said at the climate summit on Friday,

“The science is clear: The 1.5C limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce, not abate. Phase out, with a clear timeframe.”

Al Jaber’s presidency of COP28 has stirred controversy in recent months. He is the first CEO designated to be president of any climate summit so far. But he is also the chief executive of the national oil company of OPEC’s third-largest producer, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“The recent comments from COP28 President show how entrenched he is in fossil fuel fantasy and is clearly determined that this COP doesn’t do anything to harm the interests of the oil and gas industry,” said Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa.

“These remarks are a wake-up call to the world and negotiators at COP28 that they are not going to get any help from the COP presidency in delivering a strong outcome on a fossil fuel phase-out and will need to work hard to ensure a few petro-state leaders don’t imperil the planet in their efforts to protect their oil profits.”

Last week, Al Jaber denied reports of plans to use the climate summit in Dubai to push oil deals.

Earlier last week, the BBC and many other news outlets reported that the UAE planned to use its role as the host of climate talks to forge new oil and gas deals. The BBC cited leaked briefing documents obtained by independent journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting working alongside the BBC. Those documents were purportedly prepared by the UAE’s COP28 team for meetings with at least 27 foreign governments during the climate summit which Dubai will host from November 30 to December 12.