Author: admin

Authored by Jordan Schachtel via ‘The Mass Illusion’ subastack,

Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about – Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria.

Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are.

Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.

In Sweden, there’s no mandatory masks, no mandatory lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.

Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.

The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.

In August, Sweden has registered just one death (!) with/from the coronavirus. Yes, you read that correctly. One death so far. 

For the month of July, Sweden reported 226 deaths. They’ve accounted for 805 June deaths, 1646 in May, and 2572 in April. The deaths attributed to COVID-19 went from about a 50% reduction to falling off of a cliff.

The story is the same in the hospitals. COVID-19 is hardly registering as a blip on the radar. Sweden has reported just 4 new COVID-19 patients in their ICUs in August. The month of July saw only 52 COVID-19 patients in ICUs.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to come to the conclusion that the epidemic appears to have been wrapped up in Sweden for months. It’s unclear whether this is a result of having achieved the herd immunity threshold, or if the seasonality of the virus is providing indefinite relief. But it’s become absolutely clear that Sweden’s long term pandemic strategy is working.

Sweden did not do everything perfectly. Stockholm, like much of the West, failed to protect its nursing home population. The majority of the COVID-19 deaths in Sweden have come from the senior care population, with the average age of death (82) being the same as the average lifespan in the country. But remember, people in nursing homes are not mobile. They live in their own ecosystems and are not particularly impacted by COVID-19 policies. It was Sweden’s general population that was supposed to be plagued by their open society model to respond to the virus. We were told that the hospitals would be overrun, and that bodies of all ages would be dropping in the streets. This dystopian pandemia projection never came to fruition. Even during the worst months of the pandemic, Sweden’s general population never pressed their healthcare system. The same is true in the United States, but for whatever reason, many U.S. officials and “public health experts” have pushed the idea that everyone is equally impacted, which could not be further from the truth.

For this pandemic, the global public health expert class threw the pandemic playbook out the window, disregarding hundreds of years of proven science on herd immunity, in order to attempt to assert human control over a submicroscopic infectious particle. It hasn’t worked, to say the least. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that lockdowns or masks have *stopped* the spread of the virus. Sweden was one of the few places where cooler heads prevailed, and the scientists realized that attempts to stop the virus would be worse than the disease itself, in the form of economic and social ruin.

*  *  *

Thanks for reading! I would be honored if you are willing to support my work and subscribe to The Mass Illusion, my newsletter for people concerned about our “new normal.”

Back in May, we reported how TSMC, one of the biggest contract chipmakers in Asia, and a critical component of China’s high-tech supply chain, would be forced to cut off supplies of US-designed microchips used in Huawei smartphones. That, in turn, would create serious problems for the company as it seeks to supplant Samsung as the world’s largest seller of smartphones.

More than three months later, the situation hasn’t changed much: The full force of the newest restrictions out of the US are starting to bite, and on Friday, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, confirmed to an industry conference that Huawei’s new high-end Mate40 handsets, set to debut this fall, will be the last smartphones featuring the company’s most advanced processor (Huawei has had plenty of time to stockpile components). 

But starting on Septl 15, the Kirin processors used in these handsets will no longer be produced.

“From Sept. 15 onward, our flagship Kirin processors cannot be produced. Our AI-powered chips also cannot be processed. This is a huge loss for us. Huawei began exploring the chip sector over 10 years ago, starting from hugely lagging behind, to slightly lagging behind, to catching up, and then to a leader. We invested massive resources for R&D, and went through a difficult process.”

Before Washington added Huawei and a bunch of its subsidiaries to an American blacklist,

a subsidiary of Huawei produces its own chips based on designs owned by ARM

He called it a “huge loss” to the company. But it’s a problem that Huawei can only face once, as it seeks to mimic Apple by producing more of its own chips.

But since Huawei hasn’t developed nearly as much in terms of resources to developing their manufacturing capacity (as opposed to the company’s design capacity, which has thrived, bolstered by plenty of stolen IP). And the death of Huawei’s Kirin9000 chipsets, manufactured for the company by TSMC, appear to already creating new constraints for Huawei’s 2020 and 2021 smartphone shipments.

Here’s more on that from Caixin, the Chinese financial news organization:

The Kirin9000 chipsets have been produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) with U.S. equipment. In July, the Taiwan contract chipmaker said it stopped taking new orders from Huawei in May.

Yu said Huawei’s smartphone shipments this year will be less than last year’s 240 million units reflecting the chip shortage caused by the U.S. trade ban. Huawei’s global shipments in the second quarter totaled 55.8 million phones, surpassing Samsung for the first time to become the world’s largest mobile phone vendor.

However, facing disruptions in its supply chain, Yu said he regretted that Huawei had only invested in developing chips, not in manufacturing them. “After Sept. 15, we will neither be able to produce our flagship chipsets, nor our chips with AI processing capabilities — this is a huge loss to us,” he told the event.

He said Huawei is determined to solve the problems by making breakthroughs in technology innovations on operation systems, chips, data and cloud services. He also called on China’s chip industry to make advancements on chip manufacturing and new generation semiconductors.

In the first-half of the year, Huawei’s consumer business garnered 255.8 billion yuan in sales revenue and sold more than 105 million smartphones.

Since winding up on the Commerce Department’s trade ‘blacklist’, Huawei has invested heavily in R&D. But no matter how fast it innovates, the company still can’t escape the reality of a globally diversified supply chain illustrated in the chart below:

Huawei has still managed to eclipse Samsung in terms of sales, but it is still overwhelmingly dependent on the Chinese market.

In the second quarter, over 70% of its device shipments were in China, where the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs is thought to have contributed to boosting sales by 8%. Its shipments in markets outside China, however, dropped 27%.

“Strength in China alone will not be enough to sustain Huawei at the top once the global economy starts to recover,” said Mo Jia an analyst at Canalys. “Its major channel partners in key regions, such as Europe, are increasingly wary of ranging Huawei devices, taking on fewer models, and bringing in new brands to reduce risk.”

To be effectively compete against Samsung, Huawei needs to dominate. And the Trump Administration’s sanctions are about to make that much more difficult.

Authored by CJ Hopkins (satirically) via The Consent Factory,

They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit.

I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that.

People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force… a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.

You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric of human society to protect ourselves from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99.6% survive, which, it goes without saying, is totally insane.

I’ve been calling them “corona-totalitarians,” but I’m going to call them the “New Normals” from now on, as that more accurately evokes the pathologized-totalitarian ideology they are systematically spreading. At this point, I think it is important to do that, because, clearly, their ideological program has nothing to do with any actual virus, or any other actual public health threat. As is glaringly obvious to anyone whose mind has not been taken over yet, the “apocalyptic coronavirus pandemic” was always just a Trojan horse, a means of introducing the “New Normal,” which they’ve been doing since the very beginning.

The official propaganda started in March, and it reached full intensity in early April. Suddenly, references to the “New Normal” were everywhere, not only in the leading corporate media (e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, et al.), the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC (and the list goes on), but also on the blogs of athletic organizations, global management consulting firms, charter school websites, and random YouTube videos.

The slogan has been relentlessly repeated (in a textbook totalitarian “big lie” fashion) for going on the past six months. We have heard it repeated so many times that many of us have forgotten how insane it is, the idea that the fundamental structure of society needs to be drastically and irrevocably altered on account of a virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of the human species.

And, make no mistake, that is exactly what the “New Normal” movement intends to do. “New Normalism” is a classic totalitarian movement (albeit with a pathological twist), and it is the goal of every totalitarian movement to radically, utterly transform society, to remake the world in its monstrous image.

That is what totalitarianism is, this desire to establish complete control over everything and everyone, every thought, emotion, and human interaction. The character of its ideology changes (i.e., Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), but this desire for complete control over people, over society, and ultimately life itself, is the essence of totalitarianism … and what has taken over the minds of the New Normals.

In the New Normal society they want to establish, as in every totalitarian society, fear and conformity will be pervasive. Their ideology is a pathologized ideology (as opposed to, say, the racialized ideology of the Nazis), so its symbology will be pathological. Fear of disease, infection, and death, and obsessive attention to matters of health will dominate every aspect of life. Paranoid propaganda and ideological conditioning will be ubiquitous and constant.

Everyone will be forced to wear medical masks to maintain a constant level of fear and an omnipresent atmosphere of sickness and death, as if the world were one big infectious disease ward. Everyone will wear these masks at all times, at work, at home, in their cars, everywhere. Anyone who fails or refuses to do so will be deemed “a threat to public health,” and beaten and arrested by the police or the military, or swarmed by mobs of New Normal vigilantes.

Cities, regions, and entire countries will be subjected to random police-state lockdowns, which will be justified by the threat of “infection.” People will be confined to their homes for up to 23-hours a day, and allowed out only for “essential reasons.” Police and soldiers will patrol the streets, stopping people, checking their papers, and beating and arresting anyone out in public without the proper documents, or walking or standing too close to other people, like they are doing in Melbourne, Australia, currently.

The threat of “infection” will be used to justify increasingly insane and authoritarian edicts, compulsory demonstration-of-fealty rituals, and eventually the elimination of all forms of dissent. Just as the Nazis believed they were waging a war against the “subhuman races,” the New Normals will be waging a war on “disease,” and on anyone who “endangers the public health” by challenging their ideological narrative. Like every other totalitarian movement, in the end, they will do whatever is necessary to purify society of “degenerate influences” (i.e., anyone who questions or disagrees with them, or who refuses to obey their every command). They are already aggressively censoring the Internet and banning their opponents’ political protests, and political leaders and the corporate media are systematically stigmatizing those of us who dare to challenge their official narrative as “extremists,” “Nazis,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” “coronavirus deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and “esoteric” freaks. One German official even went so far as to demand that dissidents be deported … presumably on trains to somewhere in the East.

Despite this increasing totalitarianization and pathologization of virtually everything, the New Normals will carry on with their lives as if everything were … well, completely normal. They will go out to restaurants and the movies in their masks. They will work, eat, and sleep in their masks. Families will go on holiday in their masks, or in their “Personal Protective Upper-Body Bubble-Wear.” They will arrive at the airport eight hours early, stand in their little color-coded boxes, and then follow the arrows on the floor to the “health officials” in the hazmat suits, who will take their temperature through their foreheads and shove ten-inch swabs into their sinus cavities. Parents who wish to forego this experience will have the option to preventatively vaccinate themselves and their children with the latest experimental vaccine (after signing a liability waiver, of course) within a week or so before their flights, and then present the officials with proof of vaccination (and of their compliance with various other “health guidelines”) on their digital Identity and Public Health Passports, or subdermal biometric chips.

Children, as always, will suffer the worst of it. They will be terrorized and confused from the moment they are born, by their parents, their teachers, and by the society at large. They will be subjected to ideological conditioning and paranoid behavioral modification at every stage of their socialization … with fanciful reusable corporate plague masks branded with loveable cartoon characters, paranoia-inducing picture books for toddlers, and paranoid “social distancing” rituals, among other forms of psychological torture. This conditioning (or torture) will take place at home, as there will be no more schools, or rather, no public schools. The children of the wealthy will attend private schools, where they can be cost-effectively “socially-distanced.” Working class children will sit at home, alone, staring into screens, wearing their masks, their hyperactivity and anxiety disorders stabilized with anti-depressant medications.

And so on … I think you get the picture. I hope so, because I don’t have the heart to go on.

I pray this glimpse into the New Normal future has terrified and angered you enough to rise up against it before it is too late. This isn’t a joke, folks. The New Normals are serious. If you cannot see where their movement is headed, you do not understand totalitarianism. Once it starts, and reaches this stage, it does not stop, not without a fight. It continues to its logical conclusion. The way that usually happens is, people tell themselves it isn’t happening, it can’t be happening, not to us. They tell themselves this as the totalitarian program is implemented, step by step, one seemingly harmless step at a time. They conform, because, at first, the stakes aren’t so high, and their conformity leads to more conformity, and the next thing they know they’re telling their grandchildren that they had no idea where the trains were going.

If you have made it through to the end of this essay, your mind hasn’t been taken over yet … the New Normals clicked off around paragraph 2.

What that means is that it is your responsibility to speak up, and to do whatever else you can, to stop the New Normal future from becoming a reality. You will not be rewarded for it. You will be ridiculed and castigated for it. Your New Normal friends will hate you for it. Your New Normal family will forsake you for it. The New Normal police might arrest you for it. It is your responsibility to do it anyway … as, of course, it is also mine.

Following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl, many nations reiterated their intent to wean off the energy source.

However, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, this sentiment is anything but universal – in many other regions of the world, nuclear power is still ramping up, and it’s expected to be a key energy source for decades to come.

Using data from the Power Reactor Information System, maintained by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the map above gives a comprehensive look at where nuclear reactors are subsiding, and where future capacity will reside.

Increasing Global Nuclear Use

Despite a dip in total capacity and active reactors last year, nuclear power still generated around 10% of the world’s electricity in 2019.

Part of the increased capacity came as Japan restarted some plants and European countries looked to replace aging reactors. But most of the growth is driven by new reactors coming online in Asia and the Middle East.

China is soon to have more than 50 nuclear reactors, while India is set to become a top-ten producer once construction on new reactors is complete.

Decreasing Use in Western Europe and North America

The slight downtrend from 450 operating reactors in 2018 to 443 in 2019 was the result of continued shutdowns in Europe and North America. Home to the majority of the world’s reactors, the two continents also have the oldest reactors, with many being retired.

At the same time, European countries are leading the charge in reducing dependency on the energy source. Germany has pledged to close all nuclear plants by 2022, and Italy has already become the first country to completely shut down their plants.

Despite leading in shutdowns, Europe still emerges as the most nuclear-reliant region for a majority of electricity production and consumption.

In addition, some countries are starting to reassess nuclear energy as a means of fighting climate change. Reactors don’t produce greenhouse gases during operation, and are more efficient (and safer) than wind and solar per unit of electricity.

Facing steep emission reduction requirements, a variety of countries are looking to expand nuclear capacity or to begin planning for their first reactors.

A New Generation of Nuclear Reactors?

For those parties interested in the benefits of nuclear power, past accidents have also led towards a push for innovation in the field. That includes studies of miniature nuclear reactors that are easier to manage, as well as full-size reactors with robust redundancy measures that won’t physically melt down.

Additionally, some reactors are being designed with the intention of utilizing accumulated nuclear waste—a byproduct of nuclear energy and weapon production that often had to be stored indefinitely—as a fuel source.

With some regions aiming to reduce reliance on nuclear power, and others starting to embrace it, the landscape is certain to change.

By Nicole Hao of Epoch Times

Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua recently asked the governors of each province in China to make sure the sown areas of agricultural crops would not shrink and crop yield won’t be reduced this year. At a food security meeting held in Beijing on July 27, he warned that governors would be punished if they failed to uphold the promise, including with dismissals.

And when Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited northeastern Jilin Province on July 22, he told the local government to treat grain production as a priority task. The top officials’ emphasis on food supplies raised questions about whether China is facing a severe food shortage this year.

In early July, the government organ China National Grain and Oils Information Center released its estimates that the corn supply gap in the 2020-2021 fiscal year would be 25 million metric tons—more than double the previous estimated 12 million metric tons.

On Aug. 5, the Center estimated that China would import six million metric tons of wheat in the 12 months from June 2020 to May 2021, which would be the highest amount in the past seven years. The Center said the wheat would likely come from France, Russia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan.

In late January, Chinese authorities mandated that people stay at home to prevent the spread of COVID-19, farmers among them. Around March, restrictions eased and most farmers were allowed to go out again. But not long after, extreme weather across large swathes of China led to the destruction of crops. Since early June, heavy rain has befallen the country’s south, center, and east. Meanwhile, parts of the northwest and northeast are suffering from droughts. Pests such as locusts and fall armyworms have also invaded crops.  Farmers told The Epoch Times that they suspected that they would lose their harvest this year.

Flooding

Chinese farmers plant rice in 13 provinces, including Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, and Fujian. All these provinces were impacted by flooding in June and July. Farmers plant rice at three different times of the year. The early season is planted in late March, and harvested in late June. The middle season is planted in early May and harvested in late September. The late season is planted in late June and harvested in mid-October. The flooding in June and July impacted all three seasons of rice planting.

Mr. Li is from Poyang county, Jiangxi Province. He told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on July 18: “The early rice in our province was ruined before harvest. The mid-season rice was destroyed by the floods. Now it’s too late to plant the late rice.” While sobbing on the phone, Mr. Chen from Hunan Province said farmers in his area had no harvest this year. He and his fellow villagers were worried that they might not have enough food to eat, as flooding has hit the region continually.

Droughts

Wheat is mainly planted in central and northern China. Farmers only harvest once a year in late May to early June. Wheat production in Henan Province contributes to roughly a quarter of China’s total agricultural production. However, droughts killed the crops in Henan, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Jilin, and other northern provinces.

Privately-run Chinese grains and oil wholesale platform CCTIN visited wheat production areas of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces and reported that the quality of wheat in 2020 was worse than that in 2019, and production was 15 to 30 percent less than previous years.

The situation in Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Xinjiang is worse. State-run media Xinhua reported on June 16 that 50.7 percent of Inner Mongolia’s land suffered heavy droughts this year. The region mainly grows wheat, as well as soybeans and corn. Crops and wild grass were unable to grow, impacting local animal husbandry.

State-run China News reported on June 3 that the dry bout led to almost no harvesting in Gansu Province this year. “I’m 50 years old. I had never seen a drought like this year,” a farmer in Yuzhong city, Gansu said in the report. One woman in Xinjiang shared a video on social media on July 17, showing large wheat fields that have dried up.

“You think this yellow color is harvested [wheat]? They all died. Our farmers have no harvest at all this year,” she said.

新疆的麦子，全部旱死了，颗粒无收！央视刚吹夏粮丰收创新高！这脸打的！ pic.twitter.com/yj2HyFfvXi

— 吴文行wenxingwu (@wuwenhang) July 19, 2020

Chinese media reports also noted that due to a two-month-long drought, two-thirds of the corn crops in northeastern Liaoning Province have dried up.

Pests

Meanwhile, nearby Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces reported native locust plagues in June. In late June, a foreign locust invasion entered China’s Yunnan Province in the southwest, from Laos, and continued moving to other regions. On July 27, Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs organized a drill to wipe out locusts in Yunnan and estimated that more locusts would keep on entering China from Laos before late August.

Farmers in southern Guangxi and Hunan provinces have also reported native locust plagues in June.

And the fall armyworm, which enjoys feeding on corn, was reported to have destroyed crops in Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, and other provinces in July.

Other Signs

Recent trends in the Chinese market also indicated that there was a food shortage. China’s leading producer and supplier of processed agricultural products, state-run China Agri-Industries Holdings, announced on Aug. 3 that the central government released 3.6 million metric tons of state-reserved rice to the market recently, which were harvested from 2014 to 2019.

China has a national grain reserves system in order to maintain food security, but how much the country actually possesses in reserve has been called into question. Meanwhile, all domestic grain prices have gone up in the first week of August, compared to the same period last year, according to data issued by Orient Securities and Huatai Securities.

Soybean prices, in particular, jumped up 37.83 percent, from 3,454 yuan ($484.85) per metric ton in Aug. 2019 to 4,761 yuan ($682.1) per metric ton in Aug. 2020. The Chinese regime also recently made record purchases of U.S. agricultural goods. On July 29, China purchased its biggest-ever order of U.S. corn, 1.937 million metric tons, which will be delivered during the 2020-21 marketing year that begins on Sept. 1, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Orders in July also broke previous records. On July 14, USDA reported that China bought 1.762 million metric tons of corn and 129,000 metric tons of soybeans. On July 10, China ordered 1.365 million metric tons of U.S. corn, 130,000 metric tons of U.S. hard red winter wheat, and 190,000 metric tons of U.S. hard red spring wheat.

Qin, an agriculture researcher in China who only gave his last name because he was not authorized to speak to foreign media, explained that grains have three primary uses in China, which are: food for human consumption, feed for livestock, and raw materials to make wine and other industrial products.

He said the current shortage “won’t be as serious as people not having food to eat… The key is no feed for livestock and poultry. Then, people don’t have enough meat to eat,” Qin said.

One final observation confirming that food in China is indeed becoming scarce: food inflation has been in the double digits for the past 12 months.

Even in the most obvious of circumstances – the Fed printing trillions of dollars within the span of one fiscal quarter – Paul Krugman seems unable to make the basic link between purchasing power, the money supply and the price of gold, and refuses to even consider the recent worldview reversals in such prominent former deflationistas as Russell Napier, Albert Edwards and Russell Clark (all discussed previously).

Everyone’s favorite financial muppet took to Twitter over the weekend to offer his perfunctory take on an op-ed  written in the New York Times, titled “Why Is Everyone Buying Gold?” in which none other than the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, Ruchir Sharma, validated long-ridiculed goldbugs:

Gold bugs — investors perpetually bullish on gold — have long been seen as a paranoid fringe of the financial world, holding the shiny asset as a hedge against a disaster they always think is near. But lately, they appear to be on to something.

This year, gold is the best performing traditional asset in the world. Its price just topped $2,000 an ounce for the first time. From serious investors to newly minted day traders, everyone is talking up its virtues.

“It seems we’re all gold bugs now,” the op-ed capitulates, without mocking that other “expert” from the WSJ who five years ago called gold a “pet rock.”

It also attributes the rise in gold to Central Banks having lost control (or rather, as Russell Napier put it, conceded control to the government) and that inflation is a foregone conclusion, stating: “But the gold mania is also driven by a hunch that the easy money pouring out of central banks and government stimulus programs could trigger inflation, which makes it a more worrisome economic omen.”

He’s spot on – but for the fact that the inflation, as defined by an expansion of the money supply and not rising prices, has already been created. 

Likely irked by the fact that the NY Times published something on finance that redirects attention from his clueless echo chamber, Krugman took to Twitter in response. “Gold prices aren’t rising because investors expect inflation,” Krugman Tweeted. Instead, he claimed that gold prices were rising because bond yields are falling.

Here’s the 10-year breakeven inflation rate — the rate that would equalize yields on inflation-protected and ordinary bonds — plus the yield on those inflation-protected bonds 2/ pic.twitter.com/A3ioU6SqvV

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 8, 2020

Hiding behind the central bank’s definition of inflation, which according to Keynesians doesn’t even happen until it shows up in the heavily manipulated CPI, Krugman argued: “The implied inflation forecast is actually lower than it was last year; what’s happened is a plunge in yields, reflecting economic pessimism,” he continued.

He then Tweeted out two charts showing the 10 year breakeven inflation rate. But apparently, during his deep dive for his Twitter rant, the Nobel Prize winner wasn’t able to locate and post a chart of the M2 money supply, which may have offered up more clues as to why everyone bidding up gold. 

In other words, nobody cares about the inflation forecast, Paul. They care about this:

Incidentally, one other thing that Krugman never even considered, is that gold is now a hedge to both runaway inflation and deflation, something we have discussed extensively here over the past decade.

Then again, this is the same guy who said the internet’s effect on the world economy would be “no greater than the Fax Machine” (and yes, even the vacuous libtards at Snopes were forced to admit that their econ god is clueless). This is also the same “Nobel prize winner” who the day after Trump won boldly predicted that “markets will never recover” from a Trump victory and that “we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

Krugman concluded: “The thing is, we went through exactly this story in 2008-9: rising gold prices without rising inflation expectations bc of falling yields, and even a blip in TIPS prices during the post-Lehman financial disruption. No excuse for being confused now.”

So thanks for the advice, but the only one confused here is you, Paul.