Author: admin

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

Buyers of Bitcoin have seen fantastic results in the past year since the lows of March 2020. That is until the middle of this month as price has dropped a bit. Whether it’s just a momentary hiccup or just another set up to new highs is not the point of this article.

Rather I’d like to discuss a common point that is made about Bitcoin: That it is a store of value, a hedge against the global fiat printing system run by central banks.

Now conceptually one can make anything a store of value if enough people agree that it is, especially if there is limited supply as Bitcoin is structured to be with only 21M possible Bitcoins to be mined. We’ve seen this store of value concept play out for centuries throughout societies. Think stamp collecting. The rarer a stamp the higher its value, especially if collectors think so, even though to most people it’s just a piece of paper with print on it. Others disagree and bid enormous amounts of money on a rare stamp. Value is in eye of the beholder.

One can say the same thing about bottles of wine. People have and will continue to pay thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for rare wines. Happens all the time.

Heck, in many of these cases the wine is not purchased to drink (i.e. be used as a currency, but rather it is a collector’s item to be kept in a wine cellar. A store of value, something a collector may even auction off for profit at a later time. After all, a particular vintage or rare bottle of wine can’t be duplicated and if enough people are interested in it its value is likely to increase.

Fine. If that’s what people buy Bitcoin for, as a store of value who am I to argue? Have at it. As long as people want it and as long as the supply is limited price can appreciate. No different to wines or stamps I suppose.

But is it a hedge against the global fiat system? For now, as Bitcoin has seen such incredible price appreciation, the answer will most definitely be yes, especially by adherents, especially after they have seen massive price gains versus fiat and even the stock market.

But massive price gains or even rapid adoption and/or popularity are not a validation of a long term thesis. Indeed many times massive price gains entice belief in validation when there is none with no predictive value of future success. Think MySpace. It was the first winner in the internet social media world. It still exists but is totally irrelevant in today’s world. AOL? Yahoo? All early winners in the internet world all irrelevant today. But they all had one thing in common: Vast price appreciations with people chasing extremely high valuations that ultimately didn’t prove to be rooted in reality.

Once people believe absolutely in an investment idea that appears validated by vast price appreciation the FOMO and hype becomes so unbearable that even the smartest people on the planet will end up jumping on it. No more famous example than Isaac Newton, arguably the smartest human to have ever lived, yet even he got caught up in the South Sea bubble and ended up having his investment head handed to him.

The larger point: Even if something is highly popular and new at the beginning, even a new technology, it’s not a guarantee it’ll be a winner. Sentiment is fickle.

There are other stories of success of course and we all know who they, think $AMZN, and $GOOGL for example.

If you bet on $AMZN early on and never sold you’re still laughing. Even though you would’ve had to endure a devastating drawdown early on:

If you bought $AMZN above $50 or above $100 in 1999/2000 and saw it drop below $6 in 2001, you were probably not a happy camper. But $AMZN was one of the best buys ever.

And time clarifies everything. Bitcoin doesn’t have to worry about earnings growth or revenues, it only has to worry about relentless adoption, maintaining sentiment and regulation I suppose. I’m not even going to pretend to want to predict the future so I won’t.

Rather I want to focus on what I can see and test the hedge argument and here is where it gets rather murky. Why? Because as long as Bitcoin keeps running higher everyone is convinced it is a hedge.

I submit the hedge argument is entirely unproven. Yes, percentage wise Bitcoin has performed tremendously on the way up since last year. But everything in our liquidity soaked world has performed well and gone up.

Indeed, the other day I highlighted a flow chart of Bitcoin versus $SPX:

Don’t @ me about % size moves, but weekly flow correlation between $SPX and #Bitcoin has now moved to its highest level ever.

In other news, BofA today: “the main argument for #Bitcoin is not diversification, stable returns or inflation protection, but sheer price appreciation”. pic.twitter.com/0ADdMm6KCx

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) March 17, 2021

The basic point: Equities bottomed last year in March so did Bitcoin. Corrections in equities and in Bitcoin and equities tend to occur at the same time, as do new highs.

Case in point in 2021 so far: Markets made new highs in January, so did Bitcoin. The same was true in February and in March and corrections flowed alongside of each other.

Indeed this week again the same:

The correlation indicator sitting at an extreme high of 0.92.

The potential implication: It’s all the same trade albeit Bitcoin being the more volatile on the way up and on the way down.

After all excess liquidity is trying to find a home in superior returns. Which makes this chart actually a bit ironic for then Bitcoin is not a hedge but rather Bit coin has nothing but having jumped on the same liquidity train. And given it being unburdened by any fundamental performance metrics such as earnings it succeeds in vast price appreciation as more and more people jump on the train while big whales are cornering the supply by making investments in the hundreds of millions and/or billions of dollars in a limited supply universe. The perfect Ponzi in that sense. I’m not claiming Bitcoin is a Ponzi, as I said I can’t predict the future, but it has all the marketing elements of it. Price validation, relentless pumping, cornering of supply and a self fulfilling cycle of validation in the eyes of adherents as prices keep jumping and people keep chasing.

But here’s what Bitcoin hasn’t proved in my eyes: That it’s a hedge, for as long as equities keep rising on the heels of unprecedented stimulus and monetary intervention then Bitcoin is just along for the ride. The real test would come if equities enter a cycle of severe selling and to see Bitcoin then hold its own.

And looking at the chart above it appears we’ve had that test twice already. In 2018 when markets dropped Bitcoin dropped. In 2020 when markets dropped in February/March Bitcoin dropped along with them. Although in Bitcoin’s favor is that Bitcoin did not make new lows versus 2018 while markets clearly did. So one could make the argument it has already proven relative strength in this sense.

My general view here: Bitcoin will remain a successful speculative asset as long as equities keep rising and confidence can be maintained and accelerated. So far Bitcoin has proven it can outpace equities on the way up. The claim that it is a hedge against fiat printing remains, in my view, an unproven myth as of yet. That said, I wish everyone involved continued success in their endeavors, be it stamp collecting, wine collecting or Bitcoin collecting.

Just in time for its long-awaited IPO (for which the company has already filed confidentially with the SEC), infamous discount brokerage Robinhood and payment-for-order-flow pioneer is building a platform to allow users to receive coveted IPO “allocations”, in theory allowing them to capture some of the deal profits that are typically reserved for institutional investors (and, of course, Wall Street investment banks).

Since brokerages like Robinhood can’t really earn much from facilitating trading in equities and ETFs, they’ve been working to push the new retail investors into other, more lucrative, products, like options. Of course, since this is Robinhood we’re talking about, the company has couched this new project as another effort to “democratize” finance.

But in an age where more companies are going public via direct listings, Robinhood’s new platform could be a threat to investment banks, while also – according to CNBC – helping to facilitate offerings like Robinhood’s own. In fact, the company sees its IPO as a test-run for its this new platform.

Here’s more on that.

Currently, Robinhood users and other amateur traders cannot buy into stock of a newly listed company until its shares start trading. Since shares often trade higher when they debut, big funds that get allocations in the IPO have an advantage. The average first-day trading pop on U.S. listings of businesses in 2020 was 36%, according to data provider Dealogic.

Robinhood plans to carve out a chunk of its shares on offer in its IPO for its 13 million users, and to use technology it is building to administer this part of the offering, the sources said.

While Robinhood’s technology would be new, the concept of reserving shares for users is not. Deliveroo Holdings Plc, the Amazon.com Inc-backed food delivery firm that announced plans this month to list in London, is doing this, although a third-party provider is administering the process.

While implementing the service for its own IPO would be relative straightforward (from a regulatory perspective), the company has a long road ahead of it if it wants to start routinely offering early access to IPOs of other companies. And the powers that be (ie the investment banks who reap enormous profits from IPOs), will likely do all they can to kill it.

Notably, CNBC pointed out that the project could help bolster Robinhood’s own valuation ahead of its planned offering.

More novel are Robinhood’s ambitions to let users directly buy into IPOs of other companies. It would need to negotiate agreements with companies and their brokerages and get the blessing of U.S. regulators, the sources said. Robinhood could have leverage in these negotiations by arguing it would be acting as a bridge between the IPO and a major pool of investor demand, the sources added. It was not clear what kind of arrangements Robinhood would seek to put in place, and no certainty its ambition will come to fruition, said the sources, who requested anonymity because the matter is confidential. Robinhood declined comment.

Providing access to IPOs could boost Robinhood’s appeal with users, some of whom criticized it over restrictions it placed on trading of heavily shorted “meme stocks” such as GameStop Corp following a Reddit-driven buying frenzy earlier this year. Robinhood said its clearinghouse forced it to place the curbs because it lacked sufficient capital to settle the trades. The move could also boost Robinhood’s valuation in its own IPO, as the offering would price in additional demand for the shares that would normally have come through only after the stock market debut.

Interestingly, RH isn’t the only firm trying to broaden access to share offerings. SoFi is also working on a similar project. However, SoFi has an advantage over RH, since it plans to act as an underwriter for the deals it offers to its retail customers. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto (a former Twitter executive) told CNBC that the new platform will give main street access to deals typically reserved for Wall Street.

“Main Street will have access to investing in a way they wouldn’t have before,” CEO Anthony Noto said in a phone interview. “It gives more differentiation, and more access so people can build diversified portfolios.”

[…]

“Individual investors don’t generate those types of revenues, therefore they don’t get access to the unique product,” Noto said. “The cost of serving retail, if they did decide to do that, would be too high.”

Anybody who watches markets intraday is probably familiar with the post-debut bump enjoyed by high-profile new offerings. This dynamic often rewards bankers and early backers with an immediate premium. However, it also can come with increased risks, as Noto pointed out.

“Investing early is inherently is risky, and those are less-proven companies,” Noto said. “In the same way as cryptocurrency, we disclose to people that these come with a higher degree of risk.”

Whatever happens with the SoFi project, we look forward to watching Robinhood convince the SEC that it should be allowed to directly sell its own shares to the army of retail traders still using the platform.

By Michael Every of Rabobank

The Boxer-Shorts Rebellion

Sadly but truthfully, very few Americans know anything about Chinese history. That includes Wall Street’s ‘China’ teams; DC think-tank ‘experts’; and politicians. Equally, a smaller but still overwhelming majority of Chinese people don’t know much about the shorter-but-nuanced history of the US. Most Americans also don’t know much about American history….and most Chinese people don’t know much about Chinese history either. I’ve been lucky enough to live in nine different countries (10 if you count the US via my father as proxy); and not one of them teaches an honest, no-holds-barred evaluation of its own national history. It’s all edited highlights – a bit like social media we spend all day on rather than learning any history.

This matters because aside from the randomness of day-to-day movement of markets – which yesterday bounced to reverse Wednesday’s slump: long live profit-free tech stocks, apparently – if you don’t learn from history then you are damned to repeat it. The only question is if, like the analysts who repeat Marx repeating Hegel repeating that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, this time it is going to be tears, or tears of laughter.

In particular, very important developments may be taking place in China. Western sportswear and clothing retailers such as Nike, Adidas, and H&M have all made recent statements they are “concerned about reports of forced labor” in Xinjiang, or have stopped buying cotton from it completely. The Chinese response has been furious: official rhetoric is withering – “China is not to be messed with,” and those who do “will find that we are force to be reckoned with”; social media is filled with nationalist attacks and open calls from celebrities to boycott these firms; and H&M stores in China have suddenly disappeared from search engine location functions.

Yes, we’ve seen similar Chinese moves against foreign products before. Some Aussie agri exports are currently locked out; South Korean soap operas and Norwegian salmon have been in the past; and back in 2012 there were major anti-Japanese boycotts and protests due to the geopolitical backdrop. Yes, those earlier storms passed: but that was arguably a very different China, at least in the eyes of the West, and according to its own combative rhetoric. Indeed, ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy –in the past few days alone– has seen massively growing skepticism about China’s direction from Western diplomatic, military, and even businesses elites.

The problem is now on both sides. In China, the 2012 protests were quashed by the government, but this time round the Communist Youth League is actively trolling, and the diplomacy is blaring. The question in the minds of some who have read history is if this a – non-violent – replay of the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion rather than just a Boxer-Shorts Rebellion. In the West, the firms involved face a stark choice: stick to their professed social values and lose the China market, or accept China gets to dictate what they worry about – even when it reaches the alleged level of forced labour and genocide…and then try to explain corporate mottos like “Just Do It”. Could this even escalate to the level of the 2022 Olympics so we see the Para- and Parallel games? Probably not – but if it did, China has stated any boycotting countries will be sanctioned, dragging even more firms in. The risk is that this backdrop could accelerate existing moves towards decoupling of the global economy, which had been expected to be focused on semiconductors, but may now be on Lycra, sneakers, and socks and underwear value-packs too.

In short, yet again we see the underlying dynamic of hard choices having to be made by those who don’t want to make them: which we have been flagging as a logically-inevitable risk since 2017.

Markets should really be paying more attention. Not because of the hit to the stock-price of the selection of firms involved now, but because of the patterns one can see in history. True, these very often say nothing at all – unless you are a believer in dialectical materialism, which China’s Politburo officially is. Yet when one sees Hong Kongers who want to leave are being told their new British National Overseas (BNO) passports are not accepted documents allowing holders to make early withdrawal of their MPF retirement savings – hence one has to leave one’s MPF behind if one exits; and that Hong Kong is asking countries not to recognise BNO passports at all; where would one think a *possible* ‘historical dialectic’ could go next in a worst-case scenario? This is no kind of forecast at all: just stressing that rather than tracking headlines like a torch on a dark wall, one needs to look at current developments alongside longer-run trends and historical parallels to try to frame possible tail-risk scenarios.

Which, as noted, the US is not very good at. What is the US realistically aiming at vs. China, some ask? And how does one get there if one doesn’t have a clear vision of it? Well, President Biden just gave his first media press conference, and in it stressed he expects “extreme competition” with China. For Western sportswear firms, this is not what they have in mind with the phrase. Indeed:

• Biden repeated former-President Trump’s claim that China’s ambition of becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is “not going to happen under my watch” –which requires a host of US measures from geopolitics to trade to capital flows (as the SEC pushes ahead with regulations forcing Chinese firms to de-list in the US) to the USD to achieve– and will naturally be seen as a policy of containment by China;

• The US will aim to counter China’s rise by increasing investment in science and research – which necessarily means science, education, tech, and supply-chain decoupling if so; and

• The US will continue to call out China in an “unrelenting way” on human rights violations – which we already see will only amplify and accelerate existing decoupling trends, and place other Western countries in the same hot-seat.

So boxing gloves (and shorts) on. Indeed, China has just put sanctions on some British parliamentarians, who join their EU counterparts; Russia and China are cuddling up; so is North Korea; and so is Iran – which just fired a missile that damaged an Israeli ship. (That as Israeli PM Netanyahu narrowly failed to win the parliamentary majority he needed to halt his ongoing criminal trial in a fourth successive election against that legal backdrop, potentially making a risk-averse leader more bellicose.) At least the Suez Canal is already blocked so we don’t have to worry about that.

But I have to end with the Fed. They have enough challenges to deal with now that they face a K-shaped recovery, and are targeting inflation, and unemployment, and social justice: now add a Cold War they can’t afford to lose to that list. Against such a backdrop, they have decided that US banks can start share buybacks again as soon as the end of Q2. Because nothing helps heal a broken society and propel a war economy quite like financialization and a stock market bubble.

I told you Americans don’t read their own history. Happy Friday!

UMich Sentiment survey was expected to have accelerated higher from its preliminary February print and it did, notably more than forecast. The headline sentiment jumped to 84.9 (from 83.0 flash and from 76.8 in Jan).

The gauge of current conditions rose to 93 from a February reading of 86.2, while a measure of expectations increased 9 points to 79.7.

Source: Bloomberg

That is the highest level since March 2020, right before the collapse in confidence.

A gauge of the economic outlook over the next year jumped 25 points to a one-year high of 108 in March. Buying conditions for durable goods climbed, with the university’s gauge also advancing to a one-year high.

Source: Bloomberg

The passage of the latest round of federal aid is also spurring confidence among the lowest third of incomes…

Source: Bloomberg

Consumers’ outlook for inflation over the longer term climbed to an almost six-year high.

Source: Bloomberg

The reestablishment of an inflationary psychology will not occur immediately. Buy-in-advance psychology preceded actual inflation by about two years prior to 1980, with the lead time more variable and with no resurgence in the low inflation era.

Finally, we note that confidence among Republicans upticked in February, after four straight months lower…

Source: Bloomberg

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield says that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and instead escaped from a nearby lab which was performing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses to make them more easily infect humans.

“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human,” Redfield told CNN‘s Sanjay Gupta in an interview set to air Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET. “Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more & more efficient in human to human transmission.”

“It’s only an opinion; I’m allowed to have opinions now,” he added.

Redfield said he thinks the virus originated inside a lab in China and “escaped” — not necessarily intentionally. (This all airs in a new Sanjay doc this Sunday night on CNN, which should be really interesting.)

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) March 26, 2021

Redfield, a virologist picked by former President Trump to lead the Centers for Disease Control, said he believes that the pandemic began as a localized outbreak in Wuhan in September or October of 2019, earlier than the official timeline, and that it spread to every province in China over the ensuing months.

And while the rest of the world was told the only initial Covid-19 cases in China had originated from a wet market in Wuhan, Redfield is confident the evidence suggests that was simply not the case. According to Redfield, even his counterpart at the China CDC, Dr. George Gao, was initially left in the dark about the magnitude of the problem until early January. He described a private phone call he had with Gao in early January 2020, when Gao became distraught and started crying after finding “a lot of cases” among individuals who had not been to the wet market. Gao, Redfield says, “came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag.”

 

The initial mortality rates in China were somewhere between “5-10%,” Redfield told me. “I’d probably be cryin’ too,” he added.

…

The United States wasn’t formally notified of the “mysterious cluster of pneumonia patients” until December 31, 2019. Those were critical weeks and months that countries around the world could’ve been preparing. –Dr. Sanjay Gupta via CNN

And of course, CCP-friendly pundits are towing Beijing’s official line by attacking Redfield:

We are all allowed to have “opinions.” Among Redfield’s previous opinions were that a useless vaccine for AIDS was actually a cure, and that he could just make up data about the disease and publish it.

My “opinion”: Robert Redfield is a quack. @cnn should not give him a platform https://t.co/IufSP8hcXi

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) March 26, 2021

Which, should be enough evidence to 

RealClearPolitics’ Philip Wegmann noted, reflecting on yesterday’s first ‘meet the press moment’ for Joe Biden that the new president started with good news. Joe Biden told reporters assembled at the White House for his first official press conference that he now expects 200 million doses of the COVID vaccine will be administered by the end of his first 100 days in office. And that’s not all.

He expects the majority of K-8 students will soon be back in the classroom. He announced that more than 100 million Americans have cashed their $1,400 relief checks. He was pleased to report that unemployment is down and economic growth projections are up.

There was more work to do, certainly, Biden admitted, “but I can say to you, the American people, help is here and hope is on the way. Now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.”

And with that brief victory lap, the global pandemic that has taken some 547,000 lives in this country alone was quickly forgotten, at least by Biden’s media interlocutors. The president was confronted instead with questions about voting rights, the situation at the southern border, his plans for the 2024 campaign, the Senate filibuster rule, the lack of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, American troops remaining in Afghanistan, and more.

It was exactly one hour and two minutes of a certain sort of normal — very different from that of the last four years. The press didn’t shout, and the president didn’t yell or call the reporters names. But the return to normal came courtesy of the same old Biden. For anyone not already familiar, it was an introduction to the 78-year-old politician in all his long-winded, sometimes meandering, gaffe-prone glory.

Biden insisted the surge is not the result of a change in policy, despite the fact that he publicly placed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, reaffirmed his commitment to “Dreamers,” and halted construction of the border wall — all on his first day in office. No, the challenge on the border, the situation his administration has refused to call a crisis, he said, is just the normal cyclical course of events.

The question of immigration reform finally funneled down to the filibuster, and then things went a little sideways for the new president:

“Let’s deal with the [filibuster] abuse first,” Biden said, noting that he wouldn’t oppose certain changes, like making senators filibustering actually hold the floor and keep talking until they no longer can. But while the president said he agrees the procedure is “a relic of the Jim Crow era,” he does not support abolishing it just yet.

“I’m going to say something outrageous,” the president said before noting something he repeated again and again on the campaign trail: “I’ve never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate.”

Then came a word-salad:

“The best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to … anyway, we’re ready to get a lot done.”

And finally, in the same answer, was a warning to Republicans:

“If we have to, if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about.”

The White House press corps was not in the mood to push back Thursday. Left unsaid was the fact that, according to the RealClearPolitics average of the presidential approval ratings, Biden has yet to unite the country. While 53% of the public likes the job he is doing, 43% does not.

There were plenty of other questions. Most didn’t lend themselves to the victory lap that the White House would have liked to take on vaccine distribution or stimulus checks. Biden was asked what he thought of Republican efforts at the state level to overhaul voting laws and include new restrictions. He said they were “pernicious” and “un-American” and “sick.” The effort in Georgia, he said in one strained metaphor, “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

As Stephen Lendman raged following what he called “a charade of a presser,” Biden showed the world yesterday that he is too cognitively impaired to carry out the duties of the office he was selected, not elected, to hold.

Biden has lost touch with reality, affairs of state handled by others in his name – including contacts with foreign leaders by unelected president-in-waiting Kamala Harris.

Biden needed cheat sheet notes to answer questions – including names and images of reporters to know who asked questions.

Gaffe-filled answers didn’t surprise from a figure uninvolved in daily White House affairs — showing up solely to represent the real Biden in public because he’s cognitively unable to represent himself.

How much longer this charade can go on is an open question.

If not for establishment media keeping things under wraps, it would have been publicly exposed long before last November’s selection process.

All the while, hardliners in charge of his regime’s domestic and foreign policy are running wild.

They’re inflicting enormous harm on ordinary Americans — notably by pushing seasonal flu-renamed covid mass-jabbing with toxic drugs — and heightening tensions by threats against China, Russia and other nations free from US control.

The deplorable state of America today is disturbing and frightening.

Things shifted from a billionaire, bombastic, reality TV president to a hollow one.

The self-styled world’s leading nation is a laughing stock on the global stage — a hugely dangerous one with nukes and other WMDs it used before and may again.

The New York Post said “Biden seem(ed) confused during” his first presser.

He “repeatedly los(t) his train of thought…forgetting questions (asked) and relying heavily on cue cards from a binder he brought along.”

Asked about the state of US infrastructure, he said it ranks 85th in the world.

After checking cheat sheet notes, he corrected himself, saying the US ranks 13th globally.

NY Post editors called his first presser “a trip into an alternate reality.” 

“In fact after fact, his statements were either grossly misleading or downright false.”

“New photos reveal several cheat sheets used by” Biden…including one with the headshots and names of reporters he planned to call on.”

He “only took questions from a list of journalists whose names and outlets he read from a cue card.” 

“A photo of the card shows circled numbers around select reporters.”

At the end of the presser charade, he said “but folks, I’m going” — exiting without permitting one or more follow-up questions.

Separately the Post said “GOP leaders rip(ped) Biden’s ‘hard to watch’ first presser — maybe his last after Thursday’s gaffe-filled fiasco.

Questions appeared as scripted as unacceptable answers.

According to former White House press secretary Sean Spicer:

Biden “took 30 (including follow ups) questions from 10 friendly reporters for 59 minutes covering 5 subjects.”

Fellow former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted:

“Right out of the gate, the White House press corps” showed support for Joe Biden.

“Would have been nice if they would have routinely shown that level of respect for” Trump.

Wall Street Journal editors called some of Biden’s remarks “dishonest.”

He’s acting as “prime minister of the Pelosi-Schumer” regime.

Fox News slammed Thursday’s charade, saying “(i)f Joe Biden is not capable of doing the job, he shouldn’t be in the job.”

Sean Hannity called him “dazed and confused…(a) pathetic and embarrassing” performance.

“(W)ho is running the (White House) show,” he asked?

“Is it (Kamala) Harris? Is it chief of staff Ron Klain? Is it Schumer? Is it Pelosi?” 

“Is it Barack Obama? Is it Susan Rice?” 

“Because it’s certainly not the frail, the weak, and the cognitively struggling guy we all witnessed today.”

An RT op-ed accused the White House press corps of “sycophantic…boot-licking.”

An early March Rasmussen poll found that around half of Americans don’t think Biden is physically or mentally capable of conducting affairs of state.

Given his deteriorated state, he’s likely unaware of what’s being done by others in his name.