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Having blown over two trillion yen since October in purchasing stocks (ETFs) in the open market to “support Japan’s economy,” markets are rife with speculation the Band of Japan (BoJ) could pledge next week to buy ETFs at a faster pace than the current commitment to do so by roughly 6 trillion yen ($58.12 billion) per year.

Following pressure from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,

“Markets are making nervous movements amid uncertainty over the global economic outlook. Based on agreements made among G7 and G20 nations, the government will work closely with the BOJ and authorities of other countries to respond appropriately,” Abe said in a meeting with ruling party executives on Tuesday.

Reuters  reports that such a step is among options the central bank may consider if it approaches the ceiling as a result of aggressive purchases, according to sources familiar with the BOJ’s thinking.

In a somewhat surprising moment of transparency for the Japanese central bank, BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told parliament the BoJ had bought a cumulative 2.04 trillion yen worth of ETFs since October last year.

Kuroda also revealed the BoJ’s own estimate showed its holdings of ETFs may incur paper losses once Tokyo’s Nikkei stock average falls below 19,000 – 19,500. The Nikkei stood around 19,665 on Tuesday after briefly slipping below 19,000 in morning trade.

In accordance with Abe’s wishes, since BoJ issued an emergency statement on March 2 pledging to offer ample liquidity via market operations and asset buying, Kuroda has been accelerating the pace of ETF buying.

The BoJ bought 100.2 billion yen ($979 million) on Monday, matching a record pace of purchases made twice last week.

Eiji Maeda, the BOJ’s executive director, said the central bank was scrutinising daily price moves and taking appropriate action to stabilise markets.

“We of course won’t hesitate to take additional measures if needed, depending on future market developments,” he said.

So this clearly failed plan – of buying stocks directly in the market – has done nothing for the economy or the people’s wealth and is now actually destroying central bank capital…

But they believe they should just do more of it… and this is the same shit that is now being casually discussed in US banking circles.

Einstein would be proud.

Authored by Chris Calton via The Mises Institute,

In 1991, Maui police officers showed up at the home of Frances and Joseph Lopes.

One officer showed his badge and said, “Let’s go into the house, and we will explain things to you.”

Once he was inside, the explanation was simple: “We’re taking the house.”

The Lopses were far from wealthy. They worked on a sugar plantation for nearly fifty years, living in camp housing, to save up enough money to buy a modest, middle-class home. But in 1987, their son Thomas was caught with marijuana. He was twenty-eight, and he suffered from mental health issues. He grew the marijuana in the backyard of his parents’ home, but every time they tried to cut it down, Thomas threatened suicide. When he was arrested, he pled guilty, was given probation since it was his first offense, and he was ordered to see a psychologist once a week. Frances and Joseph were elated. Their son got better, he stopped smoking marijuana, and the episode was behind them.

But when the police showed up and told them that their house was being seized, they learned that the episode was not behind them. That statute of limitations for civil asset forfeiture was five years. It had only been four. Legally, the police could seize any property connected to the marijuana plant from 1987. They had resurrected the Lopes case during a department-wide search through old cases looking for property they could legally confiscate.

Asset forfeiture laws once applied only to goods that could be considered a danger to society – illegal alcohol, weapons, etc. But with the birth of the modern war on drugs, lawmakers pushed for something with more teeth, which they achieved with the 1970 passage of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Although many are familiar with the story of the steady expansion of civil asset forfeiture laws, many overlook the fact that presidential candidate Joe Biden helped put these laws on previously apathetic law enforcement agents’ radar and, worse, played a significant role in broadening their application. Biden has effectively aided and abetted the police state’s sustained assault on American subjects’ property rights.

Expanding Asset Forfeiture, Phase I: The RICO Act of 1970

In 1970, the targets of asset forfeiture were wealthy crime bosses. It was prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, who had worked under Attorney General Robert Kennedy and various congressmen, who set about broadening its scope. He helped draft a bill for a new legal concept, “criminal forfeiture,” which would allow police to seize the illegally acquired profits of a convicted criminal.

The assets that could be seized would now consist of anything that was funded with money connected to criminal activity. To appease those who were worried about abuses of power, Blakey assured them that prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the criminal was guilty of a crime before the assets could be seized. There was nothing to worry about; only legitimate bad guys would suffer.

The new policy was passed as part of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in 1970. Blakey was a fan of the 1931 movie Little Caesar, and the acronym was crafted to honor Blakey’s favorite character from the movie, the gangster Rico Bandello.

The RICO Act wasn’t designed to be part of the war on drugs; it was just meant to target criminals. But when Richard Nixon took office, the RICO Act was one of a number of new tools that the members of his newly created Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (precursor to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)) could use to fight his drug war. Combined with other legal innovations, such as no-knock raids and mandatory minimum sentences, Nixon and his administration would cure America of the drug menace.

Still, the pesky “conviction” requirement stood in the way of law enforcement’s ability to seize criminal assets. In 1978, Jimmy Carter’s director of the Office of Drug Abuse (the title “drug czar” is often retroactively applied), Peter Bourne, decided that the law needed to be changed. Bourne learned of an incident at the Miami International Airport in which a suitcase had been left on the baggage carousel for three hours before police picked it up and found $3 million inside. If drug kingpins could afford to abandon so much money, they must be flush with enough cash to hardly worry about criminal forfeiture laws.

So, at Bourne’s urging, Congress modified the RICO Act to allow the DEA to confiscate assets without a conviction. The burden of proof wasn’t entirely gone (yet), but the government only needed an indictment, rather than a full conviction, to justify asset seizure. After all, the government knew who a lot of these kingpins were, but the criminals continued to get rich while the DEA struggled to build cases against them.

Even then, though, real estate was off limits. Asset forfeiture had evolved from the seizure of dangerous items into criminal profit following a conviction, and now into criminal profit (and its “derivative proceeds”) without the conviction requirement. But real estate—such as the Lopes house—still couldn’t be touched.

But through the 1970s, the RICO Act was still largely ignored by prosecutors. Blakey was holding seminars out of Cornell University, which were attended by federal law enforcement agents and prosecutors, urging them to take advantage of the RICO Act in the war on drugs. He made few inroads. The law was unwieldy, and prosecutors were overworked. More often than not, it wasn’t worth their time. While Blakey was proselytizing the virtues of his law to little effect, he was unwittingly gaining an ally in Congress: Senator Joe Biden.

Expanding Asset Seizure, Phase 2: Biden and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984

Biden, a young Senator from Delaware, had to do something to show that despite his “liberal” reputation, he could be just as tough on crime as his Republican colleagues. He took notice of the RICO Act, and he realized that law enforcement agencies were not taking advantage of it, particularly in waging the drug war. He turned to the General Accounting Office and asked them to produce a study on the potential uses of RICO for drug enforcement.

The report showed that the RICO Act granted enormous powers to police to confiscate drug-related assets but that these powers were not being taken advantage of: “The government has simply not exercised the kind of leadership and management necessary to make asset forfeiture a widely used law enforcement technique,” the report stated. By the time the report came in, Ronald Reagan was settling into office and getting ready to renew the war on drugs.

Reagan brought the FBI into the drug war, and he gave the director, William Webster, a mission. His agents would use the powers of the RICO Act to find drug rings and take away their assets. Drug cartels must be rendered unprofitable. As the 1980s progressed, the war on drugs would be the country’s biggest political issue. Politicians from both parties would work to show that they could out–drug warrior their opponents. One Democratic representative from Florida, Earl Hutto, said, “In the war on narcotics, we have met the enemy, and he is the U.S. Code.”

Biden brought the RICO law to the attention of the federal government, Reagan enlisted the FBI to use it against drug traffickers, and both parties would now work to dismantle any limitations that the law might still impose.

The drug war became a contest of political one-upmanship. Reagan’s Justice Department fought for all kinds of new powers. Attorney General Edwin Meese and Assistant Attorney General William Weld (yes, that Bill Weld) railed against the limitations on their legal prerogative. Weld went so far as to argue in favor of the legality of using the Air Force to shoot suspected drug-smuggling planes out of the sky, a policy that even his boss was unwilling to endorse.

But Meese, Weld, and everyone else seemed to agree that forfeiture laws didn’t go nearly far enough. By requiring an indictment, the government still had to meet some standard of reasonable guilt before seizing property, which allowed far too many criminals that law enforcement knew to be guilty (but couldn’t build a case against) to keep their ill-gotten gains. To take things further, the Justice Department argued that law enforcement should be allowed to take “substitute” property: they knew that they wouldn’t be able to take everything that had been paid for with drug money, so it stood to reason that they should be able to take legally acquired assets of equal value (however that might be determined). And finally, with real estate off limits, the government was unable to seize marijuana farms, drug warehouses, and criminal homes.

The Comprehensive Forfeiture Act fixed all of these problems. Biden introduced the new bill in 1983, and its provisions became law the next year. Under this law federal agents had nearly unlimited powers to seize assets from private citizens. Now the government only needed to find a way to let local and state police join the party.

Biden’s bill was passed as part of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act . In addition to a slew of new powers for prosecutors, the burden of proof for asset seizure was lowered once again (agents had to onlybelieve that what they were seizing was equal in value to money believed to have been purchased from drug sales). More significantly, the bill started the “equitable sharing” program that allowed local and state law enforcement to retain up to 80 percent of the spoils.

The law took effect in 1986, the year before Thomas Lopes pled guilty to charges of growing a marijuana plant in his parents’ backyard. In 1987, when Thomas faced the judge, the government had just made it so that his local police had an enormous incentive and unchecked authority to seize property from private citizens, so long as they could show any flimsy connection to drugs. By 1991, the Maui police were running out of easily seized property, so they started combing through case files within the five-year limit to find new sources of enrichment for their precinct using the expanded RICO powers. One such file brought the Lopes home to their attention.

But the Lopeses are only one example out of millions. In the year their home was confiscated by police for a minor, four-year-old drug charge, $644 million in assets were seized. In 2018 alone, the Treasury Department’s Forfeiture Fund saw nearly $1.4 billion in deposits . The Lopes story merely illustrates that criminals (regardless of how one might feel about drug laws) are hardly the only people falling victim to this policy.

The decades-long abuse of this policy has reached such extreme proportions that people on all sides of the political aisle have been turning against it. At this writing (February 20, 2019 for the original version of this article), the Supreme Court has unanimously voted in favor of Tyson Timbs , whose $42,000 Land Rover was seized in 2015 following a conviction for selling $400 in heroin. The court is asserting that asset forfeiture constitutes a fine and that the Eighth Amendment—which protects citizens from excessive fines—applies to both state and local governments. The consequences of the ruling remain to be seen, but it seems nearly certain that the unanimous decision was motivated by the increasing outrage against the civil asset forfeiture policies.

In the fight against the egregious violation of property rights that is asset forfeiture, Americans must not forget who those who promulgated these laws and birthed a new paradigm of government aggression against private persons that is proving difficult to overturn.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, told CNBC on Tuesday morning that the US is not prepared for a Covid-19 outbreak and warns the health crisis will get much worse in the weeks ahead. 

“Right now, we’re approaching this like it’s the Washington, DC, blizzard — for a couple of days, we’re shut down,” Osterholm said. “This is actually a coronavirus winter, and we’re in the first week.”

He warned that the Trump administration has yet to put forth any meaningful containment policy, such as travel restrictions across the country or specific regions, to limit the transmission of the virus. As a result, the virus is “just going to keep spreading. We have to stop fooling people into thinking this is only by close contact where I have to be within 2 or 3 feet. We’re going to see much more transmission.” 

Osterholm said, “There will be a widespread transmission of this virus around the country, and what we have to do is keep people who are at high risk of having bad outcomes, older, underlying health conditions, from being exposed.”

Without containment policies in the hardest-hit areas, such as King County, Washington; Santa Clara, California; Los Angeles; and the Tri-state area, the window for suppression of the virus has long passed. This means virus migration has already started, also suggesting that the outbreak is in the early stages. 

With 755 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the airborne virus is quickly spreading across the US, now seen in more than 30 states, with officials in several states declaring a state of emergency. The lack of test kits, limited travel restrictions, and no vaccine for 12-18 months suggest that the map below will get a lot redder in the coming weeks:

What to expect next if confirmed cases and deaths continue to rise across the country is the banning of large public gatherings and the closure of education systems. Businesses would then likely send workers home. Before you can blink an eye, transportation networks and manufacturing hubs would grind to a halt, and the National Guard would be deployed to keep order. America isn’t prepared for a “coronavirus winter.” 

Authored by Alfredo R. Paloyo, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Wollongong, via The Conversation

Panic buying knows no borders. Shoppers in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States have caught toilet paper fever on the back of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Shop shelves are being emptied as quickly as they can be stocked.

This panic buying is the result of the fear of missing out. It’s a phenomenon of consumer behaviour similar to what happens when there is a run on banks.

A bank run occurs when depositors of a bank withdraw cash because they believe it might collapse. What we’re seeing now is a toilet-paper run.

Coordination games

A bank holds only a fraction of its deposits as cash reserves. This practice is known as “fractional-reserve banking”. It lends out as much of its deposits as it can – subject to a banking regulator’s capital-adequacy requirements – making a profit from the interest it charges.

If every customer simultaneously decided to withdraw all of their deposits, the bank would crumble under the liability.

Why, then, do we not normally observe bank runs? Or toilet paper runs?

The answer comes from Nobel-winning economist John Nash (played by Russell Crowe in the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind). Nash shared the Nobel prize in economics for his insights in game theory, notably the existence of what is now called a “Nash equilibrium” in “games”.

Both banking and the toilet-paper market can be thought of as a “coordination game”. There are two players – you and everyone else. There are two strategies – panic buy or act normally. Each strategy has an associated pay-off.

If everyone acts normally, we have an equilibrium: there will be toilet paper on the shop shelves, and people can relax and buy it as they need it.

But if others panic buy, the optimal strategy for you is to do the same, otherwise you’ll be left without toilet paper. Everyone is facing the same strategies and pay-offs, so others will panic buy if you do.

The result is another equilibrium – this one being where everyone panic buys.

Preventing coordination failure

So either no one panic buys (a successful coordination) or everyone does (a coordination failure).

The fear of everyone else panic buying has made some people panic buy as well. But those who are panic buying are not acting irrationally. They’re not stupid! They are executing an optimal strategy because the fear has a basis in reality: many people have experienced going to supermarkets and finding empty shelves.

Obviously, though, only one of these equilibria is desirable. So what can we do to prevent coordination failure?

One solution is a market mechanism – allowing the price of toilet paper to increase to reduce demand. This is unlikely to happen, though, given the potential backlash associated with “price gouging”.

There are two other solutions.

The first is for the government to step in as guarantor.

In 2008, for example, the market crash engendered by the subprime mortgage crisis left multiple Australian banks vulnerable to depositor runs. In response, the Australian government announced a guarantee scheme for deposits. Depositors, assured the government would cover their losses even if their bank collapsed, no longer had the fear of being caught out by not withdrawing their savings.

In the case of toilet paper, the government acting as guarantor might involve holding a strategic stockpile of toilet paper. But all things considered – from logistics to costs – this probably isn’t a very good idea.

The second solution is to ration the commodity – putting limits on the amount a customer can buy. Imperfect though these buying limits are, they are feasible, as shown by the restrictions put in place by Australia’s supermarkets.

It has been an interesting dance over the last 18 months for the Class 8 trucking industry and its analysts. While the numbers have consistently told us one thing, namely that the economy is slowing and that the trucking industry is bearing the brunt of the recession, analysts continue to make excuses for the poor numbers while holding out what seems like neverending hope for a turnaround.

But the data doesn’t lie: February Class 8 orders fell 16%. The month is traditionally a slower one for the heavy duty trucking industry, but this year included an extra day. The seasonally adjusted orders were the weakest monthly order rate since last August, according to ACT Research. 

ACT’s senior analyst Kenny Vieth said: “Weak freight market and rate conditions, as well as a still-large backlog, continue to bedevil new Class 8 orders.” 

Thanks for that groundbreaking analysis of the situation. Lest we forget, ACT Research had said last month that it expected the backlog in Class 8 orders to “continue to wear away”. We guess that is no longer the case.

Forward projections for the rest of the year don’t look optimistic either. Analyst Ann Duignan from JP Morgan has said she expects production of ~236,000 Class 8 units in 2020, or down 31% y/y. She is also estimating ~240,000 units in 2021, or up 2%. We anticipate that these numbers could vary sharply depending on how severe the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. winds up becoming. 

Leading indicators remain weak, according to JP Morgan:

According to our analysis, the ISM New Orders Index tends to be the best leading indicator of future freight trends and truck demand. Specifically, the YoY change in ISM New Orders has historically led the YoY change in the Cass Freight Index (our preferred broad-based indicator of freight trends) by 6-9 months.

ISM New Orders Index decreased 2.2pts MoM to 49.8 in February, down 9.3% YoY and back in contraction region (<50). The Cass Freight Index was down 9.4% YoY in January (the latest month available), a fourteenth consecutive YoY decline. We note though that the Cass Freight Index includes rail freight and may be less of an indicator of overall freight, so we also look at the ATA Total Loads SA Index, which increased 4.1% YoY to 112.0 in January (vs. up 6.0% YoY in December).

And while it’s seemingly stunning to “analysts”, this data should not surprise Zero Hedge readers.

Recall, in January, Class 8 orders had a temporary dead cat bounce. While analysts pontificated about brighter days for the heavy duty truck market during almost every single data report throughout 2019 and through January 2020, we remained skeptical.

For now, it looks as though we continue to be correct.

Authored by by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Leaked medical conference documents have warned that hospitals across the United States are preparing for 96 million coronavirus infections.  Not only that, but the same document wants hospitals to make preparations for 480,000 deaths from this outbreak.

the American Hospital Association (AHA) conference in February reveal that US hospitals are preparing for:

• 96 million coronavirus infections

• 4.8 million hospitalizations from the infection

• 480,000 deaths in the United States

According to Business Insider, these leaked documents are telling. Dr. James Lawler, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, presented the harrowing “best guess” estimates of the extent of the outbreak to hospitals and health professionals as part of the AHA webinar called What Healthcare Leaders Need to Know: Preparing for the COVID-19 on February 26.

These documents paint a bleaker picture for those who are over the age of 60. According to the leaked documents:

“People aged 80 and over have a 14.8% chance of dying if they contract the infection, the slides revealed. The risk declines with youth, though those aged 70-79 and 60-69 are still placed at a significant risk, with 8% and 3.6% mortality rates respectively.”  –Business Insider

Additionally, it’s worth noting that Dr. Lawler’s estimate of 480,000 deaths would indicate a death rate of just half a percent (0.5%), which is significantly lower than death rates being reported by the WHO (3.4%) and the nation of Italy (5%). If the death rate in the United States reached just 2% while 96 million Americans are infected, that would result in 1.92 million deaths.

The United States has fewer than one million hospital beds, and they are typically around 75% occupied by existing patients, unrelated to the coronavirus. Natural News has calculated that U.S. hospital beds will be overrun by May 30th if nothing is done to stop the exponential spread of the coronavirus.

Mike Adams, aka, the Health Ranger at Natural News, has a new video out presenting the math and statistics found in these leaked documents.

“If you want to die, heed the advice of Mike Pence and do nothing to prepare for the pandemic. The Surgeon General also hopes you stop buying protecting gear so that you get infected and die more quickly, thereby making more protective equipment available to the government which is stockpiling like mad at this very minute.”  –Mike Adams, Natural News

As Alt-Market’s Brandon Smith notes, it is also likely that hospitals are prepping for only 480,000 deaths because that is the maximum number of terminally ill patients their facilities can handle anyway. 

If Italy is any indication and this virus does not burn out soon, the death rate will probably be between 3%-5%.  The real number of infected versus dead will not be accurately calculated for another year at least…

Update (1729ET): Barely more than a minute after our last update, Javers reported that they’re setting up the Vice Presidential seal at the podium in the press room, indicating that Trump will not be joining the task force this evening.

And… now they’re setting up the vice presidential seal and flag. Good indicator we are NOT about to hear from POTUS. Aides caution he could always come in late, though, so stand by. pic.twitter.com/rX5JjYkdQ5

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) March 10, 2020

* * *

Update (1727ET): Eamon Javers just tweeted that nobody is sure whether President Trump is coming to the press conference tonight.

That was basically the impression we had. Trump did promise to release the details of the plan ‘tonight’. But if there aren’t any details to release…well.

GIven his showman instincts, a surprise appearance isn’t out of the question.

As of right now, aides will not say whether or not President Trump will be coming to the 5:30 press briefing to unveil his economic plan. POTUS said last night that he would have a news conference today to announce major and dramatic economic plans. That has not happened yet.

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) March 10, 2020

* * *

Last night, as the White House scrambled think of something, anything that they could say that might calm anxious markets (and increasingly anxious workers and business owners), President Trump dropped in on the task force’s press briefing (VP Pence, the task force’s nominal head, was supposed to lead) and told reporters that the administration was planning a stimulus package aimed at helping Americans cope with the economic fallout from the outbreak.

Trump has already signed an $8.3 billion stimulus package into law, but that money’s been earmarked to help the CDC and states fight the outbreak via testing and accomplish urgent priorities like rapidly expanding bed capacity to handle the soon to be overwhelming numbers of patients with life-threatening pneumonia who will be flooding emergency rooms – at least, that’s according to the most dire predictions of states and the CDC.

Now, he needs to convince markets that the administration is going to come through with the fiscal stimulus that every analyst, economist and armchair trader with a twitter account believes is necessary to save the US economy – if not the whole global economy – from sliding into a brutal recession.

With markets finishing in the green on Tuesday, the sense of urgency has slackened somewhat. Still, reporters are claiming that there is no plan, and that Trump essentially pulled the payroll tax cut idea out of his ass, failing to run it by his staff and senior administration officials, as well as the Congressional Republican leadership.

But since President Trump promised earlier to unveil the ‘details’ of his plan tonight, it appears he will be joining the task force to lay out the broad strokes of a ‘plan’ that’s reportedly nowhere near finished.

Will Trump start a war with fellow Republicans at a time of urgent national crisis, with his electoral future on the line? Hopefully, for his sake, his advisors have made clear just how important it is to convey to the public that this is a serious problem that Trump and his administration are meeting with serious solutions.

During a tweet sent a few hours ago, Trump praised the task force, and notably omitted any reference to the media conspiracy he alleges is being orchestrated to blame him for the outbreak.

The press conference is set to begin at 5:30, but like most Trump Administration press briefings, we suspect it will be late. Will Trump and the White House task force manage to restore confidence in the market and stop today’s rally from being just a dead cat bounce?

You’ll have to watch to find out: