Air Force Conducts Ground Test Of Hypersonic X-60A Missile
President Trump revealed earlier this month that the US is currently developing hypersonic missiles and touted that the weapons were “big, powerful, lethal, and fast.”
Trump’s mention of hypersonic missiles occurred during his national address last Wednesday as he spoke about escalating tensions with Iran.
Key points from Trump’s address to the nation:
*Backs down from taking military action against Iran
*Production of hypersonic missiles underway
*More sanctions on Iran
*US “no longer needs Middle Eastern oil”
*Reminds Americans that al-Baghdadi is dead https://t.co/gKGZKaLlpg
“Our missiles are big, powerful, accurate, lethal, and fast, “Trump said.
“Under construction are many hypersonic missiles. The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it. We do not want to use it. American strength, both military and economic, is the best deterrent,” he added.
The hypersonic missile under development that President Trump was likely referencing is the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) X-60A, an air-launched, single-stage rocket designed to reach speeds of Mach 5 to March 8, reported Flight Global.
AFRL moved a step closer to initial flight tests after it recently conducted test firings of its engines while on the ground at Cecil Spaceport in Jacksonville, Florida.
“This test series was a critical step in reducing risk and gathering necessary system integration data in preparation for our upcoming flight tests,” said Barry Hellman, AFRL X-60A program manager.
The X-60A has been designed to be air-launched from the undercarriage of a NASA C-20A, a military version of the Gulfstream III.
The initial flight test could take place in the second half of this year: “When we go to flight later this year, we hope to demonstrate the capability of the X-60A to provide affordable access to hypersonic flight conditions, which will position AFRL to deliver an innovative test capability for the Air Force and other [US Department of Defense] organizations,” Hellman said.
The hypersonic race is well underway. It has been said the US is falling behind the curve in hypersonic development as Russia and China race ahead with test flights and deployments.
The next global conflict will be fought with fifth-generation stealth fighters and hypersonic missiles.
On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal praising the “courage” of Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, who broke with his party during the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Drawing heavily on President John F. Kennedy’s profile of Senator Ross in Profiles in Courage, Pence praises the willingness of a Senator to oppose a “partisan impeachment.”
Yet as Gerard Magliocca explains at Balkinization, there was nothing particularly courageous about Senator Ross’ vote. Rather, Magliocca explains, Ross was something of a “coward.”
The real profiles in courage were the House impeachment managers, led by John Bingham, who fought body and soul for the Fourteenth Amendment against President Johnson’s determined opposition. (Go and read Bingham’s closing argument in the trial to see real courage.) Saying this in 1957, when Profiles in Courage was published, would have been highly controversial, so JFK took the easy way out. (He was also running for President and wanted the support of segregationist Democrats.)
Could a person of principle have voted for President Johnson’s acquittal in 1868? Probably. Was Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas, whom JFK and the Vice President single out, one of those men? Definitely not. He was bribed for his not guilty vote. Ross was promised lots of federal patronage if he voted in favor of the President. Word of this got out after the trial ended and Bingham wanted the House of Representatives to investigate. Realistically, though, there was nothing that the House could do short of impeaching Johnson a second time, which was impractical at that point.
There are serious arguments that most of the charges upon which the House impeached President Johnson were mistaken, particularly insofar as they centered on Johnson’s violation of the (almost certainly unconstitutional) Tenure in Office Act, which purported to prevent the President from removing certain government officers without Senate approval. Yet there is little reason to believe a principled concern for protecting executive power motivated Senator Ross, and there were many sound reasons to urge President Johnson’s impeachment, particularly his efforts to undermine Reconstruction.
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In August of 1945, the United States became the only country to drop nuclear bombs on an enemy.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely destroyed in the blink of an eye. And the Japanese had no choice but to surrender to the Allies, finally ending World War II.
Ever since, world superpowers have been rapidly advancing weapons technology, constantly raising the bar for destructive power.
It won’t surprise you to find out that the most powerful and destructive weapon in the world, though, by far, is claimed by the United States.
But this weapon has nothing to do with America’s nuclear arsenal. It doesn’t even require bullets.
I’m talking about the US dollar.
The US is still the world’s dominant superpower, still the largest economy in the world. And the US dollar is still the world’s dominant reserve currency.
This means that the VAST MAJORITY of international trade and cross-border financial transactions take place in US dollars.
When Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company sells petroleum to the Chinese, that transaction takes place in US dollars.
Last year when Air France (a European airline) agreed to purchase 60 jets from Airbus (a European aircraft manufacturer), that contract was negotiated in US dollars– even though both parties are European!
When commodities traders buy and sell cotton futures on the national mercantile exchange… in PAKISTAN… those trades are settled in US dollars.
When the IMF stepped in to bail out Argentina back in 2018 with an emergency loan, those funds were paid in US dollars.
And right now as I write these words, the Chile-based agriculture business I founded several years is selling literally millions of pounds of blueberries to wholesale buyers in Europe and Asia. Those deals are also closed in US dollars.
You get the idea. The US dollar is at the center of global commerce. Commercial banks, central banks, governments, sovereign wealth funds, and businesses around the world all need US dollars if they expect to be able to do any business internationally.
And that’s what makes the dollar such a powerful weapon: the US government can threaten foreign countries with nearly total financial collapse.
The US government realized it had this power roughly two decades ago after the September 11th attacks.
In their efforts to track down terrorist organizations and obtain intelligence, the Treasury Department began strongarming foreign banks to hand over financial information about suspected terrorists by threatening to revoke access to US dollars.
The threat worked. And a new weapon was born.
In 2010, they made some serious upgrades when Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, known as FATCA.
FATCA forces EVERY foreign bank and financial institution IN THE WORLD to share information about their depositors with the Treasury Department.
And if these foreign banks refuse to comply? You guessed it. They’ll lose access to US dollars.
We’ve continued to see the US government rely on this tactic more and more over the past ten years; in 2015, for example, the Treasury Department famously hit French bank BNP Paribas with an $8.9 billion fine.
BNP’s egregious crime? They were doing business with countries that the US government doesn’t like– countries like Cuba and Iran.
But wait a minute. BNP is a FRENCH bank! France has no beef with Cuba or Iran!
Doesn’t matter. Uncle Sam doesn’t like Cuba and Iran. BNP did business with Cuba and Iran. So BNP was punished.
And if BNP didn’t pay this ridiculous $8.9 billion fine? Yep, you know what’s coming– they’d lose their access to US dollars.
Just last week they did it again when the Iraqi parliament voted to expel all US troops from the country.
Now, it was just a non-binding resolution anyhow, which means it was just politicians making a bunch of noise. But the US government hit back, threatening Iraq with the loss of US dollar access if they went forward with the idea.
To be honest, when used in the right circumstances, this entire concept is pretty ingenious. It’s a powerful weapon that, unlike bombs and drones, causes no loss of life.
But the US government has been relying on this tactic WAAAY too much. Frankly they’re starting to look like a bunch of rowdy teenagers in skeleton costumes beating up a weakly Ralph Machio.
And every time they loudly threaten another country or foreign bank with losing US dollar access, they’re essentially daring the rest of the world to come up with another option.
Remember, America only has this power because there is no alternative to the US dollar. Not yet.
But people can only be threatened so many times before they start working on a solution.
In many respects it’s already happening. Countries like Russia and China are already engaging in trade with one another without the use of US dollars. And more and more governments are starting to hold Chinese renminbi as official reserves.
So far these actions have barely dented the US dollar’s dominance, so there’s not going to be any major change for at least the next several years.
But the world is definitely moving in that direction. They’ve learned that the US government is happy to weaponize its currency… so, fool me twice, shame on me.
Having the world’s dominant reserve currency is an enormous privilege that provides many economic benefits. And it has changed many times throughout history– from the Roman solidus to the Spanish real de ocho. It never lasts forever.
And at some point in the future when the US loses its dominant reserve status, historians will look back and realize they did it to themselves.
‘Leave The Hijab On’: Germans Now ‘Obsessed’ With Refugee Porn
After the mass migration into Germany of roughly a million refugees over the last several years, Germans have become ‘obsessed’ with refugee porn, according to The Sun, citing data from adult content platform “xhamster,” which reports roughly 800,000 monthly searches for the fetish.
In fact, entire film companies are now specializing in refugee smut and so-called ‘hijab porn’ – in which Middle Eastern porn stars in subjugated roles wear their religious headgear while being sexually dominated by white males.
According to the report “the headwear often stays on even when all the other garments have been taken off.“
The majority of refugee porn titles depict female protagonists in subjugated roles, who are often made to look like they have Middle Eastern origins. In explicit scenes, they are often shown as being dominated sexually by white males. A main feature in many of these adult film productions is the wearing of the hijab — the Islamic head covering used by many Muslim women; the religious headwear is frequently fetishized as a symbol representing female migrants as a whole, and only in the rarest of cases is it taken off at all — even if all other garments have been removed in the depicted scenes.
Some of the refugee porn movies also feature the Arabic language or other foreign tongues as part of their narratives in a further attempt to present migrants as mysterious, out-of-place objects of sexual desire. –InfoMigrants
According to the report, Google searches for said porn have skyrocketed over the past four years, while major porn websites host hundreds of refugee / hijab videos.
In the weeks leading up to the Austrian parliamentary elections in September of 2019, the phrase “refugee porn” high a two-year high. During the 2017 Austrian election, searches for the term had nearly doubled vs. a month earlier. Meanwhiule, German searches for “refugee porn” spiked in Saxony leading up to the September election as well.
Adding a dash of legitimacy to Germany’s newfound obsession is Professor Jakob Pastötter, a sexual scientist and cultural anthropologist, who told InfoMigrants in October that “Sexuality is a means to familiarize yourself with things that are alien to you. By approaching new phenomena from a sexual angle we get to understand these things better,” and that “Pornography doesn’t simply just show sex. People want to experience at the very least a rudimentary link between the sexual acts they view and themes from everyday life, as is the case with refugee porn.”
Professor Jakob Pastoötter believes that ethically produced pornography is part of a healthy sexuality | Photo: Jakob Pastötter
That said, InfoMigrants suggests that the porn genre objectifies migrants with violent narratives that promote rape and sex trafficking.
“(Pornography) is the public face of a larger network of sexual exploitation which deliberately recruits from foster homes, shelters serving various desperate populations and otherwise seeks out poor people from across the world to feed a supply chain with a constant need for fresh bodies,” said Jennifer Johnson, Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Pastötter disagrees – saying that “Only a small minority of so-called refugee porn films focus on aspects like humiliation. I believe that those more violent films are mainly addressed at an audience who like to watch porn, in which domination always plays a key role anyway.”
“Think about the likelihood of actually meeting a refugee woman, let alone having sex with one against the backdrop that the majority of migrants to Europe are men. It’s even less likely to actually happen than that common porn cliché about the pizza delivery boy who happens to also offer sexual services for a tip. This is all just about fulfilling fantasies, and should really be communicated as such.“
On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal praising the “courage” of Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, who broke with his party during the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Drawing heavily on President John F. Kennedy’s profile of Senator Ross in Profiles in Courage, Pence praises the willingness of a Senator to oppose a “partisan impeachment.”
Yet as Gerard Magliocca explains at Balkinization, there was nothing particularly courageous about Senator Ross’ vote. Rather, Magliocca explains, Ross was something of a “coward.”
The real profiles in courage were the House impeachment managers, led by John Bingham, who fought body and soul for the Fourteenth Amendment against President Johnson’s determined opposition. (Go and read Bingham’s closing argument in the trial to see real courage.) Saying this in 1957, when Profiles in Courage was published, would have been highly controversial, so JFK took the easy way out. (He was also running for President and wanted the support of segregationist Democrats.)
Could a person of principle have voted for President Johnson’s acquittal in 1868? Probably. Was Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas, whom JFK and the Vice President single out, one of those men? Definitely not. He was bribed for his not guilty vote. Ross was promised lots of federal patronage if he voted in favor of the President. Word of this got out after the trial ended and Bingham wanted the House of Representatives to investigate. Realistically, though, there was nothing that the House could do short of impeaching Johnson a second time, which was impractical at that point.
There are serious arguments that most of the charges upon which the House impeached President Johnson were mistaken, particularly insofar as they centered on Johnson’s violation of the (almost certainly unconstitutional) Tenure in Office Act, which purported to prevent the President from removing certain government officers without Senate approval. Yet there is little reason to believe a principled concern for protecting executive power motivated Senator Ross, and there were many sound reasons to urge President Johnson’s impeachment, particularly his efforts to undermine Reconstruction.
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Some of Ireland’s leading chefs are protesting a proposed mandatory restaurant calorie labeling law, with several of the country’s top chefs saying they’ll defy the law should it take effect.
Ireland’s health ministry has toyed with the idea of menu calorie labeling for some time. But reports last week indicated the government would press on with legislation after reviewingpublic comments on its proposal (which the government also did in 2015).
“I’ll pay whatever fine I have to, but I will never put calories on my menu,” chef Wade Murphy—whose award-winning restaurant 1826 Adare servessumptuous and authentically Irish dishes such as Cured and Marinated Organic Irish Salmon and Wild Irish Venison—toldthe Irish Times last week. “Never.”
The Times reports other “chefs and restaurateurs across the country” are outraged. “We won’t be doing it, as stated many times before, we will NEVER put calories on the menus,” famed Dublin chef Eamon O’Reilly, holder of two Michelin stars, said in a tweet that also dubbed the plan “nonsensical, ridiculous & totally impractical.“
The lead lobbyist for pub owners in Ireland, Donall O’Keefe, warns the proposal is an “administrative nightmare…. [that] will add to costs.”
The leading Irish restaurant lobby, the Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI), has opposed plans for mandatory calorie labeling on restaurant menus for years. The RAI says testing menu items and revising menus will cost the average restaurant around $10,000.
Adrian Cummins, head of RAI, says the group’s members are “totally opposed” to the plan. He details the reasons behind RAI’s position here. They include dramatic compliance costs, a shortage of Irish chefs, and the fact calories counts alone, without context, “are not a good measure of healthy menus.”
Cummins calls the calorie mandate “nanny-statism at its best” and says his members will leave the country if forced to comply with the law.
Leading Dublin chef Gaz Smith, also an award winner, penned a spectacular op-ed last week in the Irish Daily Mail blasting the proposal.
“This seems like another Nanny State box-ticking exercise by the government with no real thought on genuine implementation, the realities of the costs and time of getting it accurate, and the burden it will place on smaller independent restaurants and cafes that are already swamped in regulations, legislation, VAT increases, and the ever-soaring insurance costs,” Smith writes.
As the Irish Times notes, Smith has had a little fun with the proposed mandate by placing a warning on his menus that each dish he crafts contains somewhere between one and 1,000,000 calories.
But research consistently shows menu calorie labeling is not an effective tool for combating obesity. If menu labeling rules are “grounded in science,” I wrote in 2017, “that science is shoddy.” As I detailed in a 2014 column, “research show[s] mandatory menu-labeling doesn’t work—and may even be counterproductive.”
Last week’s Irish Times report suggests the calorie-labeling scheme is supported by research, citing a study that purportedly found “people order less and consume fewer calories when information on calorie content is included on menus.” That study, by researchers from Dublin’s Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI), concluded what some others have found: Consumers who noticed calories printed after a menu item “ordered and ate fewer calories.”
But ESRI isn’t a neutral observer. Reports last year indicated ESRI had been “drafted in to help with the legislation” on calorie counts. What’s more, while the study details I reviewed don’t include data about what percentage of people who took part in the study actually noticed the calorie counts, the study’s results appear to track closely with thoroughly unconvincing earlier research I debunked in a 2016 column: “Contradictory studies that have touted menu labeling tend to be filled with qualifiers, along the lines of a small percentage of the small percentage of consumers who self-reported that they noticed calorie information on restaurant menus reduced their calorie intake by a small amount.” (To be fair, the Irish study was based on actual research observations rather than consumer self-reporting.)
Last year Simon Harris, Ireland’s health minister, said the government would soon push for calorie labeling. “I would hope that businesses across the country will, by their own initiative, lead on this issue,” Harris said at the time. Irish businesses are doing just that—though probably not in the way Harris intended. Good for them.
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When Matteo Salvini’s Lega won the state elections in Umbria in late October few, if any, noticed. Lega and the Brothers of Italy and Forza Italia took at whopping 53% of the vote, with Lega taking 37%.
It was this result that should have had everyone in Brussels worried. But since they had just gotten finished patting themselves on the back for maneuvering around Salvini’s attempt to force an election the month before, the news quickly moved to the back burner amongst all of the Brexit drama.
But, the result in Umbria was important because it showed Lega’s ability to turn a center-Left stronghold against history. The Democrats (PD) had held sway there for over fifty years. But no longer.
The result showed that even though Salvini was no longer in a governmental office in Rome, his popularity hadn’t waned. It’s clear that polling since then has seen Lega hold its position as the dominant party in Italy, which has Lega commanding 31-33% of the vote.
The real story, however, is the surge of the Brothers of Italy (FdL) who are picking up disaffected Forza Italia voters and held them for months now, continuing to hold a solid 10%.
In short, Italian polls haven’t moved much in months despite Salvini and Lega being ousted from the ruling coalition when coalition partner Five Star Movement (M5S) made a backroom deal with PD which has only accelerated M5S’s slide in the polls. Remember, M5S was formed to stop PD from holding onto power and challenging them on EU membership and continued adoption of the euro as Italy’s currency.
Making that deal with the establishment like that has alienated a lot of M5S’s base and it’s support is now threatening to collapse below the all-important 16% level, which once breached to the downside opens the door for someone else to gain dramatically.
And that is the backdrop against which the PD/Five Star Movement (M5S) government is dealing with.
Lega alone polls close to or better than PD/M5S together nationally. And it is the upcoming state election in Emilia-Romagna on January 26th that is their next headache. As the Financial Times pointed out in a recent article, Salvini and Lega have made serious inroads in what is a traditionally heavily left-leaning area.
Giorgio Bennetti, a 35-year-old sweets seller with a stall in Ferrara’s centre, believes that many voters are willing to switch to the right to express a general political dissatisfaction. Local issues, such as the collapse of the Ferrara savings bank — 130,000 investors lost their savings — have also given voters reason to want to punish the PD, which was in charge both locally and nationally when the rescue happened in 2015.
“This is a protest vote; people don’t believe that the left is working for them any more,” Mr Bennetti says. “My grandmother used to say that people have no problem changing their shirts from red to black if they need to.”
But similar to what Donald Trump did in 2016 and Boris Johnson just pulled off in the U.K. these nominally right-wing candidates became the champions of domestic working middle class.
In Italian political terms, the former Communists in Emilia-Romagna now firmly trust Salvini to protect their futures and the jobs rather than the traditional left parties.
Current polling there has Lega with 31% of the vote, a massive 12-point rise over the last election while PD has lost even more down 20 points.
Since parties can campaign in coalitions in Italy the current center-left versus center-right numbers in Emilia-Romagna are within a couple of points. But Salvini’s guys are rising fast and it’s very possible that the polls haven’t quite caught up to the shift in sentiment leading into the election.
This happened in 2018 where Lega was polling behind Forza Italia by a couple of points and would up coming out of the election four points up and the dominant player in the center-right coalition. That paved the way for the scenario that led to the short-lived Euroskeptic coalition between Lega and M5S.
So, the probability of a center-right government coming into being in Emilia-Romagna is growing by the day. And that puts the national coalition at serious risk.
“This coalition is already so fragile that the only thing gluing it together is their fear of Salvini,” says Erik Jones, professor of European studies and international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. “If they lose it is hard to see how they make it through the spring.”
This fear is well-founded and no matter how hard they try and hold it together political forces within Italy will ultimately tear it apart. Losing Emilia-Romagna would create serious panic in the ranks of both ruling parties.
But the political establishment in Rome is dead set on keeping Salvini out of power for as long as possible. And that goes double for the traditional EU leadership in Brussels. But one thing working in Salvini’s favor here is that it has been German Chancellor Angela Merkel pulling the strings in Rome to keep the Italians in sync with German fiscal and monetary demands.
But Merkel is on the way out and there is a concerted challenge to German rule coming from French President (for now) Emmanuel Macron. Macron wants fiscal integration and the euro-zone is suffering from Merkel’s insistence on punitive austerity.
I expect the next leadership challenge in Italy will not be fought nearly as hard as in the past by the EU. Salvini either wants a stronger seat at the decision-making table for EU fiscal policy for Italy or be let out of the monetary union. In that sense Salvini is a future ally for Macron against Merkel and her successor.
I can see Macron and new ECB President Christine Lagarde not fighting Salvini’s rise to power to help them remake the EU’s fiscal structure, prevailing upon the Italian old guard like President Sergio Mattarella to allow the government to collapse and not fight new elections, which Salvini will win in a walk, likely with just the Brothers of Italy as his coalition partner depending on how the vote lays out.
At that point things get really hairy for Merkel as a Salvini as Prime Minister will be in the position to dictate terms to Germany having Lagarde and Macron on his side, tacitly.
Because, remember folks, when you owe the bank a thousand dollars it’s your problem. When you owe the bank a few hundred billion dollars it’s the bank’s problem, in this case, specifically German banks.
That’s where Salvini’s leverage lies and he knows it. But with the changing of the guard in Brussels and Strassbourg, he would finally be in a position to use it.
Some of Ireland’s leading chefs are protesting a proposed mandatory restaurant calorie labeling law, with several of the country’s top chefs saying they’ll defy the law should it take effect.
Ireland’s health ministry has toyed with the idea of menu calorie labeling for some time. But reports last week indicated the government would press on with legislation after reviewingpublic comments on its proposal (which the government also did in 2015).
“I’ll pay whatever fine I have to, but I will never put calories on my menu,” chef Wade Murphy—whose award-winning restaurant 1826 Adare servessumptuous and authentically Irish dishes such as Cured and Marinated Organic Irish Salmon and Wild Irish Venison—toldthe Irish Times last week. “Never.”
The Times reports other “chefs and restaurateurs across the country” are outraged. “We won’t be doing it, as stated many times before, we will NEVER put calories on the menus,” famed Dublin chef Eamon O’Reilly, holder of two Michelin stars, said in a tweet that also dubbed the plan “nonsensical, ridiculous & totally impractical.“
The lead lobbyist for pub owners in Ireland, Donall O’Keefe, warns the proposal is an “administrative nightmare…. [that] will add to costs.”
The leading Irish restaurant lobby, the Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI), has opposed plans for mandatory calorie labeling on restaurant menus for years. The RAI says testing menu items and revising menus will cost the average restaurant around $10,000.
Adrian Cummins, head of RAI, says the group’s members are “totally opposed” to the plan. He details the reasons behind RAI’s position here. They include dramatic compliance costs, a shortage of Irish chefs, and the fact calories counts alone, without context, “are not a good measure of healthy menus.”
Cummins calls the calorie mandate “nanny-statism at its best” and says his members will leave the country if forced to comply with the law.
Leading Dublin chef Gaz Smith, also an award winner, penned a spectacular op-ed last week in the Irish Daily Mail blasting the proposal.
“This seems like another Nanny State box-ticking exercise by the government with no real thought on genuine implementation, the realities of the costs and time of getting it accurate, and the burden it will place on smaller independent restaurants and cafes that are already swamped in regulations, legislation, VAT increases, and the ever-soaring insurance costs,” Smith writes.
As the Irish Times notes, Smith has had a little fun with the proposed mandate by placing a warning on his menus that each dish he crafts contains somewhere between one and 1,000,000 calories.
But research consistently shows menu calorie labeling is not an effective tool for combating obesity. If menu labeling rules are “grounded in science,” I wrote in 2017, “that science is shoddy.” As I detailed in a 2014 column, “research show[s] mandatory menu-labeling doesn’t work—and may even be counterproductive.”
Last week’s Irish Times report suggests the calorie-labeling scheme is supported by research, citing a study that purportedly found “people order less and consume fewer calories when information on calorie content is included on menus.” That study, by researchers from Dublin’s Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI), concluded what some others have found: Consumers who noticed calories printed after a menu item “ordered and ate fewer calories.”
But ESRI isn’t a neutral observer. Reports last year indicated ESRI had been “drafted in to help with the legislation” on calorie counts. What’s more, while the study details I reviewed don’t include data about what percentage of people who took part in the study actually noticed the calorie counts, the study’s results appear to track closely with thoroughly unconvincing earlier research I debunked in a 2016 column: “Contradictory studies that have touted menu labeling tend to be filled with qualifiers, along the lines of a small percentage of the small percentage of consumers who self-reported that they noticed calorie information on restaurant menus reduced their calorie intake by a small amount.” (To be fair, the Irish study was based on actual research observations rather than consumer self-reporting.)
Last year Simon Harris, Ireland’s health minister, said the government would soon push for calorie labeling. “I would hope that businesses across the country will, by their own initiative, lead on this issue,” Harris said at the time. Irish businesses are doing just that—though probably not in the way Harris intended. Good for them.
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Europe Leads The World In Environmental Protection
Earlier this week, the European Union unveiled their European Investment Plan aimed at shifting 1 trillion euros into making the economy more environmentally friendly over the next 10 years.
Statista’s Willem Rpoer reports that the investment plan is in line with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s Green Deal, which looks to make the European continent carbon-neutral by 2050. Since taking office, Von der Leyen has made climate change her top priority.
European countries have typically been leaders in the fight against climate change, with many ranking lowest in carbon emissions globally and highest in environmental quality. The newest trillion-euro investment plan looks to solidify Europe as the global example for combating global warming as other continents like Asia and North America continue to produce high carbon emissions and lag behind in renewable energy sources.
In 2019, Yale University released their Environmental Performance Index (EPI) for all 180 countries in order to gauge which countries had the highest environmental quality and which had the lowest.
The EPI measures two dimensions, environmental health and ecosystem vitality, through numerous metrics that focus on biodiversity, air and water quality, climate and agriculture.
European and North American countries held the highest overall scores, while Asian and African countries saw the lowest, globally.
The index doesn’t take into account the average GDP per capita in each country or the overall economic viability for a country and government to produce a healthy environment.
In the last decade, the combination of virulent asset price inflation and low reported consumer price inflation crippled sound money as a political force in the US and globally. In the new decade, a different balance between monetary inflation’s “terrible twins” — asset inflation and goods inflation — will create an opportunity for that force to regain strength. Crucial, however, will be how sound money advocacy evolves in the world of ideas and its success in forming an alliance with other causes that could win elections.
It is very likely that the deflationary nonmonetary influences of globalization and digitalization, which camouflaged the activity of the goods-inflation twin during the past decade, are already dissipating.
The pace of globalization may have already peaked, before the Xi-Trump tariff war. Inflation-fueled monetary malinvestment surely contributed to its prior speed. One channel here was the spread of highly speculative narratives about the wonders of global supply chains.
Digitalization’s potential to camouflage monetary inflation in goods and services markets, on the other hand, has come largely via its impact on the dynamics of wage determination. It has forged star firms with considerable monopoly power in each industrial sector. Obstacles preventing their technological and organizational know-how from seeping out to competitors means that wages are not bid higher across labor markets in similar fashion to earlier industrial revolutions. These obstacles reflect the fact that much investment is now in the form of firm-specific intangibles. Even so, such obstacles tend to lose their effectiveness over time.
As deflation fades, monetary repression taxes (collected for governments through central banks’ manipulation of rates to low levels so as to achieve 2 percent inflation despite disinflation as described) will undergo metamorphosis into open inflation taxes as the rate of consumer price inflation accelerates. Governments cannot forego revenue given their ailing finances. Simultaneously, asset inflation will proceed down a new stretch of highway where many crashes occur.
Historical Circumstances of Empowerment of Sound Money Forces
If the small sample size of monetary history is any guide, the combination of asset market crashes and high goods inflation empowers sound money forces in the political arena. Widespread public resentment against higher goods and services prices and wealth loss (whether by strong inflation or crash) is responsible for the shift.
By contrast, when the goods-inflation twin is camouflaged (as during the 2010s) and asset inflation is rife, unhappiness among some savers about the monetary repression tax is more than matched (in terms of electoral impact) by happiness among large segments of the population about rising wealth and the comforting performance of their pension funds.
If the asset inflation ends without the goods-inflation twin emerging from its camouflage, then most likely there would be a further triumph for unsound money, as was the case in the 1930s and again in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. The bankers, mortgage brokers, and securities salespersons would be blamed, not the money printers, though the latter’s political masters might suffer the consequences even without direct attribution.
The last time we had the combination of high goods inflation coupled with crash-prone asset markets was in the later stages of the great monetary inflation from the early 1960s to the 1970s. Sound money did become a political force both in Europe and the US despite the most effective groupings’ advancement of the flawed doctrines of monetarism.
The seriousness of the flaws and whether these could be lessened by various forms of financial system reconstruction were never put to the test. In the US, the Reagan administration by 1985 had decided on a new devaluation policy (highlighted by the Plaza Accord), endorsed at the start by then Fed chairman Paul Volcker. Earlier the same administration had undermined the original purpose of a commission to study a return to the gold standard (law signed by President Carter in 1980) by packing it with opponents. In Europe, the dollar devaluation of the mid-1980s created the political dynamics towards monetary union which proved fatal to discount margin (DM) monetarism.
After the waxing and waning of monetarism, the US adopted gradually the 2 percent inflation standard built on emperor’s-new-clothes econometrics and expectations inertia. The newly established European Monetary Union followed suit. This all occurred just as nonmonetary deflationary forces were gaining power. At first globalization was the strongest force; later it was digitalization and resource abundance (especially of shale oil and gas).
A Sound Money Resurgence?
As the camouflage of goods and services inflation now thins, a climb in consumer price inflation may undermine the equity market and lead to an early dose of asset deflation. Governments will then double down on money printing. If that asset deflation nonetheless leads to great depression, sound money advocacy will remain dead.
However, if there is no great depression and goods inflation picks up sharply into the next cycle beyond a normal recession, sound money will have its chance. The extent of malinvestment during the monetary inflation of the past decades will be revealed in the wake of asset price deflation. Effective capital shortage resulting from the obsolescence of malinvestment will mean that goods and services price inflation can pick up faster and earlier than much conventional macroeconomic modeling would suggest as the business cycle upswing gets under way.
In this case there will still be a problem for sound money advocacy in the political arena. We can count the number of US senators in favor of sound money on one hand — and less in European parliaments. There is no ready popular brand of ideology of sound money analogous to Friedman’s 1970s monetarism.
Popular branding is difficult. The fundamental prerequisite to monetary soundness is an anchoring of the monetary system, which is accomplished by designing a monetary base for which a broad and stable demand exists that is not hugely sensitive to small changes in interest rates. This is not an easy concept to popularize. Successful anchoring means that automatic mechanisms would keep money under control without any official setting or manipulation of interest rates or any targeting of the price level.
It is hard to imagine a brand “catching on” that does not include gold. which has potential and actual popular appeal. A natural ally of sound money forces promoting this brand could be antimonopolists, found on both sides of the aisle. Big Tech and Big Finance are joining with Big Government in pursuing the war against cash. While this rages, gold money and the little saver stand little chance.
In Europe the forces of sound money would have a natural base in Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Austria. These forces could build on resentment toward transfers to southern Europe and negative rates. The main counterforce for now are the Greens. Watch how European Central Bank chief Lagarde is playing to the Green Party in Germany, expecting it to be an equal partner to the Christian Democrats in the next government, probably at some point in 2020.
A gold-backed euro based in northern Europe seems like fantasy for now, but it is more plausible than a gold dollar as an outcome of this decade.
