In this week’s edition of Straight Talk Guy Adami, Dan Nathan and I are diving into the surprising jobs report, the hot topics of the widening wealth gap and social unrest, the Fed’s role in all of it, the implications of the widening rift on our society, the risks of a building record rift between asset prices and the real economy and we also offer a heartfelt discussion of the reasons of why we do what we do, offer our often contrarian and critical opinions.
Markets closed the week at a red flag screaming 151% market cap to GDP. There is no history, none, that shows valuations above 150% market cap to GDP are sustainable. None.
But this is what you get when you have a market that treats a phase one trade deal as something better than the trade volumes that were in place before the trade war ever started. This is what you get when a market treats phase one Covid vaccine trials as an actual vaccine already in place. This is what you get when a market prices in a perceived uptick in employment from a total collapse as an economy already having returned to full employment. This is what you get when a market perceives the injection of trillions of dollars as a substitute for actual growth in the economy.
This is what you get:
Welcome to the first massive financial asset bubble inside of a recession.
A financial asset bubble the likes we have never seen before. Asset bubbles happen at the end of a business cycle. Now we have one with nothing, absolutely nothing, on a extended proven growth path and the global economy still in a recession.
What bubble do we have in store for when the economy actually emerges from the recession?
Fact is the China US relation is frayed, the phase one trade deal in shambles in terms of actual volumes. There is no vaccine and while we’ve had a slowing of infections of wave 1 of the virus it is still ravaging in places such as Brazil and Mexico and back on the uptick in countries that have reopened their economies. The jury is still out.
Companies continue to make layoff announcements and more are to come.
There is little doubt the trillions in liquidity injections by the Fed and other central banks have juiced asset prices to levels that pretend to convey that nothing has happened.
New all time highs on the Nasdaq in the most vertical and aggressive “V” shaped rally ever.
$SPX back to levels last seen during the fleeting January 2020 lows when GDP growth was expected to be 2%, earnings growth deemed to be 5%-8% and unemployment at 3.5%.
Markets pretend that nothing’s happened and things are back to normal:
But they aren’t. Far from it, but that’s the illusion purposefully propagated by central banks. Millions unemployed with permanent job losses on the horizon but American billionaires having increased their wealth by $565B since March 18. This is America.
George Carlin once said:
When you are born to this world you get a free ticket to the freak show and if you are born in America you get a front seat. Welcome to the freak show that works for fewer and fewer people.
No, the market is not forward looking its blindly chasing liquidity and by doing so has blindly gone vertical and embraced an, in my view, unsustainable path of historical valuations overly reliant on overnight unfilled gaps:
A path that keeps building risks of future gap fills to come, especially in context of ever tightening price patterns not only on the market charts, but also the $VIX:
The building disconnects and the societal rifts are subjects dear to our hearts.
For out latest perspectives please join please join Guy Adami, Dan Nathan and I in this week’s edition of Straight Talk:
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3h32Qks Tyler Durden
50 State AGs Are Pushing To Breakup Google’s Ad-Tech Dominance Alongside DOJ Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/06/2020 – 19:00
In what would be a monumental move — and we might ad good for independent media breaking the shackles of the mainstream’s ongoing attempts to police content and punish dissent — Google’s total dominance over online advertising could soon come to an end.
CNBC revealed Friday that no less than 50 sate attorneys general have been investigating Google’s business practices as part of a months long probe alongside a parallel DOJ effort, and momentum is gaining toward a looming major antitrust lawsuit against the internet giant.
Source: Ad Age
Leading the probe among the states is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who did not comment in Friday’s CNBC report. Google, however, did respond, with a Google spokesperson rebutting with, “The facts are clear, our digital advertising products compete across a crowded industry with hundreds of rivals and technologies, and have helped lower costs for advertisers and consumers.”
President Trump has lately put big tech in the spotlight over allegations of targeted censorship of conservative content, lately signing an executive order which seeks to reduce liability protections of major internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
Independent and alternative voices have also long complained of being demonetized or unfairly targeted for analysis and commentary falling outside of accepted ‘groupthink’.
— Millions for Truth (@Millions4Trump2) June 5, 2020
It remains that the bulk of Google’s some $161 billion in revenue comes via ad sales, with a far smaller amount coming through products the tech giant and its parent company Alphabet Inc. are traditionally known for: software and technology.
Critics have said that Google bundles its ad tools so that rivals can’t afford to match its offerings and that its operation of search results, YouTube, Gmail and other services to hinder ad competition. They also say that Google owns all sides of the “auction exchange” through which ads are sold and bought, giving it an unfair advantage.
But a key legal obstacle the courts would have to consider is the fact that Google’s ad group doesn’t function as a stand alone business, but is made up of Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager.
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A prior WSJ explainer walked through how Google ad dominance works in three charts:
Source: the company’s website, via WSJ
If said company wants advertise on third-party websites and apps:
And finally, if the airline wants to advertise on YouTube:
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30n0Dua Tyler Durden
Over the last few days, several different friends, relatives, and members of the media from foreign countries have reached out at least in part to ask whether I am safe and well. One was even a high-ranking public official in his own country.
For the record, I’m happy to assure everyone that my family and I are safe and well, and that life in northern Virginia has been essentially normal these last few days (or at least as normal as it gets during the pandemic).
However, the fact these people thought they needed to inquire about my safety is just one of many indications of the severe damage the crisis caused by police abuses such as the death of George Floyd and resulting protests and riots have done to the image of the US across the world. Such queries are usually directed at people in the midst of natural disasters, or those visiting a dangerously unstable authoritarian state.
The harm to the standing of the US is even greater because these events come on the heels of several other blows to America’s image, such as Trump’s brutal family separation policy, multiple trade wars with allies, the badly flawed handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and so on.
Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian propagandists are having a field day:
Officials in Iran, mainland China, Russia, Venezuela, North Korean and the pro-Chinese government in Hong Kong have all called out U.S. President Donald Trump after he told state governors to “dominate” those protesting the death of George Floyd — something that he has criticized other nations for doing in the past. Trump has also claimed without evidence that the protests are illegitimate, and described the protesters as “terrorists,” “thugs” and “lowlifes…”
Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, also called out the U.S. at a news conference in Beijing. He said the protests “once again reflect the racial discrimination in the U.S., the serious problems of police violent enforcement and the urgency of solving these problems.”
Zhao, whose government has put more than 1 million Muslim-minority Uighur people in detention camps, urged the U.S. to “safeguard and guarantee the legal rights of ethnic minorities…”
Russia, which meddled in the 2016 U.S. election in part by exploiting movements like Black Lives Matter, also condemned the latest violence.
“The United States has certainly accumulated systemic human rights problems: race, ethnic and religious discrimination, police brutality, bias of justice, crowded prisons … to name a few,” Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
But at the end of the day, it is unavoidable that the nation that seeks to lead the free world is going to be held to a higher standard than the Putins and Xis of the world. And we should work to meet those standards, rather than evade them. We can and should aspire to more than being not as bad as the likes of Russia and China.
America’s position in the world does not depend only on “hard power,” such as having a powerful military and a large and productive economy. It also critically depends on “soft power”—the appeal of our ideas and our political and economic systems to the people of the world. Foreign governments—especially democracies—are more likely to cooperate with us if we have a favorable public image with their people.
As during the Cold War the US is engaged in a a war of ideas with authoritarian states, most notably China and Russia. Unlike during the Cold War, our current adversaries lack an ideology with broad, international appeal. Few people outside of these two countries are enthusiastic about Chinese or Russian nationalism, or about these two powers’ authoritarian systems of government. Nonetheless, we are doing poorly in the war of ideas, largely through our own errors, rather than because of any great skill on the part of our opponents.
During the Cold War, US leaders—including political conservatives—well understood the the importance of the war of ideas, and that winning it depended in significant part on the image America’s domestic policies projected abroad. As legal historian Mary Dudziak recounts in her important book Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, one of the reasons why the federal government began to support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s was the growing recognition that ending racial discrimination would boost the US image in the world and counter communist propaganda.
Even at its awful worst, American racial oppression in the twentieth century was not as bad as the horrific mass murders of communist states, or their repression and deportation of entire ethnic groups. But US leaders of the Cold War era knew that we could not prevail in the war of ideas merely by being less awful than the communists. We had to do a lot better than that.
As was the case during the Cold War, cleaning up our own house is a key element of winning the war of ideas internationally. There is much we can do to curb police abuses, reform cruel immigration policies, stop self-destructive trade wars, and address other issues that have damaged the US image in the world in recent years.
We should not necessarily reverse any and all policies that are unpopular abroad. But, as with desegregation during the Cold War, there are many ways for us to improve our image abroad by doing things that are also right in themselves and beneficial to US domestic policy. Such measures as curbing police misconduct and racial profiling, letting in refugees fleeing the oppression of our adversaries, and ending trade restrictions that damage our economy can benefit Americans at home at the same time as they strengthen our position in the world.
If we want to win the international war of ideas and thereby make our America’s position in the world great again, we have to pay more attention to the ways in which what we do at home affects our position abroad. Right now, we’re a long way from being able to say we’re winning so much we can be sick and tired of all the winning.
UPDATE: I have made minor additions to this post.
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via IFTTT
Over the last few days, several different friends, relatives, and members of the media from foreign countries have reached out at least in part to ask whether I am safe and well. One was even a high-ranking public official in his own country.
For the record, I’m happy to assure everyone that my family and I are safe and well, and that life in northern Virginia has been essentially normal these last few days (or at least as normal as it gets during the pandemic).
However, the fact these people thought they needed to inquire about my safety is just one of many indications of the severe damage the crisis caused by police abuses such as the death of George Floyd and resulting protests and riots have done to the image of the US across the world. Such queries are usually directed at people in the midst of natural disasters, or those visiting a dangerously unstable authoritarian state.
The harm to the standing of the US is even greater because these events come on the heels of several other blows to America’s image, such as Trump’s brutal family separation policy, multiple trade wars with allies, the badly flawed handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and so on.
Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian propagandists are having a field day:
Officials in Iran, mainland China, Russia, Venezuela, North Korean and the pro-Chinese government in Hong Kong have all called out U.S. President Donald Trump after he told state governors to “dominate” those protesting the death of George Floyd — something that he has criticized other nations for doing in the past. Trump has also claimed without evidence that the protests are illegitimate, and described the protesters as “terrorists,” “thugs” and “lowlifes…”
Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, also called out the U.S. at a news conference in Beijing. He said the protests “once again reflect the racial discrimination in the U.S., the serious problems of police violent enforcement and the urgency of solving these problems.”
Zhao, whose government has put more than 1 million Muslim-minority Uighur people in detention camps, urged the U.S. to “safeguard and guarantee the legal rights of ethnic minorities…”
Russia, which meddled in the 2016 U.S. election in part by exploiting movements like Black Lives Matter, also condemned the latest violence.
“The United States has certainly accumulated systemic human rights problems: race, ethnic and religious discrimination, police brutality, bias of justice, crowded prisons … to name a few,” Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
But at the end of the day, it is unavoidable that the nation that seeks to lead the free world is going to be held to a higher standard than the Putins and Xis of the world. And we should work to meet those standards, rather than evade them. We can and should aspire to more than being not as bad as the likes of Russia and China.
America’s position in the world does not depend only on “hard power,” such as having a powerful military and a large and productive economy. It also critically depends on “soft power”—the appeal of our ideas and our political and economic systems to the people of the world. Foreign governments—especially democracies—are more likely to cooperate with us if we have a favorable public image with their people.
As during the Cold War the US is engaged in a a war of ideas with authoritarian states, most notably China and Russia. Unlike during the Cold War, our current adversaries lack an ideology with broad, international appeal. Few people outside of these two countries are enthusiastic about Chinese or Russian nationalism, or about these two powers’ authoritarian systems of government. Nonetheless, we are doing poorly in the war of ideas, largely through our own errors, rather than because of any great skill on the part of our opponents.
During the Cold War, US leaders—including political conservatives—well understood the the importance of the war of ideas, and that winning it depended in significant part on the image America’s domestic policies projected abroad. As legal historian Mary Dudziak recounts in her important book Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, one of the reasons why the federal government began to support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s was the growing recognition that ending racial discrimination would boost the US image in the world and counter communist propaganda.
Even at its awful worst, American racial oppression in the twentieth century was not as bad as the horrific mass murders of communist states, or their repression and deportation of entire ethnic groups. But US leaders of the Cold War era knew that we could not prevail in the war of ideas merely by being less awful than the communists. We had to do a lot better than that.
As was the case during the Cold War, cleaning up our own house is a key element of winning the war of ideas internationally. There is much we can do to curb police abuses, reform cruel immigration policies, stop self-destructive trade wars, and address other issues that have damaged the US image in the world in recent years.
We should not necessarily reverse any and all policies that are unpopular abroad. But, as with desegregation during the Cold War, there are many ways for us to improve our image abroad by doing things that are also right in themselves and beneficial to US domestic policy. Such measures as curbing police misconduct and racial profiling, letting in refugees fleeing the oppression of our adversaries, and ending trade restrictions that damage our economy can benefit Americans at home at the same time as they strengthen our position in the world.
If we want to win the international war of ideas and thereby make our America’s position in the world great again, we have to pay more attention to the ways in which what we do at home affects our position abroad. Right now, we’re a long way from being able to say we’re winning so much we can be sick and tired of all the winning.
UPDATE: I have made minor additions to this post.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Y45lKK
via IFTTT
The brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police spurred widespread protests which have been followed by looting in dozens of American cities. CNN’s Don Lemon compared looters who plundered Neiman Marcus and other upscale stores to those at the Boston Tea Party. But far more Americans likely agreed with Quinta Caylor, a black North Carolina nurse on Twitter, who denounced the looters who “THUGGED OUT in 1 day” businesses that owners had worked long and hard to build.
There are not yet any solid estimates of the total damage from the looting and burning that has occurred in many cities across the nation. Total losses may range in the tens of millions of dollars or perhaps in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The pillaging has been especially ruinous to many small family-owned businesses, some of whom may not have insurance to cover their losses.
Many cities have responded to violent rampages by imposing curfews and other severe restrictions on movement.
In Portland, Oregon, “rioters have broken into Portland’s main mall in downtown and began looting the Louis Vuitton. Youths ran out with designer bags. They shouted about expropriation,” as Andy Ngo tweeted.
But the damage they inflicted was not even pocket change compared to the wreckage produced by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She prohibited anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Whitmer severely restricted what stores could sell; she prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting in stores after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity (unlike buying state lottery tickets). Though COVID infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, Whitmer shut down the entire state – including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24% statewide.
In the District of Columbia, looters pillaged an Apple Store. “I bet this is about the [COVID] contact tracing in the latest upgrade,” quipped one wag on Twitter.
But Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has inflicted vastly more damage on the city with a lockdown order that helped destroy almost 100,000 jobs.
In Richmond, Virginia, looters pillaged many black-owned small businesses as well as torching the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Local damage is far outweighed by Gov. Ralph Northam shutting down the state economy for more than two months– including vast swaths of the Old Dominion that had few if any COVID cases, helping destroy more than half a million jobs.
But more than two million New Yorkers have lost their jobs since Gov. Andrew Cuomo effectively put almost 20 million people under house arrest – a drastic step that he said would be justified if it “saves just one life.” Most counties had only a smattering of COVID cases before Cuomo caused profound upheaval in the lives of vast numbers of his subjects. Also, unlike for Cuomo, there is no evidence tying the looters to 5,000+ deaths in nursing homes.
Most of the media coverage, reciting the official narrative that shutdowns were vital and justified, has ignored the human carnage of the COVID shutdowns.
Almost 40% of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost their job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. Politicians destroyed much of the economy in the name of “risk reduction.” Unprecedented restrictions on personal and economic freedom were justified in part by federal Centers for Disease Control fatality forecasts that turned out to be wildly exaggerated.
Some leftists on Twitter urged the looters to go after national chain stores such as Target and avoid small family-owned businesses. Politicians issuing COVID shutdown decrees followed the opposite standard, effectively padlocking small businesses while Walmart and other large stores easily received the “essential” bureaucratic holy water and Amazon practically won the lottery. The recent riots may have destroyed hundreds of businesses. But forecasts predict that millions of businesses could be forced to close or file bankruptcy because of the pandemic disruptions.
The people who pillaged stores in recent days deserve vigorous prosecution, and the deluge of Twitter plundering-in-progress videos could make it easier to identify culprits. It remains to be seen whether mayors will have the gumption to throw the book at the thieves. But it is even less likely that the politicians and other government officials who inflicted far greater damage on the economy will ever be held liable.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/377SGdO Tyler Durden
Anything But “Incredible”: For Millennials And Women, The Jobs Report Was Catastrophic Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/06/2020 – 18:05
There were clear problems with Friday’s “incredible” – as Trump put it – jobs report.
First and foremost the BLS’ own admission there was a “survey error” which may have reduced the real unemployment rate by up to 3% as survey-takers mistakenly counted about 4.9 million temporarily laid-off people as employed, then moving through some very aggressive statistical assumption revisions to boost the “birth/death” model, the curious case of millions of “jobs” resurrected temporarily thanks to the PPP program: as recruitment firm LaSalle Network head Tom Gimbel said, today’s jobs report may offer a “false ray of light” because almost all job gains stemmed from furloughed employees kept on the books due to PPP loans (he said he was seeing real weakness in new hiring).
But even if one accepts the report at its face, if one digs beneath the glossy veneer, the details are anything but “incredible” as described by the president.
Start with Trump’s “incredible” V-shaped rebound: after the 2.5mm new jobs added, total US employment is basically where it was at the depth of the financial crisis, while 21 million workers find themselves unemployed – this number was 6 million just two months ago.
Putting that number in context, with roughly 133 million employed workers, there are a record 102 million Americans who are not in the labor force, of whom 92.7 million don’t even want a job.
Among those who were lucky enough to remain in the work force, millions were shifted from full to part-time.
Adding insult to injury, the only jobs created in May according to Deutsche Bank were for highly-skilled, highly-paid workers as low and medium wage jobs continue to shed millions of workers – mostly young, recent graduates – as employers shift to zoom-ing or outsourcing.
That said, we find the above chart unlikely since a breakdown of actual jobs added by industry shows that the low-paying leisure and hospitality, education and health, and retail trade made up 3 of the top 4 sectors.
In any case, the unemployment rate for those without a college education is around 16% (and 20% for those who never finished high school), which is why with young, unemployed people already protesting almost daily, it is shaping up as a summer of teenage/young adult discontent and violence for the ages.
It’s not just teenagers: millennials, already facing dire labor prospects as a result of the zombie post-GFC economy, just saw their employment rate plummet to recession levels.
The core, prime-aged segment of the workforce, those 25-54 just saw a historic collapse in their job prospects.
Yet while millennials are fired by the millions, so are older Americans: the ratio of employment of those 65 and older to the overall population just plunged to crisis levels as well.
And here is the catalyst for the next round of social discontent: women unemployment is now far higher than that of men after being roughly the same before covid: how long before accusation of rampant employer sexism are the next big thing?
What is one to do with these data? Why buy stocks of course, what else. It is “Jay’s market“, where an economic depression means +∞ for the S&P.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3h1w6YZ Tyler Durden
Update #1: File under irony, some folks on Hackernews “flagged” this post as inappropriate, after hitting the top-10 and the front page. Article about Big Tech censorship, flagged as inappropriate.
* * *
Yesterday, author Alex Berenson reported via Twitter that Amazon had spiked his new book about COVID-19 and the lockdowns.
Berenson is a former New York Times reporter, author of other books, fiction and non-fiction, and he’s even a Twitter blue check. This morning I exchanged a few emails with him and he’s slammed with emails so he sent me his statement on the matter:
The booklet was the first in a series of coronavirus pamphlets I plan to put out covering various aspects of the crisis. Readers of my Twitter feed encouraged me to compile information in a more comprehensive and easier-to-read format, and when I polled people on Twitter to ask if they would be willing to pay a nominal fee for such a pamphlet, the response was strong.
Originally I only planned to write one, but I had so much information I realized that the booklet would be an awkward length – longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book. Also, doing so would take too long, and I wanted to put it out quickly. So I decided to split the booklet into pieces. Part 1 included an introduction and a discussion of death coding, death counts, and who is really dying from COVID, as well as a worst-case estimate of deaths with no mitigation efforts. It is about 6,500 words, and I planned to sell it for $2.99 on ebook or $5.99 paperback. It is called “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1, Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.”
I created covers for both yesterday and uploaded the book. I had published Kindle Singles (Amazon’s curated program for short Kindle pieces, which now focuses more on fiction from established writers), so I was relatively familiar with the drill. I briefly considered censorship but assumed I wouldn’t have a problem because of my background, because anyone who reads the booklet will realize it is impeccably sourced, nary a conspiracy theory to be found, and frankly because Amazon shouldn’t be censoring anything that doesn’t explicitly help people commit criminal behavior. (Books intended to help adults groom children for sexual relationships, for example, should be off-limits – though about 10 years ago Amazon did not agree and only backed down from selling a how-to guide for pedophiles in the face of public outrage.)
I didn’t hear anything until this morning, when I found the note I posted to Twitter in my inbox. I will forward it to you in its entirely. Note that it does not offer any route to appeal. I have no idea if the decision was made by a person, an automated system, or a combination (i.e. the system flags anything with COVID-19 or coronavirus in the title and then a person decides on the content). I am considering my options, including making the booklet available on my Website and asking people to pay on an honor system, but that will not solve the problem of Amazon’s censorship. Amazon dominates both the electronic and physical book markets, and if it denies its readers a chance to see my work, I will lose the chance to reach the people who most need to learn the truth – those who don’t already know it.
The text of the Amazon notice follows:
Hello,
We’re contacting you regarding the following book(s):
Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates by Alex Berenson (AUTHOR) (ID: PRI-GRW1ZENP2S2)
Your book does not comply with our guidelines. As a result we are not offering your book for sale.
Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around the COVID-19 virus, we are referring customers to official sources for health information about the virus. Please consider removing references to COVID-19 for this book.
Amazon reserves the right to determine what content we offer according to our content guidelines.
Berenson is considering releasing the book from his website, so check there for updates. But it looks like I’ll have to add a chapter to my book on surviving deplatform attacks for what to do when the world’s largest retailer (a.k.a The Company Store), refuses to sell what you have to say.
Is it censorship or is it free markets in action?
It’s been an ongoing theme in our #AxisOfEasy newsletter (most recently mentioned this week) that when Big Tech insists that when it comes to coronavirus only information emanating from “official sources” is permissible, it becomes increasingly problematic for two reasons:
Official sources frequently get it wrong. We saw this when CDC flip flopped on mask use, or when the WHO waited until March to declare coronavirus a pandemic. There are numerous other examples to mention.
Sometimes the unofficial sources get it right and when you decide to tilt the scales of discourse in favour of the former and to squelch the latter, you are no longer a mechanical distributor and you are an arbiter of truth.
It is inevitable that applying this template to coronavirus because we’re in some worldwide global emergency, will sooner than later be applied to adjacent realms, because, hey, emergency, and then over time, to all realms. In Berenson’s case, his material about the COVID-19 virus is being suppressed, as is his material about the lockdowns.
The lockdowns especially, are a contentious issue. Recall the two California doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin MAssihi, who were deplatformed from Youtube for saying that the lockdowns, while initially warranted, were now becoming destructive and would lead to rampant mental health issues such as depression, spousal and child abuse, and suicide. Not only was their video dropped by Youtube, who’s stated policy is also “official sources only”, Facebook dropped their clinics page as well.
Now that Big Tech has embraced an Only Official Sources Permitted (OOSP?) policy, what field of endeavour will be next?
My audiobook shop is due to release the Incrementum guys’ book on The Zero Interest Rate Trap this month. Should we be expecting an email someday, from Amazon, telling us they’re no longer selling the book because:
Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around low and negative interest rates, Fed and Central Bank policy, inflation and wealth inequality, we are referring customers to official sources for monetary policy. Please consider removing references to these topics from your book.
…and from then on the only book Amazon will sell that has anything to say about the matter is Ben Bernanke’s “The Courage To Act”? Is this where we’re headed?
Probably.
People often argue, and libertarians are especially prone to this, that the idea of freedom of speech only applies to protection against the government, “why don’t you start your own Amazon?”. While that may be ideologically tenable, practically speaking it’s an impossible remedy. So as a libertarian, it pains me to say, I would encourage and welcome anti-trust investigations into big tech platforms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple.
When it comes to Big Tech platforms who were funded with QE-generated hot money and who are the primary beneficiaries of the Brave New World / “never going back to normal” reality we find ourselves in: they get to make their own rules, while everybody else has to play by the rules somebody else decrees.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2zenld4 Tyler Durden
Military Pilot Grounded After Low-Flying Helicopter Maneuvers Over D.C. Protests Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/06/2020 – 17:15
Despite according to a prior New York Times report top Pentagon brass initially ordered that National Guard helicopters assist in dispersing protests and riots which overwhelmed streets outside the White House early this week, at least one helicopter pilot has been grounded pending an investigation over low-flying maneuvers.
The Black Hawk helicopter presence created a huge stir among activists nationwide, as footage went viral of the pilots using gusts from the helicopter blades to deter crowds.
The Pentagon had described the “show of force” tactic as a menacing “persistent presence” to dissuade the below throngs amid raging Black Lives Matter protests.
Reporters and demonstrators alleged that in some locations where the swooping maneuver was made store windows were broken by the severe downdraft along with tree limbs, which in at least one case reportedly hurt a bystander when branches struck the person.
Caught on film were US Army UH-72 Lakota helicopters, as well as UH-60 Black Hawks coming within as little as 100 feet over the crowds.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters that the helicopter crew was grounded pending results from an internal investigation, according to local CBS affiliate WUSA9. A Pentagon spokesman told the outlet that the move was standard procedure during such investigations.
The aircraft was one of two Army National Guard helicopters that hovered between 100 and 300 feet above the streets of the District on Monday night, according to an aircraft tracker. Gusts from their helicopter blades were aimed at dispersing crowds of protesters.
Via The Drive/social media footage stillframes.
And further the D.C. National Guard commander, Maj. Gen. William Walker, had indicated in a prior statement that he’d “directed an immediate investigation into the June 1 incident.”
“I hold all members of the District of Columbia National Guard to the highest of standards,” Walker said. “We live and work in the District, and we are dedicated to the service of our nation.”
In a disturbing show of force usually seen in war zones, military helicopters hovered over crowds of protesters in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/K9g3n9Sz2s
No doubt, the pending investigation and grounding of the pilot is largely a political response, given not only the widespread condemnation of military armed forces being utilized for crowd and riot control on American streets, but at a moment the Pentagon and White House are increasingly at odds over the role of soldiers amid the nationwide unrest.
And given the controversy, we’re unlikely to see low-flying helicopters during Saturday’s protest, despite the prediction that they’ll be the biggest yet on the capitol, and potentially most dangerous given the chaos of early this week.
It also suggests a broader trend of lower ranking police officers and soldiers potentially being thrown under the buswhen the “orders” from their higher-ups come under media scrutiny.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eRaMDw Tyler Durden
The scapegoating has already started. In almost every sector of the economy that is collapsing, the claim is that “everything was fine until the pandemic happened”. From tumbling web news platforms to small businesses to major corporations, the coronavirus outbreak and the national riots will become the excuse for failure. The establishment will try to rewrite history and many people will go along with it because the truth makes them look bad.
And what is the truth?
The truth is that the U.S. economy – and in some ways, the global economy – was already collapsing. The system’s dependency on ultra-low interest rates and central bank stimulus created perhaps the largest debt bubble in history – the Everything Bubble. And that bubble began imploding at the end of 2018, triggered primarily by the Federal Reserve raising rates and dumping its balance sheet into economic weakness, just like it did at the start of the Great Depression. Fed Chair Jerome Powell knew what would happen if this policy was initiated; he even warned about it in the minutes of the October 2012 Federal Open Market Committee, and yet once he became the head of the central bank, he did it anyway.
For a year leading up to the pandemic, the Fed was struggling to maintain and suppress a repo market liquidity crisis. National debt, corporate debt and consumer debt were at all-time highs. Companies were desperate for new stimulus, and they were getting crumbs from the Fed, rather than the tens of trillions that they needed just to stay afloat. The central bank had sabotaged the economy, but they had to keep it in a state of living death until they had a perfect cover event for the collapse. The pandemic and inevitable civil unrest do the job nicely.
What many people do not understand is that the Fed does not care about the economy. In fact, every Fed action since its inception in 1913 has led to the downfall of the U.S. The Fed is not a maintenance man trying to stave off collapse; the Fed is a suicide bomber willing to destroy everything including itself in order to serve a greater ideology.
Total global centralization is the goal, and every new disaster is exploited to this end by the establishment. “Order out of chaos” is the motto of the global elites; in other words, in every crisis there is “opportunity”. This crisis has been no different. Suggested solutions have ranged from the creation of a cashless society operating on a digital currency system, to permanent lockdowns in the name of stopping “global warming”, to a surveillance state and medical tyranny utilizing 24/7 tracking of citizens in order to “stop the spread of the virus”. But how does the establishment plan to get people to go along with such freedom-crushing policies?
The pandemic by itself is not enough. The George Floyd riots may be a motivator, but they might fizzle out over time. The real catalyst, as I have said for many years now, will be an ongoing economic crash. This crash, engineered in 2008, has been a long time coming. Everything that is happening today is an extension of what happened over a decade ago. That said, the current phase was set in motion in 2018, as noted above.
The virus and the lockdowns solidified the crash, and while some people including Trump are calling for a V-shaped recovery, this is not going to happen. Perhaps Trump is referring to stock markets artificially inflated by the Fed stimulus backstop? Is anyone gullible enough to believe the stock market represents the real economy? Because today’s jobs report from the BLS, despite all the hype, does not suggest V-shaped recovery to me. The US lost 40 million jobs in the span of 6 weeks. The BLS reports a gain of 2.5 million jobs in May as the country “reopened”. So, we are still down nearly 38 million jobs in the past couple months yet the BLS stats are being called “stunning” and a “sign of recovery”?
The assumption being made here I think is that job gains will now be constant each month from now on. I think not. I think the jobs that were gained in May are the peak, and every jobs report after today will disappoint. Here’s why…
The latest Fed models predict a GDP plunge of 52.8%, and the manner in which the Fed calculates GDP is actually rigged to the upside. It is difficult to predict the REAL fall in data, but we know it will likely be larger than 52%. Keep in mind that this crash is in the 2nd quarter, while the Fed pumped trillions into the system. What exactly did this money printing buy? Well, stock markets stabilized, but the rest of the economy didn’t, and stock market optimism isn’t going to last much longer either is there are renewed lockdowns.
The primary reason we now face a second Great Depression is because the small business sector has been destroyed. Small businesses are vital to the U.S. economy, representing around 50% of the job market. The closures resulted in around 40 million job losses in the past two months. Add that to the 95 million Americans that have been out of work but not counted by the BLS as unemployed – as well as the 11 million people that are counted – and you are looking at nearly 150 million working age people not generating an income.
The latest BLS jobs gains and the way they are being hyped by the media are suspicious to me. It seems as if the establishment is trying to convince the public that the pandemic will have no affect on the economy and that their jobs will simply be waiting for them after every new shutdown (as long as they adhere to the rules and restriction set up by state and federal governments).
But it’s only going to get worse from here on…
The public doesn’t realize it yet, but many of the businesses that shut down over the past couple months are not coming back. Sure, a lot of them will try to reopen, and there will be a last gasp of activity during the next month or two, but the levels of debt attached to these ventures was already high before the pandemic hit. The recent small business bailouts seemed as if they were designed to give people false hope. According to figures out of JP Morgan, of the 300,000 clients that applied for the small business aid, only 18,000 actually received any. And, of that 18,000, many were larger corporation, not small businesses.
Business sectors most affected include retail and service, which crashed a record 16.4% overall in April. Food service lost approximately 30% of sales. Electronics and appliances lost 60%. Clothing plunged 78%. Auto sales fell 33% in May, and the expected rebound after the reopening has been disappointing.
The businesses most likely to die first are those that had large debt obligations before the lockdowns, as well as those that received no bailout money. Even though companies like General Electric, Verizon, IBM and Tesla all have massive debt issues, they may be kept alive by government bailouts, at least for a time. Small businesses, on the other hand, appear to be slated for destruction.
In particular, I suspect most restaurants besides major chains will go into bankruptcy. Boutique stores and clothing outlets will run out of money fast. Movie theater chains will collapse. Car rental outlets will collapse. Tourism businesses will close en masse and tourism towns will suffer profit losses despite the “reopening” in some states. Larger companies, like airlines, will continue to decline, and they will have to diversify into other areas, such as shipping, in order to survive. The auto industry is not coming back any time soon.
In the case of restaurants, the social distancing requirements reduce the number of customers that they can seat at any given time. Restaurants were already suffering major declines before the pandemic, and while take-out venues might have seen an uptick because of the lockdowns, this will not last as people begin to run out of cash and start cooking at home.
The same goes for small boutique stores, which rely on consumers with expendable cash flows. Such consumers no longer exist, and notions of “extra cash” will disappear along with waning government checks. As for tourism, I think there will be some travel, as lockdown restrictions are partially lifted. Many people in the cities will try to get away for a week or two just to escape and feel normal for a little while. However, I also think mainstream economists are underestimating the number of people who will refuse to travel because of concerns about coming in contact with the coronavirus. Just as retail refuses to rebound, so will tourism profits.
Air travel is unlikely to improve for the same reasons. Social distancing makes airplane flights a losing investment as passenger capacity is reduced. New car sales will remain stagnant because people are traveling less, and the used car market is being stocked with product as average people sell off vehicles to get extra cash to make ends meet.
All of these factors result in long-term job losses and debt defaults for small businesses as well as some larger companies. Which means much higher poverty rates and further dependency on government welfare programs.
The real test for the public will come when lockdowns return. I realize that there is a bit of denial in the population when it comes to this idea. I see many people operating on the assumption that the “reopening” is a long-term situation. I assure you, it is not. As I have noted in many previous articles, the establishment intends to use what I call “wave theory”, or a cycle of shutdowns and openings over the span of a year or longer. There WILL be new lockdowns, if not in the name of a resurgence in COVID infections, it will be in the name of stopping the national riots.
The response from the American people will be critical here. Will we support further lockdowns or martial law, even though the measures would harm us economically? Or will the public resist? Will the political left embrace a second lockdown in the face of further infection spikes? Will conservatives embrace lockdowns in the face of leftist protests and riots? Both sides of the political spectrum are being tempted with the use of a totalitarian government response in order to ensure their personal “safety”.
People must be made to understand the reality of our situation: the economy has already been undermined and this threat is far greater than either the virus or the riots. This is the danger that is being hidden by the pandemic and civil unrest distractions, and it is a threat that the government has no means or intention of saving us from. We must save ourselves, and doing that requires preparation and acceptance that the world is changed.
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Cornell Professor Dave Collum Publicly Shamed By His University For Defending Buffalo Police Officers Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/06/2020 – 16:25
In America you are now allowed to have an opinion, as long as the thought police agrees that it is the right opinion.
That is basically what Cornell University said at the end of the week last week, after Zero Hedge contributor and longtime Cornell Organic Chemistry professor Dave Collum did nothing more than offer his opinion on the events that took place in Buffalo, where an elderly man was pushed down by riot police, leading to him fracturing his skull, and the eventual resignation of the entire police response team.
Professor Dave Collum
Collum’s Tweets, collectively comprising just under 500 characters of opinion, sparked a public shaming from the Ivy League institution which was inundated with snowflakes complaining about Collum having an opinion that differed from whatever the Marxist norm of the day was.
When the Buffalo video first surfaced, the internet was immediately outraged. The video went viral on Thursday night and was national news on Friday.
Perhaps naive enough to believe that “social” media was a forum express one’s opinionas in – socially –Collum took the position of defending the Buffalo police, publicly on Twitter, stating that officers across the country have had raw nerves due to the riots, looting and general chaos…
…and he said that he thought the man should have given the police space. He called the man’s cracked skull “self-inflicted”.
An unpopular opinion in the left-wing stratosphere of social media? Sure. But an opinion nonetheless, and one shared by the 57 police officers who immediately resigned in protest of how the officers involved with the incident were being treated.
It was also an opinion that appeared to be backed up by Buffalo’s mayor on Saturday morning. Buffalo’s Mayor described the man involved in the video as “an agitator” who was asked to leave the area “multiple times”:
Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., said Friday the 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground by two cops the previous day was an “agitator” who had been asked to leave the area “numerous” times.
…
“There has been vandalism, there have been fires set, there have been stores broken into and looted. According to what was reported to me, that individual was a key major instigator of people engaging in those activities,” the mayor said.
But in the world of instant outrage, there’s no time for facts. Collum’s Tweet, within minutes of being posted, had been re-tweeted by comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani, who has more than 3 million Twitter followers.
Dropping this bomb onto the actor’s followers set off a nuclear reaction, with hundreds of replies and re-tweets calling for Collum to lose his job and for Cornell to punish the professor: all for just speaking his opinion.
As a result, Collum had to lock down his Twitter account.
This was followed by an article in the Cornell Daily Sun – which led with the Professor’s opinions and not the actual news item itself…
“Prof. David Collum ’77, chemistry, has come under fire from both students and administrators for a series of Thursday night tweets defending police officers that pushed and severely injured an elderly man.”
…and Cornell itself responding in a statement on Friday, claiming that Collum’s justification of police action was “insensitive”, “deeply offensive” and “at direct odds with Cornell’s ethos”.
The statement then said that “Professor Collum has a right to express his views in his private life”, which supposedly one should be grateful for: at least our learned institutions aren’t determining what opinions people can hold in private, at least not yet. But if someone dares to publish a contrarian opinion in public, well that’s just going too far.
We watched the video of the events in Buffalo yesterday where police officers shoved an elderly man to the ground and walked past while he lay bleeding on the sidewalk. The behavior we saw was deplorable. We are heartened that the authorities took immediate actions and that the two police officers involved have been suspended.
We agree with Governor Cuomo that the incident was “wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful.” We also saw the tweets by Cornell professor David Collum justifying the actions of the police. While Professor Collum has a right to express his views in his private life, we also have a right and an obligation to call out positions that are at direct odds with Cornell’s ethos.
Especially at a moment at which this nation is grappling with the vital need to implement reforms that end police brutality, we find Professor Collum’s comments to be not just deeply insensitive, but deeply offensive.
In other words, Cornell has now publicly said: You can have an opinion, as long as it’s the right opinion: our opinion. Or else just keep it to yourself.
Collum was also forced to cancel an upcoming podcast appearance. Collum’s initial Tweets were in response to a podcast host who had a difference of opinion on the matter. The two were looking forward to discussing the incident this weekend. Now, that discourse will not take place, which the podcast host called “a shame” in a video defending Collum’s right to his own opinion.
We agree with Collum’s own words: he is being shamed for having the “wrong opinion”.
And we have to ask both Cornell and the social justice warriors of the world: Isn’t shaming someone for expressing an opinion peacefully – no matter how contrarian to the current virtue signaling flood – the exact antithesis of the “diversity”, “freedom” and “justice” that everyone is currently in the midst of fighting for, and is Cornell now an institution that only encourages “thinking” and “opinions” that are only pre-vetted with the thought police of what was once an institution where original and free thought was allowed if not actually encouraged?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/377XoZ3 Tyler Durden
