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Tens of thousands of Americans flooded New Zealand’s immigration website, called New Zealand Now, during this week’s presidential election, requesting information about moving to the island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. 

New Zealand’s Stuff reports a massive surge in Americans, more than 40,000, have visited the government’s immigration website in the last few days following the prospect of another four years under a Trump presidency. Though, maybe a sign of relief for those looking to “bug out,” as the election could go to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who is currently winning the electoral college vote on Thursday afternoon (264 vs. 214). 

But really, at this point, some Americans could be considering the move no matter who wins, mainly because the writing is on the wall; the country is collapsing from within as socio-economic implosions induced by the virus downturn will deeply scar the economy for years. 

Besides economic distress and alarming wealthy inequality, the virus pandemic has formed the second virus wave, with caseloads breaching 100,00 this week. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Health Minister Chris Hipkins recently said a major milestone was reached in the country as the virus pandemic has been “squashed” because of their collective actions to mitigate spreading. 

Stuff interviewed Texas-native Valentino Johnson, who is looking to move to New Zealand because it appears to be a “place where people care enough about each other” to follow public health rules.

Johnson said Trump’s possible re-election win could produce a toxic environment for his family. 

“The country is becoming so divisive,” he said. “I want to raise my son somewhere he can be respected.”

Emergency room doctor Rob Brandt from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been living in a pool shed for six months at his home as he isolates from his family. 

Brandt said many Americans believe the pandemic is a hoax. He said his hospital is starting to see virus cases increase as the second wave pushes daily cases nationally above the 100,000 mark.

Nurse Ana Carino fears for her health at a hospital in Midland, Texas. At the end of the year, she will arrive in New Zealand to take a new job in Invercargill, a city near the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

“You guys don’t have many cases. The US president has not been proactive in handling it [the pandemic],” she said.

“I work in a hospital where people are dying from Covid-19 and it is not a joke.”

On election night, Americans also panic searched “move to Canada.” To calm their election anxieties, they also searched “liquor store near me.” 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.

There’s a definite end of days feeling to the euphoria that the world didn’t end on November 3. And what better way to celebrate the victory of what passes for normalcy with a manic stock market rally?

It’s as if everyone knows there is no returning to the good old days of a well-oiled Imperial machine chewing through any and all obstacles, and this realization is so frightening that the need to pretend everything is fine, just fine, overwhelms the last remaining ties to reality.

And since there’s a brief intermission between gladiator battles while the Coliseum attendants remove the fallen heroes from the last entertainment, let’s play the historical analogy game: which collapse will America track most closely? Rome circa 475 AD, the USSR circa 1989, or Revolutionary France circa 1789?

I’m tempted to include China’s Song Dynasty circa 1276 AD, but the analog of the Mongol invasion isn’t a likely fit. The Khmer Empire circa 1350-1430 AD and the Mayan Civilization in the 9th century might be excellent analogies but not enough is known about these complex declines to make an analogy more than guesswork.

Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them. Even though Nero didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn’t gush “Let them eat brioche” when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the regimes.

While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage, invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.

As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their power.

As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as well.

One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms, but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill.

As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear) suddenly display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.

So take your pick, America: what’s the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread?

They all lead to the same destination:

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Chicago soybean futures rose to a four-year high on Thursday morning, as dry weather in South America and increasing demand from China supported prices. 

“China is actively buying beans and we are seeing additional demand emerge from Brazil,” a Singapore-based commodity trader said, who was quoted by Reuters. 

The trader continued: “The weather is not perfect for Brazil and the crop is likely to get delayed due to the dry weather.”

November soybean contracts trading on the Chicago Board of Trade were up more than 1% Thursday morning, trading around $10.95 per bushel, climbing to the highest level since July 2016. 

Reuters notes La Nina weather pattern remains a risk for crops across South America. Their commodity desk said Brazil’s soybean-growing areas recorded rain this week, but other surrounding areas need moisture. 

Commodity traders will be closely watching the USDA Nov. 10 supply/demand reports, which some experts believe it could show “scaled-back U.S. soybean yields and increased export forecasts,” said Reuters. 

Reuters’ Karen Braun said, “China’s strong return to the U.S. soybean market in recent months has single-handedly lifted U.S. farm exports to the Asian country to new records, and the heavy forward shipping schedule bodes well for the promises outlined in the Phase 1 trade agreement between the two countries.” 

Even though China’s demand for U.S. farm goods has increased late in the year – it’s likely trade commitments outlined in the Phase 1 agreement won’t be met this year. 

China is way behind in farm good purchases. 

 Could soybean prices also be soaring because the prospects of a Biden presidency would be mean friendlier relations with China? 

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The mainstream pro-Biden media is poking fun at Donald Trump’s suggestion that there could be fraud involved in the post-election receipt of mail-in ballots. Apparently they’re not familiar with the election-theft case of Lyndon Johnson, who would go on to become president of the United States.

The entire matter is detailed in Robert Caro’s second book in his biographical series on Johnson. The book is entitled Means of Ascent.

Johnson election theft took place in 1948, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate against Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, one of the most admired and respected governors in the history of the state.

In the primary election, Stevenson led Johnson by 70,000 votes, but because he didn’t have a majority of the votes, he was forced into a run-off. The run-off was held on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning after the run-off, Stevenson was leading by 854 votes.

As a New York Times review of Caro’s account stated, the day after the run-off election it was “discovered” that the returns of a particular county had not yet been counted. The newly discovered votes were overwhelmingly in favor of Johnson. Then, on Monday more returns came in from the Rio Grande Valley.

Nonetheless, on Tuesday, the State Election Bureau announced that Stevenson had won by 349 votes. Nothing changed on Wednesday and Thursday after the election. On Friday, precincts in the Rio Grande Valley made “corrections” to their tallies, which narrowed Stevenson’s lead to 157.

But also on Friday, Jim Wells County, which was governed as a personal fiefdom by a powerful South Texas rancher named George Parr, filed “amended” returns for what has become famous as “Box 13” that gave Johnson another 200 votes. When all was said and done, Johnson had “won” the election by 87 votes.

It was later discovered that one of Parr’s men had changed the total tally for Johnson from 765 to 965 by simply curling the 7 into a 9.

Where did the extra 200 votes come from?

The last 202 names on on the election roll in Box 13 were in a different color ink from the rest of the names, the names were in alphabetical order, and they were all in the same handwriting. When Caro was researching his book, he secured a statement from Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County, who acknowledged the fraud and confessing his role in it.

As the Washington Post reported, to investigate what obviously appeared quite suspicious Stevenson employed the assistance of Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who had trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde. It was to no avail. Johnson got a friendly state judge to issue an injunction preserving the status quo, after which the Democratic executive committee, by one vote, declared Johnson to be the winner.

Stevenson took the matter to federal court but the Supreme Court punted, declaring that it had no right to interfere with a state election.

So, Lyndon Johnson stole the election and ended up going to Washington as Texas’ U.S. Senator. Ironically, if Stevenson had become the state’s senator instead, Johnson would never have been selected to be John Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate and, consequently, would never have been president.

No wonder Donald Trump is worried about those Democrats! For that matter, those Democrats should be just as worried about those Republicans! 

In perhaps the most interesting reaction out of Beijing to the stalled election outcome, Chinese state-run Global Times on Thursday published the reaction of two of its notable foreign policy analysts and geopolitical experts. With the fate of the election hanging in the balance and the world still on edge as all look for a definitive result, Global Times posed the question:

Even if Biden gets elected, will Trump and his doctrines disappear? Will there be another Trump from the Democratic Party? 

As the headline to the piece underscores, officials in Beijing are fretting that Trump doctrines will exist regardless of who wins US election. Here’s how Zhang Tengjun, an assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, put it in the state publication:

One should not be too naïve to believe that with Trump’s departure, the social environment that brews Trumpism would disappear. On the contrary, the forces represented by Trump will continue to exist and affect US politics. Trump’s ilk will inherent his doctrines. The US needs more than four years to digest the long-term destructive impact on US politics from Trump’s rule.

And another thinker at a major public research university in Shanghai was further cited as saying that “Trump-style” politicians will continue to emerge.

China of course sees this as a destructive force which will likely perpetuate already severely damaged Sino-US relations for the foreseeable future, apparently regardless of the presidential outcome. Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, had this to say – again likely reflecting the view among many top Beijing officials:

Trump proposes America First, not to pay much effort in international affairs or take unnecessary global responsibilities. As long as Trump believes a treaty or an organization does not fit US interests, he will make a quick divorce from it. Many of his measures reflect what the US public wants, at least a large proportion of them. This time, although Biden leads Trump as of press time, the election also shows that almost half of the voters support Trump. The election of Trump four years ago was never an accidental incident. Populism has already become a powerful trend in the country. 

Qiang further said what he dubbed the “Trump Phenomenon” will not end anytime soon.

While netizens from Chinese mainland watch the ongoing US presidential election like a soap opera, it seems that some living on the other side of the Straits are not as calm and poised. https://t.co/oHub65tEQH

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) November 5, 2020

“As long as such a populist public trend exists, it is very likely that in the future more and more untraditional politicians will have no alternative but to step on Trump’s path in order to win more support,” he said in GT. “After all, winning elections are US politicians’ ultimate goal. Therefore, more Trumps may come into being because they will justify their approach by their goal. I call it the Trump Phenomenon.”

This is to continue, both analysts agreed, “no matter who wins the election” and could come from within either the Republican or Democratic Party. Probably both, they said.

US opinion polls are now ridiculed by Chinese netizens. They are even less accurate than China’s Yiwu index. Don’t know how those polling organizations will survive in the US.

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) November 4, 2020

The Chinese state-affiliated analysts also made reference to Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and the popular progressive movement among young people as potentially a continued force of division for a possible Biden administration, which would be “bumpy”.

“As for the Democrats, since its internal division is inevitable, it is likely that a politician who always thinks otherwise would emerge from the left-wing radical forces,” the analysis in GT underscored. 

Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a racist. How do we know? ‘Cause media says so, that’s how. Every single statement or off-the-cuff remark by Trump that could be deliberately misinterpreted or taken out of context, or twisted into meaning something entirely different, has been used to paint an ugly racist picture of the president.

With black Americans, it’s worked. A poll earlier this year found 83 percent of blacks believing Trump is a racist. How could they not with every media outlet telling them it’s so and many prominent blacks in politics, entertainment, and sports reinforcing the narrative every chance they get?

The so-called “leaders” of the minority communities were virulently opposed to Donald Trump’s re-election. It was nearly unanimous. There were notable exceptions, but brave it was for any black or Hispanic notable to back Trump in public.

But as it turns out, many minority voters tuned out the anti-Trump noise and made an independent decision to back the president.  New York Post:

Team Trump and Republicans nationwide made unprecedented inroads with black and Hispanic voters. Nationally, preliminary numbers indicated that 26 percent of Trump’s voting share came from nonwhite voters — the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate since 1960.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the heartland of Cuban America, Trump turned a 30-plus point Hillary Clinton romp in 2016 into a narrow single-digit Joe Biden win. Texas’ Starr County, overwhelmingly Mexican American and positioned in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, barely delivered for the Democrats. Biden’s Hispanic support in other key swing states, like Ohio and Georgia, tailed off from Clinton’s 2016 benchmarks.

Cuban-Americans have been loyal Republican voters since the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s strong opposition to Fidel Castro. But they were particularly energized in 2020 to vote for Trump. Conversely, Mexican-Americans in Texas had probably never voted Republican before but were drawn to Trump’s “opportunity agenda.”

And surprisingly, young black men voted for Trump in unprecedented numbers. We won’t know the particulars of how that vote broke down for a few days, but ambitious young men who see a future in a capitalist America were no doubt repelled by the Democrats’ anti-capitalist agenda. They’re also tired of being used by Democrats as props in their little morality plays and are weary of unkept promises.

But what does this say about the Democrat-Media information complex? Looks like someone blew a circuit or two.

It turns out that minorities aren’t so infatuated with the brand of unrepentant progressive “woke-ism” now peddled by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party. The political, legal, media, corporate and academic establishments have gone all-in on the woke agenda, peddling a toxic brew of intersectionality, socialism lite and Black Lives Matter anarchism. Latinos and many blacks aren’t buying it. As one Twitter wit quipped, Democrats may have won the “Latinx vote,” but they didn’t fare well with actual Latinos.

The cognitive dissonance on the part of our bicoastal ruling class is, and will be over the ensuing months, astonishing. The ruling elite is incapable of processing the notion that the MAGA hat-clad Bad Orange Man is not, in fact, an avatar for racist whites and a harbinger of impending fascism.

The bottom line is that it isn’t only white voters who don’t listen to the media about Trump’s faults. Many in the minority community can judge Trump and what he can do for them all by themselves and don’t need to be instructed on how to vote by those who really don’t have their best interests at heart.

It takes guts to be a black or Hispanic Trump supporter in a lot of places in America. You would wish that wouldn’t be the case, but it is. Are they the harbinger of a movement by the minority community toward the Republican Party? Time will tell, but the electoral earthquake that would ensue if that were the case would be felt even among the coastal elites.

Weather models forecast Eta, currently ravaging Central America, could reemerge over the Caribbean waters and make landfall in South Florida between late Sunday and Monday. 

Eta, the 28th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, has weakened Thursday to a tropical depression as it dumps torrential rains and causes flash floods in Honduras. 

Here is a thread of some paypal links and info i’ve gathered where you can help, pray for 🇭🇳 #HuracanEta #HurricaneEta #Honduras pic.twitter.com/dlKT4leXS3

— ᴮᴱmaho⁷ (@UGHBANGT7N) November 5, 2020

“Eta will begin to feel the influence of upper-level steering to its north, causing the storm to make a hard right turn, pushing it back over the hot northern Caribbean waters. While some intensification is likely, it will be limited, at least initially, because Eta will have to contend with some dry air, upper-level wind shear, interaction with the landmass of Cuba, and limited time,” according to CBS News. 

National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Forecast Map Of Eta 

CBS notes by Saturday, Eta “will cross over Cuba, likely as a tropical storm, and then head toward South Florida.”

“It is still uncertain how strong Eta will be and the degree to which the storm will impact South Florida. Most likely, Eta will either be a strong tropical storm or even a low-end hurricane. Some models show a direct hit, while others show a glancing blow over the Florida Keys. 

“Regardless of exact track, Eta will bring a stretch of very wet weather across South Florida from Friday through early next week. Depending on the track, over a foot of rain seems likely in some spots.”

Eta To Strike Key West? 

If Eta strikes the U.S., it would be the 12th named storm to make landfall this year, a record. 

Authored by Jesse Felder via TheFelderReport.com,

The following is an excerpt from a recent report featured on The Felder Report PREMIUM. 

I like to think of markets and securities in terms of three separate but interrelated dymanics: fundamentals, sentiment and technicals. Fundamentals include things like earnings, net asset value, how those things are trending and valuation relative to them. Sentiment is simply how investors are feeling toward something and technicals are really just a way to analyze the price trend.

Typically, a security or a market becomes expensive as a result of good fundamentals leading to positive sentiment and a strong uptrend. The valuation eventually becomes overextended, sentiment becomes too bullish and momentum begins to wane. It is at this point the trend reverses. Sentiment will start to turn as the trend turns downward. Momentum will peak roughly midway through the trend. Valuation eventually becomes reasonable or even cheap and sentiment turns sour as a result of a prolonged downtrend. Eventually downside momentum wanes and the trend reverses again, usually just as sentiment bottoms out.

Each of these individual signals is valuable but not nearly as valuable as all three taken together.

Fundamentals

“The chart shows the market value of all publicly traded securities as a percentage of the country’s business–that is, as a percentage of GNP. The ratio has certain limitations in telling you what you need to know. Still, it is probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.” –Warren Buffett, December 10, 2001

The single best measure of valuations, according to Warren Buffett, currently sits just off its highest reading in history. In other words, the stock market has never been as expensive as it is today, largely the product of soaring valuations amid deteriorating fundamentals. Not only does this mean that forward returns will likely be exceptionally poor, it means that downside risk has also never been greater than it is today.

Sentiment

“Even the most circumspect friend of the market would concede that the volume of brokers’ loans—of loans collateraled by the securities purchased on margin—is a good index of the volume of speculation.” -John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 

If the level of margin debt is indicative of the “volume of speculation” then we might infer that, just as we are witnessing unprecedented valuations, those extreme prices have been driven by extreme greed, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations, if ever before.

Technicals

“For me, technical analysis is like a thermometer. Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he’s not going to take a patient’s temperature. But, of course, that would be sheer folly. If you are a responsible participant in the market, you always want to know where the market is—whether it is hot and excitable, or cold and stagnant. You want to know everything you can about the market to give you an edge.” -Bruce Kovner, Market Wizards

In analyzing the strength of the trend we can use a very simply metric like RSI. In the case of 18-month RSI, oversold readings have proven to be good long-term entry points; Overbought, readings, however, have merely indicated a strong uptrend that may last several more years. By this measure, the strength of the current uptrend peaked nearly 3 years ago and has only been weakening since, putting in a clear pattern of lower highs.

Together, these three indicators paint a picture of an extremely overvalued stock market, driven by a speculative euphoria even while the price trend is running out of steam. It is the textbook definition of “late cycle” in the stock market and suggests investors ought to exercise a great deal of caution towards equities as an asset class.