CNN’s Don Lemon Awkwardly Walks Back ‘Blow Up The Entire System’ On-Air Remarks Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/23/2020 – 17:40
CNN’s Don Lemon is trying to awkwardly walk back incendiary comments he made to his primetime colleague Chris Cuomo in front of millions of viewers Monday night.
He’s now claiming that when he called for “blowing up the entire system” while discussing the emerging Supreme Court battle days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, it was all taken out of context.
But here’s Lemon’s Monday night commentary in context, which appeared unhinged enough in the moment to even get an immediate reaction out of Cuomo of “I don’t know about that!” before trying to calm Lemon down by pointing out Americans just need to vote.
“We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” Lemon said. “I don’t know about that,” Cuomo reacted, expressing surprise his counterpart’s rhetoric went that extreme. “Yes we do…” Lemon slipped in, doubling down.
“You know what we’re going to have to do?… You’re going to have to get rid of the electoral college,” Lemon continued. “Because the minority in this country get to decide who our judges are and who our president is. Is that fair?”
“You need a constitutional amendment to do that,” Cuomo answered, to which Lemon retorted, “And if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can stack the courts and they can do that amendment and get it passed.”
Lemon jointed a chorus of pundits on the Left who were in melt-down mode over the weekend, including Reza Aslan, himself a disgraced former CNN host, who earlier tweeted “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down.”
If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down.
Aslan repeated the threat on Monday after facing widespread backlash for what many see as a clear call to mass violence.
Been a few days since I tweeted that if GOP try to jam a SCOTUS thru B4 election we burn the fucking thing down & since the death threats & Breitbart headlines about my tweet have now stopped let me just say that if GOP try to jam SCOTUS through we burn the fucking thing down.
Meanwhile Don Lemon is trying to walk back his comments, as on Tuesday night he tried to claim the blow it all up statement was made in jest. He suggested it was just exaggerated, expressive rhetoric.
“I woke up and I saw all of these headlines, ‘Don Lemon is calling for the abolishing of the electoral college!’ But I was responding to you when you said we need people with integrity!” Lemon exclaimed as he attempted to explain his remarks to Cuomo. “I was responding to you when you said we want people with integrity in office and I said, ‘Well, then we’ve got to blow up the whole system, right?’ And I said here’s what Democrats can do and that’s the danger- they can’ stack the court. But all of a sudden, I am calling for the abolishing of the electoral college… and that I’m a Democrat because I said ‘we.’ I mean the American people!”
Responding to reports about him saying we should “blow up the entire system,” CNN’s Don Lemon now claims he was speaking rhetorically in an answer to Chris Cuomo. And claims he was taken out of context when quoted as promoting the abolishment of the Electoral College. pic.twitter.com/DsBINKcl6s
But then Cuomo’s response to this ambiguously framed statement of “regret” made things even more awkward:
“But listen, you forgot something very fundamental… A Black guy can’t say that he wants to blow anything up right now,” Cuomo joked. “People are waiting for you to come and destroy their houses with people like me, your kooky White friends. So you can’t say you want to blow stuff up because you’re playing into the narrative.”
“What is wrong with you?!” Lemon chucked.
So clearly nothing was made better by this, again, considering especially it comes at a moment of multiple statements from never-Trump pundits hinting that violence is coming if they don’t get there way.
‘Burn Congress down’: Celebrated left-wingers if SCOTUS replacement is voted in before the election https://t.co/VcbyPWsDbg
Rickey Kanter, who owned a Wisconsin company that sold therapeutic shoes and footwear inserts under the brand name Dr. Comfort, pleaded guilty in 2011 to one count of mail fraud for shipping inserts he falsely claimed were approved by Medicare to a podiatrist in Florida. Kanter received a prison sentence of a year and day, followed by two years of supervised release. He also paid a $50,000 fine and agreed, in a separate civil settlement, to pay Medicare a $27 million reimbursement. But that was not the end of his punishment, since his felony conviction meant that he permanently lost the constitutional right to possess firearms.
That categorical ban on gun ownership by people with felony records, a feature of both Wisconsin and federal law, cannot be reconciled with the Second Amendment, Supreme Court contender Amy Coney Barrett concluded in a 37-page dissent from a 2019 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Barrett’s thorough and scholarly opinion marks her as a judge committed to applying constitutional provisions in light of their historical background and original public meaning.
In the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects the right to own guns for self-defense. At the same time, the majority opinion mentioned some “presumptively lawful regulatory measures,” including “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” But both Barrett and her two colleagues on a 7th Circuit panel, who upheld the federal and Wisconsin bans that Kanter challenged, agreed that Heller did not settle the question of whether the Second Amendment allows the government to disarm someone like him.
“The constitutionality of felon dispossession was not before the Court in Heller, and because it explicitly deferred analysis of this issue, the scope of its assertion is unclear,” Barrett wrote. “For example, does ‘presumptively lawful’ mean that such regulations are presumed lawful unless a historical study shows otherwise? Does it mean that as-applied challenges are available? Does the Court’s reference to ‘felons’ suggest that the legislature cannot disqualify misdemeanants from possessing guns? Does the word ‘longstanding’ mean that prohibitions of recent vintage are suspect?”
In addressing a question that she and the majority agreed Heller left unresolved, Barrett considered English common law, proposed and ratified provisions of state constitutions in the U.S., and firearm restrictions enacted in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her conclusion:
History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791—and for well more than a century afterward—legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.
That rationale does not easily fit laws that take away the Second Amendment rights of anyone who has ever been convicted of a felony (or, under federal law, “a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year,” which is similar but not quite the same thing), no matter how long ago the offense occurred and whether or not it involved violence or even an identifiable victim. While Kanter ripped off Medicare (and therefore taxpayers), the government presented no evidence that his particular crime or any other personal characteristics showed he had violent tendencies that posed a threat to public safety.
The categorical ban on gun possession by people with felony records is therefore “wildly overinclusive,” Barrett noted, quoting UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “It includes everything from Kanter’s offense, mail fraud, to selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts, redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan, and countless other state and federal offenses,” she wrote. The ban is also underinclusive, she added, since people may reasonably be deemed dangerous even when they have not been convicted of a felony—for example, when they commit certain violent misdemeanors (another disqualification under federal law).
Given the poor fit between the ban’s scope and its ostensible purpose, Barrett said, it is not “substantially related to an important government interest”—the test under the “intermediate scrutiny” that the majority said it was applying in this case. “Neither Wisconsin nor the United States has introduced data sufficient to show that disarming all nonviolent felons substantially advances its interest in keeping the public safe,” she wrote. “Nor have they otherwise demonstrated that Kanter himself shows a proclivity for violence. Absent evidence that he either belongs to a dangerous category or bears individual markers of risk, permanently disqualifying Kanter from possessing a gun violates the Second Amendment.”
Barrett closed with a warning that will alarm gun control advocates but reassure people dismayed by the failure of federal courts to follow up on Heller and the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in McDonaldv. City of Chicago (which made it clear that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments) by taking the right to arms as seriously as other constitutionally protected rights. “While both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest,” she wrote. “On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not ‘put[] the government through its paces,’ but instead treats the Second Amendment as a ‘second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.'”
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Rickey Kanter, who owned a Wisconsin company that sold therapeutic shoes and footwear inserts under the brand name Dr. Comfort, pleaded guilty in 2011 to one count of mail fraud for shipping inserts he falsely claimed were approved by Medicare to a podiatrist in Florida. Kanter received a prison sentence of a year and day, followed by two years of supervised release. He also paid a $50,000 fine and agreed, in a separate civil settlement, to pay Medicare a $27 million reimbursement. But that was not the end of his punishment, since his felony conviction meant that he permanently lost the constitutional right to possess firearms.
That categorical ban on gun ownership by people with felony records, a feature of both Wisconsin and federal law, cannot be reconciled with the Second Amendment, Supreme Court contender Amy Coney Barrett concluded in a 37-page dissent from a 2019 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Barrett’s thorough and scholarly opinion marks her as a judge committed to applying constitutional provisions in light of their historical background and original public meaning.
In the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects the right to own guns for self-defense. At the same time, the majority opinion mentioned some “presumptively lawful regulatory measures,” including “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” But both Barrett and her two colleagues on a 7th Circuit panel, who upheld the federal and Wisconsin bans that Kanter challenged, agreed that Heller did not settle the question of whether the Second Amendment allows the government to disarm someone like him.
“The constitutionality of felon dispossession was not before the Court in Heller, and because it explicitly deferred analysis of this issue, the scope of its assertion is unclear,” Barrett wrote. “For example, does ‘presumptively lawful’ mean that such regulations are presumed lawful unless a historical study shows otherwise? Does it mean that as-applied challenges are available? Does the Court’s reference to ‘felons’ suggest that the legislature cannot disqualify misdemeanants from possessing guns? Does the word ‘longstanding’ mean that prohibitions of recent vintage are suspect?”
In addressing a question that she and the majority agreed Heller left unresolved, Barrett considered English common law, proposed and ratified provisions of state constitutions in the U.S., and firearm restrictions enacted in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her conclusion:
History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791—and for well more than a century afterward—legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.
That rationale does not easily fit laws that take away the Second Amendment rights of anyone who has ever been convicted of a felony (or, under federal law, “a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year,” which is similar but not quite the same thing), no matter how long ago the offense occurred and whether or not it involved violence or even an identifiable victim. While Kanter ripped off Medicare (and therefore taxpayers), the government presented no evidence that his particular crime or any other personal characteristics showed he had violent tendencies that posed a threat to public safety.
The categorical ban on gun possession by people with felony records is therefore “wildly overinclusive,” Barrett noted, quoting UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “It includes everything from Kanter’s offense, mail fraud, to selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts, redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan, and countless other state and federal offenses,” she wrote. The ban is also underinclusive, she added, since people may reasonably be deemed dangerous even when they have not been convicted of a felony—for example, when they commit certain violent misdemeanors (another disqualification under federal law).
Given the poor fit between the ban’s scope and its ostensible purpose, Barrett said, it is not “substantially related to an important government interest”—the test under the “intermediate scrutiny” that the majority said it was applying in this case. “Neither Wisconsin nor the United States has introduced data sufficient to show that disarming all nonviolent felons substantially advances its interest in keeping the public safe,” she wrote. “Nor have they otherwise demonstrated that Kanter himself shows a proclivity for violence. Absent evidence that he either belongs to a dangerous category or bears individual markers of risk, permanently disqualifying Kanter from possessing a gun violates the Second Amendment.”
Barrett closed with a warning that will alarm gun control advocates but reassure people dismayed by the failure of federal courts to follow up on Heller and the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in McDonaldv. City of Chicago (which made it clear that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments) by taking the right to arms as seriously as other constitutionally protected rights. “While both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest,” she wrote. “On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not ‘put[] the government through its paces,’ but instead treats the Second Amendment as a ‘second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.'”
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Market Turmoil Leads To First Pulled Junk Bond Deal Since July Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/23/2020 – 17:20
Two weeks ago, when we noticed that for the entire month of August the Fed had not bought a single bond ETF, we asked if Powell was sending the markets a message. Now, with the S&P500 on the verge of a correction, the Nasdaq down 12% from its recent all time high, and traders realizing that the shift in risk sentiment is getting worse by the Fed, the answer appears to be yes.
And while stocks today suffered their worst drop since June, the turmoil in equities is starting to spread culminating in Aethon United BR, a Texas-based natural gas company, postponing a $700 million high-yield bond sale that would have refinanced existing debt. The deal – which comes at a time when junk-rated companies have been binging on debt like never before thanks to the Fed’s pledge to backstop corporate bond markets – was the first to be yanked from the U.S. high-yield bond market since July, when Diamond Resorts pulled a $525 million offering, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Yet while buying sentiment across the corporate bond market has certainly eased back in recent days, issuance of junk-rated securities is on track to break an all-time record on Wednesday. According to Bank of America, through last Friday, HY gross issuance was $321 billion and about to break its all-time full-year issuance record of $322 billion set in 2012 (BofA’s forecast remains at $375bn for the FY 2020, which would leave us at 1.2x of previous record, with a risk of further upside).
The picture is even more dramatic in net issuance terms, which we define as the difference between gross issuance and calls/tenders/maturities. So far in 2020, the net issuance has reached $119bn, already breaching the previous all-time full-year record of $94bn set in the same year 2012. For the FY 2020 we are projecting net issuance at $145bn, which would represent 1.5x of the previous record, if materialized.
A recent credit market survey from Bank of America found that net overweight positioning in Investment Grade remains elevated at 63% in the September survey, while high yield net positioning increased to a net 44% overweight in September from a net 27% underweight in July and the highest since
This investor euphoria is why even some of the companies most severely impacted by business disruptions caused by Covid-19 have been able to tap debt markets to refinance maturing obligations or add cash to their balance sheets.
However, that tide is now reversing at a dramatic pace, and Aethon may be the canary in the coalmine as the junk bond issuance window slams shut. The company had been sounding out potential investors for the five-year bond sale at a yield in the high 8% to 9% range and originally expected to price the transaction on Sept. 17, according Bloomberg. It had planned to use proceeds to repay an existing second-lien loan and borrowing under its revolver.
The rating agencies had rated the proposed bond single-B, smack in the middle level of junk. Aethon is expected to burn cash through 2021 as it invests in growing production, according to Fitch Ratings.
The question now is how long with the junk bond primary market window remains shut, and who and when will take us over the record junk bond issuance hump of $322 billion.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RUU5hg Tyler Durden
Jamie Dimon Says He Supports Taxing The Rich, But Opposes Dems’ “Wealth Tax” Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/23/2020 – 17:00
Before COVID-19 ruined the party, life was good for wealthy Americans. After more than 8 years of interest rates at zero, US stocks were trading at some of their highest valuations since the dot-com era, and the only real problem for the American elite was the growing backlash to worsening ‘economic inequality’ (ie white college educated millennials realizing they would never achieve the lifestyles their parents seemed to earn so effortlessly).
Then Bernie Sanders officially announced his candidacy in early 2019, and suddenly, bankers found themselves back in the crosshairs. Elizabeth Warren started a battle with Sanders over who could propose the most onerous ‘wealth tax’, something that would be unprecedented in the US, which – like most places – typically sticks to taxing peoples’ income, not their savings.
And as Capital Economics Chairman Roger Bootle warns that COVID-19 could usher in a wave of (confiscatory) wealth taxes around the world, Dimon is warning that while he fully supports raising taxes on “people like me”, a wealth tax that targets savings and/or assets simply isn’t the way to do it.
“A wealth tax is almost impossible to do,” Dimon said during an interview with CNBC at the JP Morgan India summit after being asked about the Democratic proposals. Asked to elaborate, Dimon said that wealthy people typically hide most of their wealth in places called ‘tax shelters’, a behavior that a ‘wealth tax’ would almost certainly aggravate.
“I’m not against having higher tax on the wealthy. But I think that you do that through their income as opposed to, you know, calculate wealth which becomes extremely complicated, legalistic, bureaucratic, regulatory, and people find a million ways around it. I would just tax income,” Dimon said. He argued that it’s far more difficult for rich people to cheat on their income, since it’s inevitably “given” to them by another source, who is also reporting it.
With Biden expected to roll back the Trump tax cuts if elected, America’s richest are already moving assets offshore, or taking other steps to preserve the wealth bonanza unleashed by the cuts. Amazingly, when asked, Dimon actually defended the Trump tax cuts, before pivoting to a discussion about how President Trump has helped destroy the bureaucratic “red tape” that Dimon said can stifle growth. And remember, when economic growth takes a hit, the most vulnerable are the most at risk.
“And I remind people, the world, when you slow down the economy, you are hurting the disadvantaged more than anybody else,” he said.
However the US decides to go about raising taxes, officials must be careful to ensure that they don’t do it in a way that impedes growth.
“There’re taxes which will slow down growth, like taxes on capital formation, or labor; and there’re taxes which will not affect growth like taxes on, you know, well-to-do people like me,” said Dimon.
“And I just think there should be far more thought about taxation…if you want an active, healthy growing economy.”
Watch the video below:
It’s just the latest reminder that Dimon and his billionaire pals doesn’t actually want the government to raise taxes on the wealthy – it’s all just more virtue-signaling, folks.
Remember: Seven years after he shut down Mike Mayo, Jamie Dimon is still “richer than you”. And he wants things to stay that way.
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In an ephemeral world, few things survive. I am not talking about species or human beings whose existence on earth is also transitory. Instead I am referring to social and financial systems which are now coming to an end.
In July 2009 I wrote an article called The Dark Years Are Here. It was reprinted again in September 2018.
Here is an extract from my original article:
“The Dark Years will be extremely severe for most countries both financially and socially. In many countries in the Western world there will be a severe depression and it will be the end of the welfare state. Most private and state pension schemes are also likely to collapse. It will be a worldwide depression but some countries may only have a deep recession. There will be famine, homelessness and misery resulting in social as well as political unrest. Different type of government leaders and regimes are likely to result from this.
How long will the Dark Years last? There is a book called ”The Fourth Turning” written by Neil Howe. He has identified a pattern that repeats itself every 80 years. The pattern has been extremely accurate in the Anglophile world. We have recently entered the Fourth Turning which is the final 20 years of the cycle. According to Howe we are in the early stages of a 20 year period of economic and institutional upheaval.
This is a period of Crisis when the fabric of society will change dramatically. Previous Fourth Turnings have been the American Revolution, Great Depression and World War II. According to Howe the Crisis will be substantially worse before it is over and it will last for another circa 20 years.
All of this is not good news and we hope that we and Howe are wrong regarding the severity and length of this crisis. But we fear that we are both right. We must stress again that never previously has the whole world entered a downturn simultaneously in such a fragile state both financially and economically which is why the Dark Years are likely to be so devastating and long lasting.”
THE INEVITABLE FALL OF SOCIETY
Neil Howe’s book The Fourth Turning had just been published when I wrote the article and it has since attained great fame. We are now in the final 8 years of his 20 year cycle and the most dramatic part of the cycle has just started which is the Fourth Turning.
In my 2009 article, I thought that the downturn was more imminent. But although I was slightly out on the timing, it doesn’t change the inevitable fall of the whole fabric of society in the next few years, be it commercial, financial or social.
Since 2009, global debt has doubled to $280 trillion and risk has increased exponentially. The final stage of the collapse started in August of 2019 with the central banks panicking and embarking on a massive money printing spree due to major problems in the financial system.
CORONAVIRUS – A CATALYST
As I have stated previously, Coronavirus which started in early 2020, is not the reason for the current downturn in the world economy. It was just a catalyst. For some reason, when cycles are about to accelerate hard down, the trigger seems to be the worst possible. Although I have often talked about disease as one potential catalyst, I did not expect it to come now and cause a total lockdown of parts of the economy and society in so many countries.
When you are approaching the end of a financial era or cycle, it is very difficult to predict exactly how it will all end. Very few people understand that we are now living on borrowed time. But there is absolutely no doubt that we are now at the end of the end and of a major cycle, whether that takes 8 years as Howe predicts or it all happens much faster, is totally irrelevant.
THE UNPREPARED COULD LOSE EVERYTHING
The risk is here now and if you don’t prepare for this, you are not just likely to lose whatever wealth you have but also your job, pension or social security depending on your circumstances. And if you live in a city, you are also likely to be affected by social unrest and crime plus a breakdown of services like medical care, schooling, law and order etc.
Many people are today trying to get out of the cities as a result of Coronavirus and the shut down of offices and shops as well as increased crime rates. For the wealthy minority, this is not a big problem but for normal people, it is not self-evident to just move out. But it is very clear that home working will become much more prevalent and many cities will become ghost towns. Tax revenue will decline dramatically and the authorities will not be able to keep up even simple services such as water, sanitation or cleaning. Also, many retail outlets and restaurants as well as offices in cities will close due to lack of customers, crime and out of town or online shopping. This trend has of course already started in many cities. In the City in London (Financial District), there are now very few people working. Only some shops or restaurants are open and the ones that are, are haemorrhaging financially.
THE DELUGE COULD COME SOONER
Coming back to Howe’s 8 remaining years of the Fourth Turning, it is of course an approximate number and not absolute. The way I see it is that it will take up to 8 years and maybe less for the artificial edifice that the world has created to collapse. But it could also happen a lot quicker.
What I mean by artificial edifice is firstly all the fake assets that have been created due to central banks deliberate profligacy. Since the creation of the Fed in 1913, the bankers have taken total control of the money system. From 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window, it became a total free for all for the (central) bankers. They could create unlimited amounts of money for their own benefit. Standing nearest the printing press is a major advantage when you print money. President Mugabe in Zimbabwe discovered this. By using the money from the printing press first, he could spend it quickly or buy dollars before the value of the printed money collapsed.
PRINTED MONEY DOESN’T REACH ORDINARY PEOPLE
In the US, the Fed has since the latest crisis started in August 2019, printed $3.3 trillion, and most of it since March 2020. Very little of this money has reached ordinary people. If it had, it would have meant a contribution of $25,000 to every one of the 130 million households in the US. Although the printed is basically worthless, it might have had some short term beneficial effect on the broad economy.
But no, money printing is not for ordinary people. It is for the bankers and the wealthy and add more fuel or liquidity to already massively overvalued asset markets rather than reaching the people who really need it. This has caused the Nasdaq to go up by 62% since late March and the Dow by 52%.
DOW 50,000 – GOLD $50,000?
In a recent article I discussed that we could see a liquidity fuelled meltup in stocks making the Dow double to say 50,000. Since I expect the Dow/Gold ratio to reach 1 to 1 or below (like in 1980 Dow 850 Gold $850), gold could at the same time reach $50,000 as inflation rises. As I consider stocks overbought and overvalued today, there is no fundamental or even technical reason for this to happen. Since markets today have nothing to do with fundamentals or sound valuation principles but are only liquidity driven, this kind of move is not impossible.
But investors must understand that I think it would be very high risk to stay fully invested in stocks currently. This is like buying the Nasdaq in 1999 to take part in the final rise but then to ride it all the way down to an 80% loss.
Much better instead to own gold, which fundamentally and technically is still early in a long term uptrend, kindly fuelled daily by central bank money printing. If the 50,000 forecast for the Dow and Gold would materialise, the Dow would double and Gold would go up 25x which is clearly a much better risk.
THE US IS BANKRUPT
Let’s face it, the US is bankrupt. No country, company or individual could lose money every year for 90 years and still be standing. (see my article). Normally the currency of such a country should have faded into oblivion. Well the dollar almost has since it is down 98% in real terms or gold since 1971 and down 85% since 2000. The only reason the dollar hasn’t disappeared totally yet is due to the Petrodollar. A major part of dollar assets are kept outside of the US due to the dollar liquidity created by the petrodollar.
The Petrodollar was created in the early 1970s by Nixon and the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They feared after the closing of the gold window that the dollar’s reserve currency role would diminish significantly. To save the dollar, Saudi Arabia was offered total military protection by the US on the condition that all oil trading would only be in dollars. Saudi Arabia would also buy substantial military equipment from the US.
THE IMMINENT DEMISE OF THE DOLLAR
This was a very clever arrangement and is the sole reason why the dollar is still standing. But the combination of a rapidly deteriorating US financial position and countries like China, Russia and Iran gradually trading in their own currencies, will soon precipitate the dollar’s demise.
Comparing currencies to each other is really a futile exercise since they are all going to ZERO. There is no prize for getting to the bottom first. Still in this exercise of relativity, it looks like the dollar will reach the bottom before the others. Having already lost 98% of its value in the last 50 years, the final 2% will not take that long. But remember that this 2% fall means a 100% loss of the dollar’s value from here.
Many people are very negative about the Euro due to the major problems in the EU. It is totally correct that the Euro is also a very weak and artificial currency. The Euro is virtually worth the same in dollars as on its launch on January 1st 1999. But right now, the Euro, in spite of its problems, technically looks stronger than the dollar.
So a crashing dollar over the next few years is virtually guaranteed and will act as a detonator which will blow up the US economy.
Also in the next 2-3 years we will see collapsing debt markets in the US and globally. Most debt in the world consists of printed money with no underlying real assets backing. Massively overvalued assets is backed by debt which will become totally worthless since it is only based on manufactured money issued by a printing press or a computer. When $10s of trillions are created with no labour, goods or service having been produced, that money clearly has ZERO value.
INTEREST RATES TO RISE STRONGLY
We will not have permanent zero rates as the FED and Ray Dalio say. There are two virtual certainties coming before the imminent mega crisis is over. The first will be the collapse of the currency system as I discussed above. The second certainty is the collapse of credit markets including bonds. The manipulation of rates will totally fail. Central banks will try to keep short rates low but will lose control of the long rates. As insolvent governments and corporates start to default, investors, including sovereign, will dump bonds.
Bond prices will collapse and rates go to at least the levels in the 1970s to early 1980s of 15-20%. The combination of hyperinflation and defaulting borrowers will see many bonds going to zero and rates to infinity. As long rates rise, they will pull the short rates up regardless of central banks attempts to hold them down. This will lead to the demise of the bond market. Obviously, central banks will frenetically print trillions or even quadrillions as derivatives disappear into a black hole. But to no avail except for panic and hyperinflation.
NOT THE TIME FOR OMPHALOSKEPSIS
So now is not the time for omphaloskepsis (navel gazing) or for investors to gloat about their stock market gains. Because the world is now entering a phase not seen for hundreds or maybe 2,000 years. Yes, stocks could meltup one final time before the total collapse but if they do, that will most likely be accompanied by a very weak dollar.
DON’T MEASURE YOUR WEALTH IN WORTHLESS FIAT CURRENCIES
To measure your assets in a fiat currency, be it dollars, euros or pounds, is absolute madness. Why do you measure your wealth in something that in real terms has declined by 98% since 1971 and 85% since 2000. It might feel good for a moment but when you realise that these gains are just paper profits that are not only meaningless but will evaporate totally in the next few years as stocks and paper money implode together.
And don’t for a second believe that the assets you own whether they are stocks, bonds or property are really worth the thousands or millions that they are valued at in fake money.
The imminent wealth destruction will soon reveal to investors that their assets are only worth a fraction of the imaginary value they have today.
Central banks will not save the world, they can’t. Because how can you solve a debt problem with more worthless debt or how can you create wealth by issuing more debt. That Ponzi scheme is now finished for a very long time.
Physical gold (and silver) will in the next few years reveal the total delusion that the financial system has rested on. Investors who are not protected should take heed.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RQYxxc Tyler Durden
Recent and ongoing battles over Supreme Court nominations have increased interest in the possibility of limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices. This idea has long enjoyed widespread (though not universal) support from legal scholars on different sides of the political spectrum, such as Sanford Levinson on the left, and Steve Calabresi on the right. While there are different variations of the proposal, in most versions Supreme Court justices would be limited to non-renewable 18 year terms, as opposed to the life tenure they enjoy now. I am happy to support the idea, as well. It has a number of important advantages, including some that have been overlooked by advocates. But it is unlikely to to put an end to bitter confirmation battles and partisan conflict over the courts more generally.
Supreme Court justices often try to retire during the presidency of someone sympathetic to their jurisprudence. Of course, that doesn’t always work: Justice Scalia died after almost 30 years on the high court trying to wait out President Barack Obama, and Justice Ginsburg died after nearly 27 years trying to outlast President Trump.
Over all, though, strategic retirements give the justices too much power in picking their own successors, which can lead to a self-perpetuating oligarchy….
The unpredictable American system of life tenure has led to four presidents picking six or more justices and four presidents selecting none, as happened with Jimmy Carter. This gives some presidents too much influence on the Supreme Court and others too little.
It also leads to justices remaining on the Supreme Court when they are unable either physically or mentally to do the job…
The solution is for Republicans and Democrats to unite in supporting a constitutional amendment that fixes the size of the Supreme Court at its current nine justices, each of whom would serve an 18-year nonrenewable term, staggered so that one seat opens up during the first and third years of a president’s four-year term…..
Given the length of this term, longer than for judges on the high courts of any other constitutional democracy, the justices would be amply independent.
Presidents would no longer have the incentive to pick comparatively young nominees — say, someone 45 to 50 years of age — to project their influence decades into the future. Justices would lose their power to help pick successors who share their views by retiring strategically.
To this list, I would add another point: As life expectancy continues to increase (at least once the awful coronavirus pandemic ends), life-tenured justices could potentially serve for even longer than they do now. Imagine a world where people routinely live to the age of 100 or more, and retain their ability to work up until that age, or close to it. A justice appointed at the age of 45 or 50 (as is increasingly commonplace) could serve for fifty or sixty years or even longer. At some point, giving people largely unaccountable power for that long will rightly be seen as intolerable. Longer life expectancy is a great thing! But it interacts poorly with life tenure for positions of great power.
At the same time, unlike Calabresi, I doubt that term limits would “end what has become a poisonous process of picking a Supreme Court justice” or “depoliticize the court and judicial selection.” Even if justices serve for “only” 18 years, they will still have great power. And presidents will still have a strong incentive to appoint justices whose judicial philosophies align with his and his party’s priorities. For their part, senators will continue have strong incentives to oppose nominees whom they (and their party) see as ideologically inimical. We live in an era of intense partisan polarization, including divisions over many legal issues that are likely to come before the Supreme Court, including such matters as abortion, affirmative action, law enforcement powers, gun rights, and (at least in recent years) immigration. The gap between the way a conservative Republican justice and a liberal Democratic one will vote on these and other issues is predictably large (even if there will be a good many outlier cases).
So long as that polarization persists, I highly doubt it will be possible to return to the era of relatively noncontentious Supreme Court nominations. Conflict is likely to continue, particularly in situations where the Senate and the presidency are controlled by different parties.
Calabresi’s proposal includes a provision designed to force the president and the Senate to cooperate on nominations:
Failure to confirm a justice by July 1 of a president’s first or third year should lead to a salary and benefits freeze for the president and all 100 senators, and they should be confined together until a nominee has been approved. The vice president would act as president during this time and the Senate would be forbidden from taking action whatsoever on any of its calendars.
Like Jonathan Adler, I am skeptical that this “confinement” can be enforced. I also highly doubt that Congress would be willing to enact a constitutional amendment that included this punitive aspect.
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute (who should not be confused with the present writer, but often is) offers some additional reasons why term limits are unlikely to end the partisan war over judicial appointments here.
Perhaps the biggest problem with term limits for SCOTUS justices is that they would be extremely hard to enact. In my view, that would require a constitutional amendment. That necessitates securing a massive supermajority: 2/3 of both houses of Congress, and 3/4 of state legislatures. While SCOTUS term limits have become more popular in recent years, I am doubtful that the idea has the level of support needed to pass. However, support might grow over time, especially if I am right about increased life expectancy creating a situation where justices routinely serve for fifty years or even longer.
In addition, there will be inevitable wrangling over how to deal with incumbent justices. If they get “grandfathered” in and allowed to serve for life, that means term limits will not have much effect for many years to come. If they are forced to accept limits themselves, the amendment is likely to be opposed by whichever party currently enjoys a majority on the Court.
Some scholars argue that term limits can be imposed by statute, without a constitutional amendment. They contend that life tenure in the Constitution simply requires that federal judges have some judicial position for life, not necessarily that of SCOTUS justice. Thus, Congress could enact a law under which, for example, justices are demoted to the lower courts after serving for 18 years (or for however long Congress dictates).
I think this argument is both wrong on the law, and would create dangerous incentives for Congress if it became widely accepted. It would have the same sorts of problems as the “rotation” proposal endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries this year. I criticized that idea here:
Instead of adding new justices to the Court, [under the rotation plan] Congress could pass a law removing some of the current justices and transferring them to lower courts…. Then, the president can appoint new Supreme Court justices who will be more to his or her party’s liking….
It isn’t hard to see how this plan could easily lead to the same sort of spiraling dynamic as court packing. Imagine Sanders [or, now, Joe Biden] gets elected president in 2020 and—with the help of a Democratic Congress—sends Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to judicial purgatory. Perhaps they end up being consigned to a specially created federal court that considers weighty matters such as appeals of tickets issued to vehicles illegally parked on federal government property. Meanwhile, their Supreme Court seats get taken by newly appointed liberal justices….
How would the next GOP president and Congress respond? Most likely they would do the same thing to two (or more) liberal justices. Perhaps Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor end up joining Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as parking ticket court judges. Meanwhile, two new conservative justices take their seats. Of course, the next Democratic president backed by a congressional majority would retaliate in kind, and so on….
These concerns apply with equal force to statutory term limits. If Congress can impose an 18 year term, they can also impose one that is 3 years or 6 years, and use that power to get rid of Supreme Court justices whose decisions they dislike. When the opposing party comes to power, they can make the terms still shorter, and thereby get rid of justices they dislike.
If Congress has broad authority to set judicial terms as they wish, they could even have asymmetric term lengths, so as to target justices they dislike for removal, while leaving others in place. For example, a Democratic Congress could enact a very short term limit that applies to justices confirmed in a year ending in 8, so as to eliminate Brett Kavanaugh (confirmed in 2018). Republicans could respond by targeting Democratic-appointed justices. And so on. Judicial review would thereby be neutered over time, as would also happen through repeated court-packing.
In sum, there is a great deal of merit to the idea of Supreme Court term limits. But it is far from a panacea for our problems, and would be very difficult to enact.
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Recent and ongoing battles over Supreme Court nominations have increased interest in the possibility of limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices. This idea has long enjoyed widespread (though not universal) support from legal scholars on different sides of the political spectrum, such as Sanford Levinson on the left, and Steve Calabresi on the right. While there are different variations of the proposal, in most versions Supreme Court justices would be limited to non-renewable 18 year terms, as opposed to the life tenure they enjoy now. I am happy to support the idea, as well. It has a number of important advantages, including some that have been overlooked by advocates. But it is unlikely to to put an end to bitter confirmation battles and partisan conflict over the courts more generally.
Supreme Court justices often try to retire during the presidency of someone sympathetic to their jurisprudence. Of course, that doesn’t always work: Justice Scalia died after almost 30 years on the high court trying to wait out President Barack Obama, and Justice Ginsburg died after nearly 27 years trying to outlast President Trump.
Over all, though, strategic retirements give the justices too much power in picking their own successors, which can lead to a self-perpetuating oligarchy….
The unpredictable American system of life tenure has led to four presidents picking six or more justices and four presidents selecting none, as happened with Jimmy Carter. This gives some presidents too much influence on the Supreme Court and others too little.
It also leads to justices remaining on the Supreme Court when they are unable either physically or mentally to do the job…
The solution is for Republicans and Democrats to unite in supporting a constitutional amendment that fixes the size of the Supreme Court at its current nine justices, each of whom would serve an 18-year nonrenewable term, staggered so that one seat opens up during the first and third years of a president’s four-year term…..
Given the length of this term, longer than for judges on the high courts of any other constitutional democracy, the justices would be amply independent.
Presidents would no longer have the incentive to pick comparatively young nominees — say, someone 45 to 50 years of age — to project their influence decades into the future. Justices would lose their power to help pick successors who share their views by retiring strategically.
To this list, I would add another point: As life expectancy continues to increase (at least once the awful coronavirus pandemic ends), life-tenured justices could potentially serve for even longer than they do now. Imagine a world where people routinely live to the age of 100 or more, and retain their ability to work up until that age, or close to it. A justice appointed at the age of 45 or 50 (as is increasingly commonplace) could serve for fifty or sixty years or even longer. At some point, giving people largely unaccountable power for that long will rightly be seen as intolerable. Longer life expectancy is a great thing! But it interacts poorly with life tenure for positions of great power.
At the same time, unlike Calabresi, I doubt that term limits would “end what has become a poisonous process of picking a Supreme Court justice” or “depoliticize the court and judicial selection.” Even if justices serve for “only” 18 years, they will still have great power. And presidents will still have a strong incentive to appoint justices whose judicial philosophies align with his and his party’s priorities. For their part, senators will continue have strong incentives to oppose nominees whom they (and their party) see as ideologically inimical. We live in an era of intense partisan polarization, including divisions over many legal issues that are likely to come before the Supreme Court, including such matters as abortion, affirmative action, law enforcement powers, gun rights, and (at least in recent years) immigration. The gap between the way a conservative Republican justice and a liberal Democratic one will vote on these and other issues is predictably large (even if there will be a good many outlier cases).
So long as that polarization persists, I highly doubt it will be possible to return to the era of relatively noncontentious Supreme Court nominations. Conflict is likely to continue, particularly in situations where the Senate and the presidency are controlled by different parties.
Calabresi’s proposal includes a provision designed to force the president and the Senate to cooperate on nominations:
Failure to confirm a justice by July 1 of a president’s first or third year should lead to a salary and benefits freeze for the president and all 100 senators, and they should be confined together until a nominee has been approved. The vice president would act as president during this time and the Senate would be forbidden from taking action whatsoever on any of its calendars.
Like Jonathan Adler, I am skeptical that this “confinement” can be enforced. I also highly doubt that Congress would be willing to enact a constitutional amendment that included this punitive aspect.
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute (who should not be confused with the present writer, but often is) offers some additional reasons why term limits are unlikely to end the partisan war over judicial appointments here.
Perhaps the biggest problem with term limits for SCOTUS justices is that they would be extremely hard to enact. In my view, that would require a constitutional amendment. That necessitates securing a massive supermajority: 2/3 of both houses of Congress, and 3/4 of state legislatures. While SCOTUS term limits have become more popular in recent years, I am doubtful that the idea has the level of support needed to pass. However, support might grow over time, especially if I am right about increased life expectancy creating a situation where justices routinely serve for fifty years or even longer.
In addition, there will be inevitable wrangling over how to deal with incumbent justices. If they get “grandfathered” in and allowed to serve for life, that means term limits will not have much effect for many years to come. If they are forced to accept limits themselves, the amendment is likely to be opposed by whichever party currently enjoys a majority on the Court.
Some scholars argue that term limits can be imposed by statute, without a constitutional amendment. They contend that life tenure in the Constitution simply requires that federal judges have some judicial position for life, not necessarily that of SCOTUS justice. Thus, Congress could enact a law under which, for example, justices are demoted to the lower courts after serving for 18 years (or for however long Congress dictates).
I think this argument is both wrong on the law, and would create dangerous incentives for Congress if it became widely accepted. It would have the same sorts of problems as the “rotation” proposal endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries this year. I criticized that idea here:
Instead of adding new justices to the Court, [under the rotation plan] Congress could pass a law removing some of the current justices and transferring them to lower courts…. Then, the president can appoint new Supreme Court justices who will be more to his or her party’s liking….
It isn’t hard to see how this plan could easily lead to the same sort of spiraling dynamic as court packing. Imagine Sanders [or, now, Joe Biden] gets elected president in 2020 and—with the help of a Democratic Congress—sends Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to judicial purgatory. Perhaps they end up being consigned to a specially created federal court that considers weighty matters such as appeals of tickets issued to vehicles illegally parked on federal government property. Meanwhile, their Supreme Court seats get taken by newly appointed liberal justices….
How would the next GOP president and Congress respond? Most likely they would do the same thing to two (or more) liberal justices. Perhaps Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor end up joining Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as parking ticket court judges. Meanwhile, two new conservative justices take their seats. Of course, the next Democratic president backed by a congressional majority would retaliate in kind, and so on….
These concerns apply with equal force to statutory term limits. If Congress can impose an 18 year term, they can also impose one that is 3 years or 6 years, and use that power to get rid of Supreme Court justices whose decisions they dislike. When the opposing party comes to power, they can make the terms still shorter, and thereby get rid of justices they dislike.
If Congress has broad authority to set judicial terms as they wish, they could even have asymmetric term lengths, so as to target justices they dislike for removal, while leaving others in place. For example, a Democratic Congress could enact a very short term limit that applies to justices confirmed in a year ending in 8, so as to eliminate Brett Kavanaugh (confirmed in 2018). Republicans could respond by targeting Democratic-appointed justices. And so on. Judicial review would thereby be neutered over time, as would also happen through repeated court-packing.
In sum, there is a great deal of merit to the idea of Supreme Court term limits. But it is far from a panacea for our problems, and would be very difficult to enact.
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While most large school districts throughout the U.S. are continuing with distance learning, the smaller number of schools that have reopened are reporting good news: So far, K-12 school buildings have not played host to sizable COVID-19 outbreaks.
“Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told The Washington Post. “In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation.”
Researchers at Brown University found extremely low levels of virus transmission over a two-week period in schools that reopened. In many places, the rate of infection in schools was lower than in the rest of the community.
These results came as something of a surprise to some teachers union leaders, according to the Post. “I am not seeing at this particular point the rate I had expected,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers.
Keep in mind that teachers unions have fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed. Last week, New York City’s union successfully pressured Mayor Bill de Blasio to delay reopening schools yet again, even though NYC is one of the areas of the country best equipped, at this point, to manage the pandemic. In Washington, D.C., the teachers union is skeptical about reopening in November.
It’s still very early, of course, and opening schools could eventually correlate with significant virus spread. But right now, the idea that it’s impossible to reopen schools safely until some undetermined, far off point in the future—perhaps when a vaccine is available—is not holding up.
College campuses, on the other hand, have seen some fairly significant outbreaks. This makes sense: College students live and socialize with each other to a greater degree than young kids do, and many administrators were either naive or indifferent to the fact that compliance with extreme social distancing demands were bound to be ignored.
But even at the college level, not everything is bleak. Some universities have found a workable solution: testing, testing, testing. The University of Illinois, for instance, is testing its entire undergraduate population twice a week; that’s 10,000 tests every day. Developing the capacity to pull this off isn’t easy, but it appears to work very well when implemented. University health officials can quickly identify asymptomatic cases and quarantine the sick.
Contrary to what the most ardent supporters of endless lockdowns believe, it is possible to safely reopen schools without making students miserable or placing teachers in danger. It just takes planning, hard work, and testing, testing, testing.
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TikTok Files New Injunction Against White House Amid Reports Deal Is “Falling Apart” Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/23/2020 – 16:19
As Fox Business publishes rumors that the TikTok-Oracle deal is falling apart, TikTok-owner ByteDance has filed a petition for an injunction Wednesday afternoon, asking a federal court in Washington DC to intervene and quash President Trump’s threatened ban of TikTok on national security grounds.
The injunction, filed Wednesday afternoon, comes after a California court shut down Trump’s attempt to ban Tencent’s WeChat just a few days ago. It follows another lawsuit filed by TikTok and its parent back in August targeting the administration and its leaders, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
The Trump Administration set a final deadline of Nov. 12 for the deal between ByteDance, Oracle and Wal-Mart to spin off TikTok into a standalone company. It also set an earlier deadline of Sept. 28, whereby a ‘partial’ shutdown was promised if the deal isn’t well on its way. With that first intermediate deadline coming up on Sunday, BD has apparently decided to move ahead
In the complaint, TikTok lawyers from Covington & Burling argued that Trump’s executive order is unconstitutional, citing violations of First Amendment Rights and due process.
Meanwhile, Fox Business reports that opposition to the deal is growing in the US, as AG Barr has reportedly expressed skepticism about approving the deal over “national security” concerns.
SCOOP via @LJMoynihan: sources say AG Barr has been skeptical of approving @Oracle@tiktok_us on national security concerns. His spox tells Fox Biz exclusively he is still in the fact gathering stage and has not reached a final decision/made a final recommendation to @POTUS$ORCL
To be sure, even if the Trump Administration were to completely roll over and accept a deal with ByteDance owning 80% of the newly independent TikTok (with 40% of that stake presumably owned indirectly by the American investors who own ByteDance), Beijing has by now spilled too much ink in its state-run press. The hard-core nationalists would never accept President Xi kowtowing to Washington like this.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RQEi2H Tyler Durden
