Tag: finance

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

When the Russians take decisive action, it is usually for a reason. As you will see below, the Russians have suddenly decided that now is the time to create an organization that will be tasked with detecting, tracking and potentially destroying incoming asteroids. Are they doing this now because they have finally decided that this is a good idea, or has something gotten their attention? Of course they are not likely to publicly admit if they have come to the conclusion that a gigantic space rock is heading directly toward us. Just like the U.S. government, the Russian government is very interested in maintaining social order, and so they would probably delay telling the public about a potential asteroid impact for as long as possible.

In life, what people do is far more important than what they say, and the new center that the Russians have just created will not just be watching giant space rocks. According to Futurism, this new organization will be in charge of making sure “they don’t collide with Earth”…

Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they don’t collide with Earth — even it means having to blow them up in space.

“As part of the creation of a monitoring system and information support for the safety of space activities in near-Earth space, we plan to launch the Russian Center for Small Celestial Bodies, whose main task will be to detect and track celestial bodies approaching Earth,” Igor Bakaras, a senior official at Roscosmos subsidiary TsNIIMash, told Russian-owned news agency Sputnik.

Certainly nobody can fault the Russians for allocating resources toward this purpose.

Our solar system is full of potentially dangerous giant space rocks, and a big enough impact could literally end our civilization.

But why now?

According to a British news source, this new organization will be evaluating whether it is better “to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth”…

Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of Nasa, wants to work out if it’s possible to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth.

This could involve slamming a ‘kinetic impactor’ craft in the rock or using a satellite to drag it onto a new course. Nukes could also be sent into space to blow up the rocks.

A new department at Roscosmos called the Russian Centre for Celestial Bodies will be tasked with looking into space to find comets and asteroids approaching Earth.

Once again, nobody can argue with the value of such a major project, but isn’t NASA already doing all this?

Couldn’t the Russians just sit back and let us Americans do all the work?

I wish someone would ask Vladimir Putin that question.

And this sudden move by the Russians comes just one year after the U.S. issued a “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”…

In 2018, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report titled the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.

The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.

Maybe U.S. officials suddenly decided last year that having a plan for incoming giant space rocks was a great idea, and maybe the Russians decided that it was such a great idea that they should copy us.

Or maybe both governments know something that they aren’t telling us yet.

Of course the truth is that NASA has not even identified most of the giant space rocks that are floating around out there. For example, back in July a very large asteroid came very close to hitting us…

A 427-foot-wide asteroid whizzed within 45,000 miles of Earth on Thursday.

While that may sound far away, 45,000 miles is what astronomers consider a close shave: It’s less than 20% of the distance between Earth and the moon. This was the closest we’ve come to an “Armageddon”-like scenario in at least a few years.

If that asteroid had actually hit our planet, it would have been the worst disaster that any of us have ever seen by a very wide margin.

And according to leaked emails, officials at NASA only knew about it the day before it whizzed by us…

Travelling at 55,000mph and measuring 426 feet by 187ft (130m x 57m), NASA only realised 2019 OK was coming 24 hours before it passed.

Experts say that had it hit, it would have devastated an entire city like London with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

So the truth is that we could be hit by a giant space rock at any time, and none of us may have any idea that it is even coming.

With that being said, there are a couple of enormous asteroids that scientists do know about that could potentially be major problems over the next decade.

The first one that I want to discuss is 2007 FT3. That is not a fancy name, and not that much is known about the asteroid, but apparently there is a chance that it “might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024”…

In the case of 2007 FT3, Sentry reported that the asteroid could hit Earth between the years 2024 and 2116. During these years, Sentry recorded a total of 164 potential Earth impacts caused by the asteroid. As noted by the monitoring system, there’s a chance that 2007 FT3 might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024.

By the way, Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of October 2nd, 2024. I don’t know if that is important, but I thought I would throw that out there.

According to NASA, this asteroid would hit at a speed of approximately 46,000 miles per hour, and it would “create a crater that’s several miles long”…

Based on the data collected by Sentry, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 1,115 feet, which makes it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. The monitoring system noted that it could breach Earth’s atmosphere and hit the planet at a velocity of around 46,000 miles per hour.

Given the asteroid’s speed and size, it is certainly capable of causing high levels of destruction if it ends up colliding with Earth. Upon impact, it would create a crater that’s several miles long. The energy that will be released from the asteroid’s explosion would be powerful enough to level an entire city as well as its neighboring areas.

2007 FT3 is not getting much publicity at all, but a slightly larger asteroid that could potentially hit us in 2029 is getting far more attention.

On April 13th, 2029, it is being projected that Apophis will pass by our planet at a distance that is “ten times closer than the moon”. The following comes from Wikipedia…

The closest known approach of Apophis comes on April 13, 2029, when the asteroid comes to within a distance of around 31,000 kilometres from Earth’s surface. The distance, a hair’s breadth in astronomical terms, is ten times closer than the moon, and even closer than some man-made satellites.[23] It will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history. On that date, it will become as bright as magnitude 3.1[22] (visible to the naked eye from rural as well as darker suburban areas, visible with binoculars from most locations).[24] The close approach will be visible from Europe, Africa, and western Asia. During the approach, Earth will perturb Apophis from an Aten-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.92 AU to an Apollo-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 1.1 AU.

NASA insists that it will not actually hit us, but other independent researchers are skeptical.

And if Apophis doesn’t hit us then, NASA has listed ten other future dates when it potentially could…

• April 12, 2060

• April 11, 2065

• April 12, 2068

• October 10, 2068

• April 13, 2076

• April 13, 2077

• April 13, 2078

• October 10, 2089

• April 13, 2091

• April 14, 2103

Over in Russia, they are so concerned about this asteroid that they have “developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis”…

In what sounds like an elevator pitch for an Armageddon sequel, Russian scientists announced that they’ve developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis, which is going to swing by Earth in 2036.

Also referred to as 99942 Apophis, it measures 210-330 meters (690-1080 feet) in diameter. According to a Slate article by astronomer Phil Plait an encounter with Earth would mean not so fun times for our planet; “it would release the energy equivalent to more than 1 billion tons of TNT exploding, at least 20 times more than the largest nuke ever detonated!”

Russian scientists have also warned that Apophis could have “hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century”.

But for now, both American and Russian scientists are assuring us that everything is just fine and that there is no reason to panic.

Do you believe them?

Maybe they are telling us the truth.

Maybe there is nothing to be concerned about at all.

But of course both governments have a long track record of being loose with the truth, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise at all if they weren’t exactly being straight with us.

Japan’s demographic Armageddon made another entry in the history books this week when Japan’s welfare ministry estimated that in 2019, Japan’s population organically shrank by 512,000 people this year compared to 2018. That’s a drop of more than the entire population of the city of Atlanta.

While Japan’s demographic doom is well-known, its severity has taken on a breathless haste in recent years with births in the country — which are expected to drop below 900,000 this year — are at their lowest figure since 1874 according to the NYT, when the population was about 70% smaller than its current 124 million.

Meanwhile, as Japan’s birthrate collapses, the total number of deaths is accelerating with every passing year, and in 2019 the figure is expected to reach almost 1.4 million, 60% more than the number of births, and the highest level since the end of World War II, a rise driven by the country’s increasingly elderly population.

That gap between births and deaths, which has risen above half a million for the first time ever, has put Japan on the path to demographic destruction and deflationary doom, because in a country that shrinks by over half a million people each year, economic concepts such as resource scarcity become increasingly quaint.

Indeed, as the number of births goes down, there are fewer young people entering its work force. That means fewer people to replace retiring workers and support them as they age, a situation that poses a serious threat to Japan’s economic vitality and the security of its social safety net – although, as we noted previously, Japan is not even in the Top 10 list of nations with the heaviest retiree burden; that group is headed by Italy, Greece and France.

Japan is not the only country having to cope with a shrinking society. It’s not even the country with the lowest birthrate: That title, according to the NYT, goes to South Korea. Meanwhile, other countries — including China and the United States — also face declining birthrates, which could spell demographic trouble down the road.

But Japan stands out in one specific way: it is the world’s grayest nation, with almost 28% of its residents over the age of 65.

Japan reached it demographic tipping point over a decade ago, giving Tokyo ample opportunity to find a solution and address the effects of its declining population. The country has been consistently shrinking since 2007, when the country’s population dipped by around 18,000 people. Since then, however, the losses have accelerated, crossing the half-million mark this year for the first time. Across the nation, whole villages are vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities (or they just happen to be close to the Fukushima radioactive wasteland).

Unfortunately for Japan, it’s only going to get worse as there is no end to the decline in sight. The government estimates that the population could shrink by around 16 million people, nearly 13%, over the next 25 years.

In seeking to stave off demographic armageddon, Japan has made efforts to push up its fertility rate defined as the average number of births per woman, from its current level of around 1.4 to a target of 1.8, although still short of the 2.1 considered necessary to hold the population steady. The government has moved to encourage births by increasing incentives for parents to have more children and reducing obstacles that might discourage those who want to.

But like every other failed attempt by the state or economists to dictate behavior, the incentives have proved woefully insufficient as more people in Japan are putting off childbirth — or not having children at all — either to take advantage of economic opportunities or because they worry that economic opportunities do not exist and feel that they cannot afford children. Even for those who do want to be parents, the hurdles remain daunting.

Demand for day care in the country far outstrips supply, making it difficult for working women to juggle careers and children. Meanwhile, working men who want to take advantage of the country’s generous paternity leave can find themselves stigmatized by an entrenched cultural belief that a man’s place is in the office, not in the home.

If this wasn’t enough, the NYT also notes that adding to the government’s worries, marriage is also on the decline. The number of marriages dropped by 3,000 year-on-year to 583,000, according to the data released on Tuesday, part of a steep decline over the last decade.

Ironically, the most practical solution, if only from a labor standpoint, is also a terminal one for Japan as a society: as births continue to drop, Japan has tried to promote robots as a supplement for its shrinking work force. The only problem: robots don’t vote, don’t pay taxes, and don’t have little robot children of their own.

Finally, in an attempt to succeed where Germany, and Merkel’s “Open Door” policies failed, Japan has also committed to accepting limited numbers of immigrants to handle vital work such as caring for the elderly. This year the country began issuing more than a quarter-million visas to immigrants who will do such work. The only problem: the Japanese are notorious nationalists and tend to ostracize, mock and ridicule and gai jin to the point where nobody actually wants to stay in the notoriously closed-off society.

Via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: Trump is calling for a weaker dollar and negative interest rates. What does this tell you about Trump’s understanding of economics?

David Stockman: It tells you that he has no understanding of economics at all!

I think Trump is not even a primitive when it comes to economic comprehension. His views are just plain stupid when it comes to exchange rates. He seems to think it’s some grand game of global golf, where the strongest player gets the lowest score.

What sense does it make tweeting as he did recently in attacking the Fed?

According to Trump, the US economy is so much better than the rest of the world’s economies, and therefore we should have the lowest interest rate as a result. It has nothing to do with economic logic or with principles related to sound money. I think he’s just thrashing about trying to create a warning that if things go badly, it’s the Fed’s fault.

The whole narrative on the economy is wrong.

The low unemployment rate is something he inherited. It’s the end of the longest business cycle in history—126 months.

As the economy continues the inch forward, the inventory of excess labor goes down. The unemployment rate, even as badly measured as it is by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), inherently goes lower. He didn’t have anything to do with it.

In fact, if you look at the first 33 job reports under President Trump, the average gains have been 190,000 a month. During the last 33 reports under President Obama, it was 225,000 a month.

There has been no acceleration. There has been no improvement. It’s a running out of the business cycle, even as the foundation underneath has been made worse and worse by Trump’s trade policies and a really insane fiscal policy of driving the deficit to over a trillion dollars at the top of the business cycle.

Even John Maynard Keynes himself said that you ought to try to balance the budget and even generate a surplus at the top of the cycle.

We’re right in the middle of the worst kind of economic policy in my lifetime, anyway—going back to the 1960s.

Trump is completely clueless about how we got here, how he got here, and where we’re going.

I’ve said many times that if you boast about it, you own it. He’s been boasting about the stock market, which is the greatest bubble in history. He’s been boasting about a business cycle that he inherited that’s got all kinds of rot underneath and that’s nearing its final days.

All of that’s going to come home to roost, and I think it’s very likely to happen before the 2020 election.

So the 2020 election is not all over except for the shouting, as a lot of people believe. In fact, the prospect that Elizabeth Warren gets the nomination on the Democratic side and becomes a serious contender to the Oval Office is very high. The irony is that it will ensure the stock market’s collapse and Trump‌’s defeat. He’s setting himself up for the worst possible outcome.

International Man: The Fed recently said it could increase its tolerance for inflation before it considers raising interest rates. It would be a major policy shift. What’s really going on here?

David Stockman: I think what’s going on is that they’re looking for another excuse to capitulate to Wall Street next time it has a hissy fit because it believes the Fed owes them another shot of stimulus and more liquidity.

Let’s address the underlying issue now. The 2% inflation target is absurd to begin with. There is no historical or theoretical evidence to suggest that inflation at 2% is better for growth and prosperity than inflation at 1.5%, 1%, or even -1%.

This is just made up, just like the money they created that’s been snatched from thin air, adopted as official policy in January 2012.

It becomes a rolling excuse for running the printing press and accommodating both the politicians in Washington, D.C., who want low interest rates so that debts are cheap to finance and the gamblers on Wall Street who want low interest rates because they result in higher asset values and cheaper costs for carry trade speculators.

The idea that we haven’t had enough inflation as it’s measured by one indicator—the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator—is kind of crazy for two reasons.

First, there’s a lot of other inflation measures that say we easily achieved 2% inflation.

The 16% trimmed-mean CPI is a very handy tool. It has the same CPI data at the product code level as that in the regular CPI, but in order to smooth out the monthly figure, it takes out the lowest and highest 16% of individual prices.

It’s probably more accurate than CPI because it removes the outliers but puts them back in as soon as they reach the center of the distribution.

The trimmed-mean CPI has averaged 2% since January 2012. During the last 12 months, it’s reached 2.34%, way over the Fed’s 2% target.

There are lots of issues here.

One of them is that there are many ways to measure inflation. Another issue is that you can’t scientifically measure inflation in a dynamic global economy like the one we’re in today.

It’s just an average in some arbitrarily-weighted product categories that are way too complicated, even for the bureaucrats at the BLS.

And third, even if you could measure it halfway accurately, which I seriously doubt, the Fed has no tools to achieve its targets anyway.

The big swings of inflation are from commodity cycles and the global trading system, evidenced in oil prices, metal and materials prices, food and grain prices, and so forth. The Fed can’t do much about that.

The point is, inflation targeting is one of the greatest efforts at misdirection that a government agency has ever concocted. This gives them a license to constantly intervene and meddle in the financial markets—pointlessly fiddling with the whole price structure of debt and equity assets.

The less inflation there is, the better.

They can’t target it to the second decimal point, and you can’t measure it anyway.

The fact that they’re now saying, “Well, we don’t mean to target inflation on a monthly basis or quarterly or annual basis, it’s a cumulative basis from a day one,” indicates they are maybe starting from the Garden of Eden or something like that.

It just shows you that they’ve backed themselves into a corner of illogic and stupidity, from which I don’t think there’s any exit.

International Man: There are increasing calls for central banks to combat climate change. The IMF, the European Central Bank, and several others have chimed in. What does this mean, and why are central bankers suddenly so keen on this topic?

David Stockman: This is beyond stupid. What could the central banks possibly do to help the global economies adjust to climate change? Climate change may or may not be happening, and if it is, it’s due to planetary forces that central banks have absolutely no power to impact or counteract.

In my view, it’s one of the many hoaxes going on. It does remind you of how far out modern Keynesian central banking has become. They only have one tool: they can try to falsify interest rates, and they do that by injecting flat credit and liquidity into the market.

That’s all they can do. They have no other ability to drive the $85 trillion global economy, or the $21 trillion domestic economy.

They have a crude instrument. As they say, when your only instrument is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s the case with the Fed.

The only thing they can do is inflate financial asset prices on Wall Street and other financial markets. If they can’t even drive the macroeconomy to hit their inflation targets, how are they going to redirect the macroeconomy to use more green energy?

It’s so idiotic that it doesn’t merit any further discussion.

These central banks are the all-time champions at mission creep.

They have added mission after mission, including inflation at 2%, as they measure it, and now they want another mandate. They want another reason to enhance their power. When already, they are the most powerful state institutions in the world, and they’re in the process of wrecking prosperity everywhere.

International Man: If Rand Paul finally gets his audit of the Federal Reserve, what do you think they’ll find?

David Stockman: What he’s going to find is just more detail on the absurdities of what they’re doing already.

I think one that you would look into is this policy called Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER). They targeted that number at 1.55% right now. There’s about $1.5 trillion of excess reserves in the banking system.

So, they’re paying out to the banks upwards of $23 billion a year in order to keep excess funds on deposit at the Fed, rather than putting it to work in the macroeconomy.

How stupid is that?

They are blindly fixated on commanding the money market rate. The Federal Funds Market has disappeared. Ben Bernanke basically destroyed that. There’s nothing left there.

Since they know that the federal funds rate is pretty much nothing in the broad money markets—which are dominated by the repo markets, they have come up with IOER to show that they can make an interest rate happen.

It’s crazy. This is what you get from modern central banks.

We have to ask, why don’t they just get out of the way and let those reserves either stay on deposit at the Fed, or let them flow into the repo market, the money market, or the commercial paper market?

So, that’s one area that a thorough audit of the Fed could get at.

The second one that I think would be even more interesting, if it were done properly, is to recognize that they’ve created a bloated balance sheet. They’re back at it again—it peaked at $4.5 trillion from a base of $900 billion, at the time of the crisis in 2008.

They rolled it back a little bit under the short-lived Quantitative Tightening (QT).

The minute the stock market had a moderate hissy fit last fall and last Christmas, they immediately dropped the project, announced the end of QT in August, and started back the other way.

So, now they’re back up to $4 trillion and rising rapidly.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that you have $4 trillion of assets at work earning the interest rates that Uncle Sam is paying on 10-year paper, the interest rates that Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae are paying on their longer-term securities—all of this money is coming into the Fed.

The cost of their liabilities is practically nothing because they’ve been created from thin air by hitting the button on the digital printing press. Other than the $23 billion that they’re paying out in this phony IOER scheme, basically, they have cost-free liabilities, and a $4 trillion balance sheet that is earning interest.

Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is it brings in a massive profit. A lot of it that gets cycled back to the Treasury, which is another circular scheme of stupidity. But it also gets used for a big fat, juicy payroll, for some 20,000 people—including several thousand economists.

It’s not only these people on the payroll, but there are all kinds of contract research they fund from the massive profits they generate from printing money. That means that a substantial share of the academic economists in the United States is on the payroll of the Federal Reserve. They lick the boots of the guy who’s signing the checks.

The system is bad enough the way it is—between the political process, the dominance of statism, interventionism, and Keynesianism. But now, even the academic economists on the payroll are being paid to find that the Fed is doing a wonderful job and should be doing even more.

If we have an audit, we ought to find out the name and serial number of every damn economist that’s on their payroll or that’s getting contract research and ignore them—because they’re saying what the master wants to hear.

*  *  *

What could be the greatest bubble in history is reaching its final days. President Trump’s call for a weaker US dollar and negative interest rates is a last ditch effort to keep the party going. The whole financial system could come crumbling down much faster than most people think. That’s exactly why NY Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent report on how to survive and thrive during an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is losing fundraising steam just days after ridiculing Mayor Pete Buttigieg for raising money from billionaires. 

At least that’s the tone coming from an email she sent supporters on Friday. Warren, who ironically spent the last Democratic debate trying to distance herself from Buttigieg’s fundraising tactics, disclosed that it has only raised $17 million in the fourth quarter, marking a significant drop from her fundraising totals in the third quarter.

“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” her e-mail says, according to CNBC. 

In the third quarter, her campaign brought in $24.6 million, far more than most other candidates, including Joe Biden and Buttigieg.

Warren’s momentum in the Democratic primary race has slowed in recent months, as she has fallen behind Joe Biden, who now leads the field of candidates. The plunge in fundraising also comes after Warren escalated her attacks on billionaires like Leon Cooperman and Mike Bloomberg, who she has accused of “trying to buy” the nomination.

Warren said during the last debate to Mayor Buttigieg: “So, the Mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave full of crystals and served $900 a bottle wine. Think about who comes to that. He had promised that every fundraiser he would do would be open door but this one was closed door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke filled rooms would not pick the next President of the United States.”

You can watch Warren spar with Buttigieg at the last debate here:

Authored by Chet Richards via The American Thinker blog,

Consider the age of monarchs.  Squabbling barons select a supreme ruler – a king or an emperor — to suppress the squabbling.  Peace and prosperity return to the land.  The king makes policy but he can’t do everything.  His minions take care of the details. 

Minions mean bureaucracy.   The bureaucracy grows.  The king grows old and dies.  The dynasty continues.  The bureaucracy continues – always continues, and always grows.  The bureaucracy becomes an establishment kingdom unto itself.  The bureaucracy grows in power and serves its own interests.  The king diminishes in power.  The land grows restless under the increasing regulatory tyranny and taxes.  Legitimacy – what the Chinese called the “mandate of heaven” –  is lost and so is the dynasty.

Change the names and we are at the end of a similar cycle – a cycle that began with the guillotine.  This time it is a world-wide cycle.  The modern king is a modern tyrant – Stalin, Hitler, Mao were the worst.

The socialist idea had been kicking around since the 18th century.  This seemingly plausible notion shaped the various Marxist evils of the 20th century.  The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazism, Fascism, and today’s imperious European Union, are all socialist tyrannies of one degree or another.

Bureaucratic agencies become ideal tools for tyrants.  A tyrant can point his agencies in a particular direction and unleash them.  They immediately glory in their new power.  Horrors ensue.  Nazi Germany gave us the Holocaust and war.  Stalin used betrayal.  Friends betrayed friends.  Children spied on parents.  During the Soviet show trials of the 1930’s Stalin’s innocent victims were forced to falsely confess in order to save the lives of their families.  Fear reigns. 

Sound familiar?  How about the FBI inducing General Flynn to plead guilty in order to protect his son?  Mao injected dark comedy by unleashing hordes of children to humiliate their elders.  No one was safe.  Fear reigns.  Sound familiar?  Antifa anyone?  Black Lives Matter anyone?  Greta anyone?  Mao lives!

The United States has become an undemocratic administrative state as well, but only by happenstance.  In this country Congress has ceded much of its power to unchecked regulatory agencies, allowing them to write their own laws — regulations which enable them to prosecute, and persecute, anyone who might stand in an agency’s way.  The agencies are powers unto themselves — judge, jury, and arresting police altogether.  Innocents are often victims.

It isn’t just the regulatory, or administrative, state that is the problem.  There is a growing sense that something is terribly wrong throughout society – throughout progressive liberal society, that is.  How about needles in the street?  How about sanctuary cities, counties and states?  How about the ruins of Detroit?  How about the weekly slaughter in Chicago?  How about suppression of free speech in academia?  How about the corrupt liberal media?  How about big tech bias and censorship?  It seems that our governments, and our intellectual establishments both, no longer serve the average citizen.  They serve only a leftist political ideology, and themselves.

Worst of all, the political ideology that the establishment promotes is antithetical to the native ideology of America.  America was founded as a society with spiritual values.  True America is a society where the family is paramount.  It is a society where a person is rewarded in proportion to his contribution.  It is a society devoted to the individual where the individual is inherently free because his rights derive from the Creator not from the government.  The purpose of government, according to the American ideology, is to serve the individual, not to be his master.  The collection of individuals is to be the master of the government.  This is classical liberalism – now a conservative ideal.  It is the opposite of “progressive liberalism.”

The true American ideology cautions against granting power to any bureaucratic establishment.  In its ever increasing hunger for power the establishment has gravitated to an alien progressive ideology – an ideology of ever bigger government and government control.  But the bossy progressive Left increasingly forbids Americans to be Americans.

Political turmoil is the consequence.  The barons are squabbling.  The Left openly advocates overthrowing the Constitution.  The Right counters with Donald Trump.  The Left politically assassinates him with impeachment.  The Right, with centrist allies, will reelect him anyway.  The Mandate of Heaven has been removed from the elitist establishment.  It is passing to the Deplorables.

It isn’t just in America.  The world as a whole is pivoting.  The dogmatic socialist established order is ending.  We enter the age of the Deplorables.  The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong, in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran.  Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant globalist socialists.  Deplorables everywhere say “from now on we will make our own decisions.”

Hong Kong Deplorables protest extradition bill (credit: Studio Incendo)

What is it with the Deplorables?  What gives them such power? 

Three things, I believe, are elevating them. 

Deplorables are pragmatic.  They are not wedded to any extreme ideology.  Deplorables will go with anything that works.  It is no wonder that the Deplorables began in America.  For, as Americans we inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.

Second, the Deplorables adhere to the original American ideology of free individuals.  They reject the concentration of government power that has accumulated over the past century.

The third energizer is a technological miracle – the internet.  Establishments everywhere fear the internet.  And properly so.  For the first time we can instantly communicate across the world.  We can find like-minded people everywhere.  We have discovered just how very many people agree with us.

It follows that Deplorables are no longer just an American phenomenon, the phenomenon resonates with people everywhere.  People around the world are much the same.  They value their traditions and customs.  They value their families, their values, their spiritual heritage.  They value their nation.  They resent the imposition of intrusive government by strangers, by bureaucratic globalists.  They are becoming Deplorables.

Born in the still free parts of America, this new movement seems destined to chart the course for the whole world — for this century and beyond.

The Mandate of Heaven no longer rests with the condescending progressive bureaucratic establishment.  It is passing back to the people.  It is passing to Deplorables everywhere in the world.

Administrators at New York’s Rikers Island prison have thought of an ingenious plan for a steady supply of lattes, mochas and other artisan beverages that would otherwise cost $4.00 on their way to work; train inmates to become baristas!

Indeed, one of the country’s most notorious jails has an in-house coffee shop that “pops up twice daily in the staff lounge,” serving a picky prison staff their favorite caffeinated indulgence just right, according to the New York Times.

Officer Green wanted her vanilla latte piping hot. “With vanilla on top, not a lot, just a drizzle, and very hot, don’t make it warm,” she shouted to Eddie Rodriguez, who was taking orders. He nodded and wrote Green on the side of a cup. “Don’t worry, I got ya. Extra hot for Officer Green.” Then he slid the cup down the bar where Mr. Rodriguez and the other inmates in the barista training program at the Rikers Island prison complex were adding ice, steaming milk and grinding beans to load into a $3,000 Nuova Simonelli espresso machine.

It was rush hour at the coffee shop that pops up twice daily inside the staff lounge at one of the nation’s most notorious jails. The uniformed guards formed a sea of blue in the dreary institutional lunchroom, with Maury Povich’s talk show playing on an overhead TV and a smell of waffle fries and bleach in the air. They put in their specialty drink orders: a chai latte for a deputy warden (“not too sweet!”). Four shots of espresso for a guard headed into a long shift (“I need that extra kick”). Five orders in a row of the house specialty, the “Captain T”: an iced caramel latte with whipped cream on top named after a favorite officer.

“Omar, you’re an artist, kid!” one guard said as Omar Jhury, 29, swirled the caramel syrup on top and peeled back a straw in a delicate petal shape. –New York Times

“Whole lotta drizzles today,” said 44-year-old inmate Randolph Denis, as he prepared various drinks during a visit to the prison by the Times‘ Amy Chozick, who notes that Denis and the rest of the baristas were “convicted and sentenced to short city sentences” where around 730 inmates and 800 uniformed staff “coexist each day, not always peacefully.

The program was launched in 2017 at the prison’s women’s facility. After overwhelming success (shocking, we know), the New York City Department of Correction expanded it to include 18-24 year-old male inmates. In four weeks, they’ve learned all sorts of practicable coffee shop skills, including customer service, the differences between dark and light roast, and the nuances of steamed milk.

“If it sounds like a piece of tearing paper, it’s ready,” said inmate Eddie Rodriguez, adding “You don’t want to hear popping.”

While the Rikers barista program is unpaid, inmates are learning valuable skills which can, in theory, help them tap into the $88 billion coffee industry upon their release – with the ability to earn $10 to $15 per hour, the average range of a Starbucks employee.

What’s more, “working in a coffee shop helps people inside remember how to interact in polite society,” amid the dehumanizing experience of incarceration.

“In some ways it’s just about restoring dignity. That’s really hard to do if you’re a robot on an assembly line with no windows working 10 hours a day,” said Nick Hirsch, director of the Coffee Crafters Academy which operates two in-prison coffee shops in Ohio. “But when you craft a drink, you have to have soft skills, customer interaction, that impacts your work.”

Those cordial customer interactions can help leaven daily prison life, where the guard-inmate relationship is tense. In New York, the barista program is at the forefront of the Department of Correction’s wider efforts to lessen confrontations between inmates and staff and help inmates maintain social skills.

That said, with 68% of released inmates rearrested within three years of release and 83% rearrested within nine years, many employers are weary of hiring ex-cons. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, employers are half as likely to call back applicants who have a criminal record.

While no data exists yet for tracking how many former inmates go on to work in the coffee trade, the Department of Correction said restaurants and hospitality represented a growing field of employment for people with criminal backgrounds. And at a time when ex-convicts have started hip ice cream shops and a boutique workout called Con-Body (“a prison-style fitness boot camp”), coffee is a relatively easy small-business start-up. Numerous women who participated in barista training courses at a prison in Alaska went on to open coffee kiosks or sell coffee out of a van. “You can outfit a full business for less than $100,000,” said Edward Mesick, a barista who trains inmates in the Anchorage area.

“Getting folks a job right after release is a good public safety policy and a good work force development policy,” said Christopher Walker, executive director for New York State at the Center for Employment Opportunities, a nonprofit that helps secure jobs for released inmates.

Interestingly, the program is modeled after the Norwegian prison system, which has more peaceful prisons. Last fall, Bill de Blasio’s director of criminal justice, Elizabeth Glazer, visited the Scandinavian nation, where she observed prisoners wearing their own clothes, cooking their own food (with knives), and receiving a daily allowance to spend at the commissary – a humanizing experience.

“The barista stuff, we’re trying to make it part of a holistic continuum,” said Glazer. “It’s an incredibly important part of how we think about lightening the touch of the criminal justice system.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Chris Powell via Money Metals Exchange,

For most of this decade owning gold and gold-related investments has required the patience of Job, and the sector is so obscure that it is hard to be sure of anything.

But for months now the unusual developments have been piling up so much that it may be possible to regain some optimism.

There are indications of a shortage of metal not just at the New York Commodities Exchange, where for months now most contracts have been settled through a supposedly “emergency” procedure called “exchange for physicals,” but also in London, the hub of the world gold market, where the usual flow of metal to Switzerland recently reversed, with metal flowing back to London amid increasing demand.

This corresponded with announcements of gold acquisitions by central banks that had not shown any interest in gold.

For months, the usual central bank-inspired smashes in the gold futures markets have not been having much effect, even as Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) consultant Robert Lambourne has reported increasing intervention in the market by the Bank for International Settlements.

The Comex has just quickly authorized a vast expansion in what bullion banks can use as collateral for their selling – “pledged gold” held off the exchange, supposedly in London, for whose existence and unimpairment there is no public evidence.

Amid these indications of shortages, the open interest in gold futures on the Comex keeps hitting record highs. The bullion banks selling the contracts seem to be acting as if the gold supply itself is infinite, not just the supply of gold paper.

Or maybe they are acting as if they have confidence that when real metal is exhausted, as it was in early 1968 when the previous gold price suppression scheme, the London Gold Pool, faltered and then collapsed, they will be immunized by a declaration of force majeure, cash settlement, an official revaluation of gold, and even capital controls on the monetary metal.

Any prediction about the gold price is of course just a guess.

But the developments described here are facts, and surreptitious intervention against gold is longstanding Western government policy amply documented by the GATA and confirmed by the refusal of the U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve System, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission to answer some specific questions we have posed along with U.S. Rep. Alex X. Mooney of West Virginia.

Governments less enthusiastic about this market rigging have been on to it at least since 2004 when the Bank of Russia’s deputy chairman, Oleg V. Mozhaiskov, annoyed the London Bullion Market Association’s meeting in Moscow by mentioning GATA’s work.

This Russian central banker called the gold price “enigmatic” and slyly confessing to suspicion that “the real forces acting on the gold market are far from those of classic textbooks that explain to students how prices are born in a free market.”

It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these other governments, including Russia and China, have been acting on Mozhaiskov’s suspicion.

Indeed, the U.S. economists Paul Brodsky and Lee Quaintance hypothesized seven years ago that gold price suppression had become part of a central banking plan to redistribute world gold reserves in anticipation of an international currency reset that would push the gold price way up to hedge central banks against currency devaluations.

The infinite money lately being created and distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York means infinite leverage in the markets, infinite market rigging, infinite speculation, infinite misallocation of capital, and infinite corruption.

But for infinite money creation to succeed, it requires infinite commodity price suppression, or else government currencies are ruined.

So what happens if the primary monetary commodity – gold – runs out, as it more or less did upon the collapse of the London Gold Pool in 1968 and the government-ordered suspension of the world’s main gold market?

Does that lead to von Mises’ crackup boom, a flight to hard assets?

Perhaps no one knows. But “what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

Governments rig markets and particularly the monetary metals markets to sustain their power.

Governments undertake various forms of war against each other – military, political, and economic – to gain or restrict power.

And as his deputy explained to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the State Department in 1974, control of the gold price is control of the world, and gold is the secret knowledge of the financial universe.

The signs swirl all around us even as mainstream news organizations strive to ignore them and governments and central banks refuse to discuss them. So let us confidently hope that a little more light will come into the world again soon.

This past year witnessed the United States nearly go to war with Iran in the Persian Gulf, after a summer of ‘tanker wars’ and the September Saudi Aramco attack, but now it appears the new year will witness a superpowers balancing act of sorts play out in the region. 

FT reports of an unprecedented development in the gulf region: 

Russia, China and Iran launched their first joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman on Friday in a direct challenge to US influence in the Middle East. The move reflects growing co-operation between the US’s two main rivals and the Islamic republic, which is under sanctions imposed by Washington.

Crucially, the start of the four day exercises come as the United States has struggled to attract key European allies to join its ‘maritime naval mission’ in the gulf to thwart Iran. Instead, Europe has initiated its own mission which leaders have emphasized has nothing to do with the US project. 

Predictably, the US mission counts as key regional allies Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But Iran has long stated only its forces and its partners can ‘secure’ vital oil waterways like the Strait of Hormuz.

The unprecedented Iran-China-Russia drills also come after in the past months the US has sanctioned major Chinese shipping companies over alleged sanctions-busting activities related to imports of Iranian oil. 

But sensing that its fortunes and past year of extreme isolation (and with little substantial help from Europe) have changed, Iranian military officials are now boasting in the face of Washington threats. 

Iran has long stated its readiness to work w/our neighbors to secure Persian Gulf. #HOPE-Hormuz Peace Endeavour-is on table right now

Our joint military drills in Oman Sea/Indian Ocean w/ our Russian & Chinese partners make clear our broader commitment to secure vital waterways.

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) December 27, 2019

“The most important achievement of these drills . . . is this message that the Islamic republic of Iran cannot be isolated,” vice-admiral Gholamreza Tahani, a deputy naval commander, was quoted as saying.

“These exercises show that relations between Iran, Russia and China have reached a new high level while this trend will continue in the coming years,” the Iranian naval commander added. 

The US meanwhile, warned in a statement that Iran should “think twice” about following through with the joint exercises, a message already clearly ignored. 

In a statement to FT, the State Department said Friday’s military exercises “should concern all nations with an interest in safeguarding freedom of navigation in the region.” 

Unmoved, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif underscored, “Our joint military drills in Oman Sea/Indian Ocean with our Russian & Chinese partners make clear our broader commitment to secure vital waterways,” in a statement posted to Twitter.

#MarineSecurityBelt#Iran
Sahand frigate, Alvand frigate,Tonb landing craft, Konarak tender, Neyzeh attack craft, Martyr Nazeri vessel, a Tondar-class attack craft, & a tug boat.#Russia
Yaroslav Mudry frigate,Viktor Konetsky tug boat, & Yelyna tanker.#China
Xining destroyer pic.twitter.com/cCGundlzBu

— Iran Military (@Iran_Military) December 26, 2019

And Second Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani described that among the drills’ strategic objectives are “improving the security of international maritime trade, countering maritime piracy and terrorism, exchanging information regarding rescue operations and operational and tactical experience.”

Specifically the joint exercises have been dubbed as as the “Marine Security Belt” and will be conducted across an area of 17,000 square kilometers and is set to demonstrate “various tactical exercises”.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Everything is great in America, isn’t it?

After all, the new Star Wars movie just came out, stock prices just hit another all-time record high, and Americans spent more money on Christmas gifts this year than ever before. According to some people, this is the greatest time to be alive in all of American history, and the years that are ahead of us are going to be even better. Of course if you are gullible enough to believe that there is a giant bridge in California that I would like to sell to you.

We live at a time when our society is literally falling apart all around us, and throwing even more money at our problems is not going to fix them. As I noted the other day, “the suicide rate is at an all-time high, we are fighting the worst drug crisis in our history, according to the CDC more than 110 million Americans have an STD, and we have the highest percentage of children living with a single parent of any nation in the entire world.”

In other words, anyone that is attempting to argue that this is a golden era in America history is being more than just a little bit delusional.

Yes, the stock market has been soaring in recent days, and that is a good thing.

But investors are pouring their money into stocks because they believe that America has an exceedingly bright future.

When that optimism disappears, stock prices will collapse, and then what will we have to brag about?

Everywhere around us, the fabric of our society is deteriorating, and our decline seems to be accelerating with each passing month.

In this article, I am going to share yet more examples of our stunning societal decline with you. The following are 10 things that just happened in America during the holiday season that will make you cringe…

#1 Two real life grinches were trying to ruin the holidays for as many people in Roseville, California as possible before the police caught up with them. According to one media report, they were caught “with approximately 100 stolen packages” in their van: Two men are behind bars after they were found with approximately 100 stolen packages in Roseville, according to the Roseville Police Department.

#2 This is known as “the season of giving”, but one 65-year-old guy in Colorado decided it would be more fun to do it with other people’s money: Just after noon on Monday, a 65-year-old man walked into a downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado bank and stole thousands of dollars before running outside and tossing the cash up into the air while yelling “Merry Christmas!”

#3 Speaking of Colorado, one group of high school students was recently forced to recite poetry that contained worship of Moloch. Apparently that whole “separation of church and state” thing does not apply to pagan deities: A school in Steamboat Springs is under scrutiny after a parent reported an assignment in which students were required to recite sexually explicit and/or distasteful poetry that includes worship of the pagan deity Moloch as well as conveying the topic of “sexting” in society – which was assigned to eleventh grade students without parental consent.

#4 Considering the fact that the streets of San Francisco are constantly littered with human waste, one homeless man decided that it must be okay to defecate in the middle of a grocery store too: The picture shows a disheveled gentleman in a man-bun with his pants around his knees, feces clearly visible on the floor near a chip display as he prepared to wipe.

#5 Don’t let your kids hear about this or you will be sorry. This holiday season, “fart launchers” became one of the most popular toys in America: The Fart Launcher’s reek, “while incredibly accurate … is organic, plant-based, doesn’t get caught in fabric and dissipates in minutes,” WowWee brand manager Andrew Yanofsky tells The Post.

#6 It just wouldn’t be the holidays unless “Florida man” did something really crazy. In this instance, a Florida man was trying to bust down a bathroom door with a hatchet: A Shalimar man is charged with trying to attack another man with a hatchet after using the weapon and his feet to bust down a bathroom door. The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office arrested 39-year old Jason Godwin Christmas Day for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill and culpable negligence.

#7 You may have been safe, warm and well fed this holiday season, but more than half a million Americans didn’t have a home at all: While millions of Americans celebrate Christmas this year with loved ones, carving turkey and sharing gifts, others are not so fortunate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million of us will spend Christmas on the streets. The government agency estimates that on any given day, around 553,000 Americans are homeless. A third of those are families with young children. African Americans and those with disabilities are particularly likely to become homeless.

#8 One rapper in Los Angeles decided that the best way to address the problem of homelessness was to climb on top of a tall building and throw cash down on to the homeless people living on Skid Row so they could fight over it: The 22-year-old rapper known as Blueface climbed onboard a black Mercedes SUV in Skid Row before throwing money out of a bag while dozens of people below scramble to catch the flying cash and pick it up from the ground. The artist, whose real name is Jonathan Michael Porteris, is known for the Benjamin Franklin tattoo on his cheek and a handful of hit tracks that reached viral status in recent years.

#9 Providing daycare for working parents is apparently quite lucrative if you pack them in like sardines. When police investigated a suspicious residence in Colorado Springs recently, they found 26 children and two adult workers hidden behind “a false wall”: Not finding any children, officers spoke with Faith, who, according to Sokolik, “refused to cooperate.” While still in the home, officers said they heard the sound of children, Sokolik said. Eventually, they found “a false wall” leading to a finished basement, where they discovered 26 children — 20 more than the license allowed — all under the age of 3, and two adults, police said.

#10 This last item on the list should definitely break your heart. For many Americans, this is one of the most difficult times of the year. And when the pressure becomes too much, unfortunately some people completely snap. On Christmas Day, a 40-year-old mother in Boston threw her two young children off of the roof of a nine-story parking garage before killing herself as well: A Boston woman who pushed her two young children from the top of a parking garage and then killed herself in a double murder suicide has been identified. Erin Pascal, 40, was named on Thursday as the woman whose body was found on the sidewalk next to those of her two young children; four-year-old daughter Allison and 16-month-old Andrew.

It is such a tragic thing when someone commits suicide, because that is never, ever the solution to anything. There is so much to live for, but our society trains us to relentlessly chase things that don’t really matter.

Sadly, even though the suicide rate is already at a record high, it is likely to go even higher as our society continues to deteriorate in 2020 and beyond.

What we need is not more money.

What Americans really need is more faith, more hope and more love, and those three are in very short supply in our society today.

“They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down… The only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market.” – Trump, 9/5/16

It’s been a year of buying everything:

• S&P’s best year since 1997

• Gold’s best year since 2010

• Bond’s best year since 2014

And all it took was $5 trillion in global liquidity!!!

Source: Bloomberg

Remember, correlation is not causation… especially when your salary depends on it…because this rally in stocks is all about the fun-durr-mentals…The S&P 500 is up almost 30% and earnings expectations are down almost 5% on the year…

Source: Bloomberg

Chinese stocks were unchanged on the week…

Source: Bloomberg

US majors started weak today, rebounded, then ended weak… Nasdaq ended its winning streak…

US Small Caps lagged on the week as Nasdaq soared (the S&P is on the verge of its best year since 1997)…

Nasdaq bounced perfectly off 9,000 intraday…

The Dow bounced off unchanged twice…

AAPL had a more volatile day than normal… was the guy in charge of buybacks taking some time off?

 

Still doesn’t really matter eh?

Source: Bloomberg

We also note that AAPL rejected the Fib 161.8% extension of the late 2018 collapse…

Source: Bloomberg

Something has changed in the last couple of days with AAPL…hedging the huge gains into year-end?

Source: Bloomberg

Even TSLA was red today, but has a long way to catch down to un-exuberant bonds…

Source: Bloomberg

VIX has notably decoupled from stocks this week…

Source: Bloomberg

The open was yet another short squeeze but it didn’t last and stocks dumped. But were rescued into the European close by another squeeze…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields ended the week 3-5bps lower

Source: Bloomberg

10Y yields broke back below 1.90%…

Source: Bloomberg

The Dollar plunged today (biggest single-day drop since Sept 4th)…

Source: Bloomberg

This is the 3rd weekly drop in the last 4 weeks, to its weakest close since July…

Source: Bloomberg

As the dollar has slipped, Yuan has drifted very quietly sideways, apparently pegged around 7.00…

Source: Bloomberg

The pound inched higher this week after last week’s bloodbath, ending back at pre-election-spike levels…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin was unchanged on the week with Bitcoin Cash surging today to lead on the week; Ripple and Ethereum lagged…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin has been relatively stable for two week weeks (despite the pump and dump)…

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities were all higher as the dollar tumbled, but PMs trumped crude and copper…

Source: Bloomberg

Silver topped $18 on the week (though fell back below today)…

And gold topped $1500 and held it…

Silver has outperformed gold for the 3rd week in a row…

Source: Bloomberg

And WTI Crude has accelerated beyond its uptrend channel…

Copper has now risen for 6 straight weeks – the longest streak since Sept 2017…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, investor greed has reached peak-extreme…

And hedge fund exposure to the US equity market is exploding…

This won’t end well