Tag: finance

Authored by Matt Agorist via The Free Thought Project,

In the ostensible land of the free, we are told that all people are presumed innocent until proven guilty by their peers. To those who’ve been paying attention however, we know that “innocent until proven guilty” is a farce into today’s police state. If you doubt this assertion, you need only look at the data to see that a whopping 74% of people in jails across the country – have not been convicted of a crime. 

While it is true that many of these folks are awaiting trial for crimes they did commit, there are innocent people behind bars for the sole reason that they cannot afford bail. A free country — who claims to protect the rights of citizens — should not be keeping hundreds of thousands of presumed innocent people in cages, yet this is the status quo.

A recent report from the Tampa Bay Times shows just how determined the American police state is to guarantee an assembly line of otherwise entirely innocent people to continue this process. Police in Florida are targeting children in an attempt to label them as criminals at a young age — despite the children being entirely innocent.

The Pasco sheriff’s office has a secret list of students it believes could “fall into a life of crime” based on ridiculous standards like their grades.

By these standards, people like Thomas Edison, one of the most successful inventors in human history, could’ve been labeled a criminal after he was kicked out of school at age 12 for being poor at math and unable to concentrate.

Steven Spielburg, the famous movie producer, may have been labelled a criminal as well after he temporarily dropped out of high school only to return to be put in a “special ed” class.

Kids often make poor choices when they are younger and these choices should never put them on some police watch list or criminal database. This is nothing short of “pre-crime” tactics that ultimately lead to segregation of dystopian societies based on ratings from the state.

Nevertheless, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office uses data from the Pasco County Schools district and the state Department of Children and Families to compile this very list from middle and high schools who they think will turn out to be criminals.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff’s office defended the tactics and said its data-sharing practices with the school district goes back 20 years and are intended to keeping school campuses safe. Only a juvenile intelligence analyst and the school resource officers have access to the information, it said.

The department says they use this information to help troubled kids, but the parents of these kids have no idea that police are surveilling their children to potentially label them as future criminals.

“These programs, in conjunction with the School District’s Early Warning System, provides recommendations to community or school based programs or resources, and mentorship to those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, something academically proven to lead the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects,” a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

School officials explained that they didn’t even realize this child surveillance was happening.

School District Superintendent Kurt Browning and the principals of two high schools told the newspaper they were unaware the sheriff’s office was using school data to identify kids who might become criminals.

“We have an agreement with the Sheriff’s Office,” Browning said in a statement. “That relationship has been strengthened in the wake of the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and that includes processes for a two-way sharing of information that could save lives and result in timely interventions with students who are at risk.”

The program, called the Early Warning System tracks students’ grades, attendance and behavior. If a student was a victim of abuse or witnessed abuse, this increases their chances of police labelling them a criminal.

What qualifies for an “at risk” designation could be anything from getting a “D” on a report card to missing school more than three times in a quarter, according to the program’s manual. Other factors include witnessing domestic violence, having a parent in prison and being the victim of abuse or neglect.

The sheriff’s office then compiles this information — combined with grades and other data sets — and puts it into a system that scores children in 16 categories. The unwitting children are then each assigned a label: On Track, At Risk, Off-Track or Critical.

Hundreds of children are on this list.

The sheriff’s office denies that the list is used to label kids as criminals, and claims it is instead used to identify kids at risk for victimization, truancy, self-harm and substance abuse. As the Times reports, however, future criminal behavior is the only designation on the list and the office had a hard time proving anything else:

But the intelligence manual — an 82-page document that school resource officers and other deputies are required to read — doesn’t mention those other risks. Instead, in five separate places, it describes efforts to pinpoint kids who are likely to become criminals.

The office could not provide any documents instructing school resource officers to interpret the list another way.

The idea of cops spying on children in an effort to predict future criminal behavior is chilling. Thankfully, the Tampa Bay Times’ report has shed some much needed light on the practice.

“Can you imagine having your kid in that county and they might be on a list that says they may become a criminal?’ Linnette Attai, a consultant works with student privacy laws, told the Times. “And you have no way of finding out if they are on that list? This is a district that is sending millions of dollars to the sheriff of Pasco County to target its students as criminals.”

Indeed, this is worse than minority report.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is being accused of threatening President Trump with assassination in a speech he gave this past week ahead of the one-year anniversary of the killing of popular Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3rd, 2020 in Baghdad.

It all appears to be based on a mistranslation from the Farsi of Rouhani’s words while he addressed a cabinet session on Wednesday. In a widely shared article The Washington Times quoted the Iranian president as saying, “Trump will soon be dead.” The report claimed that this was a clear death threat, also given Rouhani made a comparison to the Saddam Hussein’s demise. 

But Iran’s leaders are now slamming this as but more “anti-Iran bigotry” designed to escalate tensions as a pretext for preemptive military action against the Islamic Republic. Tehran has called The Washington Times report a deliberate mistranslation based in “fake news”. 

“Cowardice in assassinating foreign leaders is a US-Israeli trademark; NOT Iranian,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzade tweeted Friday evening, strenuously denying all accusations of an Iranian plot to target the US president. 

“@WashTimes should know better than to publish #FakeNews & spread anti-Iran bigotry -even though it has featured PAID content by the outlaw MeK terrorist cult,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman added. “Your readers deserve better!”

This “misunderstanding” comes after past weeks of Iran’s civilian and military leadership vowing future “vengeance” for the assassination of Gen. Soleimani, who headed the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

Here’s how Iranian media presented (presumably correctly) Rouhani’s words translated into English: 

Addressing a cabinet session on Wednesday, Rouhani said: “I said it once, and I repeat it, Trump was like Saddam. Saddam imposed eight years of war against us and he was overthrown, and Trump imposed three years of economic war against us and he will be overthrown in the next few weeks, not just from office but from [political] life.”

“One of the effects of the stupid and disgraceful act of assassinating Martyr Soleimani was that Trumpism ended, and in a few days, this murder’s mandate is drawing to an end and he will go down into the dustbin of history,” Rouhani added.

Cowardice in assassinating foreign leaders is a US-Israeli trademark; NOT Iranian.@WashTimes should know better than to publish #FakeNews & spread anti-Iran bigotry -even though it has featured PAID content by the outlaw MeK terrorist cult.
Your readers deserve better! https://t.co/f8OrGEu4cm pic.twitter.com/FxuYqbp2IE

— Saeed Khatibzadeh (@SKhatibzadeh) January 1, 2021

This isn’t the first time that a mistranslation of the words of Iran’s leadership had led to increased tensions. 

In a 2005 speech then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously declared Iran’s goal was to “wipe Israel off the map”. However, this has since been subject of fierce debate and was largely debunked: 

Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project noted in 2007 that Ahmadinejad “never… uttered the words ‘map,’ ‘wipe out,’ or even ‘Israel'” in his statement.  Rather, he argued, the translation should have been that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”  (Both The Washington Post and The Atlantic came up with similarly variant translations.)

This is a key difference, Mr. Norouzi argued, because Ahmadinejad used the “vanish from the page of time” idiom elsewhere in his speech: when describing the governments of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein.  While war and revolution were involved in the three regimes’ collapse, none of them, Norouzi argued, were “wiped off the map.”  Rather, they underwent regime change.  This suggests in turn, he said, that Ahmadinejad was calling for regime change in Israel, not nuclear genocide.  Juan Cole, another critic of the speech’s translation, compared Ahmadinejad’s statement to Reagan-era calls for the end of the Soviet Union.

Critics of the mistranslation also point out the former president had been referencing Zionism as a political movement as well.

The “wipe Israel of the map” words have been used endlessly by hawks arguing for preemptive action against Iran to prevent their achieving nuclear weapons capabilities. 

Anthony Fauci is being broadly slammed after admitting to the New York Times that he publicly lowballed his estimate of the Covid-19 herd immunity threshold, but, as Holman Jenkins writes in WSJ, it’s ludicrously late in the day to discover that “messaging” has been going on.

Official lying about things large and small has been a staple of COVID politics: the letters to college students threatening them with arrest if they don’t quarantine, the interstate travel “bans” that were never enforced, the death counts that swept up anybody who died of any cause while infected with COVID.

Only lately has this reality snuck into public rhetoric as leaders in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere started admitting that their moves are more about “signaling” than any practical effect.

And now, as The Western Journal’s Kipp Jones reports, Fauci is perhaps up to his “signaling” best once again, saying in an interview that the COVID-19 vaccines becoming mandatory in some cases is “on the table” with regard to international travel, or even in some localities to allow a return to in-person learning at schools.

Speaking to Newsweek in an interview that was published on Friday, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke on the potential for so-called immunity passports, stating, “Anything is on the table. Anything is possible, of course.”

Fauci, who presumed president-elect Joe Biden announced last month would serve as the chief medical adviser in a Biden administration, Forbes reported, signaled he would help to form policy for which cases vaccines might become mandatory. But he doesn’t foresee the federal government mandating the vaccines broadly.

“It’s not up to me to make a decision. But these are all things that will be discussed [under the Biden administration],” he told Newsweek.

Fauci stated with regard to national health matters “we almost never mandate things federally.”

“I’m not sure [the COVID vaccine is] going to be mandatory from a central government standpoint, like federal government mandates,” he said.

“But there are going to be individual institutions that I’m sure are going to mandate it.”

“For example, influenza and Hepatitis B vaccines are mandated at many hospitals. Here at the NIH [National Institutes of Health], I would not be allowed to see patients if I didn’t get vaccinated every year with flu and get vaccinated once with Hepatitis [B]. I have to get certified every year … if I didn’t, I couldn’t see patients,” he said.

As far as mandatory vaccinations for schools go, Fauci said he foresees those decisions being made “at the state level and city level.”

“A citywide school system might require it in some cities but not other cities. And that’s what I mean by things not being done centrally but locally,” he added.

He also speculated some countries might make proof of a vaccine required prior to travel. Israel, for example, will issue the so-called immunity passports to citizens traveling abroad. Those passports could allow those who have them to avoid COVID testing upon arrival at their destinations.

The U.S. could issue similar immunization passports under a Biden administration and potentially at the recommendation of Fauci.

Also, with regard to confusing information about the vaccines which might require those inoculated to remain socially distant and masked, Fauci said that is because it is not yet known if being vaccinated can prevent people from passing along the coronavirus to others.

“We do not know if the vaccines that prevent clinical disease also prevent infection. They very well might, but we have not proven that yet,” he told Newsweek.

“That’s the reason why I keep saying that even though you get vaccinated, we should not eliminate, at all, public health measures like wearing masks because we don’t know yet what the effect [of the vaccine] is on transmissibility.”

On the subject of the unknowns about both the coronavirus and now the vaccine, Fauci said “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

A day before his Newsweek interview, Fauci predicted a return to “normality” by the fall of this year during an interview on MSNBC.

“If we do it correctly, hopefully, as we get into the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall of 2021, we can start to approach some degree of normality,” he said.

However, we return to Jenkins’ WSJ op-ed for the reality of a return to normality. At year-end, pundits everywhere sermonized over the lessons of the pandemic: the need to change our relationship with nature, the need for more disease surveillance, etc.

Most of it won’t matter in the least when natural selection throws up another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus wasn’t just transmitted easily; crucially, its effects were mild enough that for billions of humans the cost of quashing it outweighed the personal benefit.

This rock-bottom truth our uninsightful media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse, it tried to make this truth go away by frightening or morally bullying people into behaviors at odds with perceived self-interest.

This proved to be the dead end it usually does. We need to smarten up. Limited social distancing to protect the most vulnerable is the only kind likely to prove sustainable over time.

In July, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler thought he was in control. As BLM protests raged across the country in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died while in police custody in late May, Wheeler decided to mingle with protesters – a mix of BLM activists and Antifa.

Yet, instead of a rockstar crowd-surfing moment or whatever fantasy he envisioned, Wheeler was mocked as he gagged on tear gas, until he was forced to flee.

“He doesn’t deserve to speak. He’s a fucking fascist.” pic.twitter.com/EEXrg918u1

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) July 23, 2020

Two weeks later, Wheeler had changed his tone – calling protesters who attempted to burn down a police station with people inside “attempted murderers,” as the city saw its most violent month in decades – which came after the Portland City Council slashed the police budget as part of an early July push to defund the police. The move forced the city to make drastic cuts to its Gun Violence Reduction Team as lawless anarchists destroyed property throughout the city.

The loss “forced us into a position where we have to really look at what resources we can bring to bear, absent that structure that we had with the Gun Violence Reduction Team,” said Police Chief Chuck Lovell in August.

In December, Portland police were attacked in broad daylight after Antifa erected a new ‘autonomous zone.’ Police were seen being struck by fists, fists, and even bricks hurled through the air “in broad daylight,” as the AP described further that “The violence happened in broad daylight.”

More video of how antifa in Portland attacked police at the autonomous zone and made them retreat. They sprayed a chemical all over one police cruiser’s front window to completely block the view while others threw projectiles. pic.twitter.com/La91Tn2F5r

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) December 9, 2020

Portland protesters have put up barricades on Mississippi Ave in an attempt to block an eviction of “The Red House” residence. Portland police have attempted to evict on multiple occasions during the over the past year. #Portland #protest #Portlandprotests #BLM #Antifa pic.twitter.com/0yYKH8r3ln

— Independent Media PDX (@NDpendentPDX) December 9, 2020

Now, (and with the 2020 election in the rearview mirror) Wheeler has had enough in the wake of a New Year’s Eve riot.

Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese spoke about the new year’s eve riot in downtown Portland where antifa ransacked and looted businesses, started fires, assaulted responding law enforcement, and tried to break into the Justice Center. pic.twitter.com/1iutoyagup

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) January 2, 2021

In a New Year’s press conference, the Portland Mayor admits that efforts to compromise with Antifa have failed, and he’s now committing to pushing back – with his limited police force.

“My good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence, and even scorn, from radical Antifa and anarchists,” said Wheeler.

“It will be necessary to use additional tools, and to push the limits of the tools we already have, to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end,” he added. “Lawlessness and anarchy come at great expense, and with great risk to the future of our community. It’s time to push back harder against those who are set on destroying our community, and to take more risks in fighting lawlessness.”

“I condemn anyone who engages in violence or criminal destruction no matter what their ideology.”

In his new year’s presser, Portland Mayor @tedwheeler admits that his efforts to de-escalate & compromise with antifa have failed to yield results. He condemns the violent extremist movement by name & calls for more to be done. https://t.co/1MJhHOxO1u pic.twitter.com/HtsSSM3dzz

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) January 2, 2021

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Facebook shut down a fundraising page for Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) just days before voters head to the polls to decide between the Republicans and their Democratic challengers.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) runs the Georgia Battleground Fund, a joint fundraising committee for the NRSC and the campaigns for Loeffler and Perdue.

According to a screenshot from the committee, Facebook alerted them that the page for the fund was disabled “for policy violation.”

The page allegedly violated a policy against unacceptable business practices.

“We don’t allow ads that promote products, services, schemes, or offers using deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to mislead or scam people out of money or personal information,” the alert said.

“Big Tech is at it again,” the NRSC said in a statement.

“This is unacceptable with only four days to Election Day.”

A Facebook spokesperson told news outlets that what happened was a mistake.

“An automated error caused this ad account to be disabled,” the spokesperson said.

“The account has since been restored.”

The Jan. 5 runoff elections could determine which party controls the Senate.

Republicans hold a 50-48 edge in the upper chamber in the next Congress. If Democrats win both runoffs and the White House, they’d control the Senate by virtue of the tiebreaking vote the vice president, acting as the president of the Senate, can cast.

Democrats maintained a majority in the House of Representatives, though their edge got slimmer.

Loeffler is being challenged by pastor Raphael Warnock while Perdue is facing filmmaker Jon Ossoff.

In a world where the rollout of covid vaccines has been far slower than the so-called experts predicted – which is bizarre considering the plunge in public faith in the “covid scientist” sector amid the surge in horror stories involving adverse side-effects from both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, to which the mainstream media has finally caught on as detailed in “As COVID-19 vaccines come online, fewer Americans want to take them” – the same mainstream media has been fawning over those counties which have steamrolled through popular skepticism and opposition with authoritarian ruthlessness to unleash widespread vaccination campaigns, praising them as model nations for everyone to follow. Countries like Israel.

Case in point: in its top charts of 2020, none other than Goldman was quick to demonstrate Israel – where over 1 million people or 12% of the population has already been vaccinated – as the sole “successful” outlier in rapid vaccine rollout, and proof that “logistical issues” surrounding vaccinations can be “resolved given Israel’s rapid rollout.”

The New York Times rushed to congratulate Israel, explaining “How Israel became a world leader in vaccinating against COVID-19”  in which it wrote that…

More than 10% of Israel’s population has received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, a rate that has far outstripped the rest of the world and buoyed the battered domestic image of the country’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, at a critical juncture.

Israel’s campaign, which began Dec. 20, has distributed the vaccine to three times as much of its population as the second-fastest nation, the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, according to figures compiled mostly from local government sources by Our World in Data.

By contrast, less than 1% of the population of the United States and only small fractions of the population in many European countries received a vaccine dose by the end of 2020, according to Our World in Data, though China, the United States and Britain have each distributed more doses overall.

In short: Israeal great and shining example of how to force millions to get injected with some mRNA, while the US (and orange man of course) bad.

Which would be fantastic, if only it wasn’t for the ideologically-mandated and rushed conclusion, which is laughable at best and potentially lethal at worst because just as Israel has been scrambling to get everyone vaccinated with substances whose side effects are still very much unknown, the Times of Israel reported that over two hundred Israeli citizens have been diagnosed with the disease days after getting the Pfizer/BioNTech shots. The number of those who got Covid-19 despite being vaccinated was at around 240 people, according to data from the Times of Israel

According to the official explanation provided by the Israeli media, while the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine doesn’t contain the coronavirus and can’t infect the recipient, time is needed for the genetic code in the drug to train the immune system to recognize and attack the disease. The course of the US-made vaccine requires two shots. According to the studies, immunity to Covid-19 increases only eight to ten days after the first injection and eventually reaches 50 percent. The second shot is administered 21 days from the first one, while the declared immunity of 95 percent is achieved only a week after that. And, of course, there’s still a five percent chance of getting infected even if the vaccine is at its full potential.

This is why the second dose of the vaccine, given 21 days after the first, is critical: It strengthens the immune system’s response to the virus, bringing it to 95% effectiveness and ensuring that immunity lasts. This level of immunity is only reached about a week after the second dose — or 28 days after the first.

In other words, anyone who is infected a few days before getting the vaccine’s first dose or in the weeks before full effectiveness is reached is still in danger of developing symptoms. (Even when the vaccine reaches its top potential, there remains a 5% chance of this.)  It wasn’t immediately clear what other symptoms those receiving the rushed vaccine shots may have demonstrated.

For those wondering how Israel has been able to mount such a rapid and aggressive vaccination campaign, the Times of Israel explains that the country’s “heavily digitized, community-based health system — all citizens, by law, must register with one of the country’s four HMOs — and its centralized government have proved adept at orchestrating a national inoculation campaign, according to Israeli health experts.”

With a population of 9 million, Israel’s relatively small size has played a role as well, said Balicer, who is also the chief innovation officer for Clalit, the largest of the country’s four HMOs.

An aggressive procurement effort helped set the stage.

The health minister, Yuli Edelstein, said in an interview Friday that Israel had entered into negotiations with drugmakers as an “early bird,” and that the companies were interested in supplying Israel because of its HMOs’ reputation for efficiency and gathering reliable data.

“We are leading the world race thanks to our early preparations,” he said.

True, meanwhile the world is also looking at Israel with great interest due to the country’s decision to make itself a gunniea pig for the rest of the world in the most rapid administration of vaccines which have been developed in record time and have never been used before. Meanwhile, since vaccinations kicked off on December 20, at least four people in Israel died shortly after getting the short, Kan public broadcaster reported. However, the Health Ministry said that three fatalities were unrelated to the vaccine, with the fourth case of an 88-year-old man with preexisting conditions currently being investigated.

Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

Janet Yellen is back.

Naturally, the follies of Keynesian central banking come to mind.

In many ways, Yellen’s tenure as Fed chairman was far worse than Ben Bernanke’s. At least Bernanke’s money-printing madness was undergirded by his credentials as a misguided scholar of the Great Depression and the mistaken conclusion that the Wall Street meltdown of September 2008 was the prelude to another such occurrence.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by way too much Fed-fostered foreign borrowing on Wall Street during the roaring twenties. It stimulated an unsustainable boom in US exports—soaring domestic CapEx in order to expand production capacity and a stock bubble–fueled consumer-spending boom in cars, radios and appliances. Therefore, when the Wall Street bubble burst in October 1929, foreign borrowing dried up, US exports and CapEx crashed and spending on consumer durables plummeted.

This was the cause of the massive contraction in 1930–1933, which took the GDP down from $95 billion to $58 billion in dollars of the day. By contrast, it had nothing to do with Milton Friedman’s crashing M-1 (money supply), which was a consequence of unavoidable and necessary bad debt liquidation by the banking system. Nor did it stem from any lack of credit availability to solvent borrowers, as demonstrated by market interest rates that remained ultralow (under 2%) throughout the downturn.

The depression of 1930–1933 wasn’t owing to the stinginess of the Fed, which actually expanded its balance sheet by 72% between August 1929 and early 1933.

Consequently, Bernanke’s maneuver of flooding the zone with fiat credit during 2009–2013 was a mistaken page from Milton Friedman’s counterfactual playbook, which was wrong the day it was written in the early 1960s and even more wrong when Bernanke cut and pasted it into his PhD thesis at MIT in 1979.

By the time Yellen became Fed Chairman in February 2014, however, there was no plausible excuse for keeping Bernanke’s bloated Fed balance sheet in place or continuing to keep interest rates at the zero bound. If there was ever a chance to normalize Bernanke’s misbegotten Depression-fighting policy, it was during the 48 months of Yellen’s term.

Needless to say, Yellen’s Fed did no such thing.

After 45 years of devotion to the 1960s Keynesian bathtub theory of full employment economics, Yellen kept real interest rates buried in negative territory during the entirety of her term, and not just marginally.

The 16% Trimmed Mean CPI increased by an average of 1.90% per annum during that four-year period, while the Fed’s target interest rate averaged just 0.40%.

During the sweet spot of the longest business cycle expansion in history—from month #55 to month #103—when the economy should have been left to expand on its own without “stimulus” from the central banking branch of the state, Yellen kept real money market rates pinned at an unprecedented -150 basis points.

The justification for such economic insanity was the claim that the US economy was not at its full-employment level as measured by the dubious U-3 unemployment rate and that the job of the central bank was to keep injecting “demand” into the economy until the bathtub was full to the brim and 100% of “potential GDP” was attained.

But here’s the thing. Potential GDP and full-employment labor markets are Keynesian malarkey.

In a world in which domestic labor competes with China’s price for goods, India’s price for internet-based services and Mexico’s price for manufactured goods assembly, full employment cannot be measured by the headcount metrics of the BLS, nor can it be achieved by injecting massive amounts of fiat credit into the bank accounts of Wall Street dealers.

In fact, with total outstanding credit now at $81 trillion, or 382% of GDP, the Fed’s liquidity injections never really leave the canyons of Wall Street. The result is increased speculation on Wall Street and accelerating inflation of financial asset prices.

After all, money markets do not finance the working capital or fixed asset investments of business, nor do they fund consumer borrowing for automobiles and durables. Instead, short-term money markets are where Wall Street dealers finance their inventory and where speculators fund their positions in the options markets—or via margin and repo credit against stocks and bonds held outright.

Consequently, negative real interest rates are the mother’s milk of financial speculation and the resulting asset price bubbles.

Yellen’s policies constituted an epic monetary error that has fueled bond- and stock -market bubbles that are off the charts, thereby sending erroneous price signals to Wall Street gamblers, corporate C-suites and spendthrift politicians alike.

Real Cost of Money Market Borrowings, 2014–2018: 16% Trimmed Mean CPI Less Fed Funds Rate

The yawning gap below between the red line, signifying (the running inflation rate) and the blue line (the money market rate) connotes the massive subsidy Yellen’s Fed conferred on speculators and day traders.

In short, Yellen sowed the wind of monetary excess, and now we are reaping the whirlwind of a gargantuan Wall Street bubble that is a clear and present danger to the economic future – because it will crash, and the resulting financial and economic damage will be biblical.

Ironically, Janet Yellen may be sitting in the captain’s chair when the most violent and destructive financial storm in history finally comes ashore. It would serve her right.

*  *  *

The coming economic and political crisis is going to be much worse, much longer, and very different than what we’ve seen in the past. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s. Click here to download the free PDF now.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is leading a group of 11 Senators who plan to object to certifying state Electoral College votes on Wednesday.

The group, which includes Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), John Kennedy (R-La.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), are also calling for the resurrection of an Electoral Commission to conduct an emergency audit of the results.

According to Axios, the move pits the group of GOP Senators against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had ‘hoped to avoid the spectacle of his party leading a last-ditch effort to prevent Joe Biden from being declared the 2020 election winner.’

The move comes after Sen. Josh Howley (R-MO) said that he would raise a general objection.

“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed,” the eleven Senators said in a statement.

• The group noted a similar commission – made of five representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices – reviewed allegations of fraud in the 1876 election.
• “Accordingly, we intend to vote on Jan. 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed.” -Axios

Notably, Democrats have raised similar election challenges in the past.

See below for the full text of a joint statement from the Cruz-led coalition:

“America is a Republic whose leaders are chosen in democratic elections. Those elections, in turn, must comply with the Constitution and with federal and state law.

“When the voters fairly decide an election, pursuant to the rule of law, the losing candidate should acknowledge and respect the legitimacy of that election. And, if the voters choose to elect a new office-holder, our Nation should have a peaceful transfer of power.

“The election of 2020, like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.

“Voter fraud has posed a persistent challenge in our elections, although its breadth and scope are disputed. By any measure, the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.

“And those allegations are not believed just by one individual candidate. Instead, they are widespread. Reuters/Ipsos polling, tragically, shows that 39% of Americans believe ‘the election was rigged.’ That belief is held by Republicans (67%), Democrats (17%), and Independents (31%).

“Some Members of Congress disagree with that assessment, as do many members of the media.

“But, whether or not our elected officials or journalists believe it, that deep distrust of our democratic processes will not magically disappear. It should concern us all. And it poses an ongoing threat to the legitimacy of any subsequent administrations.

“Ideally, the courts would have heard evidence and resolved these claims of serious election fraud. Twice, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to do so; twice, the Court declined.

“On January 6, it is incumbent on Congress to vote on whether to certify the 2020 election results. That vote is the lone constitutional power remaining to consider and force resolution of the multiple allegations of serious voter fraud.

“At that quadrennial joint session, there is long precedent of Democratic Members of Congress raising objections to presidential election results, as they did in 1969, 2001, 2005, and 2017. And, in both 1969 and 2005, a Democratic Senator joined with a Democratic House Member in forcing votes in both houses on whether to accept the presidential electors being challenged.

“The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states-Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina-were alleged to have been conducted illegally.

“In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy. Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission-consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices-to consider and resolve the disputed returns.

“We should follow that precedent. To wit, Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.

“Accordingly, we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed.

“We are not naïve. We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise. But support of election integrity should not be a partisan issue. A fair and credible audit-conducted expeditiously and completed well before January 20-would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President. We owe that to the People.

“These are matters worthy of the Congress, and entrusted to us to defend. We do not take this action lightly. We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it. And every one of us should act together to ensure that the election was lawfully conducted under the Constitution and to do everything we can to restore faith in our Democracy.”

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

Leaders in the House of Representatives announced on Friday a rules package for the 117th Congress that includes a proposal to use “gender-inclusive language” and eliminate gendered terms such as “‘father, mother, son, daughter,” and more.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D-Mass.) announced on Friday that the rules package includes changes that would “honor all gender identities by changing pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral.”

A separate announcement from McGovern (pdf) said that the Democratic rules package will make “Changes [to] pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral or removes references to gender, as appropriate, to ensure we are inclusive of all Members, Delegates, Resident Commissioners and their families—including those who are nonbinary.”

James McGovern (D-Mass.) speaks during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 21, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Terms to be struck from clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII, the House’s Code of Official Conduct, as outlined in the proposed rules (pdf), include “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, [and] granddaughter.”

Such terms would be replaced with “parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, [and] grandchild.”

According to the proposed rules, “seamen” would be replaced with “seafarers,” and “Chairman” would be replaced with “Chair” in Rule X of the House.

Pelosi and McGovern said that the overall package “includes sweeping ethics reforms, increases accountability for the American people, and makes this House of Representatives the most inclusive in history.”

The rules package includes removing floor privileges from former Congress members who have been convicted of crimes related to their House service or election.

It would also make it “a violation of the Code of Official Conduct for a Member, officer, or employee of the House to disclose the identity of a whistleblower.”

It also establishes a new Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, to “investigate, study, make findings, and develop recommendations on policies, strategies, and innovations” to “[empower] American economic growth while ensuring that no one is left out or behind in the 21st Century Economy.”

The rules package will be introduced and voted on once the new Congress convenes.

Tesla reported that it fell slightly short of its annual vehicle delivery expectations for the year on Saturday, while beating expectations for Q4. The company is also reportedly cutting prices in China heading into 2021.

The company said it delivered 180,570 EVs in the fourth quarter, which beat its previous record and Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter, which averaged 174,000. It produced 170,757 vehicles during the same period.

But for the year, Tesla fell slightly short of the 500,000 vehicle guidance it issued at the beginning of the year and confirmed during the summer. The company’s deliveries came in at 499,550 – but despite the company’s vehicle totals falling slightly short of expectations, Tesla stock is still up about 700% over the last 12 months.

“…We only count a car as delivered if it is transferred to the customer and all paperwork is correct,” the company’s press release said. Here is how the numbers shaped up for 2020:

The increase in deliveries was clearly driven by the Model 3, while Model S and Model X deliveries remained relatively stagnant:

Some on social media were “less than impressed” with the numbers:

$TSLA misses 2020 delivery guidance given in January and reiterated in July.

Since this guidance, stock price has increased 6X and forward EPS estimates from analysts have decreased. pic.twitter.com/hsBlj0mBBV

— Stultus (@StultusVox) January 2, 2021

The Saturday release is the tell https://t.co/ZbHqtp7naj

— TC (@TESLAcharts) January 2, 2021

*their promises*
500,000 in 2018 & 1,000,000 in 2020 (source: $TSLA filings) &
500,000 in 2019 (source: @elonmusk) pic.twitter.com/5eI53fbEaY

— Eike (@TSLA_Q) January 2, 2021

When’s the last time a stock +700% on the year didn’t absolutely COLLAPSE if it didn’t BLOW AWAY full-year guidance? I believe that “last time” was “never.”

When the SEC learns who’s buying the BIG BLOCKS of call options (not the one-offs) things will get interesting.$TSLA

— Stanphyl Capital (@StanphylCap) January 2, 2021

Too bad you can’t gamma squeeze physical vehicle deliveries

— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) January 2, 2021

“Tesla Says 2020 Deliveries Should Comfortably Exceed 500,000”

Is 499,550 comfortably exceeding?

— Stalingrad & Poorski (@Stalingrad_Poor) January 2, 2021

Much of Tesla’s production goals were helped along by the company’s plant in Shanghai – but it’s unclear whether that momentum will continue into the new year, as we have noted that Tesla appears to be falling out of favor with the Chinese state. 

And why release the delivery news on a Saturday? As it turns out, the company’s delivery news came right around the same time Chinese state media reported that Tesla had announced price cuts for its models in China. “The Tesla Model Y now has a starting price of 339,900 yuan (US$52,262) for its long range sedans, compared with 488,000 yuan previously,” Shine reported. 

One Chinese Tesla owner commented: “Why are there so many price cuts by Tesla. The price cuts are so deep that they hurt the hearts of owners of Teslas like me.”