Tag: finance

The Japanification of Japan continued its bold, if one-way voyage into the surreal in November when according to estimates by Shingo Ide equity strategist at NLI Research Institute, the Bank of Japan – which unlike most developed central banks long ago dropped any pretense of manipulating equity markets and has been buying ETFs and REITs for over a decade – took over as the biggest owner of the nation’s stocks, with the total value of its holdings climbing above a record 45 trillion yen.

On the back of massive ETF purchases to prop up the Japanese stock market amid the pandemic this year combined with subsequent valuation gains, the value of the BOJ’s Japanese equity portfolio has hit 45.1 trillion yen, $434 billion, in November.

That, according to Bloomberg, marks the first time that the central bank’s holdings have eclipsed those of the other Japanese market whale, the world’s largest pension fund the Government Pension Investment Fund, whose equity holdings Ide estimated at 44.8 trillion yen last month.

What this also means is that by matching the purchases of the country’s largest pension fund, the BOJ is effectively backstoping the country’s retirement system which would be insolvent had the BOJ not propped up the country’s equities which is where a substantial portion of retirement “wealth” is parked since JGBs yield next to nothing.

To be sure, regardless of which Japanese whale is bigger, the massive presence of these two public entities in public “capital markets” (where independent price discovery no longer exists) has raised concerns over their influence on market prices. The combination of “a state-run institution, the BOJ, and the country’s representative public pension fund, the GPIF, buying up local equities feels distorted,” said Satoshi Okumoto, chief executive officer at Fukoku Capital Management, quoted by Bloomberg. We are confident that Satoshi realizes that without the “distorted” buying by these institutions, the Nikkei and Topix would be a fraction of its current value… and he would most likely be out of a job.

Realizing that allocating capital to Japan’s zero-yielding bonds is a losing proposition, the GPIF increased its equity market presence in 2014 when it doubled its allocation target for local stocks to 25% as part of an effort to increase returns through a shift into riskier assets. The BOJ’s ETF purchases started in earnest in 2010 (the BOJ had been purchasing equities previously as well but with nowhere near the same “dedication”) and accelerated later as part of Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s unprecedented stimulus package aimed at revitalizing the economy.

As shown below, the BOJ further ramped up its support program this year as the coronavirus outbreak sent equity markets tumbling, saying in March it could potentially purchase 12 trillion yen worth of Japan ETFs this year, double its annual target. After a few months of heavy buying the pace has slowed back down, and it’s likely the total for 2020 will fall short of the new theoretical limit, although we are confident the BOJ will more than make up for it over the long-term.

Even at the current pace, however, “the gap between the BOJ and GPIF’s stock holdings will widen further,” according to NLI’s Ide, especially if share prices continue to rise: the benchmark Topix climbed 11% in November while the Nikkei 225 Stock Average surged 15% in its best month since 1994. That pushed unrealized gains on the BOJ’s stock purchases to over 10 trillion yen at one point in November, according to Ide.

Amusingly, Japanese strategists took time to remind readers that central banks never sell the stocks they have bought: “The BOJ has never taken profits on its holdings and only continues to build its holdings in ETFs,” said Takashi Ito, a strategist at Nomura. The GPIF, meanwhile, “has to sell equities when prices are high to adjust the weight of stock holdings within its portfolio.”

Yet as the BOJ loads up on even more stocks, it “could face more scrutiny” over whether it needs to continue buying equities when prices are elevated like they are presently, said NLI’s Ide. BOJ Governor Kuroda has repeatedly said that the ETF purchases are needed as part of monetary stimulus to reach the BOJ’s inflation target, an excuse which in light of events in the past decade is as laughable as it is stupid now that even shoeshine boys know that the only mandate central banks have is to make sure stocks never drop and the business cycle remains dead.

Submitted by Harry Kazianis of the Center for the National Interest

On Saturday afternoon (December 5, 2020, EST), I spoke to National Security Advisor and Special Assistant to the President Robert C. O’Brien in an exclusive interview for 19FortyFive. We had a long and detailed discussion centered almost entirely on Asia, but with a specific focus on coronavirus, China’s response to the pandemic, North Korea, and much more.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

First, as we are now a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I would like to get your thoughts on China’s role in this crisis. The Trump administration in the past has been very tough on Beijing, criticizing their reaction, lack of transparency, and initial response. How much blame today, if any, do you place on China for the spread of the Coronavirus? Do you think they could have done more? 

They absolutely could have done more.

From the very start, we wanted to have CDC teams go into China and help them to try and contain the disease and understand the disease because this was the fourth or fifth major disease that’s come out of China since the turn of the century. We had SARS, H1N1 and MERS probably came from China and now we have COVID so this is–we have had AVIAN Flu–so this a recurring public health problem coming out of China. They don’t have these things under control.

And it doesn’t just affect China, as we have seen with here COVID, it has affected the entire world. It has affected the world economy.

More importantly, it’s the hundreds of thousands of people that have been killed in the United States and around the world and the death and tragedy it has brought. And the Chinese did not do anything to help from the start. They weren’t transparent.

The doctors and nurses who were whistleblowers at the onset of this were silenced, potentially thrown in jail. So we are very concerned about the lack of transparency coming out of China and that’s something we have pointed out from the start. The Chinese have never cured it. They have never given us the information we need to fully understand this virus and that’s really a shame.

The other thing they did is they launched false stories about this being a U.S. Army program or engaged in other what they call “wolf warrior diplomacy” and “mask diplomacy” in an attempt to exploit the virus, to obtain preferential treatment for Huawei or other Chinese companies around the world.

The Chinese have handled this thing very poorly with a lack of transparency in an attempt to capitalize on the virus to gain a geopolitical advantage over their neighbors, the United States, and other countries. It’s a very sad record for the Chinese, and the president has been willing to call it out, unlike many others. And I think the Chinese loss of credibility will be very difficult for them to overcome as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sticking with China for the moment, Alex Wong, the Deputy Special Representative at the U.S. State Department on North Korea, in a recent address to CSIS was very tough on China for its lack of North Korean sanctions enforcement–a problem that to be fair has plagued many U.S. administrations in the past. What steps would you like to see Beijing take to enforce sanctions more effectively? Can they, in fact, be trusted to enforce sanctions considering the challenging state of U.S.-China relations?

As the Deputy Special Envoy for North Korea to Stephen Biegun, he [Alex Wong] knows this issue incredibly well. We are concerned, as is Alex and others in the State Department, about the lack of sanctions enforcement by China.

They continue to allow North Korean workers to come into China and make remittances back to North Korea. We think they have been very lax on the transfer of coal and other commodities out of North Korea.

As we have done from the start, we call on China to fully live up to their obligations as members of the UN, and specifically, members of the security council, because the sanctions against North Korea are security council driven sanctions so China is under a special obligation to enforce those.

They talk about wanting to be involved in multilateral organizations and lead multilateral organizations. If that is going to be the case then they need to fulfill their obligations to enforce multilateral sanctions.

There have been quite a few reports coming out of North Korea claiming that the so-called hermit kingdom is in varying degrees of lockdown due to the Coronavirus. How worried are you when it comes to the overall stability of the Kim regime, considering their health care system would be highly challenged to handle any large-scale outbreak? Would the U.S. stand ready to help the DPRK if asked for assistance? 

On humanitarian assistance during the COVID crisis, we have been helpful to friends and foes alike.

We would have to look at the circumstances and see what the request was but the president was incredibly generous for example with ventilators. We passed out ventilators all over the world, stoop up an industry almost from scratch almost, and built 100,000 ventilators at a time when folks thought it would be impossible to even supply the United States with ventilators. Not only have we resupplied the U.S., rebuilt our stockpile, but we gave out 16,000 ventilators around the world and some of those went to countries who our advisories or competitors of ours because this COVID crisis is a humanitarian crisis and this is something we want to help people around the world.

We would take a very careful look at it and I am sure to alleviate the COVID pandemic we would look for opportunities to help North Korea if it was asked for.

So far, they appear to have avoided any sort of mass outbreak of COVID. That’s sometimes easier to do in an authoritarian country where you can have a lockdown and close the borders and institute very draconian policies which is what the DPRK has done so far. So, we will have to wait to see what happens, but if there was a mass outbreak and they asked for help from the United States, something, as you know, you’re an expert on this Harry, they have been reticent to ask for outside help for things in the past but if they did we would certainly look at that very seriously.

I think the president’s inclination is to always provide humanitarian assistance around the world to whoever needed it when it was a flood or fire or pandemic relief. That’s something the United States does and we do it often without respect to the governing party in a country that is seeking assistance.

One underappreciated threat when it comes to North Korea is the challenge they pose when it comes to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This topic broadly was something then-candidate Trump also worried about as he feared the spread of nuclear weapons technology. What steps has the U.S. taken to ensure North Korea cannot or will not try to sell or trade WMD technology? 

I think the North Koreans understand that if they started proliferating on a significant scale–either ballistic missiles or delivery systems or in the worst-case scenario weapons of mass destruction especially on the nuclear side or biological or chemical as well–that would really be crossing a redline with not just the United States but the international community.

It would be an extraordinarily risky venture for Kim Jong Un to get into the proliferation business when it comes to nuclear weapons. It’s something that I am hoping won’t happen. We don’t see it on the WMD side–we don’t see that happening at this point.

We have real concerns on the ballistic missile proliferation side of the ledger but on the weapons of mass destruction side, it’s something that would take the crisis to a whole other level.

We would certainly look at what the response from the U.S. would be if there was the proliferation of nuclear weapons or nuclear material out of North Korea to other rogue states or other unstable areas.

That would be extraordinarily unhelpful and I don’t think at the end of the day would be good for North Korea.

Finally, clearly, North Korea has built up its asymmetric cyber-warfare capabilities. How would you assess this overall threat to U.S. security and what steps has the Trump Administration undertake to mitigate it?  

North Korea has a very sophisticated cyber capability and cyber warfare capability. That’s something we take seriously.

It’s one of a number of countries that has a degree of capability when it comes to cyber. Iran is another country that has a lot of capability, of course, Russia and China are probably the biggest competitors to the skills and capabilities the United States maintains. So we are watching all of those countries carefully and there are other countries. Venezuela has a cyber capability.

The new age of warfare is going to be fought in cyber to a large extent and it’s also going to be fought in the ultimate high ground of space.

We have invested a tremendous amount of money into resources in Cybercom in the NSA into all of the tools that we need to protect the internet but also our critical infrastructure when it comes to digital infrastructure.

We also have invested in offensive capabilities to deter our adversaries from engaging in acts against us.

On the space front, we have created the Spaceforce which is the first new branch of the armed services in seventy years. In addition to things like protecting satellites and kinetic abilities, the Spaceforce will also have a very significant cyber capability.

As so much of our information is transmitted through space and through our satellite systems and otherwise we have done what we can to harden our infrastructure. But we have also made it a priority for the Pentagon to be prepared to go offensive if necessary in cyber and in the space domain. North Korea is just one of several countries that have highly advanced technical capabilities in that realm.

“You don’t need Congress – All you need is the flick of a pen,” Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded of President-Elect Joe Biden during a Monday press conference outside his Midtown Manhattan office, continuing to pile on the pressure for a controversial immediate student debt forgiveness of $50,000 for each and every borrower (with the exception of course for all who’ve previously dutifully paid off their debt).

Schumer is urging Biden to act on the very first day he takes office after January 20. “We have come to the conclusion that President Biden can undo this debt, can forgive $50,000 of debt the first day he becomes president,” he said.

.@SenSchumer stepping up pressure today on Biden to use executive action to cancel $50K of student loan debt per borrower — and to pick an education secretary who will do that.

“You don’t need Congress,” Schumer said. “All you need is the flick of a pen.” pic.twitter.com/gh0eRQbJfu

— Michael Stratford (@mstratford) December 7, 2020

But given that analysts speaking from the perspective of both sides of the aisle are unanimous in saying there’s no way the Schumer-Warren plan would ever get past Congress, Schumer is pushing for an “overnight” solution to what would be the inevitable impasse crucially without legislation.

Biden has previously vowed to forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for all (with an additional slashing of all debt for public university and Black college attendees whose families are below a certain income level); however, progressives are angered that it’s ‘simply not enough’ especially amid the coronavirus pandemic, they argue. 

1. Biden-Harris can cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt, giving tens of millions of Americans an immediate financial boost and helping to close the racial wealth gap. This is the single most effective executive action available for a massive economic stimulus.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 12, 2020

Biden’s current plan would result in, according to some common estimates, a whopping $1.7 trillion outstanding student loan debt being wiped out.

But it’s far from enough, says Schumer – echoing statements of Elizabeth Warren – in the Monday press conference which was held alongside New York congressman-elects Mondaire Jones, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres.

“College should be a ladder up but student debt makes it an anchor down. For far too many students and graduate students, some years out of school, student loans and federal student loans are becoming a forever burden,” Schumer said. 

But look at the language and word choice:

“They stand in the way of people getting the job they want, they stand in the way of buying a home, of starting a family, of buying a car and they hurt our economy dramatically,” Schumer added.

So apparently if someone doesn’t get something for nothing this is a supposed barrier to a job, home, and even starting a family.

Progressive Dems have already been attempting to lay legal groundwork in an effort to bypass Congress, as noted in CNBC:

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to forgive student loans in the first days of her administration, including with her announcement an analysis written by three legal experts, based at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, who described such a move as “lawful and permissible.”

“The Federal Reserve says this would be a huge shot in the arm to the economy,” Schumer claimed.

Just like that. Really the senator should stop with the medical analogy and go with something else like… Poof! it’s magic. 

But, pushing back against such wishful and fanciful imaginings of the woke, here’s Goldman Sachs with a new report out which shows Even Substantial Student Debt Relief Would Only Have a Small Effect on GDP and in particular that—

Most student debt—and the vast majority of debt with a large balance—is held by households with a graduate or professional degree that have high earnings potential and are less likely to be resource constrained.

* * *

Here’s the executive summary of Goldman Sachs’ research (emphasis ZH)…

Barring surprise Democratic wins in the Georgia Senate runoffs, a divided government appears most likely, meaning any fiscal expansion will likely be limited by Senate Republicans. Against this backdrop, some Democrats have recently proposed forgiving existing federal student debt through executive action. In this US Daily we consider student debt relief proposals and analyze their potential effects on the federal budget and GDP.

President-elect Biden will likely have the authority to forgive federal student debt through executive action. Although some Democrats have suggested wiping away all federal student debt (or all loans under $50k), we think smaller-scale debt forgiveness up to $10k/borrower would be more likely if the incoming Biden Administration chooses to act. In light of tax rules, this might be structured as a payment reduction rather than immediate cancellation.

There are several reasons to be skeptical that forgiving student debt would provide a large boost to consumption. Most student debt—and the vast majority of debt with a large balance—is held by households with a graduate or professional degree that have high earnings potential and are less likely to be resource constrained.

Furthermore, student loan payments reflect a modest share of after-tax income for most borrowers, partly because many lower-income households already qualify for debt relief.

We estimate that forgiving federal student loans up to $10k would add less than 0.1% to the level of GDP starting in 2021, and cumulatively add only $0.43 in real GDP for each $1 of forgiven debt over the next 10 years.

A more generous debt relief program that forgives federal loan balances up to $50k would provide a slightly bigger boost to GDP, but would have a smaller per-dollar impact.

Forgiving federal student loans up to $10k would likely cost around $300bn (1.6% of GDP), while forgiving loans up to $50k would cost around $800bn (4.1% of GDP).

However, since these loans have already been funded through prior Treasury issuance, the impact on Treasury financing would be spread out over many years due to the lack of interest and principal payments. If loans were forgiven immediately, Treasury’s financing needs might actually decline, as tax payments on the forgiven amounts would likely more than offset the lack of scheduled loan payments. 

Nat gas futures plunged Monday morning on new weather models suggesting “December could end top 3 warmest all time,” according to weather forecasters BAMWX. 

“BAMWXWeek 3/4 forecast guidance via the CFS/GEFS suggesting December could end top 3 warmest all time. Similar cases in years past go on to suggest Winters run incredibly warm. Our top analogs going forward would favor a top 5 warmest winter on record scenario.”

Nat gas futures are getting clobbered, down more than 6% to around $2.42.

“It’s hard to look at a near-term temperature forecast such as this & NOT be surprised when #natgas gaps down 7%. All of the bullish catalysts—record LNG exports, stalled production, strengthening powerburn, tight S/D imbalance—are ignored, for right or wrong, in this environment,” one energy trader said. 

It’s hard to look at a near-term temperature forecast such as this & NOT be surprised when #natgas gaps down 7%. All of the bullish catalysts—record LNG exports, stalled production, strengthening powerburn, tight S/D imbalance—are ignored, for right or wrong, in this environment. pic.twitter.com/pAALavWcFW

— Celsius Energy (@CelsiusEnergyFM) December 7, 2020

 Blame the abnormally warm weather on La Nina? 

Real Vision managing editor Ed Harrison is joined by editor Jack Farley to break down the froth of the market and explore whether it will boil over. Ed analyzes the significance of the Smart Money Index’s (SMI) hitting a one-year low, and Jack gives a snapshot of the roaring U.S. credit markets. Ed looks at the ongoing efforts to distribute the vaccine in the U.K. and ponders the rotation trade from growth to value stocks, as electric vehicle makers surge and cloud technology stocks remain exorbitantly priced, by historical metrics. Ed discusses Tesla’s eclipsing of Berkshire Hathaway in market capitalization, a phenomenon which Ed sees as the epitome of the market’s current zeal for flashy, growthy names. In the intro, Real Vision’s Haley Draznin reviews price action and stimulus hopes, as well as a slew of upcoming IPOs, including DoorDash and AirBnb.

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and the BIS – the central banks’ central bank – warning about excesses from monetary policy (the most recent amusing example of this was last October when as we wrote, “Fed Announces QE4 One Day After BIS Warns QE Has Broken The Market“). Actually, to this list of 3 certainties we can add one more: central banks roundly ignoring the warnings from the central bank mothership.

That, however, does not prevent the BIS from continuing this trend of warnings, and today the Basel-based organization did just that when in its Quarterly Review publication it cautioned that the surge in financial markets following COVID-19 vaccine breakthroughs and the U.S. election has left asset prices increasingly stretched.

Sounding surprisingly similar to Goldman, which as we reported earlier today issued an almost identical warning, when it observed that its sentiment indicator is now +2.0 standard deviations above average…

… which has left positioning extremely stretched and represents a 98th percentile reading since 2009…

… the BIS’ quarterly report on Monday noted how credit markets and some of world’s biggest stock markets had surpassed their pre-pandemic levels despite the significant degree of uncertainty that still remains over the pandemic as it continues to spread.

The BIS’ perpetual skeptic, Claudio Borio, who is also Head of the BIS Monetary and Economic Department, said a rally had been justified by the vaccine news and ongoing fiscal and monetary stimulus, but there were also signs of an overshoot.

“A certain amount of daylight between risky asset valuations and economic prospects appears to persist,” Borio said diplomatically in his latest warning that markets and equities are disconnected, adding that “questions about overstretched valuations” had already been present before the coronavirus crisis.

As regular readers know, the views of the Basel-based BIS – which was profiled here in 2015 in “Meet The Secretive Group That Runs The World” – are often watched by economists as the world’s top central bankers take part in its behind-closed-doors meetings. They are then summarily ignored because whereas the BIS has been preaching a return to monetary orthodoxy for the past decade, that is no longer possible for central banks which have boldly entered the global Minsky Moment with helicopter money in tow.

In any case, Borio said one of the developments it was particularly wary of was the rapid easing of stress in corporate credit markets, which recently culminated in record low junk bond yields, a paradox considering that corporate leverage hit record highs, yet perfectly understandable in light of the Fed’s backstop of the entire corporate bond market.

And in a dire warning that got virtually no airplay today, Borio made the following stunning announcement to reporters. “We are moving from the liquidity to the solvency phase of the crisis.”

Translation: it’s about to get much worse, only because central banks will ignore all the warnings, they will double down on the same failed policies, pushing leverage to even record-er highs, yields to even record-er lows, and sparking a propagation of zombies the likes of which have never before been seen.

“We should be expecting more bankruptcies going forward yet credit spreads are quite low by historical standards, and indeed while banks are pricing risk more carefully we don’t see the same in capital markets.”

One almost sensed the futility in Borio’s comments when he said that with $17.5 trillion worth of bonds now carrying negative yields many money managers were being pushed into riskier and riskier assets.

Well, WHOSE FAULT IS THAT MR CHIEF HEAD OF THE MONETARY DEPARTMENT AT THE CENTRAL BANKS’ CENTRAL BANK?

Of course, Bortio wouldn’t bring himself to admitting that the very same central banks he is “supposed” to advise are ignoring his warnings and recommendations – and are instead flooding the market with trillions in stimulus which does not flow into the economy but merely makes asset holders richer beyond their wildest imagination – as that would mean that someone, clearly not the BIS, is now in charge of monetary and economic advice at central banks.

Which also means that the BIS is no longer relevant, having been upstaged by its constituent members.

Maybe for his next quarterly report, Borio and his BIS colleagues can write a lengthy report discussing just who or what is now in control of global monetary policy, because the BIS’ track record has merely devolved to publishing quarterly warning after warning that everyone now openly ignores and flaunts.

In his parting words absolution to the helicopter money insanity that has taken over, Borio had no choice but to admit that – despite his misgivings – he has to side with the central banks: “The outlook is rather uncertain and you would rather err on the side of doing too much as opposed to doing too little.”

Brilliant… just ignore that the entire world is now on the verge of a financial cliff where the next crash will not only wipe away hundreds of trillions in wealth and destroy confidence in central banks and fiat money, but abolish the voodoo “science” that is modern economics that keeps people like Borio employed.

It will be for the best.

Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The legal team led by former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell will appeal the dismissal of the election lawsuit tossed by a federal judge on Monday.

Powell told The Epoch Times in an email that they “will proceed as fast as possible to the Supreme Court.”

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Batten dismissed Powell’s lawsuit on Dec. 7, opining that the plaintiffs have no standing to sue, should have brought the lawsuit to a state court, and had filed the case too late.

“There’s no question that Georgia has a statute that explicitly directs that elections contests be filed in Georgia Superior Court,” Batten, an appointee of President George Bush, said in explaining his decision following an hour of oral arguments in court on Monday. “They are state elections. State courts should evaluate these proceedings from start to finish.”

Batten signaled his skepticism about the lawsuit at the opening of the hearing, choosing some of the talking points emphasized by the defendants to introduce the case.

Powell filed the lawsuit on Nov. 25 on behalf of the presidential electors for President Donald Trump. One of the core allegations of the lawsuit concerns election machines and software by Dominion Voting Systems. The lawsuit cited several affiants to claim that the Dominion machines were manipulated to illegally alter the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.

“Their primary complaint involves the Dominion ballot marking devices. They say that those machines are susceptible to fraud. There’s no reason they could not have followed the administrative procedure act to object to the rulemaking authority that had been exercised by the secretary of state. This suit could have been filed months ago when the machines were adopted,” Batten said.

Plaintiffs asked the court to decertify the results of the election, a remedy the judge deemed extraordinary.

Powell also alleged the existence of several other categories of potentially illegal votes, each sufficient to dispute the outcome of the election. She disagreed with the argument that the plaintiffs do not have standing or brought the suit too late.

“For those reasons we request the court to deny the motion to dismiss, allow us a few days, perhaps even just five, to conduct an examination of the machines that we have requested from the beginning and find out exactly what went on and give the court further evidence it might want to rule in our favor because the fraud that has happened here has destroyed any public confidence that the will of the people is reflected in their vote and just simply cannot stand,” Powell said in closing her argument.

Something strange is going on at the New York Times, in that the paper all of a sudden seems keen on digging hard into the truth about the origins about Covid-19. In fact, as of last week, CNN appears to be doing the same. 

This weekend the Times published a lengthy piece that looked into how China is peddling different stories to try and cover up the origins of the Covid pandemic. These efforts come as the World Health Organization readies an investigation into how the virus jumped from animals to humans. 

In addition to reporting on China’s misinformation, the piece also seemed to lend credence to the idea that the “official narrative” out of China (that got us banned from Twitter for some time) may not be the gospel the mainstream media once thought it was.

The NYT refutes deflections from China, where officials are now blaming everybody but themselves as the culprit for Covid. The article noted that “state news media has published false stories misrepresenting foreign experts” in order to suggest the virus came from outside of China. 

One non-peer reviewed paper from the state run Chinese Academy of Sciences suggested that India could be to blame. It states: “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened.” The paper was submitted to, and then mysteriously pulled by its authors from The Lancet. 

The country is also pushing a narrative that frozen food from other countries could have started the pandemic. Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said recently: “More and more evidence suggests that the frozen seafood or meat products probably spread the virus from countries with the epidemic into our country.”

But experts have said “packaged food alone cannot explain why the first major outbreak took place in Wuhan.”

Erin Baggott Carter, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern California, said the misinformation is to try and skirt blame, plain and simple. She said: “If Xi is able to escape blame for the coronavirus, that reduces one major source of discontent with his rule.”

The ramp up of misinformation comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) is starting an investigation into Covid’s origins. China has “tightly controlled” the WHO’s efforts in the past, the NYT notes:

The party also appears eager to muddy the waters as the World Health Organization begins an investigation into the question of how the virus jumped from animals to humans, a critical inquiry that experts say is the best hope to avoid another pandemic. China, which has greatly expanded its influence in the W.H.O. in recent years, has tightly controlled the effort by designating Chinese scientists to lead key parts of the investigation.

WHO emergency director Michael Ryan said: “We need to start where we found the first cases and that is in Wuhan in China.”

Recall, about 10 months after Zero Hedge was suspended from Twitter and ridiculed by those peddling the “official” narrative about Covid-19 for an article we published asking critical questions about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the Washington Post also did the same thing.

As a reminder, in January 2020, shortly after we asked if “This [Is] The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic“, referring to Wuhan Institute Of Virology scientist Peng Zhou (who three months later was being investigated by western spy agencies for his role in creating Covid) and some low-grade “reporter” from Buzzfeed decided to report us to Twitter for “doxxing” Zhou using publicly available information, Twitter told us our account had been suspended.

Recall, in September 2020, Twitter also nuked the account of “rogue” Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who “shocked” the world of establishment scientists and other China sycophants, by publishing a “smoking gun” scientific paper demonstrating that the Covid-19 virus was manmade.

It was not immediately clear what justification Twitter had to suspend the scientist who, to the best of our knowledge, had just 4 tweets – none of which violated any stated Twitter policies – and the only relevant tweet being a link to her scientific paper co-written with three other Chinese scientists titled “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route” which laid out why the Wuhan Institute of Virology had created the covid-19 virus.

For those who missed it, here is our post breaking down Dr. Yan’s various allegations which twitter saw fit to immediately censor instead of allowing a healthy debate to emerge.

133 days after Twitter “permanently” banned Zero Hedge on January 31, the network reinstated us after admitting it made an error. 167 days after that, the Washington Post asked the questions that got us banned in the first place. Now, 309 days since our initial “permanent” ban, it appears The New York Times isn’t sold on the official narrative either. 

Of course, there are numerous theories as to why the NYT cares so much all of a sudden…

Of course they’re putting this out now. Battlefield prep for 1/21/20 when they go all out to show why NOTHING is Feeble Joe’s fault. It will now be Trump’s fault, China’s faults, Italy’s fault, etc…. https://t.co/8gXRUeMtxa

— Defend Santa Cruz (@Save_SantaCruz) December 6, 2020

…but regardless of whether or not the mainstream media embraces it – and, if they do, regardless of for what reason – the truth will eventually make its way out.

Three papers about COVID’s lab origins have already been published in established peer-reviewed journals: https://t.co/4strBzhpW7https://t.co/z1sL1SYENkhttps://t.co/L9otIDK4ZZ

— Harvard2TheBigHouse (@Harvard2H) December 6, 2020

You can read the full NYT report here.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

The top U.S. intelligence official suggested on Sunday that election lawsuits and other issues need to be resolved first before the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election is declared.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox Business that issues brought up by President Donald Trump’s legal team have to be heard in court.

“These election issues, we’ll see who is in what seats and whether there is a Biden administration,” he told the broadcaster.

Ratcliffe said that due to the unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, many questions remain about the results.

“Essentially we had universal mail-in balloting across this country in a way we hadn’t seen before, and to that point, almost 73 percent of the American people this year voted before Election Day, a good percentage of those by mail,” he said.

“That’s about an 80 percent increase over anything we’ve ever seen before, so it’s little wonder that we see what’s happening around the country as a result of that, with mail-in balloting and all of the questions—and the questions that are being raised in lawsuits and by everyday Americans about what happened in the election,” Ratcliffe said.

In the interview Sunday, Ratcliffe made note of allegations that were brought up in recent days, including a truck driver who claimed to have transported hundreds of thousands of apparently completed mail-in ballots from a town in Long Island, New York, to Pennsylvania. He also referred to recent footage obtained by Trump’s team that shows election workers pulling out black, suitcase-like ballot containers from beneath a table after poll observers and other election workers were apparently told to go home for the night at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

“But people need to understand that’s different than election fraud issues—things like postal drivers saying they took 200,000-plus ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. Tens of thousands of ballots supposedly mailed in, but no folds or creases in them. More votes than ballots issued in places,” the intelligence chief said.

“People pulling out suitcases and video evidence of that with questionable explanations for that. Those are issues of election fraud that need to be investigated and there’s a lot of them and it’s not just one person or one group of people. It’s across the country.”

Georgia election officials said the video showing containers being pulled from the table is not unusual, while Trump’s team said it is evidence of fraud. Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, and election officials have provided conflicting accounts of what happened on the night of Nov. 3, with one Fulton County spokesperson, Regina Waller, telling ABC News and other outlets at 11:30 p.m. on Election Night that vote counting was done for the night.

Later that week, other Fulton County officials confirmed that counting had continued for several hours longer. Georgia’s Republican Party chief, David Shafer, has said that poll observers were not present during this time period.

As a result, Ratcliffe said numerous Americans don’t believe “the votes were counted fairly, that the processes at the state and local level weren’t administered fairly.”

Just days after it was announced that Uber was in advanced talks to sell off its air taxi division, the company has also reportedly “abandoned” efforts to develop its own self-driving vehicle.

Uber is going to be transferring its 1200 employee self-driving division to driverless vehicle start-up Aurora, which is backed by Amazon and Sequoia, according to the FT on Monday afternoon. In exchange, Uber will receive a minority stake in Aurora. 

The move comes at a time when Uber is clearly looking to streamline its operations after the shock of the pandemic. It also comes as self-driving “competitor” Tesla reaches a stunning $600 billion market cap, fueled heavily by nothing but rampant speculation about the company’s future prospects; one of which is self-driving.

FT notes that when Uber started its self-driving division in 2016, then-CEO Travis Kalanick called it “basically existential” for the company. Uber also quickly invested $680 million in driverless startup Otto in 2016. 

But Uber’s self-driving project got off to a bad start when, in 2018, a woman was killed in an accident involving one of its test cars in Arizona. Investors in the company, as a result, have pressed Uber to focus on its core business of ride-sharing instead. Uber had also estimated in 2016 it would have 75,000 autonomous vehicles on the road by 2019.

The company also settled with Waymo in 2018 on a trade secrets dispute that resulted in Uber handing over $245 million in stock. 

Aurora currently has 600 people on its staff and Uber will invest $400 million into the business, which was most recently valuated at $2.5 billion in 2019. The Uber deal could “quadruple its valuation to $10bn,” FT notes. Uber’s self-driving division was most recently valued at $7.25 billion in April 2019.

Uber and its partners will own 40% of Aurora after the deal consummates. If Aurora’s valuation quadruples accordingly, the $4 billion valuation presents a sharp markdown on the division’s valuation for Uber. 

Chris Urmson, Aurora’s chief executive, commented: “This is a bit of a coup and we are incredibly excited about it.”

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive, will take a seat on Aurora’s board as part of the transaction. Khosrowshahi concluded: “Few technologies hold as much promise to improve people’s lives with safe, accessible and environmentally friendly transportation as self-driving vehicles.”