Tag: finance

A popular trucking app called “CDLLife” polled its users Thursday and found an overwhelming number of drivers will not “pickup/deliver to cities with defunded/disbanded police departments.” 

On Saturday afternoon, 1,212 users of the trucking app responded to the poll, with 79% saying they will not deliver loads to lawless cities. 

Truck drivers also voiced their opinions on the comment section of the poll. After reviewing their concerns, we found several notable responses:

“As American Truck Drivers I feel we have the power to Stop all this that’s going on! Park you Truck until the RIOTS STOP HAPPENING!,” app user Albert T Pearl wrote. 

“Unless my company starts allowing me co carry my gun in truck I won’t do it,” Robert Adkins wrote. 

“Fuck those liberal assholes,” David Simpson wrote. 

“No cops= more Violence and targeted robbing,” Scott Cuellar wrote. 

“No I will not deliver to an area with a disbanded police department. My life matters and i do this for my family,” wrote Casnpaper.

“I just turned down a load from Miami to st paul paying 3800 my life matter more than any other,” wrote Carlos Barreras.

“Nope no load is worth my life,” wrote Eddie Bean.

The poll comes after weeks of social unrest across the country. It has since sparked a political movement among radical leftists who seek to defund and disband police departments. We noted last week the Minneapolis City Council voted to replace the police department with “community-led” model: 

“The City of Minneapolis just took another step – albeit a small one – toward the “police-free future” that BLM activists, denizens of the CHAZ and the Democratic politicians who pander to them envision, as the “defund the police” movement gains momentum across the country. On Friday afternoon, members of the Minneapolis City Council who previously voted in a veto-proof majority to try and abolish the department again voted to take the next step toward pushing an agenda item that has virtually no chance of ever becoming a reality.

According to the latest vote, the council will begin a year-long process to gather input from various community stakeholders about what a future ‘public safety department’ might look like.”

Already a dangerous profession, truckers, who value their lives more than the cargo they haul, have been heard on CDLLife app calling for a nationwide moratorium of delivering goods until the riots stop. To understand why truckers are rejecting deliveries to certain cities — the shocking videos below detail the “Mad Max” situation across major US metros: 

I 35W protesters in Minneapolis open the back of a moving UPS truck and start looting the packages. 10:20pm. @kare pic.twitter.com/VtSYY8G78p

— Adam Jukkola (@Jukkaloop) May 30, 2020

Did you forget to mention those guys were looting the truck? pic.twitter.com/jJD0g2NeYK

— LaFievreJaune (@fievre_jaune) May 30, 2020

Protesters even looted containerized freight on a train 

This is America, They have begun robbing moving trains in packs of hundreds #Riots2020 #looting #riots. #robbery #Rioters pic.twitter.com/C9cAiAbsGg

— Silver Report Uncut™ 🇺🇸 (@silver_report) June 4, 2020

Truck drivers have been on the frontline of the global pandemic. These folks move 68% of all freight tonnage in the US. So if riots and defunding police cause drivers to reject loads, and even form a protest of their own — then say hello to domestic supply chain disruptions — or better yet, no V-shaped economic rebound this year.

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

And then it happened. A vicious sell off seemingly out of the blue putting a sudden end to the steepest rally ever with many indices and individual stocks getting hammered seeing sizable declines just as Nasdaq was making new all time highs and $SPX was going green for the year setting up markets for an epic battle of control in the days and weeks to come.

Markets were clearly extended on many fronts and a correction was due. But nothing is normal about these liquidity soaked markets. The rally was historic with a 47.5% nearly vertical ascent following the March lows and the disconnect of valuations behind the size of the real economy has taken on historic levels. Markets reached nearly 152% market cap to GDP before the snapback as valuations suddenly dropped to 141.8% by Thursday’s market close. And it happened fast as little support was built in a market that so heavily reliant on open overnight gap ups on the way up.

On Monday I made the case for Crash 2 highlighting narrowing patterns in the $VIX and $SPX that suggested another volatility event was shaping up and just 3 days later the $VIX wasted no time spiking to the 44 level filling its open gap in that area:

In short: A breakout in volatility and a violent breakdown in the rally trend. And suddenly some of the open gaps I highlighted on Monday started seeing some filling:

In process markets produced what in technical terms is called an island reversal with price left hanging isolated, even on the almighty tech sector:

Setting up for a key battle zone for control and I gave a quick snapshot readout on the levels last night:

 

In episode 6 of Straight Talk Guy Adami, Dan Nathan and I discuss this week’s market action, its implications, we discuss $AAPL, the banks, the Fed, the disconnect between the political cheerleading and the economic and social reality on the ground, keeping it real:

My quick technical take on the week: $SPX pic.twitter.com/nr7DO90Beh

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 12, 2020

The Fed now having set the expectations that rates will remain at least at zero (while still publicly denying negative rates are coming) has inadvertently revealed a major gap in narrative: That of a V shaped recovery presumed by markets and a Fed signaling with zero rates through 2022 that there is no V shaped recovery in the offing, rather a protracted high unemployment environment that is entirely inconsistent with market valuations north of 150% market cap to GDP.

Somewhere in between these narratives is a truth and that’s a truth markets have to negotiate.

As this rally has been driven by record artificial liquidity and has been again entirely dependent on multiple expansion alone it should also be noted that this rally stopped during the same week that the Fed’s incremental expansion of its balance sheet shriveled to nearly zero with its slowest expansion since the March 23rd lows:

Fed expands balance sheet by only $3.7B in the past week and markets completely fall apart. pic.twitter.com/43v5CIXm9S

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 11, 2020

My phrase, no bull market without central bank intervention, again appears to ring true.

This week’s aggressive flush lower has created short term oversold conditions and next week is OPEX week which traditionally has a bullish slant, but be aware, unless markets can repair the island reversal gaps and resume the rally toward the open 3300 gap on $SPX, these reversals stand and they, along with a bearish engulfing weekly candle and trend breaks on the charts has bearish connotations suggesting that rallies may end up getting sold and lower prices are to come.

I am reminded of what I wrote on March 23rd, the day of the lows: “The 1929 redux tells us a big rally will come and this rally will be awe inspiring, it’ll produce technical reconnects in a market that is now widely disconnected to the downside and it will bring back optimism. But then the historical script suggests lower highs to come as the world is then confronted with the consequences of the costs of extinguishing this fire. The bill comes due as the world will be settled with even more debt, but now a much higher unemployment rate, poorer consumers, and companies focused on margin efficiencies.”

The consequences are already staring us in the face:

US debt has just hit $26 trillion, up from $23.5 trillion in March, and up $1 trillion in just the past month alone.

A yearly deficit of $1 trillion was crisis mode in 2009.
Now we did it in a month.

We’re on a path to $30 trillion in a hurry or close to 150% debt to GDP.

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 11, 2020

Lay off announcements are continuing, corporate debt is higher than ever approaching 50% of GDP:

..while earnings have done nothing for years and are now declining:

With the share of zombie companies, now increasingly held afloat by the Fed, is ever increasing:

Want to take this all to be the recipe for a new structural bull market be my guest. From my perch this historic market cap to GDP extension fueled by nothing but artificial liquidity and now accompanied by speculative retail FOMO behavior still bears the historical footprint of an epic bear market rally. And if that is so the forces of intervention and cheerleading with find themselves greatly challenged by the forces of reality in the months to come.

And this is what our Straight Talk series is all about: Keeping taps on reality in a world keen on wanting to avoid it.

*  *  *

For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.

ETFs have taken over the market and become so widespread that a trend really hasn’t “made it” now unless it has its own ETF. This rush to come up with new ways to generate fees from lazy and unsophisticated investors incapable of building their own portfolios has led to ETFs becoming the ultimate contrarian indicator at times. 

For example, the Direxion Fallen Knives ETF, which trades under the ticket NIFE, was launched last Thursday. The ETF follows the Indxx US Fallen Knives Index, a benchmark designed to identify stocks that have fallen precipitously, according to Yahoo. 

As if the traders on Robinhood needed an easier way to buy total garbage that has been decimated by the market…

“Fallen knives may offer the opportunity for outperformance within an equity allocation. A systematic approach brings a concentrated basket of the prospective securities within the US stock market,” according to Direxion. “Screening for eligible names that have recently experienced substantial negative returns helps identify differentiated exposure.”

The idea of buying companies that had fallen in value fell apart on the day the ETF launched, Thursday, when the Dow finished the day down almost 2,000 points.

Another ETF that launched recently was the ETFMG Travel Tech ETF, which trades under the symbol AWAY. It invests in online travel companies and was launched on February 12, just days before the entire sector took a massive plunge due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Almost every stock in the travel and leisure category is trading lower than it was on the day the ETF was first launched. 

Direxion also recently launched the Direxion Dynamic Hedge ETF recently, which trades under the symbol DYHG.

This product uses futures contracts to manage risk and increases short exposure during volatile environments, while increasing long exposure during times of less volatility. In other words, it’s a backward looking indicator doing the exact opposite of getting ahead of the trade. 

We are eager to hear the success stories that traders will pay 0.57% a year to share while transacting this ETF. And while we joke, we sadly know that many RIAs and “investment advisors” have likely already piled into these instruments, furthering a growing illiquidity problem in ETFs that has been widespread across markets for sometime now.

But hey, with the Fed now providing a multi-trillion dollar backstop to the market, does it even matter anymore?

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

Creating purpose and fulfillment within a failing system…

What the heck is going on?

I hear this a lot these days. Developments are happening too quickly to process for many folks, creating a persisting cloud of confusion.

Even focusing down on any particular single event often gets nowhere because so much of what’s going on simply makes so sense

Take for example, the W.H.O. which as recently as two weeks ago recommended that only sick people should wear masks.  What? We’ve known for months that people can spread Covid-19 when they are asymptomatic.  How can a ‘sick person’ wear a mask if they are sick but even they don’t know that? It just makes no sense.  What is even going on?

Or take Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, who defiantly declared that the Federal Reserve “absolutely does not” contribute to the wealth inequality gap:

(Source)

Say what?

The Fed is busy buying distressed financial assets for far more than they are worth from the largest and wealthiest of stock and bondholders.  That absolutely contributes to inequality.

So does juicing the stock market, or ““market”” as I like to term it (because it’s so distorted it needs two sets of quote marks).

So does appointing Blackrock – the world’s largest private asset manager – to select which private assets should be bought with the freshly-invented currency emanating from the Fed’s electronic printing presses.  Should we really be shocked to learn that Blackrock chose their own distressed assets, like the junk bond fund JNK, for the Fed to buy first?

It’s a bald-faced lie for Jay Powell to claim anything other than the Fed is the #1 contributor to inequality.  And that’s by a country mile.

So does Powell even think he can state such an obvious untruth and be taken seriously? And why does no one in the media seriously challenge him on this?

What the heck is going on?

The US government is supposed to be an open-book affair.  The public has both an interest and a right to know what’s going on with its money.

Yet somehow, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin believes that $500 billion in recent bailout funds shoveled out the door to US corporations both can be and needs to be kept secret:

How is this even possible?  How can anybody, let alone a sitting US Treasury Secretary think that it’s okay to keep $500 billion in fund disbursements a secret to the public? What the heck is going on?

At least this hasn’t entirely escaped everyone’s notice:

But ask the average person on the street? 99 out of 100 won’t have a clue this is going on.

Look, in the US alone, 44 million people have applied for jobless claims over the past 12 weeks.  Over that same time period, thanks to the efforts of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve, the Nasdaq 100 powered to brand new all-time highs:

The economy as measured by GDP is thought to have plunged anywhere from 15% to 50% during the quarter…and stocks were not just stable, but positively euphoric over those same 12 weeks, as if gleefully celebrating the largest loss of jobs in US history.

What the heck is going on?

What Comes Next

These and dozens of other weird, backwards, and truly unnatural acts are piling up; each difficult to understand on its own. But taken together, they reveal a current era of great uncertainty and upheaval.

There’s really no other explanation other than something has broken and it scares The Powers That Be to the point that they are wildly flailing about with increasing desperate policies, lies, and extreme actions that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

So, here we are.

The important question to ask yourself at this time is: What am I going to do about it?

For my part, I think that this current shock to the world economic system is too great to simply paper over.  The loss of economic activity as measured by the demand destruction for oil, which remains down some -20% to -25%, suggests very large future disruptions the economy and, more generally, our way of life.  Supply chains will run short of critical supplies and suddenly-blocked money conduits in the financial system imply a cascade of defaults are yet to come.

Nobody is smart enough to figure out in detail what any of that means. It’s just too huge and too complex.

So, what to do about it?  You become more resilient.  If you’re unsure if your paycheck is secure, you save money, begin thinking about ways to trim expenses, and fire up alternative income streams.  Just in case.

If you can’t be certain that the stores will always be stocked with food, you build up a deep pantry and start a garden.  Just in case.

If you doubt the ability of the Federal Reserve and Congress to ‘get it right’ you buy gold, invest in your home, and develop a buy list to execute if or when ‘they’ dial up the deficits, debt levels and money printing to even more ludicrous levels.  Just in case.

If you’ve been relatively isolated but want a community to enrich your life in good times and support you in bad ones, you dedicate more of your waking hours to doing things with and for your neighbors to strengthen those social bridges.  Just in case.

Here’s the thing: nobody knows what’s going to happen next.  Our economy, our machinery of state, and our global supply chains are all interconnected complex systems.   Such systems have two features:

1. they are inherently completely unpredictable, and
2. they have emergent behaviors

An emergent behavior is something that arises out of the conditions of the system.  Because humans are complex systems, we can use them as an example.

Put one set of humans in a desert with scant resources on and you’ll get one set of languages, culture, art, technology, and beliefs.

Pick up those same humans, drop them onto a lush and moist prairie and eventually you’ll get an entirely different set of languages, culture, art, technology, and belief systems.  The complexity of the ecology and the human species will yield different results under different circumstances.

Even though you know everything there is to know about humans, you cannot possibly predict what will emerge.  You can only observe these things as they emerge.

Similarly, our economy and its key derivatives — such as technology and systems of production and distribution — have emerged from the combined actions of billions of people using immense amounts of fossil fuel energy.

What can we expect from our new reality now that tens of millions of formerly-productive people aren’t working? Nobody knows because it’s unpredictable.  At the same time oil consumption, our primary energy input, is down by a shocking -20%.  What does that mean in terms of changes in behaviors and goods produced? Nobody knows.  We can only observe what emergent activity happens (or ceases to happen) next.

Here’s another thing to know about complex systems – perhaps the most important feature: they owe their complexity to the flows of energy through them.  More energy and they can become more complex.  Less energy and they become less complex, they simplify.

In economic terms, a reduction in energy throughput might manifest as a far simpler arrangement of fewer people working at fewer types of jobs.  Or it might mean fewer sorts of goods being produced and reduced services to choose among.  Again, we can’t know the future details; but the broad strokes can be defined — and ‘simpler’ is one of those broad strokes that comes along with a -20% drop in oil consumption.

Which is why because I cannot predict the outcome, I prepare.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, driven by a growing internal anxiety of the increasingly insensible developments around us, I purchased a 182-acre property earlier this year. One I’ve been hard at work restoring into a productive and highly-sustainable family homestead.

It’s time to reveal what I’ve been up to.

In Part 2: Building The Foundations Of  A Resilient Life, I give you a tour of the specific projects and installations my fiancee Evie and I have been busy with this hectic spring. An important goal of mine as we work to fully activate this property’s potential is to produce a body of “how to” content to help guide you and anyone else interested in making their home more resilient.

It’s the only way I know how to make sense out of today’s increasingly insensible world.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

Summary:

• Authorities cover another 8 cases tied to Xinfadi market Sunday morning
• China confirms 57 cases from June 13
• Tokyo sees another spike
• 23 US states see cases climb
• US reports 25k+ cases, largest daily increase in 2 weeks
• Several states reporting record jumps
• Iran sees deaths rebound
• Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico see troubling climb continue
• UK officials review lockdown conditions

* * *

Update (0900ET): The SCMP has a more detailed breakdown of the latest batch of cases reported in China Sunday, the largest one-day total in 2 months.

Beijing reported 36 new local coronavirus cases on Sunday, all of them linked to the city’s biggest wholesale food market.

The patients included 27 people who worked at the Xinfadi food market, which has been closed down, and nine who had been exposed to it, the municipal government said.

Another person had also tested positive for the coronavirus but showed no symptoms, it said. Under Chinese rules, asymptomatic cases are not added to the tally.

Beijing has confirmed 43 local cases since Thursday, before which it had not had any for 55 days.

The outbreak has also spread beyond the capital to neighbouring regions, with the Liaoning provincial government announcing two new cases on Sunday, both of whom had been in close contact with Beijing residents confirmed as having the virus this week.

For the country as whole, there were 57 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the 24 hours to midnight Saturday, the National Health Commission reported, the biggest one-day total in two months. Some 38 of the new cases were locally transmitted, including the 36 in Beijing, with the other 19 were travellers arriving from abroad.

A spokesman for the Beijing Health Bureau urged all residents who visited the Xinfadi market to get tested immediately (that’s an order, not a request).

With the market in Beijing accounting for the vast majority of new cases, it’s clear that the officials are reckoning with the reality that the asymptomatic spread across China’s biggest cities is likely much larger than authorities will admit.

What’s more, officials have reported another 8 positive cases from Sunday morning (June 14), all of which were tied to Xinfadi (according to authorities).

Reuters: CHINESE CAPITAL SAYS 8 NEW CONFIRMED COVID-19 CASES ON JUNE 14

— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) June 14, 2020

(All new cases are linked to Xinfadi market. The 8 cases are as of 7 am Sunday)

— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) June 14, 2020

* * *

The steady drumbeat of discouraging COVID-19-linked headlines continued yesterday as Florida, along with several other southern states, reported record-breaking spikes in new infections. That marked the state’s third daily record in a row, as Gov Ron DeSantis has blamed farm workers and sought to play down the rising numbers as an inevitable consequence of reopening, as beachgoers returned to Miami Beach for the first time.

According to the New York Times, there are 23 states where the daily number of new cases continues to climb.

Here’s what the Times heatmap of the US looked like Sunday morning:

Source: NYT

With a large swath of southwestern Beijing back under lockdown, Chinese health officials said they confirmed another 57 new cases yesterday as they aimed to test more than 10k people connected by contact tracers to a local seafood wholesaler/market that has been shut down for a deep cleaning, as officials said it was the epicenter of the latest outbreak. Furthermore, officials have moved a widely anticipated economic briefing online. The NBS presser will take place at 10amET.

#BREAKING:Mainland #China reported 57 new cases of #coronavirus and 9 asymptomatic cases for Saturday, said the National Health Commission.Nineteen of them were imported cases.#Beijing reported 36 locally transmitted cases. The other 2 local cases were in Liaoning.

— Jeremy (@mehabecapital) June 14, 2020

Meanwhile in Japan, officials in Tokyo confirmed the capital city’s largest daily total (47) of new COVID-19 cases since May 5.

In the Middle East, Iran suffered its biggest daily death toll from the coronavirus since April 13, around the time Iran started relaxing its lockdown. So far, a total of 187,427 people have been infected with the disease and 8,837 have died in Iran, according to Health Ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari.

He added that Iran reported 107 deaths over the last 24 hours, a 9-week high.

In the UK, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak backed calls to ease the UK’s 2-meter social distancing benchmark as HMG carries out its “comprehensive review” of the restrictive lockdown measures imposed by PM Boris Johnson during the early days of the pandemic. Since then, the methodology of the projections that inspired the government’s approach have come under question.

As the number of new cases continues to soar in Brazil, Mexico, India and Russia, the Russians reported 8,835 new confirmed coronavirus infections, a 1.7% increase over the past day. An additional 119 people died in same period, bringing the overall death toll to 6,948, leaving it in third place.

Meanwhile, the global tally of coronavirus cases has surpassed 7.8 million cases, while the US is nearing 2.1 million cases (2,074,526).

US virus cases rose by more than 25k cases reported yesterday (remember, these numbers are reported with a 24-hour lag), the fastest pace in two weeks, while Brazil’s infections increased 2.6% as deaths climbed 2.1%, with Brazil seeing the number of cases draw closer to the 850,000 mark. Deaths in the country are nearing 50k.

It appears Presidents Trump and Erdogan finally have something to agree on. Erdogan’s office slammed Twitter on Friday, calling the US-based social media platform a “propaganda machine” after the company announced it suspended over 7,000 “fake” accounts known for churning out pro-Erdogan and AKP friendly tweets.

The accounts were suspected of being a bot network utilized by Erdogan’s AK party insiders to advance its political agenda inside the country, along with others displaying “inauthentic” activity.

The Turkish presidency’s office lashed out, saying Twitter has declared war on freedom of expression in the country while unfairly targeting the country’s ruling party.

An official Twitter statement described:

Detected in early 2020, this network of accounts was employing coordinated inauthentic activity, which was primarily targeted at domestic audiences within Turkey. Based on our analysis of the network’s technical indicators and account behaviors, the collection of fake and compromised accounts was being used to amplify political narratives favorable to the AK Parti, and demonstrated strong support for President Erdogan. We’re disclosing 7,340 accounts to the archive today.

Twitter had targeted alleged fake activity out of China and Russia as well.

An Erdoan spokesman, communications director Fahrettin Altun, responded with: “(This) has demonstrated yet again that Twitter is no mere social media company, but a propaganda machine with certain political and ideological inclinations,” according to Reuters.

The statement further claimed Twitter’s crackdown on the accounts were due to enemies “peddling their ideological views” and influencing the US company’s decision-making and censorship. 

The Erdogan spokesman went so far as to issue a veiled threat suggesting Ankara could in turn move to block Twitter within the country. This after Twitter had in the past been temporarily blocked amid political turmoil related to Syria as well as the Kurds. 

“We would like to remind the company (Twitter) of the eventual fate of a number of organizations which attempted to take similar steps in the past,” Altun added as part of the Turkish presidency’s statement.

Interestingly in its statement Twitter charged that the youth organizations within AKP had actually managed to hack and take over accounts previously critical of Erdogan.

“As a result, the network we’re disclosing today includes several compromised accounts associated with organizations critical of President Erdogan and the Turkish Government,” the Twitter statement said.

CNN has been attacked once again while covering Black Lives Matters protests and riots, but this time instead of the network’s usual awkward attempt to paint the mayhem evidently all around them as “peaceful”, there was a rare candid moment they were admitted to be “aggressive”.

It happened late Saturday following the deadly Friday night shooting of a 27-year-old black man, Rayshard Brooks, at a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta. As we reported, Brooks, who had fallen asleep at the wheel at the Wendy’s drive-thru, was shot by an officer after he grabbed one of their Tasers and pointed it at them as he was running away. He died later that evening at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Moments after rioters descended on the Wendy’s location Saturday night, a CNN crew of four showed up (and one security guard accompanying) and they were harassed and came under attack. “We were trying to get video of what was happening, and there were protesters who were very angry that we were recording this and tried to block our cameras,” CNN national correspondent Natasha Chen detailed on air.

CNN crew attacked in Atlanta pic.twitter.com/dziVvHM6Lf

— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) June 14, 2020

“At that point they got aggressive and our CNN camera was broken,” she described, after which she said her crew had to swiftly exit the area, fearing for their safety. It apparently involved a physical alteration before the news crew fled. 

Subsequent overhead shots of the chaotic overnight scene showed a dangerous, lawless situation unfolding.

#BREAKING: CNN crew attacked by protesters outside Wendy’s in #Atlanta where a Black man was shot by police. CNN it’s time to send your crews out to record w/ phones becuz a big TV camera attracts those who want to do you harm. #AtlantaPolice #BLM pic.twitter.com/nZMM8J6hBs

— Rebecca Aguilar (@RebeccaAguilar) June 14, 2020

It appeared that protests and riots that gripped dozens of American cities in the two weeks after George Floyd’s death after being choked out by a Minneapolis police officer, which also included mass looting, had actually lost significant steam.

But Rayshard Brooks’ death and what’s sure to be a coming week of raging controversy over how it happened and who’s at fault — controversy which has already resulted in Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields announcing she’ll be be stepping down following the incident — is likely to spark a new major round of nationwide unrest.

When the architect of Sweden’s controversial strategy for combating the coronavirus, a strategy that involved voluntary social distancing measures and no lockdowns, admitted that he would have done things differently knowing what he knows now, proponents of lockdowns and other heavy handed measures pounced, accusing Sweden of admitting that it was responsible for the thousands of additional deaths when compared with its neighbors.

The country’s top epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, later clarified that his comment wasn’t intended as an admission: while he might have favored certain other measures he said he had ‘no regrets’ about Sweden’s approach.

At last count, the country had nearly 4.9k confirmed deaths (4,854 to be precise). But a public poll released Saturday found that Sweden’s ruling party has retained its broad popularity despite the higher mortality rate, as its decision to skip lockdowns remained largely popular. The survey was taken in late May, according to the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, which published the data in partnership with Sifo.

The party had the support of 30% of voters, compared with a reading of 31.7% in May, according to the poll by Sifo in newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. That difference is within the poll’s margin of error. The Moderates, the leading opposition party, also gained in popularity during the pandemic and had the support of 19.5% of voters in the poll.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has been the target of criticism from political opponents because of his government’s controversially soft lockdown policy. His party has seen large political gains during the crisis, despite the resulting high mortality rate.

“The recent criticism against the government doesn’t seem to have affected the Social Democrat Party to any larger extent,” Toivo Sjoren, head of opinion at Sifo, told the newspaper. The Swedish government is still benefiting from the Covid effect, he said.

It’s only the latest indication that Sweden’s governing Social Democrats remain in a strong position, popularity-wise, despite criticism over Tegnell’s handling of the virus.

Meanwhile, other scientists have stepped up to praise Sweden’s approach, while the WHO announced, then later walked back, that several recent studies had affirmed that cases of ‘asymptomatic transmission’ – when a patient with no symptoms spreads the virus to another – appear to be very rare. Of course, if this is true, it would have potentially radical policy implications. However, the WHO has spent much of the last week walking back a statement on the research from one of its top scientists while warning that the outbreak is getting worse, not better, despite progress in western Europe and the Greater New York Metropolitan Area.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

The Russian role will be to balance the hegemonic powers, as a guarantor of a new union of non-aligned nations

Professor Sergey Karaganov is informally known in influential foreign policy circles as the “Russian Kissinger” – with the extra bonus of not having to carry a “war criminal” tag from Vietnam and Cambodia to Chile and beyond.

Karaganov is the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He’s also the honorary chairman of Russia’s Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

In December 2018, I had the pleasure of being received at Karaganov’s office in Moscow for a one-on-one conversation essentially about Greater Eurasia – the Russian path for Eurasia integration.

Now Karaganov has expanded his main insights for an Atlanticist made in Italy vehicle usually more distinguished for its maps than its predictable “analyses” straight from a NATO press release.

Even noting, correctly, that the EU is a “profoundly inefficient institution” on a slow path towards dissolution – and that’s a massive understatement – Karaganov observes that Russia-EU relations are on their way to a relative normalization.

This is something that has been actively discussed in Brussels corridors for months now. Not exactly the agenda envisaged by the US Deep State – or the Trump administration, for that matter. The degree of exasperation with Team Trump’s antics is unprecedented.

Still, as Karaganov recognizes: “Western democracies don’t know how to exist without an enemy.” Enter NATO’s routine secretary-general Stoltenberg’s platitudes on the Russian “threat.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping get friendly at a ceremony to present Xi with a degree from the St Petersburg State University on June 6, 2019. Photo: AFP / Dmitri Lovetsky

Even as Russia’s trade with Asia is now equivalent to trade with the EU, a new “threat” emerged in Europe: China.

An Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China was just invented last week as a new demonization platform, congregating representatives from Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, Norway and Sweden as well as members of the European Parliament.

China “as led by the Chinese Communist Party,” is to be faced as a “threat” to “Western values” – the same old triad of democracy, human rights and neoliberalism. The paranoia embodied in the dual Russia-China “threat” is nothing but a graphic illustration of the prime Grand Chessboard clash: NATO vs Eurasia integration.

‘Russia’s Kissinger’: Head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy Sergey Karaganov. Photo: AFP/Evgeny Biyatov/Sputnik

A great Asian power

Karaganov breaks down the crucial Russia-China strategic partnership to an easily absorbed formula: As much as Beijing finds strong support on Russia’s strategic power as a counterpunch to the US, Moscow can count on China’s economic might.

He recalls the crucial fact that when Western pressure on Russia was at its peak after Maidan and the Crimea referendum, “Beijing offered Moscow virtually unlimited credit, but Russia decided to brave the situation on its own.”

One of the subsequent benefits is that Russia-China abandoned their competition in Central Asia – something I saw for myself in my travels late last year.

That does not mean competition has been erased. Conversations with other Russian analysts reveal that fear of excessive Chinese power is still on, especially when it comes to China’s relations with weaker and non-sovereign states. But the bottom line, for such a sterling realpolitik practitioner as Karaganov, is that the “pivot to the East” and the strategic entente with China favored Russia in the Grand Chessboard.

Karaganov totally understands the Russian DNA as a great Asian power – taking into consideration everything from authoritarian politics to the natural resource wealth of Siberia.

Russia, he says, is “close to China in terms of common history despite the enormous cultural distance separating them. Up to the 15th century, both were under Genghis Khan’s empire, the largest in history. If China assimilated the Mongols, Russia ended up expelling them, but in two and a half centuries of submission it incorporated many Asian traits.”

Karaganov considers Kissinger and Brzezinski “lucid strategists,” and laments that even if they suggested otherwise “the American political class” inaugurated a “new Cold War” against China. He breaks down Washington’s objective as playing a “Last Battle” profiting from the forward bases the US still dominates in what Wallerstein would define as our collapsing world-system.

New Non-Aligned Movement

Karaganov is very sharp on Russia’s independent streak – always fiercely countering “whoever pointed at a global or regional hegemony: from the descendants of Genghis Khan to Charles XII of Sweden, from Napoleon to Hitler. In the military and political spheres, Russia is self-sufficient. Not in the economic, technological and cyber spheres, where it needs markets and external partners, which it will search and find.”

The result is that the Russia-EU rapprochement dream remains very much alive, but under “Eurasian optics.”

That’s where the concept of Greater Eurasia comes in, as I discussed with Karaganov in our meeting: “a multilateral, integrated partnership, officially supported by Beijing, based on an egalitarian system of economic, political and cultural links between diverse states,” with China playing the role of primus inter pares. And that includes a “significative part of the Western extremity of the Eurasian continent, that is, Europe.”

That’s what the evolution in the Grand Chessboard seems to point at. Karaganov – correctly – identifies western and northern Europe as attracted to the “American pole,” while southern and eastern Europe are “inclined towards the Eurasian project.”

The Russian role, under this framework, will be to “balance the two possible hegemonic powers,” as a “guarantor of a new union of non-aligned nations.” That hints at a very interesting new configuration of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Yugoslav President Marshal Josip Broz, better known as Tito (R, 1892-1980) shares joke with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (L) and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (C) in July 1956 at Brioni Island during a Non-Aligned Movement summit. (Photo: AFP)

So meet Russia as one of the supporters of a new multilateral, multi-vector partnership, finally moving from a status of “periphery of Europe or Asia” to “one of the fundamental centers of northern Eurasia.” A work in – steady – progress.

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A hot humid day, but a gentle, warm breeze is blowing. The smoke and tear gas swirl gently to and fro, hanging in the dense, sweaty air, as shafts of dazzling sunlight scythe through the smokiness at sharp angles. A mass protest is forming. Youths are chattering; people moving aimlessly. It still has not solidified into purpose, yet the raw tenseness of the coming conflict hangs, as palpably as does the smoke in the air. It is evident – there will be violence today.

No, this is not America. This is the flashpoint crossroad between the radical Jewish settler outpost of Beit El in the West Bank, and its interface with the Palestinian town of Ramallah. Between the two, the Israeli army are ranged, awaiting the hostilities to commence. This was back, during the Second Palestinian Intifada; it was a time of near war, and I was present, charged with observing this, and other unfolding confrontations, on behalf of the EU.

As usual, I head to the back of the sprawling mob, for it is only from this perspective that one can understand the nature of events. You observe the silent organization in action. Young men smoothly and unobtrusively, position the piles of stones that later would be hurled (mostly ineffectually) at the soldiers who are stood just beyond the range of stone-throwers. Then the protest managers are gone – vanished.

I know what is about to unfold. I have just seen two snipers (in this instance, Palestinians), slip into position, well-back, concealed on a hillside over-looking the crossroads. It is a sad sight – the young people massing before me are not dangerous; they generally are decent, sincere young people, angry at the expanding settler-occupation, and hyped by the ‘animators’ sent amongst the crowd to stoke emotions. They are not bad young people.

I am sad, because some, I know, will soon be dead, their families mourning a child’s loss tonight. But they are the fodder – innocent fodder – and this is war. At the height of confrontation, the snipers begin. Just a couple of rounds, but enough; they fire with silenced weapons. The Israelis soldiers cannot tell (unlike me), the source of the firing. A number of Palestinian youth fall dead; the mood incandescent. Purpose achieved.

Why do I write about these twenty-year old events? Because I know well the patterns. I have seen them often. It is a playbook widely used. And I see familiar tell-tales emerging in the videos posted on the current protests in America.

Most notable, are the ubiquitous palettes of bricks that mysteriously appear in the background to many videos of the protests (see here for a typical selection). Who is positioning them? Who is paying? U.S. commentator, Michael Snyder, too has noted the “complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were, and where police were not, for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to… where they thought officers would not be.”

He observes too, the anticipatory raising of bail money; the preparing of medical teams, ready to treat injuries; and of caches of flammable materials (suitable for torching official vehicles), pre-positioned in places where protests would later occur. All this – with simultaneous protests in more than 380 U.S. cities – in my experience, signals much bigger, silent backstage organization. And behind ‘the organisation’, the instigators lie, far back: maybe even thousands of miles back; and somewhere out there will be the financier.

However, in the U.S., commentators say they see no leadership; the protests are amorphous. That is not unusual to see no leadership – a ‘leadership’ appears only if negotiations are sought and planned; otherwise key actors are to be protected from arrest. The most telling sign of a backstage organisation is that on one day, it is ‘full on’, and the next all is quiet – as if a switch has been pulled. It often has.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of protestors in the U.S. this last week, were – and are – decent sincere Americans, outraged at George Floyd’s killing and continuing social and institutional racism. Was this then, an Antifa and anarchist operation, as the White House contends? I doubt it – any more than those Palestinian youth in Beit El constituted anything other than fodder for the front of stage. We simply don’t know the backstage. Keep an open mind.

Tom Luongo presciently suggests that should we wish to understand better the context to these recent events – and not be stuck at stage appearances – we need to look to Hong Kong for indicators.

Writing in October 2019, Luongo noted that: “What started as peaceful protests against an extradition law and worry over reunification with China has morphed into an ugly and vicious assault on the city’s economic future. [This is] being perpetrated by the so-called “Block Bloc”, roving bands of mask-wearing, police-tactic defying vandals attacking randomly around the city to disrupt people going to work”.

An exasperated local man exclaims: “Not only you [i.e. Block Bloc protestors are] harming the people making their living in businesses, companies, shopping malls. You’re destroying subway stations. You’re destroying our streets. You’re destroying our hard-earned reputation as a safe, international business centre. You’re destroying our economy”. The man cannot explain why there was not a single police officer in sight, for hours, as the rampage continued.

What is going on? Luongo quotes a September Bloomberg interview with HK tycoon, Jimmy Lai, billionaire publisher of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) scourge, the Apple Daily, and the highly visible interlocutor of official Washington notables, such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. In it, Lai pronounced himself convinced that if protests in HK turned violent, China would have no choice but to send the People’s Armed Police units from Shenzen into Hong Kong to put down unrest: “That,” Lai said on Bloomberg TV, “will be a repeat of the Tiananmen Square massacre; and that will bring in the whole world against China … Hong Kong will be done, and … China will be done, too”.

In brief, Lai proposes to ‘burn’ Hong Kong – to ‘save’ Hong Kong. That is, ‘burn it to save it’ from the CCP – to keep its residue in the ‘Anglo-sphere’.

“Jimmy Lai”, Luongo writes, “is telling you what the strategy is here. The goal is to thoroughly undermine China’s standing on the world stage and raise that of the U.S. This is economic warfare, it’s a hybrid war tactic. And the soldiers are radicalized kids in uniforms bonking old men on the heads with sticks and taunting cops. Sound familiar? Because that’s what’s going on in places like Portland, Oregon with Antifa … And that cause is chaos”. (Recall, Luongo wrote this more than six months ago).

Well, here we are today: Steve Bannon, closely allied with what he, himself, terms the U.S.’ China super-hawks, and allied with yet another Chinese billionaire financier, Guo Wengui (a fugitive from the Chinese Authorities, and member at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club), is pursuing an incandescent campaign of denigration and vitriol against the Chinese Communist Party – intended, like Lai’s campaign, to destroy utterly China’s global standing.

Here it is again – the tightly-knit band of U.S. and exile super-hawks want to ‘burn’ down the CCP, to ‘save’ what? To save the ‘Empire Waning’ (America), through ‘burning’ the ‘Empire Rising’ (China). Bannon (at least, and to his credit), is explicit about the risk: A failure to prevail in this this info-war mounted against the CCP, he says, will end in “kinetic war”.

So, back to the U.S. protests, and drawing on Luongo’s insights from Hong Kong – I wrote last week that Trump sees himself fighting a hidden global ‘war’ to retain America’s present dominance over global money (the dollar) – now America’s principal source of external power. For America to lose this struggle to a putative multi-lateral cosmopolitan governance – Trump perceives – would result in the whole, white Anglo-sphere’s ejection from control over the global financial system – and its associated political privilege. It would entail control of the global financial and political system slipping away to an amorphous multi-lateral financial governance, operated by an international institution, or some global Central Bank. Since before WW1, control of global financial governance has been in the hands of the Anglo-American nexus running between London and New York. It still does, just about – albeit that today’s Wall Street elite is cosmopolitan, rather than Anglo, yet still it is firmly anchored to Washington, via the Fed and the U.S. Treasury. For this to slip would be the ‘end of Empire’.

To maintain the status of the dollar, Trump therefore has assiduously devoted himself to disrupting the multi-lateral global order, sensing this danger to the unique privileges conveyed by control of the world’s monetary base. His particular concern would be to see a Europe that was umbilically-linked to the financial and technological heavy-weight that is China. This, in itself, effectively would presage a different world financial governance.

But, is the fear that the threat principally lies with Europe’s Soros-style vision justified? There may – just as well – be a fifth-column at home. The billionaires’ club of the very rich has long ceased to be culturally ‘Anglo’. It has become a borderless, ‘self-selecting’, governing entity unto itself.

Perhaps an earlier ‘end of Époque’ metamorphosis shows us how readily an old-established elite can swap horses in order to survive. In the historical Sicilian novel, The Leopard, Prince Salina’s nephew tells his uncle that the old order is ‘done’, and with it, the family is ‘done’ too, unless … “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

It is clear that some billionaire oligarchs – whether American or not – can see the ‘writing on the wall’: A financial crisis is coming. And so, too, is a social one. A recent survey done by one such member, showed that 55% of American millennials supported the end to the capitalist system. Perhaps the brotherhood of billionaires is thinking that ‘unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist socialism on us’. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. The recent disorder in the U.S. will have unnerved them further.

The push towards radical change – towards that global financial, political and ecological governance that threatens dollar hegemony – paradoxically may emerge from within: from within America’s own financial elite.  ‘Burning’ the dollar’s privileged global status may become seen as the price for things to stay as they are — and for the elite to be saved. The future of Empire hangs on this issue: Can US dollar hegemony be preserved, or might the financial ‘nobility’ see that things must change – if they are to stay as they are? That is, the Revolution may come from within — and not necessarily from abroad.

In recent days, Trump has pivoted to being the President of ‘Law and Order’ – a shift which he explicitly connected to 1968, when, in response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of George Floyd, Trump tweeted: “When the looting begins, the shooting starts”. These were the words used by Governor George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate, in the 1968 Presidential election: Republicans launched their “southern strategy” to win over resentful white Democrats after the civil rights revolution.

Trump is determined to prevail – but today is not 1968. Can a Law and Order platform work now? U.S. demography in the south has shifted, and it is not clear that the liberal, urban electorates of America would sign up to a law-and-order platform, which implicitly appeals to white anxieties?

In a sense, President Trump finds himself between a rock and a hard place. If the protests are not quelled, and “the right normal (not) restored” (as per Esper’s words), Trump may lose those remaining ‘law and order’ conservatives. But, were he to lose control and over-react using the military, then it may be Trump who has his own ‘Tiananmen Square’ – one, which Jimmy Lai (gleefully) predicted in Hong Kong’s case would bring in the whole world against China: “Hong Kong will be done, and … China will be done, too.”

Or, in this instance, Trump might be done, and… the U.S. too.