Tag: finance

Real Vision editor Jack Farley welcomes Real Vision’s Weston Nakamura and Max Wiethe to the Daily Briefing. After briefly analyzing the day’s price action (U.S. equities surged as Treasury yields rose), they analyze the forced liquidation of Archegos Capital. Weston provides insight into the mechanics of the over-the-counter derivatives that were involved in the blow-up as well as big banks such as Goldman Sachs, Nomura, and Credit Suisse that were prime brokerages to Archegos Capital.

One year after beating out rivals like Amazon for the coveted Pentagon “JEDI” contract, a $10 billion mandate to rebuild the Pentagon’s cloud-computing infrastructure (despite a lawsuit from Amazon alleging unfair discrimination in the awarding of the contract), Microsoft has just won another major DoD contract, this one worth potentially more than 2x the JEDI contract.

Microsoft shares climbed on the news that the company had won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented-reality headsets for the US Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88BN over a 10-year stretch.

Investors celebrated the news likely because, according to CNBC, the deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a “futuristic product” like the HoloLens, which involved years of research, and also lies beyond the company’s core competency area – software and its Windows operating system.

The mega-contract follows a much smaller contract worth $480MM Microsoft received to develop prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System. The new contract is essentially an order to put that prototype into mass production.

Though it was widely panned when first release, the HoloLens (which costs $3,500) overlays a holographic interface over real-world environments, and allows users to interact using hand and voice gestures. For example, the headset can use thermal imaging to reveal enemy combatants hiding in the night.

It will also enable soldiers to fight and train using the same system.

“The IVAS headset, based on HoloLens and augmented by Microsoft Azure cloud services, delivers a platform that will keep soldiers safer and make them more effective,” Alex Kipman, a technical fellow at Microsoft and the person who introduced the HoloLens in 2015, wrote in a blog post. “The program delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios.”

While Google parent Alphabet’s employees do everything they can to stymie their employers’ attempts to win lucrative contracts from the Department of Defense (GOOG’s hyper-progressive employees have deemed working with the DoD “immoral”, though they had little, if anything, to say about Google’s efforts to break back into the Chinese market) Microsoft is apparently taking the opposite tack.

We wonder which approach shareholders will appreciate more? After all, the Pentagon probably could have ordered 120,000 souped-up Google Glass headsets just as easily.

Authored by Stacey Lennox via PJMedia.com,

On March 19th, the President of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, wrote an open letter on the border crisis and posted it to Facebook. It lays waste to the narrative that the current policies that encourage migration are a kinder, gentler approach. Dannels also directly confronts the hypocrisy of our public health bureaucrats remaining silent on the COVID risks posed by the current crisis while restricting the movement and activities of American citizens.

Dannels details how the Mexican cartels, which he correctly labels transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), use their significant increases in human trafficking to cover for drug smuggling. He also talks passionately about the dangers of placing children in these criminal organizations’ care, which control the southern side of the border entirely. Dannels also believes the number of border crossers is grossly underestimated due to monitoring on the Arizona border:

In Cochise County, Arizona they have a sophisticated camera system along migrant routes across the border. These cameras detect significantly more traffic than our federal partners report capturing. In fact, our estimates are that only about 28% of the people crossing illegally are taken into custody. While the scope of the known crisis is enormous, we believe it may be underreported by close to 300%.

Leveling significant criticism at the Biden administration, Dannels notes:

Due to what we believe is misdirected policy from Washington, DC undocumented persons are being released into our communities. This is overloading our NGOs and nonprofits. Once released we have an affirmative responsibility to provide some standard of care for these people. Our local community resources are no longer able to provide social services to our own citizens. We have no meaningful assistance from the federal government. The appearance is of washing their hands of a mess they alone created and leaving it to border communities to struggle through. This is completely unacceptable.

Dannels’s assessment is similar to that of the mayor of Del Rio, Texas, who said his city’s resources are exhausted due to caring for migrants. This morning Sheriff Dannels spoke to Glenn Beck, and the situation has only gotten worse. Dannels, a 37-year veteran of law enforcement at the border, talked openly about the progress made during the Trump administration that President Biden dismantled.  Dannels called President Biden’s executive order on immigration, signed on day one of his presidency, politically and ideologically driven.

“What he [President Biden] did that the first day, it sent a message to the cartels and those vulnerable people that hey, we’re coming across, we’re opening up the border. He stopped the construction on the border which stopped the perennial technology revenue, resources, and the physical barrier. My three checkpoints are shut down in my county. I’ve got a border patrol station shut down in my county for responding to help my deputies. I’ve got my aerostat shut down and I just learned Friday they removed me from the Homeland Security Council.”

When Secretary Mayorkas removed people from this advisory council, it was the first time members were released since its formation after 9/11. A total of 32 members were relieved of their advisory positions. The letter said the group would reconvene using a new model. All of the members were volunteers who advised the secretary on national security issues using their frontline experience and expertise.

The cartels use roads and physical elements that were part of the border wall construction to improve their smuggling operations. With no proper closure to the project, it has made patrolling the border more difficult. Dannels says Arizona has chaos on the border just taking into consideration the technology and physical barrier problems.

He also detailed how the cartels operate. He talked about the recycling of children who cross the border with multiple adults to gain easier entry. Dannels said the crossing price in his Arizona county is $6,000. When individuals cross and are indebted, illegal migrants become involved in the sex trade, drug smuggling, and gangs due to these debts. This pattern affects the safety and security of small towns along the border:

“It seems like nobody can fix this problem. We had the most powerful leader in the country and that’s our president. Excluding President Trump, who put a lot of effort on this border. I’ve gone through a lot of presidents in my 37 years and I’m telling you it’s rather disgusting. Because it’s like we’re left out of the U.S. when it comes to security, being American, our Constitutional rights are on the southwest border.”

Dannels closed with a warning encouraging Americans to reject the open borders policies of the Biden administration:

“Everything coming over the southwest border, whether it’s drugs, whether it’s a national security issue, whether it’s a health pandemic issue, COVID, whatever it may be it’s coming into your neighborhood. We might be the gate to all, but it’s coming into your neighborhoods. They’re not staying in my community. Until they can find the means the non-governmental programs can get them out of here. Right now, we see charter buses all the time. $1500 a hit to take kids out of our county. $1500 and almost every day you’re seeing them pull out of my county.”

On April 21st, the pandemic health policies at the border that allow essential travel only will expire. Right now, that order enables Arizona to return border crossers to the Mexican state of Sonora. The state across the border from Texas will not allow border crossers to return. Dannels cautions if that restriction expires, additional migrants will flood the southwest border.

WATCH the full Interview with Cochise County, Arizona Sheriff mark Dannels:

With prosecutors expected to announce the first plea deals for individuals charged as part of the Capitol Riots on Jan. 6  in the coming days, Politico reports that many of the suspects allegedly involved in the “attempted insurrection” likely won’t face jail time, which could be a “jarring reality check” for (mostly liberal) Americans outraged by the “storming” of the Capitol.

While a handful of defendants could face jail time for vandalism, assault or even murder/manslaughter for fighting with Capitol Hill police during the Jan. 6 incident, the vast majority will likely be hit with a slap on the wrist. The reason being that protests on the Capitol are extremely commonplace, and legally speaking, most of those charged aren’t culpable for charges beyond simple trespassing. If judges tried to change this up, they would then need to hand down more strict punishments to protesters charged with interrupting Congressional votes or the State of the Union (tactics that, while they don’t always attract media attention, are still key parts of the progressive toolkit)

There are two main reasons: Although prosecutors have loaded up their charging documents with language about the existential threat of the insurrection to the republic, the actions of many of the individual rioters often boiled down to trespassing. And judges have wrestled with how aggressively to lump those cases in with those of the more sinister suspects.

“My bet is a lot of these cases will get resolved and probably without prison time or jail time,” said Erica Hashimoto, a former federal public defender who is now a law professor at Georgetown. “One of the core values of this country is that we can protest if we disagree with our government. Of course, some protests involve criminal acts, but as long as the people who are trying to express their view do not engage in violence, misdemeanors may be more appropriate than felonies.”

Even though the administration has no sway (at least, in theory) over judges’ sentencing decisions, a wave of lenient sentences could be a PR disaster for Biden & Co., as members of the hyper-progressive “squad” would likely seize the opportunity to slam the administration for letting a small army of alleged “white supremacists” off the hook. At one point, Biden and other senior Democrats were saying the rioters’ behavior bordered on “sedition”, speculation that the media took and ran with.

The prospect of dozens of Jan. 6 rioters cutting deals for minor sentences could be hard to explain for the Biden administration, which has characterized the Capitol Hill mob as a uniquely dangerous threat. Before assuming office, Biden said the rioters’ attempt to overturn the election results by force “borders on sedition”; Attorney General Merrick Garland has called the prosecutions his top early priority, describing the storming of Congress as “a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no longer any room for nuance in political messaging. And the high expectations set by DoJ prosecutors, who described elaborate plots to murder lawmakers and touted a cache of molotov cocktails seized by officers, have deflated somewhat as new information has emerged.

The American Thinker’s Monica Showalter expands on this in a piece entitled “Biden left with egg on his face as facts of Capitol ‘riot’ wind through courts”.where she argues that the nigh-inevitable outcome of the Capitol Riot prosecutions will be an embarrassment of the administration that has tried to portray the “riot” as a legitimate act of insurrection, and claimed that the protesters fully intended to overthrow the Congress and instate President Trump as “president for life.”

The rest was just protest theatre, plenty of arrests, lot of trespassing, some vandalism, lots of selfies posted conveniently for prosecutors on social media, lots of tattling, and no question as to how the outcome was going to turn out. There were five deaths, four of unarmed protestors, including one who was shot at close range in the neck by an unnamed Capitol police officer, and one of a police officer who was quickly cremated amid shifting stories, and a mendacious New York Times report, with inflammatory claims about the circumstances of how he died. That’s since been discredited, leaving them with egg all over their faces.

The arrests of the protestors are now winding their way through the courts. And surprise, surprise, the prosecutors, who are probably leftists themselves, are not finding any grand plots. All of Joe Biden’s windblowing about the ‘threat to democracy is coming to naught. There never was a threat to democracy. There was never a grand ‘insurrection.’ No heads on pikes, no torches. There were just conservatives and marginal characters-who-never-vote acting like Code Pink or Black Lives Matter.

But the administration isn’t the only institution that might have some ‘splaining’ to do: the media, as Showalter points out, was also complicit.

The press seems to have been complicit. As I noted here, a CNN reporter reportedly danced with glee with a known leftist rioter who’s since been arrested for acts at the Capitol, shouting, “We did it!” with him, which if true suggests some kind of complicity. Someone needs to start answering questions about that.

Now the Times gets rid of its bad reporting, post-impeachment, when it no longer matters, claiming that its two official sources somehow had bad information. Who the hell were these bounders? A good reporter would get rid of bad sources like a bad penny based on how they damaged his credibility, but not these guys — they continue to protect them. The Times doesn’t really care about what this stuff does to their credibility based on this behavior. Yet if they were real journalists, they’d get to the bottom of this and really report how they had been used by creeps spreading false information for political gain. What were their bad sources’ motives? Were they worthy as sources or political operatives with an agenda? But this is being hidden in that hope-to-not-be-noticed “oopsie note” at the top of their lower-than-tabloid mendacious story.

With this in mind, we wouldn’t be surprised to see coverage of the capitol riot prosecution slowly fade away before the sentences are handed down.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The wealthy are reveling in their giant mountains of money, but meanwhile our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us.  The stock market has been hovering near all-time record highs, and for those at the very top of the economic pyramid these may seem like the best of times.  But for most Americans, the “good old days” are a long distant memory.  More than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed over the past year, poverty is absolutely exploding all around us, and crime rates are shooting higher at an unprecedented rate. 

In fact, one study of 34 big U.S. cities found that their murder rates rose by an average of 30 percent in 2020…

A study by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that murders increased by 30% across 34 large U.S. cities.

In some areas, carjackings, robberies, shootings, sexual assaults and violence have become so common that it seems like the crime literally never stops.

Unless you have a death wish, there are certain parts of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore that you should never enter night or day.  If you doubt me, just go wander the streets of the worst neighborhoods of those cities and see what happens to you.

This was supposed to be a year when crime rates began to return to normal, but instead they are on the rise again.  One study that looked at 37 large U.S. cities found that murder rates are up by an average of 18 percent so far in 2021…

The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021.

A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.

What is truly frightening is that this is about as good as things are going to get in America from here on out.

So if murder rates are spiking this much under relatively good conditions, what will our cities look like when things get really crazy?

Some of the crimes that we are witnessing are almost too horrible for words.  For example, just consider what just happened to a 12-year-old boy in Miami…

A suspect in a black car kidnapped the boy at about 2 a.m. early Saturday morning from a Miami street, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.

He drove a few blocks, raped the boy, and then shoved him out of the car and drove off, police said.

A good Samaritan on a bike near the scene of the crime came to the boy’s rescue. He was bleeding from the head and said he had been shot.

How sick do you have to be in order to do something like that?

Sadly, I could write about nightmarish crimes such as this every single day of the week if I wanted to, because they happen constantly.

Much of the crime boom is being fueled by gangs.  There are more than 100,000 gang members living in the city of Chicago alone, and a steady stream of illegal immigrants ensures that the gangs will always have an influx of new recruits.

Securing our borders would go a long way toward solving this problem, but we refuse to do that.

Just recently, a sheriff in Texas took a reporter from the Daily Mail down to “the easiest illegal border crossing along the Rio Grande”…

The crossing point is on private property where an abandoned house sits on a quiet rural street that runs parallel to the Rio Grande, about 5 miles out of town from Del Rio, Texas, 150 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Law enforcement has nicknamed it ‘Border Lawn.’

‘It’s the easiest illegal border crossing along the Rio Grande,’ Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

When the river is low, immigrants can wade across the Rio Grande in about five minutes.

Authorities know that hordes of people come across the border at this spot each week, but they won’t stop it.

Of course any immigrants that are detained need to be held somewhere, and facilities at the border are already packed beyond overflowing.  In particular, the infamous facility in Donna, Texas is already holding more than 10 times more migrants than it was designed to hold…

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in Donna, Texas, is supposed to house no more than 250 migrants during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, the tent complex was holding more than 4,100 migrants, including 3,200 unaccompanied children, according to Oscar Escamilla, a Border Patrol official in the Rio Grande Valley who briefed reporters during the first press tour of a CBP facility under President Biden.

So much of the immigration debate is focused on the unfortunate children that are being held in places such as this, but that is just a drop in the bucket.

Each week, thousands of grown men illegally cross the border without being detained at all.  Many of those grown men end up in our core urban areas, and with few legitimate employment prospects available many of them turn to crime.

In an article that I published yesterday entitled “We Have Never Seen A Home Buying Frenzy Quite Like This”, I discussed the fact that we have seen a mass exodus from our core urban areas over the past year.  Millions of Americans have been looking to buy homes in desirable rural and suburban locations, and this has pushed housing prices into the stratosphere.

Today, I came across another example of this phenomenon.  122 offers were made on a 1,400 square foot home that was listed for sale in Citrus Heights, California in just one weekend…

A Citrus Heights home in a quiet cul-de-sac received 122 offers in one weekend on the market.

The 1,400 square feet home has three bedrooms, two baths and a spacious backyard with a swimming pool and an asking price of $399,900.00.

Could you imagine paying $400,000 for a house that is just 1,400 square feet in size?

The real estate agent that listed this property was astounded to receive so many offers, because it wasn’t underpriced at all…

“People would think that it was underpriced. It was not underpriced. It was straight on with the comps,” said Deb Brittan, the listing agent for the property. “I had hoped, I thought, maybe if we get 20 offers that would be amazing.”

As for the couple that sold the house, they don’t need it anymore because they are moving to Idaho.

As conditions in the United States continue to deteriorate, we will continue to see people flock to rural and suburban communities at an unprecedented rate.

So if you are planning to move, I would not wait.

Millions of Americans have already been priced out of the market, and the feeding frenzy is not going to subside any time soon.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

For the fourth straight quarter, US stocks dramatically outperformed Treasuries…

Source: Bloomberg

S&P gained over 6% as Treasury’s total return fell over 4%…

Source: Bloomberg

And despite all of JPM’s wailing of massive rebalance flows, Small Caps and Big-Tech have soared this week (as bonds were dumped)…

Trannies were the best-performing major index in the US in Q1 (up 17%), followed by Small Caps (+12%). The last couple of days melt-up in big-tech dragged then positive for the quarter (Nasdaq 100 +2%)…

Source: Bloomberg

This is the 4th straight quarterly gain for US stocks in a row.

Cyclicals (up for the 4th straight quarter) dominated Defensives (up 10% vs 3.5% in Q1)…

Source: Bloomberg

Value stocks (+10% – 4th straight quarterly gain) dramatically decoupled (higher) from growth stocks (+2.4%) from Mid-Feb…

Source: Bloomberg

Energy stocks soared 30% in Q1 (after rising 26% in Q4) and Tech underwhelmed (but was still higher in Q1…

Source: Bloomberg

The “Most Shorted” stocks in the US markets soared a stunning 33% in Q1 leaving hedge funds scrambling (after the GME debacle) for a modest 3.6% gain in their most-owned stocks…

Source: Bloomberg

HY Bond prices ended Q1 lower – the first quarterly loss since Q1 2020’s crash…

Source: Bloomberg

The entire Treasury complex was sold in Q1 but the long-end was an utter bloodbath with 10Y yields up 80bps!!

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury’s Total Return in Q1 was worst since Q3 1980.

Source: Bloomberg

5Y Yields have soared recently and hover now at the 2016 spike lows…

Source: Bloomberg

After 3 straight quarterly losses, the dollar surged in Q1 to its highest since early November…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold’s worst quarter since Q4 2016 (and worst Q1 since 1982) as the precious metal plunged from almost $1960 at its early January highs to almost $1675 at its lows this week…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold surged back above $1700 today though ahead of Biden’s infrastructure bill announcement…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil surged over 25% in Q1, its best quarter since Q2 2020…

Source: Bloomberg

But we note that WTI tumbled back below $60 this afternoon as Macron unveiled a new 4-week long total national lockdown in France (ahead of tomorrow’s OPEC+ meeting)…

Cryptos all soared in Q1 with Bitcoin surging over 100% in Q1 – its 4th quarterly gain in a row; and Ethereum exploding 150% in Q1 – its best quarter on record…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin flash-crashed $3,000 overnight but buyers bid it all the way back up during the day session…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we note that global aggregate central bank balance sheets went absolutely nowhere in Q1, hardly supportive of ‘stonks’ and perhaps why Nasdaq also went absolutely nowhere.

Source: Bloomberg

Get back to work Mr.Powell.

As more details from the now infamous debacle surrounding Tiger cub Archegos, whose massive derivative-based exposures spilled out into the open and transformed into the biggest and most painful rolling margin call to hit Wall Street since Lehman, we now know that at least six Prime Brokers scrambled to unwind the biggest hedge fund blowup since LTCM without hammering the overall market.

To “make a living in this business… be first, be smarter, or cheat…”

We previously noted that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were the “first” to break ranks and rejected the efforts of Credit Suisse’s emissaries who tried to create consensus to unwind the positions without sparking a panic.

As we now also know, Nomura and Credit Suisse which dithered and were unsure what to do, seeing their stock crushed and their counterparty risk hedge premia explode higher.

And today we get confirmation that Deutsche Bank was among the early game-theoretical defectors, as Bloomberg reports the big German bank sold about $4 billion of holdings seized in the implosion of Archegos Capital Management in one large private deal on Friday.

It’s unclear whether Deutsche Bank’s sale was to one firm or a consortium. If it was a single buyer, it would be the largest known transaction to emerge from the messy unwind of Hwang’s huge portfolio.

It also brings to almost $30 billion the known value of Archegos investments that have been liquidated so far.

Deutsche Bank joins Wells Fargo in the group of prime brokers that – reportedly emerge unscathed from this debacle.

And now, as is usual after a a major market blowup, The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has initiated a preliminary investigation into Bill Hwang over his leveraged trades that have roiled Wall Street.

Bloomberg reports that, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the inquiry isn’t public, the examination is in its early stages and is being led by the asset-management group in the SEC’s enforcement division.

As a reminder, it’s not the first time that Hwang has been in the SEC’s crosshairs.

In 2012, his former hedge fund, Tiger Asia Management, pleaded guilty and paid more than $60 million in penalties after the SEC and U.S. prosecutors accused it of trading on illegal tips about Chinese banks. Hwang opened Archegos, a family office, following the sanctions, as the SEC kicked him out of the hedge fund industry by banning him from managing money on behalf of clients.

We look forward to seeing what they will do this time? And perhaps more notably, will this have a systemic impact on the entire Total Return Swap/Contracts-For-Difference market in US equities that flies under the regulatory radar (and as we have just witnessed in the case of Hwang, can lead to enormous unknown risks to the financial system).

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Progressives have their eyes on on your wallet to pay for their big government schemes. And it looks like Biden will oblige them.

$10 Trillion for Climate and Infrastructure 

The National Review reports Liberal Senators Push Biden for a $10 Trillion Climate and Infrastructure Bill

On Monday, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) unveiled a climate and infrastructure plan that called for $10 trillion in spending over the next decade. Biden’s initial campaign pledge to invest $2 trillion over four years was already inadequate to confronting climate change, and his coming proposal may be even less so, said Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who helped craft the Markey-Dingell plan. Pollin said a $3 trillion investment only amounted to about 1.3 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

To put the $10 trillion Markey and Dingell are proposing in perspective, over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office expects that we’ll spend $1.4 trillion on veterans’ programs, $6 trillion on Medicaid, $8.5 trillion on defense, and $8 trillion on all other non-defense discretionary spending. The Markey-Dingell bill would be higher than any of these parts of the budget, only it would come on top of all of these existing expenditures.

Biden’s Big Plans 

The Wall Street Journal comments Behind Biden’s Big Plans: Belief That Government Can Drive Growth

The Biden economic team’s ambitions go beyond size to scope. The centerpiece of their program—a multitrillion-dollar proposal to be rolled out starting Wednesday, less than a month after a $1.9 trillion stimulus—seeks to give Washington a new commercial role in matters ranging from charging stations for electric vehicles to child care, and more responsibility for underwriting education, incomes and higher-paying jobs. 

The administration has also laid the groundwork for regulations aimed at empowering labor unions, restricting big businesses from dominating their markets and prodding banks to lend more to minorities and less for fossil-fuel projects. All while federal debt is currently at a level not seen since World War II.

It all marks a major turning point for economic policy. The gamble underlying the agenda is a belief that government can be a primary driver for growth. It’s an attempt to recalibrate assumptions that have shaped economic policy of both parties since the 1980s: that the public sector is inherently less efficient than the private, and bureaucrats should generally defer to markets.

The administration’s sweeping plans reflect a calculation that “the risk of doing too little outweighs the risk of doing too much,” said White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese. “We’re going to be unapologetic about that,” he said. “Government must be a powerful force for good in the lives of Americans.”

Crazy Thinking 

If you think this is crazy, you are thinking correctly. 

If you don’t think this is crazy, you are crazy.

The notion that government can spend money wisely and allocate resources wisely has been disproved countless times. 

Take a look at Soviet 5-year plans, Venezuela, Japan for the last three decades, or dozens of other examples. 

A Word About Capitalism 

The saving grace of capitalism is failure. Good ideas are rewarded, bad ideas fail.

We don’t have failure, we have bank bailouts, student loan bailouts, housing bailouts, and so many moral hazard market interventions by the Fed and Congress I cannot even name all the facilities or tools.

And without failure, you don’t have capitalism. So don’t tell me that we need big government because capitalism doesn’t work.

The problem is lack of capitalism not a failure of capitalism. Governments fail and ideas fail, capitalism doesn’t fail.

Regardless, more big government ideas are about to be tested. 

As organized groups of social justice activists pressure US companies to oppose Georgia’s new election law, CEOs of major corporations are now coming out against the GOP-sponsored overhaul.

On Wednesday, 72 black executives – led by former American Express CEO Ken Chenault and outgoing Merck CEO Ken Frazier – signed an open letter demanding that corporate America fight the Georgia legislation. “Fundamentally, if you can’t oppose this legislation — that’s the lifeblood for black Americans, the right to vote. We can’t be silent, and corporate America can’t be silent. And if they can’t speak out on this issue, what can they speak out on?” Chenault said during an appearance on CNBC.

“there’s no middle ground here. You’re either for more people voting or you want to suppress the vote,” he added.

“We’re asking Corporate America to publicly and directly oppose any discriminatory legislation.”

— Former American Express CEO Ken Chenault, who is leading an effort among Black executives to get companies to help roll back new voting laws pic.twitter.com/GyoVwjq0MT

— The Recount (@therecount) March 31, 2021

“The campaign appears to be the first time that so many powerful Black executives have organized to directly call out their peers for failing to stand up for racial justice,” wrote the New York Times.

The changes via Axios:

• Cut the time period voters have to request absentee ballots and impose new identification requirements.

• Make it easier for state officials to take over local elections boards.

• Limit the use of ballot drop boxes.

• Allow challenges to voting eligibility.

• Criminalize any attempt to approach voters in line.

• “[R]eplace the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed [former President] Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results,” AP writes.

According to civil rights groups, the changes disenfranchise minorities (unlike arguably harder to obtain vaccine passports, for some reason).

Joining Chenault and the black executives are Atlanta-based Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who called Georgia’s new election law “unacceptable” in a memo circulated to staff, adding that the “entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie” about election fraud in the 2020 election. “After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”

Also ‘concerned’ over Georgia’s election law is Microsoft, which will press the state to change the ‘unfair’ law over provisions the company says “unfairly restrict the rights of people to vote legally, securely, and safely,” according to president Brad Smith in a statement posted to the company’s website. Smith notes the company’s significant investments in Atlanta, adding “we should all work together to oppose legislation in other states that would undermine the right to vote conveniently, securely, and safely.”

Lastly, Coca-Cola North American President Alfredo Rivera issued a Wednesday statement during Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ State of the City Address, saying “I, along with my colleagues at The Coca-Cola Company, have been disappointed in the outcome of Georgia’s voting legislation. We don’t see this as the final chapter, as we will continue to work with many of you.”

Now do vaccine passports…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A reaction to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine caused a severe rash that eventually led to a man’s skin peeling off, doctors and the man said.

“It all just happened so fast. My skin peeled off. It’s still coming off on my hands now,” Richard Terrell, 74, of Virginia, told WRIC.

Terrell received the shot earlier this month but was soon forced to go to the Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Medical Center for treatment.

The issues began appearing four days after the injection. Discomfort turned into an itchy rash that began to swell.

Graphic photographs show how Terrell’s legs and feet turned bright red as swelling intensified.

“It was stinging, burning, and itching,” Terrell said.

“Whenever I bent my arms or legs, like the inside of my knee, it was very painful where the skin was swollen and was rubbing against itself.”

Fnu Nutan, a dermatology hospitalist at VCU, said doctors determined what happened to Terrell was a reaction to the vaccine.

“We ruled out all the viral infections, we ruled out COVID-19 itself, we made sure that his kidneys and liver was okay, and finally we came to the conclusion that it was the vaccine that he had received that was the cause,” Nutan told WRIC.

“Lots of patients come in and say ‘I got the vaccine, here’s what happened, I’m sure it’s the vaccine,’” Nutan added to Fox News. “We’re very careful when we see such patients, we want to make sure we have ruled out the more common causes of the reaction—most commonly it would be antibiotics or something he took, even over-the-counter.”

Tests done on Terrell included ones for viral illnesses, COVID-19, and adenovirus.

Nutan said the reaction, which likely had to do with Terrell’s genetic makeup and the vaccine type, is extremely rare and that she still recommends people get a COVID-19 vaccine.

“If you look at the risk of getting the virus versus the benefit of getting the vaccine, the risk-benefit is still highly in favor of the vaccine,” she said.

Johnson & Johnson, VCU, the Virginia Department of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not respond to requests for comment.

Drug regulators authorized Johnson & Johnson’s shot last month.

As of March 30, 96 million Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. According to the passive reporting Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1,005 reports of skin issues following vaccination have been lodged in the United States. In total, there are 160,137 reports of adverse effects following vaccination.

Federal authorities, including the CDC, say they’re monitoring reports of severe allergic reactions, including by following up on reports from VAERS. Anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction, post-COVID-19 vaccination is rare, occurring in two to five people per million vaccinated in the United States, the CDC says on its website.

“This kind of allergic reaction almost always occurs within 30 minutes after vaccination. Fortunately, vaccination providers have medicines available to effectively and immediately treat patients who experience anaphylaxis following vaccination,” it states.