“The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
– Margaret Thatcher
For months myself and very few others have been warning about the problems in Europe. That the real problem isn’t in the U.S., though it’s certainly a mess, it is in Europe.
It’s why I focused so hard on Brexit. Would the U.K. actually get out of the EU before it all came crashing down around the deaf and now stunned Brussels technocrats?
A U.K. outside of the EU meant localizing a major problem on the backs of those that 1) engineered it and 2) cheered it as they literally stole hundreds of billions of pounds from them.
But while everyone has been focused on the melting equity markets and what the high priests of monetary wizardry at the central banks were going to do, did anyone notice the complete collapse of European bonds last week?
I could go on with this but I think you get the point.
But what happens when the rate of selling overwhelms their buying programs?
What happens when they expand those programs, like they did last week, and the selling still overwhelmed them?
More importantly, what happens when short-term spread traders no longer front-run the ECB’s buying chasing nickels in front of a freight train?
Scroll up.
For years those momo-monkeys made it easier for the ECB to keep the fiction of a functional bond market alive. This distorted them beyond all recognition.
And now they’ve run out of other people’s money to bid them higher.
Forget 2008 folks. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. It will likely be a once-in-five-lifetimes event if Martin Armstrong’s cycle projections are anything close to accurate.
Armstrong from 2015:
There is interaction also between the different fractal levels. The grand or major level at the 309.6 scale shows that the current major trend is a PUBLIC WAVE. since the late 1700s into 2032.95. This has been the age of big government and the shift from Laissez-faire economics in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies. This is the primary difference between a PUBLIC and PRIVATE WAVE.
And looking at the events of the past few days it’s pretty clear everyone who is anyone believes that our institutions are there to save us from our own excesses and mistakes.
But they aren’t. The Fed did what it was supposed to do: lower rates, create liquidity, support falling capital markets and buy up government debt so that the Trump administration can spend it.
And it didn’t work. The Dow crashed, and government bonds are hitting their peaks. And still there is an unquenchable need for dollars.
Zero-bound and negative interest rates created this mess, they won’t get us out of it.
The central banks stand naked along the shore as the tide rolls out.
And this morning financial analysts of all stripes are whistling past their own graveyards. They are trying to make sense of it all when it simply comes down to the following…
It creates the terrible dynamic we’re in now: hyper-inflation of risks which come through the selling debt to fund social engineering.
The money printing obfuscates the lack of real capital and the rest is credit pulled from a future incapable of supporting it.
It doesn’t matter the form the spending takes. It doesn’t matter what programs it was used to fund. The end will always be the same.
Epic deflation as the Ponzi scheme of your government paying off its Visa with its MasterCard runs out of people to sell the debt to.
Socialized banking of any form has never worked and it never will. To protect the lower and middle classes from future global bankruptcies we need a free market for money.
Money which is free from the avarice of psychopaths with guns extracting unearned wealth or rent from the people they say they serve. Money is supposed to measure the profit of a voluntary exchange between two actors with productive advantages in different goods or services.
The hard truth is that until we embrace that conceit again we will be at the mercy of these terrible people.
Today, the ECB is powerless to stop this. They don’t have the tools nor the expertise. And they won’t even after they get the reforms they believe they need. It is bankrupt now and it will need external help to survive.
What will the numbers be in 2021? And who will actually be there to pay for it?
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UK Covid-19 Could Last Until Spring 2021 With Millions Hospitalized
A public health document viewed by The Guardian says the Covid-19 outbreak could last until spring 2021 and lead to millions hospitalized.
The secret document was written by the Public Health England (PHE) reveals the virus crisis could be sticking around for another 12 months and infect upwards as 80% of Britons over time.
The document says that: “As many as 80% of the population are expected to be infected with Covid-19 in the next 12 months, and up to 15% (7.9 million people) may require hospitalisation.”
UK Covid-19 Cases And Deaths (as of March 15)
Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty recently said the worst-case scenario has modeled 80% of the population “are expected” to contract the virus.
Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told The Guardian that if the public were to hear that the virus would be disrupting their lives for one year, then they would be “really upset” and “pretty worried about that.”
“A year is entirely plausible. But that figure isn’t well appreciated or understood,” added Hunter.
“I think it will dip in the summer, towards the end of June, and come back in November, in the way that usual seasonal flu does. I think it will be around forever, but become less severe over time, as immunity builds up,” he added.
As we noted Sunday, the UK likely missed the containment window to implement social distancing policies that would flatten the curve to slowdown infections, suggesting the country could see an exponential rise in Covid-19 cases over the next month, sort of like what’s happening in Italy at the moment.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the military could be deployed to keep order at supermarkets, hospitals, and in the streets, as Britons could soon find out that virus disruptions may extend into early 2021.
Presently NATO is in the initial stages of military operations called Defender-Europe 20. The 40,000 soldier strong war game exercise includes roughly 20,000 American troops and accompanying weaponry. This witnesses the largest deployment of US personnel in Europe since 1983 Operation Re-forger exercises in the height of the Cold War era. Dutifully, Canadian forces based in Latvia are poised to play their willing role in this exercise. Despite some amusing logistical glitches in Poland (no re-fuelling stations, no bivouac for US troops) Operation Defender is scheduled to run into June. There is some speculation that the contagion of the COVID-19 virus, much to the chagrin of the NATO brass, may cause some re-assessment of this operation.
So why exactly do the brain trusts of this British/US-led bully boy global army deem this silly stomping of boots and rattling of sabres necessary?
Because of course… as the leaders of the desperate, morally and financially bankrupt so-called rules-based western liberal democracies and the lying legacy media have been shouting for the last two decades… that evil thug and dictator Vladimir Putin and his “Red Army” is intent on invading and conquering Europe and world domination.
In a press service sidebar blurb found in sundry print media, according to NORAD commander US General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, Mad Vlad and his evil Kremlin cohorts have designs of military dominance of the arctic and thus “…an avenue through which Russia can quickly attack…” US targets.
O’Shaughnessy should cause Irish folk everywhere to be embarrassed.
In the initial stages of Defender 20 at the Strategic Command Centre in Nebraska, US Defence Sect. Esper participated in computer scenarios simulating nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Russia.
In statements made to the US Senate earlier this month, General Tod Wolters, the commander of US European Command and head of all NATO armed forces has fully embraced what he defined as a “flexible first strike” doctrine which exposes the US and allies’ “nuclear deterrence” policy a sham.
When the commander of NATO makes such insane statements at the same time that NATO is flexing its military muscle on Russia’s border, the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is real.
The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad is NATO’s main target. All economic, geopolitical and military policy that both Russia and China have adopted over the last two decades, have been a direct reaction to unwarranted and unjustified British/US/NATO aggression.
In an interview on a Russian TV station Putin stated,
“We are not going to fight against anyone. We are going to create conditions so that nobody wants to fight against us.”
The YouTube video of Vladimir Putin’s comments made at the 2007 Munich Security Conference should be earnestly heeded.
Execs At Over 20 Companies Agree To Forfeit, Freeze, Or Cut Salaries Or Bonuses Amid Virus Fallout
Believe it or not, corporate executives are reportedly slashing some of their pay as a result of the coronavirus.
Despite what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders would have you believe about the rich, they apparently have at least some sympathy for other human beings: executives and boards at more than 20 companies agreed to cut, freeze or forfeit their salaries or bonuses in recent weeks.
The companies include those who work in travel, airport baggage and jewelry sales, among others, according to Bloomberg.
Some cuts were made as part of broader cuts due to industries like travel collapsing – but other executives cut voluntarily as a show of solidarity with their employees.
Michael Maslansky, CEO of communications advisory firm maslansky + partners said: “Whenever a CEO asks for concessions in times of financial strain, the first question is almost always: ‘Are you feeling the pain, too?’ The only way to make an employee-wide pay cut possible is if management leads by example.”
The most prominent reductions have come from airlines. Thai airways said senior executives would surrender 25% of their salaries for 6 months. El Al Israel Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand, Australia’s Qantas Airways, U.K.-based Virgin Atlantic, Sweden’s SAS and Cebu Air have all followed suit.
United will see its top two executives give up their salaries until midyear and Southwest’s CEO will take a cut of 10%. Robin Hayes of JetBlue will surrender 20% of base pay. Delta’s CEO is also reportedly considering a reduction.
The concessions won’t have a major impact on each company’s financials, nor will they have a profound impact for most executives’ quality of life.
Robin Ferracone, CEO of executive-compensation advisory firm Farient Advisors said: “Widespread cuts probably hurt people lower down in the organization more than the people at the top since a significant part of compensation at the top is comprised of incentives, which presumably are not cut.”
JetBlue’s Robin Hayes
And it’s not just airlines feeling the pain. Singapore’s national post office will cut and freeze pay for upper lever managers and Hong Kong based jeweler Chow Tai Fook is making its directors take a 30% pay cut through April.
Travel agencies in Australia, like Helloworld Travel, are following suit. Along with Webjet, they are cutting pay for their top executives as much as 30%.
Senior executives at two companies in Singapore that provide baggage handling and airport security are also taking cuts of up to 15%.
Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Carlos Brito was denied a bonus in the second half of 2019 due to coronavirus zapping the company’s profit growth. He commented: “If you own a bakery and don’t make any money one year, you don’t get a bonus — this is the same thing. After a bad year, that’s when you see leaders rising to the occasion.”
Maslansky conlcuded: “CEOs are acutely aware of how the market and public react to their peers. So when the first one goes, others quickly follow.”
Only three months ago, John Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (a hive of self-professed globalists) ran a “pandemic simulation” called “Event 201” specifically focused on Coronavirus. Not Ebola, or Swine Flu or even Avian Flu – but CORONAVIRUS. The simulation features the spread of coronavirus in South America, blamed on animal to human transmission (pigs). The conclusion of the exercise was that national governments were nowhere near ready, scoring 40 out of 100 on their preparedness scale. The simulation projected over 65 million deaths worldwide.
Event 201 played out almost exactly as it has been in China today. Some very disingenuous or perhaps rather stupid people have been arguing that this kind of thing is “normal”, claiming that we are “lucky” that the elites have been running simulations in advance in order to “save us” from a coronavirus outbreak. I assert that Event 201 was not a simulation but a war-game to study the possible outcomes of an event the globalists already knew was coming. Set aside the fact that before almost every major crisis event and terrorist attack for the past few decades authorities were running simulations for that exact event right before it happened; does anyone really believe that Event 201 is pure coincidence?
And warned that while it was still hard to say with certainty, this appears to be the “black swan” that the globalists were waiting for (or planning) all along.
In the discussion below, Derrick Broze discusses a recent announcement by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control regarding the Event 201 pandemic exercise and the new COVID Action Platform. What does this mean for liberty?
But what do globalists have to gain directly from a coronavirus pandemic beyond simple chaos that can be exploited?
On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the People’s Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.
The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweeted an article from the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of “disinformation”, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a “conspiracy theory.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Civil Defense Chief also said the coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhao’s posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.
Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags like The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well as The Epoch Times of the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has close ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagon’s largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.
When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 1950–1953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject is divided. However, an unredacted report from 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many “former” Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.
Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing “plague bombs” by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the Korean War. According to Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:
“…Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.”
Frank Olson , one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama series Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIA’s activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.
Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspended amid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detrick’s germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.
Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagon’s own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism — though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Army’s Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland has cooperated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.
Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfully recreated the avian influenza flu virus in a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the ‘Spanish flu.’ The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemic’s effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the world’s population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.
Soldiers ill with the Spanish flu at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918
There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barré Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.
If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is already partnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus which would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.
One of the WHO’s other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his ‘charitable’ private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in “fixing” the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congo which forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.
More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gates stated:
“First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
To put it another way, one of the world’s wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of ‘overpopulation’ pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.
Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by a short list of fossil fuel companies and the world’s largest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the world’s poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such as BirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular “progressive” politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). ‘AOC’ is also the face of the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for “achieving a more sustainable population.”
The false notion of “overpopulation” became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of German scientist Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb in 1968 ,an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Today’s doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlich’s false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlich’s eco-fascism. As much as today’s ‘population bombers’ like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.
Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regime’s programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefeller’s grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in “reproductive health” (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.
In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominously wrote that the world should “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war.” The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise caused tens of millions of deaths and set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself has stepped down from Microsoft to focus on his philanthropy while his foundation is busy working on a vaccine.
Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which won an award at last year’s Sundance film festival , puts forth a chilling theory that a South African white supremacist organization deliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjöld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is a recorded confessionfrom a former SAIMR soldier to having deliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africans through immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.
Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow press’s version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a ‘patient zero’ in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elite’s eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the world’s population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elite’s potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.
While American asset-gatherers and commission-rakers were busy demanding investors ‘buy the dip for the long-term’ this week as each leg down just went further down (until Friday, of course), Brazilian money-managers were a little more frank with their clients.
Although US markets were a bloodbath, Brazil was worse with shocking moves intraday – including a high to low drop of 20% on Thursday – leaving a trail of red in Brazil’s fund industry.
And, as Bloomberg reports, the best-performing money managers are reeling after the nation’s markets were especially hard hit by the global selloff. Some took to social media to try to appease anxious investors.
One apologized outright:
“Unfortunately, we were unable to defend ourselves from this fall like we did in 2015, or in the drawdowns of 2016 or in May 2018 and in other moments,” Joao Braga, co-head of equities at XP Asset Management tweeted on Wednesday.
“I apologize and we will work hard to recover.”
He has some apologizing to do as the XP Long Biased fund is suffering its worst monthly loss since its 2013 inception, down 30% through March 11, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The fund, with about 2 billion reais ($425 million) under management, still has the best five-year return among 100 peers.
Another discussed his sleep patterns:
Alaska Asset Management’s Henrique Bredda and Luiz Alves Paes de Barros took to social media to explain their losses. Their Alaska Black Master fund, one of the nation’s best performers, is down 43% year to date through March 11. Barros says moments of massive stress can take a toll on how much he sleeps, but so far he’s fine.
“I’ve been sleeping like a prince,“ he said.
“I wake up very satisfied willing to start buying.“
And a last manager admitted his mistakes and promised to do better:
After posting a return of 155% in 2019 – more than three times its peers’ average – Logos Capital posted a 51% loss this year through March 11. Assets have dropped to about 170 million reais from a peak of 333.7 million reais in early January.
“Moments like this have happened to us before and we usually manage to recover,” Luiz Guerra, the Sao Paulo-based chief investment officer at Logos Capital, said in an interview, saying the firm also made a mistake with banking stocks, which it scrapped, and is now focusing on utilities, telecom companies and exporters.
This humility in the face of collapse should be worth more than the permabull BTFD hubris of every other talking head on business media.
Last week, the Federal Reserve responded to Wall Street’s coronavirus panic with an “emergency” interest rate cut. This emergency cut failed to revive the stock market, leading to predictions that the Fed will again cut rates later this month.
More rate cuts would drive interest rates to near, or even below, zero. Lowering interest rates punishes people for saving, thus encouraging consumers and businesses to spend every penny they make. This may give the economy a short-term boost. But, it inhibits long-term economic growth by depleting the savings necessary for investments in businesses and jobs. The result of this policy will be more pressure on the Fed to indefinitely maintain low interest rates and on the Congress and president to create another explosion of government “stimulus” spending.
Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren has suggested that Congress allow the Federal Reserve to add assets of private companies to the Fed’s already large balance sheet. Allowing the central bank to buy assets of, and thus assume a partial ownership interest in, private companies would give the Federal Reserve even greater influence over the economy. It could also allow the Fed to advance a political agenda by, for example, favoring investment in “green energy” companies over other companies or refusing to purchase assets of retailers who sell firearms or tobacco products.
Mr. Rosengren’s proposal to allow the central bank to “invest,” in private companies seems like something one would hear from democratic socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders. This is not surprising since the entire Federal Reserve system is a textbook example of socialism.
The essence of socialist economics is government allocation of resources either by seizing direct control of the “means of production” or by setting prices business can charge. Federal Reserve manipulation of interest rates is an attempt to set the price of money. Federal Reserve attempts to set interest rates distort the signals sent by the rates to investors and business. This results in a Fed-created boom, which is inevitably followed by a Fed-created bust.
Economic elites benefit when the Federal Reserve pumps new money into the economy because they have access to the money created before there are widespread price increases. Artificially low interest rates also facilitate the growth of the welfare-warfare state.
The Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies harm the average American by eroding the dollar’s purchasing power. This forces consumers to rely on credit cards and other forms of debt to maintain their standard of living. Many Americans are unable to afford their own homes because they are saddled with student loan debt that can even exceed their income.
Since the bailouts of 2008, there has been a growing understanding that the current system is rigged in favor of the elites and against the average American. Unfortunately, popular confusion of our system of Keynesian neoliberalism with a free-market economy, combined with a widespread entitlement mentality, has led many Americans to support increasing government control of our economy.
The key to beating back the rising support for socialism on both the left and right is helping more people understand that big government and central banking are the cause of their problems and that free markets in all areas – and especially in money — is the solution. It is important that the liberty movement put pressure on Congress to cut spending and rein in or, better yet, end the Fed.
Here Come The Mass Layoffs: New York Unemployment Site Goes Down After “Tens Of Thousands” Lose Their Jobs
In many ways the US economy is currently in the eye of the coronavirus storm: cities and states are under quarantine lockdown, the CDC has prohibited any groupings of more than 50 people; stores, clubs, restaurants, bars and hotels are voluntarily shuttering indefinitely as the economy grinds to a halt and yet besides a tapestry of ghost cities across the nation, the immediate impact of the devastating viral storm on the service economy has yet to manifest itself.
But the hurricane is about to hit front and center, and the service-industry mecca of New York City is leading the way.
As the Daily News reports, New York’s unemployment website was overwhelmed Monday as the coronavirus pandemic put tens of thousands of people across the state out of work.
Screenshot of crashed Department of Labor website
The flood of suddenly jobless workers hitting the Department of Labor website with applications for unemployment benefits was unleashed by a drastic move by Gov. Cuomo, who announced all of the state’s restaurants, bars, movie theaters, gyms and casinos would close by 8 p.m. Monday to contain the corona outbreak.
So many people tried to apply that the website crashed several times throughout the day, while the DOL’s hotline was so jammed up that callers seeking aid could not get through to someone who could handle their claim.
The unemployed can apply from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. DOL spokeswoman Deanna Cohen said the department saw a “spike in volume comparable to post 9/11,” adding there are more than 700 staffers assigned to handle the high demand.
Gabe Friedman, a drag queen who performs under the name Kiki Ball-Change
“I’m completely unable to log in and apply” said 26-year-old Gabe Friedman, a drag queen who performs under the name Kiki Ball-Change. “Me and so many other drag queens are completely out of work for at least two months. If I pay rent at the end of April, I would be broke.”
It’s not just the drag queens that find themselves with zero demand for their unique “skills”: tens of thousands of workers across New York’s service industries have already been, or are about to be let go as their employers are forced to either shut down permanently or hibernate until the economy recovers.
The DOL on Sunday waived a seven-day waiting period on unemployment benefits for people out of work due to coronavirus — but that concession proved to be moot as many people could not apply at all.
Rita Lee, 57, who works in the film industry (hopefully not as a drag king), said she started to apply Sunday night after movie productions shut down across the city. She hit a wall once applications opened Monday.
From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Lee tried and failed to apply on the website, saying she kept “getting either a system or server error message, or the page will never load.”
“I’ve called all the toll-free numbers, which are recordings that redirect you to a main menu or a message saying that all the operators are overloaded now and to call back,” said Lee. “Can’t reach a human to help.”
David Stollings, a sound engineer at a now-shuttered Broadway theater, called the situation a doozy. “I got the site to load once,” said Stollings. “Before this it was just not loading at all.”
Marnia Halasa, a Manhattan-based figure skating coach, said she was also unable to apply and became worried about paying rent. “What if I have to blow the New York popsicle joint and run back to Ohio to live with my father?,” asked Halasa, who’s lived in the city for 28 years.
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While it is not clear how many New Yorkers will lose their jobs due to the pandemic, Empire Center founder E.J. McMahon told the NYDN the hit could be worse than the Great Recession of the late 2000s when roughly 370,000 people lost their jobs in a more than two-year span.
“The website crashed, that’s evidence that there has never been anything like this so quickly,” said McMahon. “You can fix a computer glitch. But I don’t think the problem is how the safety net operates. I think the problem is how the economy operates in the future for all these people.”
Incidentally, the chief economist of a multi-billion macro hedge fund advised us that they are now modeling approximately 10 million job losses over the next two to three months. We leave it up to readers to decide if that’s too little, too much or just right.
CBS News wants to reeducate America on how racist everyone is by policing their language and making them understand that the country’s founding fathers were really awful bigots.
That’s the overriding message that emerged from a Tuesday segment on This Morning where the anchors and their guests attempted to convince viewers that everyday terms with zero racial context are proof of how “the roots of racism” are deeply embedded in the US.
The segment promoted a new book aimed at children titled ‘Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’, by CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi and co-author Jason Reynolds.
Anchor Tony Dokoupil announced that “Many headlines referred to the stock market plunge yesterday as ‘Black Monday,’ and that is just one of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that racism has been braided into our everyday culture.”
Co-host Anthony Mason then listed more terms with the word ‘black’ in them, ridiculously suggesting that they are all really racist.
“Terms like ‘Black Monday,’ ‘Black Sheep,’ can be freighted with a negative connotation that sometimes we don’t even realize.” he said, with the other co-host Michelle Miller chiming in that the terms are “baked into the vocabulary.”
A graphic (see picture above) then appeared on screen “Words With Negative Connotations: Black Monday, Black Sheep, Blackballing, Blackmail, Blacklisting.”
“Yeah, and I don’t think we even realize when you have a skin color and regular color and we’re connoting both in a negative fashion. There are relationships between the two and I think we have to break not only the relationship, but those negative connotations.” Kendi suggested.
Miller had earlier argued that children need to be reeducated about how racist the founding fathers were, saying that there are “so many misconceptions and truly lies throughout the history of what children are taught about their history.”
“I hate to put it that directly, but, you know, when you go back and you look at people like a Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, these founding fathers who were so revered, how do you re-teach that?” she worried.
So, just to summarise, even saying the word ‘black’ is now racist, terms that have no racial context, and refer specifically to the colour black are racist, and children need to be re-educated about how racist everyone is.
Netanyahu Gives Himself Broad Phone Tapping Powers To Fight “Invisible Enemy” Coronavirus
Over the weekend we noted with alarm that the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now tapping counter-terror forces and technology to fight the “invisible enemy” of the coronavorus – as Netanyahu put it in a Saturday address.
“We will very soon begin using technology… digital means that we have been using in order to fight terrorism,” Netanyahu had said. Among these new “emergency measures” include broader domestic phone tapping powers as part of the counter-terror technology initiative, as AP reports:
Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Sunday authorized the Shin Bet security agency to use its phone-snooping tactics on coronavirus patients, an official confirmed, despite concerns from civil-liberties advocates that the practice would raise serious privacy issues. The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending an official announcement.
Via Reuters: Netanyahu called coronavirus the “invisible enemy that must be located.”
Ironically enough the outbreak scare has emboldened Netanyahu to admit that much of his plan will “entail a certain degree of violation of privacy.” This extreme overstep action comes as Israel has reached over 200 confirmed Covid-19 cases and has thousands in mandated quarantine.
The technology, which according to the prime minister has “never been used on civilians” – a highly doubtful claim – will help track an infected person’s history of past interactions as well as current whereabouts, ensuring they don’t break isolation, according to the plan.
“They are not minor measures. They entail a certain degree of violation of the privacy of those same people, who we will check to see whom they came into contact with while sick and what preceded that. This is an effective tool for locating the virus,” Netanyahu said.
Well at the very least he was honest about taking Israeli society down the road of Orwellian police state in the name of “protection” from the pandemic. However, we would note that it’s the first we’ve heard of a country openly touting its counter-terror technology and domestic spying as being used to fight the virus, with the exception of China.
Netanyahu said these are “means that until today I have refrained from using among the civilian population.”
In a clear understatement, yet deeply disturbing nonetheless, one opposition party leader from Meretz party, Nitzan Horowitz noted that tracking citizens“using databases and sophisticated technological means are liable to result in a severe violation of privacy and basic civil liberties.”
Meanwhile, former US special forces soldier and now journalist Jack Murphy put it more bluntly:
Once these “emergency measures” are implemented, they will never ever be repealed.
