Tag: news

Addressing a topic that could soon become a big concern for the bond market – the October dead limit deadline –  Curvature’s repo expert Scott Skyrm said this morning that, “for the past several years, Congress always reached a compromise before the possibility of a “technical default” creeped into the markets. This year, as we get closer to the “drop dead date” (which hasn’t yet been determined) the markets will start pricing in distortions.”

To this we can add that as we noted yesterday, distortions in the bond market are already clearly emerging, with the spread between October and November – this is where the market estimates the “drop dead date” will take place – T-Bills rising fast:

The next chart shows that the T-Bill curve is clearly moving wider around the early November timeframe.

As a reminder, yesterday Treasury Secretary Yellen sent a letter to congressional leaders this morning indicating that the the Treasury will exhaust its cash and extraordinary measures “during the month of October”. This slightly sooner than the “October or November” timing that the Congressional Budget Office had estimated in a report in late July.

So how will the upcoming debt limit drama play out? According to Goldman, there are several possible scenarios from here:

The most likely scenario is that Democratic leaders will attach a debt limit suspension to upcoming spending legislation to keep the federal government open past the end of the fiscal year (a “continuing resolution”) and to provide emergency disaster relief funding related to the fires in the Western US and storm damage in the East and South.  As 46 Senate Republicans have indicated they will block a debt limit increase, there is a good chance this strategy will not succeed. That said, passage of short-term debt limit might be possible as several Republican senators represent states affected by recent disasters.  One option Republicans might consider would be to vote against the bill but decline to filibuster it, allowing it to pass with only 51 votes in the Senate. This would likely require unanimous Democratic support in that chamber, which is possible but not certain.

If Senate Republicans block the spending bill later this month, Democratic leaders would then need to decide whether to force the issue and risk a partial federal government shutdown, or to remove the debt limit suspension from the spending bill.  If lawmakers end in a stalemate, a government shutdown might follow, though Goldman does not see this as the base case.

If they are unable to raise the debt limit as part of a spending bill, they might consider using the reconciliation process to pass it with only 51 votes. However, this faces two challenges:

• First, it is unclear whether all Senate Democrats would vote for a revised budget resolution that increases the debt limit by several trillion dollars. if Democrats use the reconciliation process, Senate rules would probably allow them only to raise the debt limit by a specific dollar figure, which would lead to more politically problematic headlines, rather than suspend it for a period of time, which has become the norm over the last decade as it does not lead to a specific dollar amount at the time of passage.
• Second, the current reconciliation process to pass as much as $3.5 trillion in new spending is already underway, with House committees already in the process of considering and passing their segments of the bill in committee. Revising the budget resolution, which governs that process, could interfere with consideration of that legislation, and would likely take at least a couple of weeks, if not longer. If Democrats wait until Sep. 30 to test support for a debt limit increase as part of the spending bill, they might not have sufficient time to go through all of the procedures necessary to revise the resolution before the debt limit deadline.

In other words, as on every prior occasion when the debt limit was raised or extended in the last possible minute, this time is unlikely to be an exception – after all the alternative is a catastrophic outcome for the US. However, the longer Congress waits the more challenging the debt limit process becomes, and could be thrown for a loop if one or more holdouts block the process in the last minute, unleashing chaos in the market if only to provoke politicians into action. As we get closer to the D-Day, keep an eye on the spread in T-Bills for an indication of just how nervous the market is becoming:

The Biden Justice Department filed suit against the state of Texas on Thursday in a bid to block the state’s new abortion law, which bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, while also providing legal recourse for private citizens against anyone who assists a woman in killing her unborn child.

At a Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the ban is “clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.”

The suit, filed in a federal court in Austin, asks a judge to declare the measure unlawful and block its enforcement to “protect the rights that Texas has violated,” according to the Washington Post.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote to let the law go into effect – with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts in their dissent.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley dissects what’s going on:

The announcement in the press release came after President Joe Biden promised a “whole government” response to the new Texas abortion law. However, Garland was pledging to enforce a law that has long been robustly enforced. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) to “protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services.” It specifically protects against the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services or to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.

That is not the basis of the new threat posed by the Texas law to abortion services. The Texas law exposes providers to private enforcement of a rule that sets an abortion bar during the pre-viability stage of a pregnancy.

The fanfare given by the DOJ to the use of the FACE reflects the limited range of possible options for the Justice Department. Indeed, as I previously wrote, efforts to create a new federal law or new federal enforcement effort to create a new basis for challenges by pro-life litigators.

The fact is that a greater challenge to Roe is not coming from Texas but Mississippi. The Court already has a case on the docket, Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that could roll back on Roe and allow for greater pre-viability limitations. Conversely, the Court could ultimately decline to review the Texas law which is likely to be declared unconstitutional under existing case law by the lower courts.

The new Texas law allows for private enforcement, not citizen action to barricade or attack clinics. FACE already protects against such threats and has been used in the past to maintain access to clinics. In the meantime, the law will be challenged in the courts, which are likely to declare it unenforceable pending a new ruling from the Supreme Court on pre-viability state limitations on abortions.

Garland was clearly under pressure from Biden to promise some action. To his credit, he did not make the situation worse by creating a federalism challenge in addition to the current challenges in the federal courts.

With the all-important quarter end approaching for auto delivery numbers, the Tesla email “leak-mill” is starting up again as it tends to do around 2-3 weeks before every quarter end, and moments ago Reuters reported that according to an internal email seen by the news agency, Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked employees to “go super hardcore” to make up for production “challenges” early in the third quarter and “ensure a decent Q3 delivery number.”

“The end of quarter delivery wave is unusually high this time, as we suffered (like the whole industry) from extremely severe parts shortages earlier this quarter” Musk explained. 

The Reuters report was parsed out in several early headlines, and when algos read the “challenging” part, proceeded to sell TSLA stock as shown below. To explain just how “challenging” the quarter was, Musk said that that Tesla built “a lot of cars with missing parts that needed to be added later.”

However, just a few seconds later, when Reuters tried to abbreviate what was fundamentally an ominous warning from Musk, namely that “This is the biggest wave in Tesla history, but we got to get it done”, the Reuters headline creator instead delivered it as if the biggest wave refers not to the challenges facing the company – i.e., negative – but rather to the number of deliveries, which any algo would instantly interpret as positive:

• TESLA CEO SEES ‘BIGGEST WAVE IN TESLA HISTORY’ OF END-OF-QUARTER DELIVERIES IN Q3 -INTERNAL EMAIL

This headline was enough to reverse the initial drop in TSLA stock and push it higher, even if the headline misrepresented what Musk was actually saying regarding the biggest wave.”

We now have to wait several weeks to find out if Tesla employees will be up to the challenge of going “super hardcore” to offset the “biggest wave in Tesla history.”

Ten days after the US and Western countries concluded their chaotic evacuation from Kabul international airport, the previously severely damaged airport is now said to be “fully up and running” – according to a Qatari official who assisted the Taliban in getting it operational again. 

Qatari and Turkish technical teams have been assisting the Taliban in getting commercial flights going again, with Qatar’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Mutlaq al-Qahtani, announcing the airport is “about 90 per cent ready for operations but its reopening is planned gradually.”

A Qatar Airways plane had touched down at the airport earlier on Thursday carrying humanitarian aid inbound, while it later departed for Doha carrying passengers, “including a large group of foreigners on board,” according to Al Jazeera. It marks the first passenger flight departure since the US withdrew on August 30, taking the last American troops out of the twenty-year long war. 

Crucially, it sets up the ability to fly between 100 and 150 Westerners out from Kabul “in the coming hours” after the Taliban gave permission. This will include a group of Americans who have been seeking to leave the country, Al Jazeera reports. Other reports suggested as many as 200 mostly Westerners have been authorized to leave Thursday.

CNN observed that:

A US official and a source with knowledge of the matter had earlier said the Taliban had cleared around 200 people, including American citizens, to fly out.

Live pictures showed people boarding the flight on Thursday afternoon Kabul time; earlier, Qatari and Taliban officials were seen touring the airport tarmac, where the Qatar Airways Boeing 777 stood.

Qatari special envoy Qahtani said, “This is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is fully operational. We have been faced by huge challenges … but we can now say that the airport is fit for navigation.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid issued a statement of appreciation to Qatar, saying, “In the very near future, the airport will be ready for all sorts of flights including commercial flights.” He issued the words while standing beside the Qatari delegation on the airport tarmac. 

As The Daily Caller reports, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany responded to Taliban-grounded flights in Afghanistan, saying the U.S. is “at the mercy of terrorists.”

“We have left Americans behind. That is a hard, cold fact. Another fact is that we are at the mercy of terrorists right now. We are at the mercy of the Taliban. They are dictating terms,” McEnany said.

McEnany criticized the Secretary of State Antony Blinken for saying the Taliban are not letting Americans leave.

“It’s a stunning admission as to where we are.”

Days ago Kabul’s airport saw its first domestic flights depart, albeit without the use of radar or navigation systems. This served at the time to make “international civilian flights more difficult to resume” – as The Hill highlighted.

Given Thursday’s declaration that the airport has resumed international air traffic, radar and navigation systems have now presumably come back online. 

Authored by Joanna Miller via The Organic Prepper blog,

Daisy wrote an article recently on the “othering” of the unvaccinated. She went into detail regarding how individuals are blaming the unvaccinated for absolutely everything going wrong these days. I share her concern. There is a long, detailed history of the “othering” of a population leading to all sorts of horrors.  However, it is wrong at a more mundane level, as well.

Public discourse surrounding the pandemic seems to focus solely on vaccination as a means of achieving herd immunity. Those who have recovered from the disease and have natural immunity, are being completely ignored.

But why?

Natural immunity.

The most frustrating thing to me, the past year and a half, has been the constantly changing narrative and the dismissal of formerly well-understood scientific truths. Natural immunity is one of those concepts from freshman biology that many seem to completely disregard these days.

I think this is a natural effect of the “cult of expertise” we have in the United States. Seemingly, anyone with specific credentials is automatically deferred to, regardless of how competent they are… or more insidiously, where their financial interests lie.

If more of us were willing to think critically about the “science” in the news these days, we could be more confident in managing our health. A healthy, confident population willing to argue and drag its feet on accepting medical treatments with which they aren’t comfortable is hard to push around.

A population willing to do anything to just “get back to normal” is not.

We’re not going “back to normal.” 

As early as April of 2020, Daisy wrote that we were never getting “back to normal.” And I agree.

But we can move forward a little more well-informed.

I’ve gotten into some discussions with medical professionals about whether people who have recovered from the disease need to be vaccinated. These conversations would have been seen as utterly ridiculous three years ago. However, now, it seems, we all need to relearn freshman biology. So I’d like to review the concept of natural immunity to help organize my thoughts and maybe help others that feel like their heads are in a whirl.

I’ve got my old college biology textbook-Life: The Science of Biology, by Purves, Sadava, Orians, and Heller. I’ve got the sixth edition, published in 2001, so it’s about 20 years old. I also have a newer college biology textbook because I’m a big nerd. It’s Campbell Biology, by Reece, Urry, Cain, Wasserman, Minorsky, and Jackson, published in 2014. Both textbooks detail how our immune systems work, and both say pretty much the same thing.

Our bodies have two major ways of defending against disease.

Our innate defenses are things like our skin and mucus. We’re born with these, and they make it difficult for various pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and multicellular parasites to enter our bodies. Our bodies also have an immune system that recognizes and attacks any infectious agents that make it past our innate defenses.  

Our immune system is really sophisticated, and in healthy individuals, it works pretty well. Suppose some kind of pathogen makes it past the body’s innate defenses and begins infecting cells within the host. In that case, the host’s body will, in turn, start producing antibodies that will specifically attack the invading pathogen. The host body will continue producing antibodies until either the host dies or the invading cells die, and the patient’s body can return to normal.

The best part is, even after the active infection is over, the host’s body will retain the memory of the antibodies it produced during the infection. So if the formerly infected person reencounters the pathogen, the body will immediately have the antibodies to kill the pathogen. They rarely get sick again, and if they do, it’s generally very mild.

Even the incredibly pro-vaccine Wall Street Journal had an article on this recently.

Usually, the WSJ leaves their articles up on the Opinion Page for about a week. However, within twenty-four hours, WSJ buried this article on natural immunity. Jeff had a great article about alternative media just the other day. This definitely feeds into his narrative about how much good info is getting buried right now.

Anyway, the WSJ article discusses mucosal immunity vs. internal immunity. The author (a neurologist) states that while vaccines stimulate internal immunity, they do nothing to address mucosal immunity. The viruses don’t penetrate the host’s organs, which is why most vaccinated people don’t get really sick. But, the viruses still live and reproduce in mucus-lined mouths and nasal passages. That is why vaccinated people with no symptoms are still spreading Covid like crazy. However, those of us that have recovered have both mucosal and internal immunity.

In case you needed further proof of the efficacy of natural immunity.

An Israeli study showed recently that vaccinated people were 13 times as likely to become infected and 27 times as likely to have symptomatic infections as people with natural immunity. 

Alex Berenson posted this information on Twitter on August 25, and the platform permanently banned him on August 28. However, medical professionals are starting to make noise about it, such as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist. Hopefully, more people begin to listen.

The benefits of natural immunity shouldn’t be as shocking as they seem to be.

After all, we’ve been observing this with other diseases for a long time. A case in point: when I was a kid, everyone still got chickenpox. We all got to miss school and stay home for about a week. I’m the oldest of eight kids, and I think the vaccine came out when my youngest siblings were kids. But I know the oldest four of us caught chickenpox.

One of my brothers caught it twice. The first time around, he caught it when I did. We were pretty sick for a few days and had a rash that covered our bodies for about a week. I never got chickenpox again. However, my brother picked it up a second time at school. He only had a very slight fever for one day and four or five blisters the second time around. That was it.  

None of what I’ve said above is even remotely controversial.

In fact, if you look at the history of smallpox, records date back well over 2000 years that smallpox survivors nursed the sick. Even then, it was common knowledge that survivors wouldn’t get sick again.  

Now, is smallpox exactly the same as Covid? No, not exactly. The story of smallpox eradication is an amazing one. Since then, we seem to keep hoping we can destroy every disease with vaccines. But that’s not necessarily realistic. For starters, smallpox has no recorded animal hosts. This means, once you wipe it out in humans, it’s gone. Covid, regardless of whether it originated in animals or a laboratory, is known to live in many different animal species. It will never really go away. Humans may gain the upper hand at times. But, it will always be living and evolving within a variety of animal hosts.

Now is not the time to despair.

So, should we all throw up our hands in despair over the fact that there is a new disease, unlikely ever to be eradicated, in our midst? No. We’ve been living with the cold and flu viruses for millennia. They won’t be eradicated either because they mutate rapidly and have a variety of hosts.  

I’m not trying to be insensitive to the people that have suffered from Covid. And, as it now seems generally accepted that Covid originated in a laboratory, I’m also not trying to downplay the absolutely evil minds involved in making this disease what it is. But we’ve been living with diseases for millennia. We can learn to live with this one too.

Some people feel totally comfortable with the new mRNA vaccines.

Personally, I’m not comfortable with the mRNA. But, I won’t try to change anyone’s mind. I had Covid, and I’ve got natural immunity. I was extremely low-risk for complications from Covid. (In my late thirties, close to my ideal weight, and no outstanding vitamin deficiencies.) And sure enough, I only felt sick for about a day.

I never had any fever or respiratory symptoms. I was achy for about twenty-four hours and tired the day after. My sense of taste and smell disappeared, which was why I got tested. They have not returned, which is depressing because I love good food, but I can live without it. No child on this planet should miss one race or one get-together with friends because I can’t properly enjoy coffee anymore.

Others have had it way worse. You can read about Daisy’s experience with Covid HERE . She has also shared with her newsletter readers that she lost a close family member to Covid – a healthy man in his mid-40s who had no comorbidities. Bernie Carr, the founder of ApartmentPrepper.com, has had a lengthy battle that included hospitalization and long-term dependence on oxygen, and Greg Ellifritz, of ActiveResponseTraining.com, came pretty close to dying himself but is on the mend.

For anyone else who is vaccine-hesitant yet still concerned about the disease itself, there are many other treatment options. Again, humanity treated disease for a long time before vaccines entered the scene. Some of the first doctors to treat Covid patients formed Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance to develop and share low-cost treatment options. This article talks about managing the symptoms of Covid at home for those who are not sick enough to require hospitalization. 

This is not an argument for or against vaccines.

If no one were willing to try anything new, we’d never make any progress. But the trials need to be made by fully informed, consenting individuals. That isn’t what we have right now. What we have now is coercion.

I am trying to argue against fear and hysteria. I want to encourage anyone, like myself, who is even moderately scientifically literate, to revisit your old textbooks. Build your confidence to make your own decisions. There’s too much fearmongering out there surrounding this disease. We’re distracted by a disease that 99.5% of infected people under 55 will survive as our rights are taken away, and our international reputation for being even a little bit competent and reliable falls apart. 

Don’t allow yourself to get swallowed up by fear. The same things that mostly kept us healthy in the past will mostly keep us healthy now. Eat nutritious food, exercise regularly, and get sunshine.

Does this mean that if you are healthy, nothing terrible will ever happen to you? Of course not, just as obeying all the traffic rules won’t necessarily prevent some drunk from slamming into you. We can’t eliminate risk in our lives. All we can do is try to stack the odds in our favor.

How will you build your resilience and mental strength?

Resilience and mental strength are a huge part of prepping. Going back to the first principles, educating yourself will help you gain confidence in your decisions for yourself and your family. Confidence will help you stand firm against the rising tide of crazy we see in the world. Are you confident in your preparations? Have you reeducated yourself along the way? Let’s talk about it in the comments section. 

Now is not the time to give in to fear. Now is the time to become strong.