Tag: news

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

California once was run by alternating conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. 

True, paleo-liberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration, building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear, and agricultural industries.  

So why and how would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage? 

Why allow California to have the highest aggregate basket of income, sales, property, and capital gains taxes in the nation, the highest gas and power prices in the continental United States, and nearly the worst schools and infrastructure, the largest populations of homeless, welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and, soon, criminals?

Remember that the left-wing of the Democratic Party became hyper-wealthy through globalization and the tech revolution.

Coastal universities like Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley USC, and UCLA became global nexuses of millions who flocked to California to learn business, engineering, science, math, and the professions. 

University endowments were no longer measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the many billions. Hollywood and professional sports now had a lucrative worldwide audience of billions. 

The market capitalization of Silicon Valley was to be measured in the trillions of dollars, as the world bought iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks to Google, tweet, and use Facebook. The result was the greatest concentration of wealth in such a small space in the history of civilization. 

Within 40 years, California had created a new plutocracy of Elois, whose wealth exempted them from all worries about the mundane problems of the distant and despised Morlock others.

The wealthier the long thin line from San Diego to Berkeley grew, the more the overseers felt they were nearing Utopia, at least in their own lives.

The new Democratic Party liked to redistribute money for the poor and so obeyed the orders from the rich. But they ignored old-fashioned infrastructure that once had allowed the middle class to drive quickly and in safety, ensured them water during droughts, curbed their forest fires, and allowed their children to leave school competitively educated. 

Instead, reaction not prevention was the new mantra. Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom failed to thin out forests, build water storage, and allow affordable housing. 

When those problems exploded, they reacted by citing climate change or some right-wing bogeyman as the culprit rather than government dereliction. They preferred utopian high-speed rail solutions to pragmatic problem solving. And they ensured none of their crackpot ideas ever affected themselves.

Why worry about affordable housing and electricity for the masses when all the right people had the means to live in the right ZIP codes without much worry about turning on the air conditioning or heat since there were rarely any scorching days or frigid nights in coastal paradise? 

Why worry about open borders, when labor became even cheaper, and “they” were never seen in Malibu or Pacific Heights except as maids and gardeners?

Why worry that teacher unions, massive numbers of non-English speakers, and therapeutic education codes had sent California public schools to the near bottom of state comparative ranks—when there were more elite and prestigious prep schools than ever on the coast? 

And why worry about producing lumber for houses, irrigated crops for food, or oil for gasoline, when the right Californians would always have the money to import their hardwood floors, arugula, and fuel from grubby others far away who would make or grow in silence what was needed?  

Yet ideas eventually have consequences. Soon even the left-wing paradise on the coast was infected by the anarchy they had created for others less important elsewhere. 

The homeless did not just defecate on the streets of Fresno, but soon preferred Venice Beach and Market Street in San Francisco. 

Fires began to smoke out not just the brush of the inland foothills, but dared to near saintly Lake Tahoe, home to the right skiers and the chosen shore owners. 

Soon thieves even attacked former U.S. senators in downtown Oakland and smashed the windows of Bay Area BMWs and Volvos.

The current California recall election is a choice between Gavin Newsom who embodies the woke, old-boy privilege of the Bay Area, and an alternative direction. Newsom is the epitome of the medieval mindset of the virtue-signaling elite who patronize the poor and drive out the despised middle class.

Gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder did not give us the current California. Indeed, he spent most of his life warning us where Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, and the rarified society of the coastal corridor was taking the state. 

A careening California is heading for a colossal train wreck. Voters will have to pick between the incompetent engineer snoring at the wheel or the private passenger who rushes into the cab to get the engine back on track. 

One week ago, and about a year after we turned bullish on the uranium sector which has more than doubled since despite Democrats’ unwillingness to include uranium in their ESG umbrella…

… we presented readers with a unique take from Harris Kupperman, who explained how the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust could serve as a springboard to substantial further gains not only in the price of uranium itself but also uranium-linked stocks and ETFs. Comparing its action to the positive feedback loop that emerged in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which served as the springboard allowing bitcoin to rise from $10,000 a year ago to over $60,000 earlier this year, Kupperman said that the Sprott Trust had the potential to “upend” the illiquid uranium market by creating an actual physical shortage that would then translate to much higher prices, to wit:

The Sprott Physical Uranium Trust commonly (known as SRUUF), is the entity that has upended the uranium market. Since launching its ATM 13 days ago, it has acquired 2.7 million pounds of uranium. This is an average daily rate in excess of 200,000 pounds or roughly a third of global production on an annual basis. If GBTC is the roadmap to follow, as the price of uranium begins to appreciate, the inflows into the trust should accelerate. Interestingly, there are plenty of other entities also purchasing physical uranium, uranium that utilities were counting on for their future needs. The squeeze is on.

As expected, the utilities are blissfully unaware. Surprised?? I’m not. Utilities are quasi-governmental agencies, managed by the types of fukwits who’d work at your local DMV, except they enjoy stock options. The fact that they’ve ignored the coming squeeze shouldn’t be surprising. Inevitably, they’ll demand rate increases to buy back this uranium–it’s not their money anyway. This is your bid at some point in the future.

Kupperman summarized his bullish thesis as follows: “Uranium is a small market at roughly $6.3 billion in annual consumption (180 million pounds at $35/lb). SPUT has raised approximately $85 million in the 13 days since the ATM went live. It’s hoovering up supply and is already struggling to procure pounds, as shown by their increasing cash balance—cash that they’re legally forced to spend. Something is going to give here, and I suspect it’s the price of uranium.”

Since then, Uranium prices have risen as expected, while the price of both uranium stocks and the SRUUF has soared.

And while gains in the price of physical uranium are welcome for commodity speculators and producers such as Cameco, what was really needed for the Uranium thesis to take off in the capital markets, was similar euphoria in paper Uranium, namely ETFs which track the sector. That’s precisely what happened today.

As Bloomberg’s in-house ETF expert Eric Balchunas writes, the Uranium ETF URNM is having the “biggest flow week of its life after a 50%(!) move up in less then 3wks.” Indeed, URNM Is now up 82% YTD and 216% since launching 18mo ago. It’s now about half a billion and trading over $10m/day regularly.

As Balchunas summarized, “In short, it has arrived.“

The Uranium ETF $URNM having biggest flow week of its life after a 50%(!) move up in less then 3wks. Is now up 82% YTD and 216% since launching 18mo ago. It’s now about half a billion and trading over $10m/day regularly. In short, it has arrived. pic.twitter.com/Cj5OEcPVHa

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) September 9, 2021

But while the mass retail investor has clearly discovered uranium on the “ETF table”, and more upside is assured if the SRUUF mechanism described above accelerates and especially if the upward momentum is picked up by the reddit daytrading army, another far bigger catalyst looms which few have noticed.

On Wednesday, shares of Japanese utility companies surged after after Taro Kono, the administrative reform minister and the most likely candidate to replace Yoshihide Suga as prime minister, said Japan needs to restart nuclear power plants, in order to realize its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

“It’s necessary to some extent to restart nuclear plants that are confirmed to be safe, as we aim for carbon neutrality,” Kono, currently regulatory reform minister, told reporters according to Japan Times.

“Basically, our priority is to increase the use of renewable energy sources, but it would be possible to use nuclear plants whose safety is confirmed for now if there are power supply shortages,” Kono said, adding that while “nuclear plants will disappear eventually, I’m not saying that they should be scrapped immediately, like tomorrow or next year.”

The comments are notable as Kono had been a vocal opponent of nuclear power in the past; some renewable energy stocks have surged on bets that he’ll win the race to become Japan’s next prime minister. And once the world realizes what a Japanese restart of NPPs would mean for uranium demand, uranium stocks could double from here purely on uranium supply/demand dynamics, returning to levels last seen before the 2011 Fukushima disaster which mothballed Japan’s nuclear energy.

And if that wasn’t enough, Sanae Takaichi, a former internal affairs minister who is also gunning for the newly vacant prime minister position, said that she would make small modular reactors a national project, read: more uranium demand. The comment was made during Wednesday’s press conference when she announced her formal bid for LDP leadership.

In short, after years of being left for dead, the uranium sector is not only vastly outperforming the broader market but its upside from here could be dramatic.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have been discussing a growing list of losses of the Biden Administration in court, a record that began soon after inauguration. Most concerning is the litigation of legal claims that most legal experts viewed as unsustainable given recent Supreme Court precedent. In one such case on the eviction moratorium, President Biden admitted that his own White House counsel and their favorite legal experts all told him that the moratorium would clearly fail but he listened to Professor Laurence Tribe at the urging of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Despite the pledge to return to a respect for the “rule of law,” Biden openly suggested that they could use the litigation to get as much money out of the door as possible before being barred by the courts.

They lost as many of us predicted.

Now however there is a new email that suggests that the Biden Administration may have pushed another program that it viewed as presumptively unconstitutional under controlling precedent: the exclusion of white farmers under the debt relief program during the pandemic.

As we discussed earlier, the exclusion has been struck down by judges in various states as racially discriminatory.

However, now a document has surfaced as part of discovery by the Bader Family Foundation in its lawsuit against the Agriculture Department.

The June 2 email from Lawrence Lucas of Justice for Black Farmers Group ends with an intriguing statement :

“Please remember it was the Biden/Harris transition team that you headed up that told us that debt relief for Black farmers was ‘unconstitutional.’”

That agriculture transition team was headed by now Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

However, Vilsack then proceeded to add the provision to the law while critics were denounced as effective racists.

He claimed that the racial preference was “one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in decades.” The media also heralded the legislation without even addressing the obvious constitutional concerns over its racial classifications. Federal courts later declared it as racial discrimination.

The legislation included a loan-forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers under Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA). The program pays up to 120% of direct or guaranteed farm loan balances for Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American or Pacific Islander farmers.

As part of the ARPA, Congress appropriated “such sums as may be necessary” to pay for the cost of loan modifications and payments to “socially disadvantaged” farmers and ranchers. § 1005(a)(1). The term “socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher” is defined under 7 U.S.C. § 2279(a). § 1005(b)(3) as a farmer or rancher who is a member of a “socially disadvantaged group.” § 2279(a)(5).

“Socially disadvantaged group” is then defined as “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.” § 2279(a)(6).

The Biden Administration defines “socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher” to include individuals “who are one or more of the following: Black/African American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander.” American Rescue Plan Debt Payments, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, available at https://www.farmers.gov /americanrescueplan.

The lawsuit was previously criticized as baseless or, as NBC reported, part of a “war against equity” by Trump supporters.

Nevertheless, the court found that the program was unambiguously discriminatory since “the only consideration in determining whether a farmer or rancher’s loans should be completely forgiven is the person’s race or national origin.” As such, “Plaintiffs are excluded from the program based on their race and are thus experiencing discrimination at the hands of their government.”

A federal judge in Wisconsin found on the required compelling interest that the Administration failed to state a case:

Here, Defendants lack a compelling interest for the racial classifications. Defendants assert that ‘Congress targeted the debt payments in Section 1005 to the minority groups that it determined had suffered discrimination in the USDA programs and that had been largely left out of recent agricultural funding and pandemic relief.’ But Defendants have not established that the loan-forgiveness program targets a specific episode of past or present discrimination. Defendants point to statistical and anecdotal evidence of a history of discrimination within the agricultural industry. But Defendants cannot rely on a ‘generalized assertion that there has been past discrimination in an entire industry’ to establish a compelling interest. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. at 498; see also Parents Involved, 551 U.S. at 731 (plurality opinion) (‘remedying past societal discrimination does not justify race-conscious government action’). Defendants’ evidence of more recent discrimination includes assertions that the vast majority of funding from more recent agriculture subsidies and pandemic relief efforts did not reach minority farmers and statistical disparities.

According to this email, that may also have been the conclusion of the Biden transition team before the Administration introduced the provision and declared it to be “one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in decades.”

The 2021 NFL season kicks off tonight with the Dallas Cowboys at Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The league expects a post-pandemic season, but many virus-related challenges linger amid the spread of the delta variant. Fans have been waiting a year to return to full stadiums to see their favorite teams duke it out with opponents, but Dr. Anthony Fauci doesn’t believe that’s a good thing.

Entering the first week of the NFL season, about 93% of players and 99% of coaches and staffers are vaccinated, according to WaPo. The league has planned a 17th game season for each team with packed stadiums. 

“Our challenge right now … is certainly that we are in a major surge,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said recently.

“It’s no secret to any of you, nor is it a secret to any of us in medicine, with the impact that the delta variant is having.”

The continuing issue for the NFL is how to keep players healthy amid the spread of COVID variants. 

In August, the NFL attempted to make vaccines mandatory for all players, but the NFL Players Association refused to agree to that.

Leaguewide, unvaccinated players tested positive for COVID-19 at a rate seven times higher than unvaccinated players. One mandate the NFL did manage to make mandatory is vaccines for coaches and support staff. 

But, when it comes to football fans, Fauci is not happy.

The fearmonger-in-chief joined CNN’s Jim Sciutto in a television interview on Tuesday and was asked a series of questions about the upcoming football season in crowded college and NFL stadiums around the country amid outbreaks of COVID. He told Sciutto that he doesn’t think it’s a brilliant idea to attend these sporting events. 

“I don’t think it’s smart,” Fauci said. “Outdoors is always better than indoors, but even when you have such a congregate setting of people close together – first, you should be vaccinated. And when you do have congregate settings, particularly indoors, you should be wearing a mask.”

“We could be stuck in outbreak mode, and that’s why I think what you’re going to be seeing is…a lot more local mandates,” he warned.

“There are gonna be organizations, and there are gonna be universities, there are gonna be colleges, there are gonna be sports events, travel events, where the rule is going to be if you wanna participate – you get vaccinated,” Fauci added. “If not – sorry, you’re not going to be able to do it.”

Fauci’s appearance on CNN demonstrates what’s he’s good at: Fearmongering.  

Dr. Fauci criticizes colleges for hosting packed college football games: “I don’t think it’s smart” pic.twitter.com/Jlappir5K9

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 7, 2021

After fans were denied access to stadiums in the 2020 season, people just want to have fun and enjoy a pre-pandemic life of tailgating at stadium parking lots ahead of games and cheering for their favorite team in a packed stadium with tens of thousands of other fans. 

Though Fauci’s comments ruin this for those, who have a natural immunity to the virus, it’s still mindblowing that the US’ top health official ignores science he doesn’t like and concentrates on science that benefits mega-biotech companies, such as the push for more vaccines and booster shots. 

For those who may have a natural immunity to the virus and don’t want Fauci to ruin their fun by discouraging them from attending a sporting event this fall, Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff makes the case that “natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.” 

Fauci is distraught that life for some is returning to normal.

Today was supposed to be a buy the dip day… but that dip-buying effort failed in large part (Small Caps outperformed but suffered a big puke into the close)…

But all the majors remain red from last Friday…

“…as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…”

The Dow closed back below its 50DMA for the first time in 2 months…

Small Caps bounced off the 100DMA…

Mega-tech FANG stocks stumbled for a second day…

Source: Bloomberg

The flip-flopping rotation from cyclicals to defensives and back continued with defensives underperforming today…

Source: Bloomberg

Very strong 30Y auction, echoing yesterday’s very strong 10Y auction sent yields tumbling, erasing all the post-payrolls losses…

Source: Bloomberg

30Y yields back below 1.90% and 10Y yields fell below 1.30%…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar reversed its brief rally after tagging the post-J-Hole plunge lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin rebounded very modestly after Mastercard headlines, holding above $46k…

Source: Bloomberg

Wild ride in crude oil today, battered by China SPR release headlines, dip-bought, then inventory data and a super strong 30Y auction sent WTI reeling lower again…

Gold was just as choppy today but ended higher – testing back above $1800…

Finally, breadth stinks…

Source: Bloomberg