Tag: news

Via SchiffGold.com,

Peter Schiff recently spoke at the “virtual” Los Vegas Money Show and explained why we are near the endgame for the dollar.

Peter opened up his talk speculating that the Money Show could be close to the end of its run.

I think the money that most people have, or at least what they think is money isn’t going to be money much longer.”

What in the world is he talking about?

The looming dollar crisis.

The dollar is going to fall through the floor and inflation is going to ravish the United States. What’s about to happen is that the world is going to go off the dollar standard and go back to the gold standard. That is where we are headed.”

Peter warned that we’re about to see a loss of wealth on an unprecedented scale.

He reiterated that this isn’t about COVID-19. We were already on the cusp of a crisis. The coronavirus simply made it worse.

It’s one of many problems,  but it’s not why we’re about to go through this massive economic collapse. But it is the monetary and fiscal policy response to COVID-19. The government’s cure is what’s going to kill the economy.”

In fact, the problems started long before the pandemic. As Peter reminds us, interest rate cuts and QE were already ongoing before the government shutdowns started last March. In fact, it goes back much further than that.

Everything the US government did in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was a mistake. All the monetary policy was wrong. All the fiscal policy was wrong. As a consequence, we never actually recovered from that crisis. We simply made all of the problems that caused that crisis worse. And of course, the crisis was caused by the Fed, by the government, using the same policies that they used to respond to the crisis — only the mistakes they made after 2008 were far bigger than the mistakes they made before 2008. And therefore, the bubble that they blew up was far bigger and the collapse now that that bubble has popped is going to be catastrophic.”

Peter said that everybody is going to get wiped out, even people not in the stock market because the dollar itself is going to get wiped out.

The Fed is now running QE infinity. The US government is spending money at a staggering rate. It is borrowing 60 cents of every dollar it spends. This borrowing and spending isn’t free just because Uncle Sam hasn’t raised taxes. We’ll pay for it in inflation.

There are two ways government can pay for its spending. It can collect taxes legitimately by taking your money or can do it illegitimately by taking your purchasing power. … They just print money out of thin air and they give that money to somebody else and now that somebody else spends something. But the amount of goods and services to buy hasn’t expanded. The government doesn’t print purchasing power. It just prints claims to the existing production supply of goods and services. So, what happens is the people who get the new money go out and spend it and that bids up prices. And so what happens is prices go up and so now you can buy less stuff — not because you have less money but because your money is less valuable.”

Peter warned that we are seeing inflation on an unprecedented scale. We’re going to see the cost of living skyrocket. And it will happen very, very quickly.

It’s going to hit people like a ton of bricks and they’re not going to see this coming.”

Peter said the dollar crisis will be much worse than the financial crisis. The Fed could print money to bail us out of the financial crisis.

When you have a dollar crisis that doesn’t matter anymore. You can’t print dollars because nobody wants them.”

The only way to prevent this crisis is for the Fed to let interest rates rise. The last time this happened was in the 1980s when then Fed Chair Paul Volker let rates rise to 20%. But given the level of debt in the economy, we can’t even afford 2 or 3% interest rates. If the Fed did the right thing, the US government would have to default on its Treasury bonds.

All of these empty promises are going to be exposed if the Fed does the right thing. But again, what are the odds that they do the right thing given how painful doing the right thing is going to be? So, instead of doing the right thing, they will double down on doing the wrong thing, or triple down on it, and they’re not going to let interest rates go up. So, the dollar is going to fall through the floor and inflation is going to ravage the United States.”

Peter said ultimately, the world is going to reject the dollar as the reserve currency and remonetize gold.

The entire American economy is built on the foundation of the dollar being the world’s reserve currency. That is the secret sauce that makes this economy work. Once the dollar is just another currency, then it’s all over, it’s the end of the game for America. Because now we can’t consume unless we produce. Now we can’t borrow unless we save. We’ve been getting a free ride on the global gravy train. Well, that train is coming to an end and America is going to have to deal with its greatly diminished standard of living.”

After flip-flopping in the past year whether to slap millionaires with even higher taxes, it now appears that New Jersey is willing to take the plunge and as Bloomberg reports, Governor Phil Murphy on Tuesday proposed more than $1 billion in new taxes, which would mostly come from millionaires even as some of the state’s most prominent rich residents most notably David Tepper previously packed up their bags and left for Florida in response to the state’s egregious taxes, already among the highest in the nation.

What is confusing is that in order to fund NJ spending after the novel coronavirus sent revenue plunging, Murphy also proposed $4 billion in borrowing. Why not just do $5 billion in new debt in a time when rates are already record low, and not risk another m/billionaire exodus? Plus it’s not like any of this debt will ever be repaid.

So where would this newly minted millionaire money go? Why to bail out the state’s underwater pensions of course. The governor, a first-term Democrat and retired Goldman senior director, would make a record pension payment and boost the surplus. The governor pledged a $4.89 billion pension contribution, a 32% increase over the current fiscal year. What is striking is that although it is a record high it is still not enough and is 20% short of the actuarially required payment, the fallout after previous governors from both parties skipped or shorted contributions, deepening the pension burden.

There was some good news: the overall budget plan is less bleak than Murphy’s earlier doomsday assessment of New Jersey finances in a state hit harder than most by the virus. According to the Bloomberg report, Murphy plans no cuts to school and municipal aid and intends to restore funding for the popular Homestead Benefit and Senior Freeze property-tax abatement programs.

Today’s budget decision comes after Murphy won a fight in the state’s highest court this month to borrow as much as $9.9 billion to plug spending  holes; the governor is now counting on using less than half that amount. Still, if the revenue doesn’t materialize to repay those bonds, New Jerseyans face higher sales and property taxes.

“Besides setting off an unprecedented public health crisis, this pandemic also unleashed an economic crisis that can only be rivaled by two other times in our state’s entire 244-year history: the Great Depression and the Civil War,” Murphy said in a speech at the Rutgers University stadium (the open-air venue was chosen over the Trenton statehouse to reduce the chance of viral transmission. Almost 16,000 deaths in New Jersey have a lab-confirmed or probable coronavirus link, and Murphy has yet to reopen indoor dining, gyms and theaters.)

The New Jersey economy has been hit especially hard, with 1.4 million unemployment claims filed since March. In June, the jobless rate hit 16.8%, more than 50% higher than during the Great Recession’s peak was 9.8%. In 12 months during that crisis, sales tax revenue declined by $672 million. In just four months of the pandemic, the amount dropped $505 million. The current fiscal year has a $1.44 billion revenue shortfall, led by sales and use tax declines.
Murphy’s budget also leaves a $2.24 billion fund balance — 8% higher than that for the extended fiscal year — “to address the very real possibility of another shutdown due to a resurgence of the novel coronavirus,” according to a budget preview.

* * *

The budget marks the third time – fourth, if counting Murphy’s scuttled February plan – that the governor has proposed a millionaires tax. Each time in the past it was blocked by Senate President Steve Sweeney, a fellow Democrat who has cited New Jersey’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes, averaging $8,767 last year, and other steep living costs. This may also mark the first and only time in history a Democrat fought another Democrat over higher taxes for the rich.

Some more details from the proposed millionaire-soaking budget: the new marginal tax rate on high earners, 10.75% rather than 8.97%, would apply to every dollar in excess of $1 million. Murphy anticipates raising $390 million, the biggest amount among the proposed new levies. The higher rate already applies to those earning $5 million or more, a change Murphy put into effect for the 2018 tax year. We wonder how many of those millionaires the plan expects to flee if and when the already ridiculously high NJ state taxes rise even further (our guess is zero).

But wait there’s more: while Murphy anticipates a total $1.02 billion from new taxes, including from millionaires, the budget also proposes making permanent a 2.5% corporate business surtax to raise $210 million; another cigarette-tax boost to $4.35 per pack, for $143.1 million; a higher fee for health-maintenance organizations, for $102.7 million; a surcharge for those with qualified business income greater than $1 million, for $75 million; and higher rates on limousine services, yacht and boat sales and firearm and ammunition taxes, for $26.3 million.

The biggest irony is that none of this matters since the state has to sell billions in debt at the same time: the governor has said the state needs tens of billions of dollars from borrowing, including from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s municipal liquidity fund, plus as-yet-uncertain federal grants. In a ruling issued on Aug. 12, the state Supreme Court said Murphy could borrow as much as $9.9 billion, a defeat for Republicans who had sued, citing constitutional language and a 2004 decision by the court.

Which begs the question: why not cut taxes to create an even greater influx of New York millionaires and billionaires fleeing the disaster zone that Manhattan has become, while selling even more debt at a time when the Fed will ultimately buy it all up if the private sector does not step up. After all, we are long past the point when anyone even pretends that the debt burden at the individual, corporate, state or sovereign level is sustainable or will ever be repaid.

The media and markets are on high alert ahead of Thursday’s virtual “Jackson Hole” symposium (which this year will be held via webcast), whose highlight will be Jerome Powell speech titled “Monetary Policy Framework Review” and which wraps up an examination which started in early 2019 among both among central bank officials and the public, during a series of open events, on what policy should look like in the future. It will be, as CNBC puts it, a “profoundly consequential” speech, changing how the Fed views inflation, and specifically will outline the central bank’s most active efforts ever to spur inflation back to a healthy level.

Putting aside the fact that inflation as measured by the CPI and its often grotesque hedonic adjustments, has been for the past three decades politically suppressed at the CPI level precisely to allow the Fed enough buffer to conduct the loosest monetary policy possible without hitting political interference for running the economy “hot” (as discussed in “The Politics of Inflation“,  “The Muzzle on Inflation” and “Lessons from the 1980 “Inflation” Virus“), there has been speculation that as part of its framework overhaul, the Fed may need a new working definition of inflation, ideally one which captures the dramatic divergence between runaway inflation in asset prices (bad inflation) on one hand and muted wage pressures and real economy prices (good inflation) as shown in the chart below.

But even without a comprehensive overhaul of how inflation is measured, the market appears convinced that average inflation targeting (AIT) could be announced on Thursday with new a policy formally adopted on the 16 September FOMC meeting. As such, Powell will likely give an overview of the coming changes, the thinking behind them, and why other options such as negative interest rates and yield curve control might remain on the back burner for future consideration.

So will Powell formally unveil AIT? Well, according to a new report from Bank of America, Powell won’t go that far, and will fall short of formally adopting AIT, instead acknowledging that a period of inflation overshoot is necessary to produce an average inflation rate of 2% over a cycle. This, according to BofA’s Ralph Axel “could take the form of officially changing the 2% inflation target to a range of 1.5-2.5%, or codifying that it will officially seek periods of inflation overshoots on the order of, say, 50-100bp to achieve its 2% goal on average through the cycles.”

To be sure, Fed officials have recently supported overshooting the target: in July, Governor Brainard said “refraining from liftoff until inflation reaches 2 percent could lead to some modest temporary overshooting, which would help offset the previous underperformance.” Others were just as vocal: Chicago Fed President Evans recently noted that the Fed did not need to raise rates until inflation headed to 2.5%. Dallas Fed President Kaplan would be willing to let inflation rise to the order of 2.25-2.3%, and St. Louis Fed President Bullard pointed out that there was greater sympathy at the Fed for overshooting 2%.

So why not an explicit AIT policy? Because according to BofA, that would entail picking a specific time period over which PCE inflation is required to average 2% before beginning a policy normalization (hiking) process. This is a problem, because in simulations conducted by the BofA rates team, it found this could in require the Fed to remain on hold for 42 years!

Some more details:

If price level targeting was implemented when we hit the zero lower bound in late 2008, and we assume the price level was 100 at that time, the price level now would be 117 versus a target 2% yoy price level of 122 (Chart 2). At this point, it would take 42 years to reach the price level target if core PCE remained at 2.1% yoy, or just 2 years if core PCE rocketed to 4.0% yoy. While these scenarios are extreme, they demonstrate the large variation in Fed policy regimes that could result from adoption of price targeting.

Alternatively, the Fed can “simply” supercharge core PCE to 4% annually and reach its target in just 2 years, but by the end of that period the Marriner Eccles building would have burned down as the anti-inflation riots finally set their sights on the true target.

Just as importantly, explicit AIT could also cripple the Fed’s already waning credibility, not least of all because “it would also bring up difficult issues around the appropriate time period to calculate averages and the maximum realized inflation rates the Fed would tolerate while the average climbs higher.”

Ultimately, BofA concludes that an explicit policy of AIT could greatly complicate both Fed communication and logistics. This would risk a reduction in the Fed’s credibility, which is already vulnerable given:

• the market’s pricing of inflation expectations well below 2% for the next 30 years, and
• its decade-long miss in achieving its inflation mandate

Then there is the question of just what mere “forward guidance” and jawboning can do when the Fed is already at the limit of its firepower, and according to some has even crossed into illegal territory by purchasing corporate bonds. In other words, as Axel cautions, “the market is overhyping the Fed’s ability to change the course of inflation in the future, under any policy.” Here’s why:

To begin with, interest rates are already close to 0 across the entire Treasury curve. The principle of monetary easing is to increase aggregate demand by lowering the cost of funding, theoretically increasing borrowing for spending and investment. But at the current low rates, even if the Fed were to set all Treasury rates to 0bp, how many new borrowers and spenders would emerge? This is the problem of the zero lower bound that has worried the Fed and other central banks for years. The incremental ability to ease, without adopting deeply negative rates, is limited.

More important than even the Fed’s limited firepower to lower interest rates under a new framework is the fact there are larger structural forces outside of the Fed’s control that have an arguably larger impact on inflation and inflation expectations. Here a full list would include:

• record debt
• demographics
• globalization
• technological advances
• government policy
• de-unionization
• consumer perception

While all of these factors remain in flux, and while some are arguably changing directions (for example, de-globalization may become a new trend), BofA concedes that it is unlikely monetary policy of central banks is the main driver of inflation. In addition, as the next chart from BofA shows, 81% of the variance in inflation measures across the US, Europe, and UK are explained by a single factor, which implies inflation is driven by global forces.

So where does that leave the Fed, which has on more than occasion called inflation a “puzzle” in recent years. Former Chair Yellen in one of her last speeches as Fed chair noted that our understanding of inflation may be flawed by models that are misspecified and our inability to predict trends in sectors such as health care and housing which are large components of the price index. More notably, the complete breakdown of the Phillips curve, inversely relating unemployment rates to wages, has long mystified the Fed and has caused them to rethink long-held concepts such as NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).

In summary, Bank of America believes that the market is putting too much stock into the Fed’s power to increase inflation expectations, i.e., to widen breakevens between TIPS and nominal Treasuries, with a change in its official policy framework. It’s also why the bank has exited its long breakeven position “no longer see wider breakevens as offering any added value over a simpler short duration position.”

As the chart above show, breakevens are now where they were when the Fed was actively tightening monetary policy (something which we know won’t happen for a long, long time) and just below the long-term average from before the financial crisis of 1.90%; Meanwhile breakevens face other hurdles: as BofA explains, “if rates rise, which would likely be the case if an effective vaccine became available, we would expect breakevens to widen along with rates based on their historical betas. And the opposite would be true if the downturn becomes longer and deeper than anticipated with both rates and breakevens falling.”

But the punchline is that the bank’s rates team does not expect a structural widening of breakevens or curve steepening to come merely from the Fed’s announcement on policy framework changes; in fact it is quite likely that much if not all of the Fed’s AIT is already priced into the market and if anything breakevens will slide as the news is sold.

In conclusion, BofA suspects “the market bar is too high for the Fed to deliver on its new framework, and breakevens may be poised for a short-term decline around Jackson Hole” especially since the Fed remains unwilling to adopt game-changing policies such as negative interest rates or price/GDP targeting. For that to happen, a new and even more powerful market crash would be necessary but that’s a topic for another article.

Dramatic video has emerged from the latest incident involving Black Lives Matter protesters entering a residential neighborhood — a trend which is increasingly resulting in worried and anxious homeowners brandishing guns, as happened with the most famous such incident of the gun-toting McCloskey’s defending their mansion in St. Louis over a month ago. Rarely have such tense encounters resulted in shootings, but that appears to have changed. 

Late Monday night a homeowner in a suburban neighborhood of the small rural town of Schellsburg in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, reportedly fired upon Black Lives Matter marchers as they entered a residential area. 

Social media video appeared to show at least two or possibly three local men confronting the marchers, telling them to exit the neighborhood, after which shots ring out. Local media confirmed a person from among the BLM activists was indeed wounded by gunshot, and transported to Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown around 12:15 a.m. Tuesday.

BREAKING: Milwaukee protest leader Frank Sensabaugh, also known as Frank Nitty, says someone in his group was shot by homeowners in PA while the activist group was en route to D.C. Events

pic.twitter.com/XrR5ViXXn2

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 25, 2020

The group of marchers were engaged in a cross-country protest to walk (and drive, it appears, from the videos) all the way from Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. when apparently they entered the wrong neighborhood:

In an incident that was documented on social media this Monday, Black Lives Matter protesters on a cross-country protest walk from Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. were fired upon in Pennsylvania.

The shot apparently came from a homeowner in the neighborhood. At one point in the video, three men can be seen staring down protesters, one of them seemingly carrying a rifle.

After the shots ring out, some marchers can be heard trying to reason with the men.

Police are said to be investigating the shooting, many of the details of which remain unclear and murky. It appears one victim was shot in the face but is expected to survive.

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, meanwhile, later said the person was admitted to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. “In the live-streamed video, at least two gunshots can be heard. One of the marchers is seen bleeding from his face and he said he was shot before other marchers rush him to the hospital,” the report describes.

Pennsylvania State Trooper Brent Miller also confirmed in a statement that:

“Gunfire was exchanged between the activists and the residents, and one activist was struck.”

This strongly suggests some among the BLM activists entering the neighborhood were armed or had firearms in their vehicles. The footage captures the activists telling each other “don’t shoot back” at one point.

TMZ also obtained video from BLM protest leader Frank “Nitty” Sensabaugh, who was live-streaming some of the events:

TMZ describes of the separate video: 

You hear one other gunshot and then you hear screaming and chaos. One of the marches can be heard telling the men they’re leaving and that there’s no need to get violent.

Frank and the rest of his group jump into vehicles that were accompanying them and race to the hospital. In a separate video, you can see him holding somebody in the car who appears to have a bloodied shirt. They arrive to the hospital and end up talking to cops about it.

“This dude is shooting at us,” Nitty can be heard yelling, while leaving the scene in a vehicle. 

The shaky and chaotic footage shows a white man holding a long rifle. 

FRANK NITTY II and protesters were marching when white man with gun comes out and start shooting at them shooting one protester in the face. On day 21 walking from Milwaukee to DC 30 miles a day. Police have made no arrest and seen video evidence. pic.twitter.com/pP3bVb3GTv

— Philly (@divahustle) August 25, 2020

Below video shows the group days prior marching through a separate residential neighborhood while on their way to Pennsylvania and ultimately on to Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration events scheduled later in D.C.:

#MarMar rocks the beat to the movement while marching to Washington D.C by foot from Milwaukee with #Franknitty pic.twitter.com/RUAGPYUToe

— Darchel (@just2classy2002) August 17, 2020

Schellsburg has a population of a little over 330 and lies in the southern part of Pennsylvania. Like with many countryside areas and farm and ranch communities, it’s more than likely that significant numbers of the residents are gun owners. 

With the increasing lawlessness in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police that resulted in riots, looting, and mayhem across multiple major US cities, it appears more and more Americans especially in rural areas are interpreting any level of BLM or Antifa activity as a direct threat to their property and lives in a dangerous situation which only looks to escalate. 

As President Trump seeks to take on big pharma in a campaign-year push to burnish his reputation for being tough on drugmakers, rhetoric that was a key part of what differentiated him from other Republicans during the early days of the 2016 primary, even if he hasn’t always delivered, the DoJ is reportedly poised to charge Teva Pharmaceuticals in a generic drug price-fixing probe, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

• U.S. POISED TO CHARGE TEVA IN GENERIC DRUGS PRICE-FIXING PROBE
• TEVA SHARES FALL AS MUCH AS 6% ON DOJ PRICE-FIXING REPORT

The news rattled the pharma giant’s shares, which tumbled 6% to the lows, though it has recovered somewhat.

Teva reportedly rebuffed a settlement offer from the DoJ earlier.

The investigation first became public last month, when a Philadelphia judge ruled that Teva would be the first trial to advance in a multi-district case involving an alleged industry-wide conspiracy to fix generic drug prices. Meanwhile, trials involving schemes to fix the prices of three specific drugs – clobetasol, clomipramine, and pravastatin – will advance along a separate track. While that case involves civil legislation, the FBI is also reportedly carrying out its own price-fixing probe based on the same alleged behavior.

Although the market initially reacted like this was all new information, analysts have likely been closely following the civil litigation – even if the FBI probe has been mostly opaque – which has grown into a tangled mess of cases, all of which have recently been consolidated into fewer actions. Currently, the MDL also involves antitrust suits filed by healthcare companies, enforcement actions filed by almost all state attorneys general, and proposed class actions filed on behalf of the wholesalers who buy the drugs directly from Teva.

Teva, one of the world’s top 15 biggest pharmaceutical companies by market value and sales, has its global headquarters in Israel, and its US headquarters in New Jersey. It’s also known as the world’s biggest generic drug maker, meaning it likely played a critical role in any industry-wide price-fixing.

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

Platform shut-ins in the Gulf of Mexico have reached 82.4 percent of oil production, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement reported, with 56.92 percent of gas production also shut in ahead of two tropical storms heading that way.

Some 281 offshore platforms have been evacuated as storms Marco and Laura make their way through the Gulf. According to the latest update from the National Hurricane Center, storm Marco has begun to weaken while Maura is growing stronger. Marco has therefore been downgraded to a tropical depression, expected to dissipate by tomorrow. Laura, on the other hand, has the potential to grow into a hurricane, possibly a Category 2.

Refiners on the Gulf Coast are also preparing for a hurricane, Bloomberg reported Monday, with some shuttering processing units, securing equipment, or checking their emergency protocols. The shut-ins could lead to a cut of some 1 million bpd in processing capacity at a time when fuel prices definitely need a boost. Gasoline is up 1 percent as a result of this latest news.

Yet oil prices have been reluctant to climb higher for more than a few hours. In fact, after a brief jump, West Texas Intermediate was down again in Asian trade on Tuesday.

“Due to the moribund demand for gasoline and diesel fuels these days, due to the pandemic, it is hard to get a rally going off this remarkable dual-storm threat, which itself is remarkable,” John Kilduff from Again Capital told CNBC on Monday.

“Given that both storms appear modest based on current forecasts we see lower potential for a sustainable impact on crude … We expect the elevated storm activity to offer modest but short lived support for both oil prices and refining margins,” BofA analyst Doug Leggate chimed in.

The amount of shut-in production and refining capacity is bound to lift prices further, but just how long the rally will last remains an open question, at least until Marco dissipates and Laura makes landfall.

Russia has for the first time released full declassified footage of the Soviet Union’s monster nuclear bomb known as the ‘Tsar Bomba’ hydrogen bomb (codenamed “Ivan”).

Widely considered to be the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested, it was detonated 4,000 meters above a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea on Oct. 30, 1961 as part of a secretive test nevertheless detected by US intelligence. 

The bomb had a yield of an estimated 50 megatons, or the equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT, and though poor-quality images had already been released, just days ago the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation published a 40-minute full documentary featuring the new declassified video of the bomb detonation after being dropped by a Tu-95 Bear bomber on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Russia’s nuclear industry.

As shown in the new footage, the physical dimensions of the Tsar Bomba was unprecedented at a length of 26 feet and height of 7 feet. 

BBC had previously profiled it as “too big to use in war” given the thermonuclear bomb was so powerful it could potentially wipe out any nearby Soviet outpost along with the enemy (the Soviet long-range bomber that dropped it was said to have been impacted by the shock wave even though it was already at least a couple dozen miles away at the moment of detonation).

New declassified footage shows the detonation of the Soviet Union’s 50 megaton Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested https://t.co/kRndXfZzPs pic.twitter.com/v4mFPOAg1b

— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) August 22, 2020

Aspects of the Tu-95V Soviet bomber that dropped it over the Arctic test site had to be modified to accommodate it.

The new footage features never before seen images of the massive bomb being carefully transported by train.

As The Drive details, the footage reveals multiple never before seen angles to the blast which produced a shock wave felt at least 75 miles away and created a mushroom cloud that reached 42 miles into the air, or seven times taller than Mount Everest:

The documentary shows us inside the cockpit of the Tu-95V, where aircrew don protective goggles before we see the 26.5-ton bomb falls away gently under a parachute towards its intended target — the Russian Defense Ministry’s State Testing Site No. 6 — close to Novaya Zemlya’s Matochkin Strait. The detonation itself is recorded from several different aspects, including from the air. 

The ‘covert’ Soviet test ended up not being so secret after all, given reports say the blast and resulting mushroom cloud were visible up to 621 miles away, further shattering windows in nearby Finland.

Below is the full declassified video published by Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation:

It was considered the Soviet Union’s final great “doomsday weapon” and thankfully was never to be replicated, though Soviet leaders later boasted they could produce a blast twice as large in any final nuclear showdown with the United States.

For years analysts have said the detonation was so large as to make the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear like mini-nukes in comparison.

And The Drive describes further of the new footage:

According to the video, the Tu-95V was 28 miles away from the release point, and the detonation produced a fireball visible 621 miles away, despite cloudy conditions. “The explosion was accompanied by a bright flash of unusual strength,” the narrator explains. Within seconds, a column of dust had risen to a height of around 6 miles. 

“The footage then returns to the aircraft, at a distance of 155 miles from the detonation and we see the huge fireball, rising slowly and expanding to reach a maximum of 12 miles across,” the report adds. 

And the cloud ends up reaching an unbelievable forty miles into the atmosphere: “Forty seconds after the detonation, the fireball has reached a height of approximately 19 miles, after which a mushroom cloud begins to form, reaching a maximum height of 37-40 miles and a diameter of 56 miles.”

* * *

Clip focusing on the new blast footage showing multiple angles and distances from detonation site, which makes up the final minutes of the full declassified documentary:

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

In another embarrassment for US training programs for international forces, this past week’s coup in Mali found itself linked to an American training program. Colonel Assimi Goita, the new dictator of Mali, graduated from US training courses.

That’s a problem for Washington, also as photos of Goita were featured heavily on US military sites regarding the training operations. The military has so far avoided comment on the matter, though some media are reporting that the photographs were disappearing from the sites when the news started to break.

It looks bad, but also isn’t shocking. Mali’s last coup, in 2012, saw the exact same thing, with Captain Amadou Sanogo having been through six training missions with the US before the coup.

Meanwhile, Foreign Policy reports that “The United States has halted all security assistance training and support for Malian military forces that carried out a coup in the West African country after new details emerged that the coup was orchestrated in part by military officers who received training from the U.S. military.”

Meet Mali’s junta leader: “Let me introduce myself, I am Colonel Assimi Goita, chairman of the National Committee for the salvation of the People”. https://t.co/BgmnfpHYOP

— Harun Maruf (@HarunMaruf) August 20, 2020

And further, the report continues:

The Washington Post first reported that Goita, the head of the new junta, was trained by U.S. and European forces, including U.S. Special Operations forces. Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesperson, told Foreign Policy in a statement that the U.S. military is “looking into other Malians who have participated in U.S. training and, though counter to that training, may have played a role in the recent mutiny.”

This is a really bad way to look innocent, @DeptofDefense pic.twitter.com/aVZfDcq110

— Tommy Miles (@tommymiles) August 20, 2020

The number of coup leaders, war criminals, and general bad actors in the training program has raised concerns that the Pentagon is too heavily focused on efficiency and fostering relationships with Western military bureaucracies, without focus enough on respect for civilian governance and democracies.