Class 8 Orders ‘Dead Cat Bounce’ 2 Months After Hitting Their Lowest Level In 25 Years

Class 8 Orders 'Dead Cat Bounce' 2 Months After Hitting Their Lowest Level In 25 Years

Tyler Durden

Mon, 07/20/2020 – 04:15

Class 8 trucking orders – often seen as a gauge of how the U.S. production economy is faring, have been brutalized for almost all of 2020 so far due to the ongoing pandemic. But June’s data appears to suggest a slight respite in orders, despite crashing retail sales, even though we’re not quite certain that it’s going to carry into the second half of the year.

Regardless, June is traditionally a tough month for Class 8 orders and the industry (and its analysts) are optimistic. 

Final Class 8 truck data for June has been released and retail sales were down 41% YoY to 17,055 units. Orders were up 23.2% for the month, marking a small bounce back for the industry.

This comes after two incredible poor months that we highlighted (ZH Class 8 report April, ZH Class 8 report May) where orders hit their lowest level in 25 years. In May, new orders “recovered” slightly to a dismal 6,687 number before taking off this June.

Regardless, Class 8 orders remain down 24.7% YTD, mostly as a result of a continued lagging economy and pressured supply chain due to the coronavirus pandemic. In the first half of 2020, 65,814 trucks were ordered, compared with 87,466 in the first half of 2019. 

Retail sales are also lagging YTD, still down 39%, according to data from JP Morgan. Builds have appears to make somewhat of a V-shape recovery, but were down 39% YoY in June and have fallen 70% in Q2. Builds remain down 52% year to date. 

But that hasn’t stopped the industry’s perpetually bullish analysts, who weigh in on the numbers every month and – somehow – can find the positive in almost the most dismal of reports.

Don Ake, FTR’s vice president of Commercial Vehicles said: “The Class 8 market is on the slow, steady recovery that matches our forecast. It is also encouraging that fleets are showing enough confidence in the economy to begin placing some viable orders. The trend should continue, but a significant increase is not expected until October when the big fleets begin placing orders for 2021 delivery.”

He continued: “June’s order activity is good news, after last month’s disappointing number. We expected orders to average around 10,000 units for a few months. Now they have averaged 11,000 for the past two months.”

Kenny Vieth, ACT president and senior analyst commented: “North American Class 8 net orders were up against an easy year-ago comparison, when orders were under pressure from still large backlogs and rising equipment overcapacity.” 

ISM New Orders Index posted its strongest jump on record (up 24.6pts MoM) to 56.4 in June, up 11.7% YoY to its highest level since January 2019, JP Morgan noted. 

JP Morgan is still, however, forecasting Class 8 builds of ~165,000 (down 52%) for the year.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30tzrIL Tyler Durden

Europe Has Been Preparing A Global Gold Standard Since The 1970s

Europe Has Been Preparing A Global Gold Standard Since The 1970s

Tyler Durden

Mon, 07/20/2020 – 03:30

Submitted by Jan Nieuwenhuijs from Voima Gold,

The current fiat international monetary system is ending—unconventional monetary policy has entered a dead end street and can’t reverse. I have written about this before, and will not repeat this message in today’s article. Instead, we will discuss a topic that deserves more attention, namely that European central banks saw this coming decades ago when the world shifted to a pure paper money standard. Accordingly, European central banks have carefully prepared a new monetary system based on gold.

When the last vestige of the gold standard was terminated by the U.S. in 1971, circumstances forced European central banks go along with the dollar hegemony, for the time being. Sentiment in Europe, however, was to counter dollar dominance and slowly prepare a new arrangement. Currently, central banks in Europe are signaling that a new system that incorporates gold is approaching.

If you want to read a summary of this article you can skip to the conclusion.

Contents:

  • The Rise and Fall of Bretton Woods
  • Europe Equalizes Gold Reserves Internationally
  • Private Gold Ownership Distribution
  • Setting the Stage for a Gold Standard
  • Conclusion
  •  Sources

The Rise and Fall of Bretton Woods

At the end of the Second World War, a new international monetary system called Bretton Woods was ratified. Under Bretton Woods, the U.S. dollar was officially the world reserve currency, backed by gold at a parity of $35 per ounce. The United States owned 60% of all monetary gold—more than 18,000 tonnes—and promised the dollar to be “as good as gold.” All other participating countries committed to peg their currencies to the dollar. Bretton Woods was a typical gold exchange standard.

It didn’t take long for the U.S. to print and export more dollars than it had gold backing them, which raised concern about the parity of $35 dollars per ounce. As a consequence, foreign central banks started redeeming dollars for gold at the U.S. Treasury. The vast gold reserves of the U.S. began flowing out and ended up mainly in Western Europe.

In an attempt to stabilize the international monetary system, a consortium of eight Western central banks set up the London Gold Pool in 1961 to keep the gold price in the free market at $35. Despite being a member of the Pool, France—that was very critical of U.S. monetary policy—repeatedly redeemed dollars at the Treasury. France thus bought gold at the Treasury, to sell in the free market through the Pool.

In 1965 pressure on the dollar increased and the Pool had to supply huge amounts of gold to sustain the peg. European central bankers started deliberating how to get out of the Pool agreement. Europe didn’t want to defend the peg indefinitely for what was in essence a problem caused by the United States. In 1967 the British pound devalued, which injured confidence in the entire system and France withdrew from the Pool. The situation escalated quickly. Famous gold author Timothy Green writes in The New World of Gold (1982):  

Could $35 gold be maintained? The gold pool, except for France (under de Gaulle who shrewdly opted out), thought it could. They had nearly twenty-four thousand tons of gold at their disposal. And William McChesney Martin of the Federal Reserve Board rashly said they would defend the $35 price “to the last ingot.” But the Tet offensive in Vietnam crushed that pledge. Between March 8 and March 15, 1968, the pool had to provide nearly one thousand tons to hold the price at the fix. U.S. air force planes rushed more and more Fort Knox gold to London, and so much piled up in the Bank Of England’s weighing room that the floor collapsed.

On March 15, 1968, the Pool ceased its operations and the gold price in the free market was allowed to float. Though central banks agreed to keep trading gold among each other at $35 and not buy and sell in the free market. A “two-tier gold market” had emerged.

Foreign central banks could still redeem dollars at the Treasury—at the official gold price that was lower than the free market price—but it was seen as “unfriendly.” Early August, 1971, France, again, sent a battleship to New York to load up on gold in exchange for dollars. A few days later, on August 15, the United States unilaterally decided to end Bretton Woods by suspending dollar convertibility. Europe, Japan, and other countries, were not amused. Dollar reserves, previously backed by gold, had turned into pieces of paper plummeting in value against gold. What followed was a diplomatic conflict between Europe and the U.S.

Since the 1960s, America seduced foreign central banks to reinvest their dollar reserves in U.S. government bonds (Treasuries), instead of redeeming them for gold. If Treasuries would replace gold in the international monetary system, the United States could continue to print money for imports, and have savers abroad finance their fiscal deficits. Such a dollar standard would yield the U.S. unprecedented power, though it wouldn’t be an equitable system.

One of the reasons the euro was created was to counter dollar dominance. Many decades before it was launched, Western Europe started to integrate. The first seed was the Treaty of Rome in 1957 that gave birth to the European Economic Community (EEC). From classified documents that have been released in recent years, we know the U.S. opposed monetary cooperation in Europe, for the simple reason it didn’t want competition for the dollar hegemony. Below are excerpts from a telephone call between U.S. National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, William Simon, on March 14, 1973. 

Kissinger: … I basically have only one view right now which is to do as much as we can to prevent a united European position without showing our hand. … I don’t think a unified European monetary system is in our interest.  

… You understand, my reason’s entirely political, but I got an intelligence report of the discussions in the German Cabinet and when it became clear to me that all our enemies were for the European solution that pretty well decided me.

The “European solution” was to fix the exchange rates of the EEC’s currencies, and float as a bloc against the dollar. The “common float” would enhance trade within Europe and show the world Europe’s unity and leadership. This was not in the interest of the U.S. According to Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, Paul Volcker, the European solution was a euphemism for saying: “Let’s leave the United States out of the world and go our independent course.”

Furthermore, the EEC took the stance that central banks should be able to buy and sell gold at a market-related price, both among themselves and on the free market. Also, in 1973 the EEC publicly stated in the New York Times: “[Europe] will promote agreement on international monetary reform to achieve an equitable and durable system taking into account the interests of the developing countries.” This statement can be traced to what Georges Pompidou, President of France, said in a meeting with Richard Nixon, President of the U.S., in 1970: “Power thus established never lasts long. The existence of more centers of economic and political power makes things more complicated but in the longer term has greater advantages.” France’s view was that if there were more centers of economic and political power, the world would be more stable.

The U.S. opposed the end of the two-tier system, because this would increase the official price of gold and put it back in the center of the international monetary system. America pushed for “phasing gold out of the international monetary system,” all the more because Europe was holding more gold than the U.S. since the 1960s.

A historic document that pointedly illustrates the aforementioned dynamics is, “Minutes of Secretary of State Kissinger’s Principals and Regionals Staff Meeting, Washington, April 25, 1974”. From the American meeting in 1974:

Mr. Enders: … It’s been in the newspapers now—the EC [EuropeanCommunity] proposal.

Secretary Kissinger: On what—revaluing their gold?

Mr. Enders: Revaluing their gold—in the individual transaction between the central banks [meaning the end of the two-tier system].

Secretary Kissinger: What’s Arthur Burns’ [Chair of the Federal Reserve] view?

Mr. Enders: Arthur Burns—I talked to him last night on it, and he didn’t define a general view yet. He was unwilling to do so. He said he wanted to look more closely on the proposal. Henry Wallich, the international affairs man, this morning indicated he would probably adopt the traditional position that we should be for phasing gold out of the international monetary system; but he wanted to have another look at it.

Secretary Kissinger: … my understanding of this proposal would be that they—by opening it up to other countries, they’re in effect putting gold back into the system at a higher price.

Mr. Enders: Correct.

Secretary Kissinger: Now, that’s what we have consistently opposed.

Mr. Enders: Yes, we have. You have convertibility if they—

Secretary Kissinger: Yes.

Mr. Enders: Both parties have to agree to this. But it slides towards and would result, within two or three years, in putting gold back into the centerpiece of the system—one. Two—at a much higher price. Three—at a price that could be determined by a few central bankers in deals among themselves.

Secretary Kissinger: Why are we so eager to get gold out of the system?

Mr. Enders: It’s against our interest to have gold in the system because for it to remain there it would result in it being evaluated periodically. Although we have still some substantial gold holdings—about 11 billion [USD]—a larger part of the official gold in the world is concentrated in Western Europe. This gives them the dominant position in world reserves and the dominant means of creating reserves. We’ve been trying to get away from that into a system in which we can control—

Secretary Kissinger: But that’s a balance of payments problem.

Mr. Enders: Yes, but it’s a question of who has the most leverage internationally. If they have the reserve-creating instrument, by having the largest amount of gold and the ability to change its price periodically, they have a position relative to ours of considerable power.

Secretary Kissinger: O.K. My instinct is to oppose it. What’s your view, … Ken?

[Ken] Rush: Well, I think probably I do. The question is: Suppose they go ahead on their own anyway. What then? 

Secretary Kissinger: We’ll bust them.

Mr. Enders: I think we should look very hard then, Ken, at very substantial sales of gold—U.S. gold on the market—to raid the gold market once and for all.

The above goes to show the distaste of the U.S. with respect to gold, and their ambition to maintain the dollar hegemony.   

For informative comments by Arthur Burns we will turn to a “Memorandum For The President” he wrote on June, 3, 1975. From Burns:

… removal of the present restraints on inter-governmental gold transactions and on official purchases from the private market [meaning the end of the two-tier system] could well release forces and induce actions that would increase the relative importance of gold in the monetary system. In fact, there are reasons for believing that the French, with some support from one or two smaller countries, are seeking such an outcome.

It is an open secret among central bankers that, at a later date, the French and some others may well want to stabilize the market [gold] price within some range.

All in all, I am convinced that by far the best position for us to take at this time is to resist arrangements that provide wide latitude for central banks and governments to purchase gold at a market-related price.

The French, and some of its allies, wanted gold’s importance to increase in the international monetary system and stabilize its price “at a later date.” Which boils down to a gold standard. The Federal Reserve favored a continuation of the two-tier market, which in practice meant gold’s demonetization.

Right after the two-tier system was cancelled in 1978, eight European countries launched the European Monetary System (EMS). We will leave the exact mechanics of the EMS for a future article, but I will share a quote by Professor of American and Foreign Law, Kenneth W. Dam, with respect to the EMS. From The Rules of the Game: Reform and Evolution in the International Monetary System (1982):

Finally, the EMS may also turn out to be a first step toward rehabilitating gold as an integral part of the international monetary system.  

In 1998 the EMS was annulled and replaced by the Eurosystem.

Although France, and some other European countries, were surely in favor of gold and against the dollar hegemony in the 1970s, I don’t know if this group had a solid plan from the start. Perhaps, they had a direction in mind and adjusted their policies throughout the years.   

The U.S. never did “raid the gold market once and for all.” They sold roughly 500 tonnes in the late 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to lower the price in the free market. Gold traded more or less sideways throughout in the 1980s and 1990s, but didn’t get phased out of the international monetary system. However, the Americans succeeded in imposing the paper dollar standard on the world. There was a lot of discussion in the 1970s about the Special Drawing Right (SDR), a reserve asset issued by the International Monetary Fund, but it didn’t function (and still doesn’t). The U.S. could continue to print and export dollars, and Treasuries became the main international reserve asset. As a result, the U.S. has been running a trade and fiscal deficit since 1971.

Europe Equalizes Gold Reserves Internationally

As mentioned, Europe preferred a new “equitable and durable system taking into account the interests of the developing countries,” and France, supported by allies, was aiming for something of a gold standard “at a later date.” Remarkably, what I discovered is that European central banks started selling gold in the 1990s to equalize their gold reserves relative to other nations. A new gold standard would be equitable if all gold was distributed evenly, which is what European central banks have been managing.

After the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008, the Minister of Finance of the Netherlands, Jan Kees de Jager, was asked in parliament for the main reason why the Dutch central bank had sold 1,100 tonnes of gold since 1993, and if storage costs had been a motivation. His answer:

Through gold sales in the past, the Dutch central bank brought its relative gold holdings more in line with other important gold holding nations. Storage costs didn’t play any part in the decision to sell gold… 

At the time DNB [Dutch central bank] determined that from an international perspective it owned a lot of gold proportionally.

Another question directed at de Jager, was if he could confirm if other nations—in contrast to the Netherlands—had increased their official gold reserves in the past years. His answer:

The buyers are developing nations whose international reserves are growing, or historically have a small gold stock.

According to de Jager, the Dutch central bank sold gold to equalize reserves internationally. He mentioned no other reason for the sales. (De Jager denied the Dutch central bank sold gold for paying off the national debt of the Netherlands, which is a frequently mentioned reason for European gold sales.) In addition, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported in 1993 that the Dutch central bank had sold 400 tonnes through the Bank for International Settlement, and this was partially bought by the Chinese central bank. I conclude that the Netherlands sold 1,100 tonnes to help developing nations get equal in terms of gold reserves proportionally and prepare for a new monetary system that incorporates gold. Why else—than to reposition gold in the international monetary system—would the Netherlands want to equalize their gold reserves with other “important gold holding nations”?

Other central banks in Europe have done the same as the Dutch central bank. In 1999, fourteen (Western) European central banks surprised the gold market with a statement regarding a “concerted programme of [gold] sales over the next five years.” The program was dubbed the Central Bank Gold Agreements (CBGA), and the signatories declared:

Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves. … Annual [aggregated] sales will not exceed approximately 400 tons and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,000 tons. … This agreement will be reviewed after five years.

Gold sales were tightly coordinated. In the knowledge Europe wanted to balance gold reserves internationally (more proof below) this statement makes perfect sense.

The World Gold Council interpreted CBGA as removing “concern that uncoordinated central bank gold sales were destabilising the market, driving the gold price sharply down.” It’s true that some European countries sold significant amounts of gold before CBGA, which drove the price down, and right after CBGA was announced the gold price started to rise. Mission accomplished, I would say.

Eventually, CBGA was extended three times, and ten more European countries joined. During CBGA 1-4 a little over 4,000 tonnes were sold, virtually all of which before 2009.

One of the members of Voima Gold’s Advisory Board is Pentti Pikkarainen, who was Head of Banking Operations at the central bank of Finland—one of the signatories of CBGA—from 2001 until 2010. When I asked Pikkarainen if in addition to the Dutch central bank, others had sold to bring their “relative gold holdings more in line with other important gold holding nations” as well, he answered:

It is true that some central banks compared their gold holdings with those of other central banks and came to that type of conclusion.

So, multiple central banks in Europe sold gold to equalize reserves internationally.

To get a sense of the equalization process within Europe, I have made a chart showing gold sales per country before and during CBGA, current gold reserves, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Before and during CBGA, mainly medium sized economies sold gold to have an equal share relative to others. It’s not a perfect fit, but striking nonetheless. Still more, because Cyprus, Estonia, Italy, and Lithuania were signatories of CBGA, but didn’t sell an ounce of gold during the “concerted programme of sales.” Finland and Ireland were buyers during CBGA, albeit of small weights, which makes sense when comparing reserves across the board. It appears CBGA was not a concerted programme of gold sales, but a concerted programme of equalizing gold reserves. The main outlier is the U.K.  

Official gold reserves around the world are spread more evenly since the 1970s. Eurasia minus Western Europe held 2,000 tonnes in 1971, versus 9,300 tonnes currently.

The equalization process continues until this day. In 2018, the central bank of Hungary (MNB) purchased 31.5 tonnes of gold, a tenfold in their official reserves. MNB disclosed it bought gold because “it may play a stabilising role … in times of structural changes in the international financial system,” but also to bring their gold reserves more in line to its peers. The Polish central bank (NBP) bought 125.7 tonnes in 2019 and stated the same:

the share of gold in NBP foreign exchange reserves was below the average for all central banks (10.5%) and significantly below the average in European countries (20.5%). The purchase of gold allowed not only to increase the strategic financial buffer of the country, but also to bring the NBP closer in terms of the share of gold in foreign exchange reserves to the average of all central banks (10.5%).

We undoubtedly read about preparing for a change in the international financial system, and balancing gold reserves proportionally. I’m aware de Jager, MNB, and NBP talk about leveling “gold reserves as a percentage of total reserves,” but I see a more significant pattern in gold reserves versus GDP. To be complete, below is a chart showing official gold reserves as a percentage of total reserves (foreign exchange, gold, and SDRs) for European countries.  

Private Gold Ownership Distribution

Private gold holdings make up a larger portion of total above ground stocks than official holdings, but it’s a lot harder to localize. Although the data is limited, private gold distribution shows to be roughly equal for “important gold holding nations.” (Of course, it can never be exactly equal.)

Official gold reserves make up less than 20% of total above ground reserves.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control over China in 1949 it effectively banned the private use of gold. Since the 1980s, Chinese citizens were slowly allowed to buy gold jewelry, and in 2002 the Chinese gold market was fully liberalized with the launch of the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Gradually, the CCP began stimulating its citizens to accumulate gold. In 2012, President of the China Gold Association, Sun Zhaoxue, elaborated on the importance of private gold ownership in the leading academic journal of the CCP’s Central Committee, Qiushi:

Practice shows that gold possession by citizens is an effective supplement to national reserves and is very important to national financial security. … We should advocate to ‘store gold among the people’ …

A year later Sun made a statement in the Wall Street Journal on how much gold Chinese people own on average:

Meanwhile, the average Chinese person “only holds 4.5gram of gold,” Mr. Sun said. “That is far below an average of 24 grams per person globally …

The Chinese government aims to elevate the amount of private gold per capita, to bring it more in line to the global average. China’s gold strategy matches Europe’s gold strategy in terms of equalizing reserves (next to the obvious reasons to own gold in the first place).

From previous research, I know approximately how much private gold is in India, China, France, Italy, and Germany. When I combine the private and official gold reserves of these countries, and compare it to GDP per capita, these measures appear to be quite close to each other.

The amount of gold each citizen owns on average, directly and via their central bank, is roughly equal to their economic income. At a gold price of about $10,000 dollars per ounce, that is. The biggest difference is between China and India.

For China’s official gold reserves I have used a speculative estimate of 5,000 tonnes. According to my calculations China currently is at 18 grams of gold per capita.

It goes without saying that partially the gold distribution in recent decades has been organic.

The story of China and gold goes back further than many people think. On the website of Bank of China—a state owned bank—we can read:

From 1973 to 1974, Vice Premier Chen Yun … carried out special research on foreign trade issues. On June 7, 1973, when listening to a bank report, Vice Premier Chen Yun raised ten important questions in international economy and finance, … The ten research topics assigned by Chen Yun covered economy, finance, currency and other important aspects in the contemporary capitalist world, which were:

(1) How much money was issued in the U.S., Japan, UK, Federal Republic of Germany and France from 1969 to 1973? How much were their foreign currency reserves and gold reserves?

(6) In addition to political contradictions, what are the economic contradictions between the U.S. and UK, Japan, Federal Republic of Germany and France? What are the principal contradictions?

(7) What are the possible solutions to problems concerning trade and currency between the U.S. and Japan, UK, France and Federal Republic of Germany? Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France advocated the linkage between currency and gold. Can we reckon an approximate ratio between the total monetary flow and the total possession of gold in the world?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence the Chinese government started developing domestic gold mining in the 1970s, and is now the nation with the largest mine output. Don’t get me wrong, the Chinese didn’t become “gold bugs” overnight, but understood the strategic importance of gold. They anticipated gold’s role in international finance would anything but vanish, as the U.S. wanted the world to believe in the 1970s.

In 1979, the Chinese even set up a new military unit, called the Gold Armed Police, dedicated to gold exploration. This division of the Chinese army still exists.

Courtesy The China Times. “April 2011, about 100 soldiers from the 7th detachment [of the Gold Armed Police] carrying out geology and resources survey tasks in Xinjiang.”

Setting the Stage for a Gold Standard

After the GFC, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Austria have repatriated gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of England. These countries show to assign greater importance to gold as a reserve asset versus fiat currencies, and their trust in the U.S. and U.K. as custodians has waned. In the words of the Polish central bank:

central banks usually strive to diversify their gold storage locations, … to limit geopolitical risk, the consequence of which could be, for example, loss of access or limitation of the free disposal of gold reserves kept abroad.

Storing gold on domestic soil is safer than abroad, but having some of it in trading hubs such as London allows the gold to be used more easily for, i.e., swaps and international settlement. According to the German central bank their repatriation scheme had three objectives: cost efficiency, security, and liquidity

Another important indicator for what European countries have prepared for, is that after the GFC some have upgraded their official gold reserves to current wholesale industry standards. France, Germany, Sweden, and Poland, that we know of, have disclosed their gold bars to adhere to “London Good Delivery” standards. Consequently, their metal is liquid and ready for international settlement.  

From the Banque de France:

Since 2009, the Banque de France has been engaged in an ambitious programme to upgrade the quality of its gold reserves. The target is to ensure that all its bars comply with LBMA [London Bullion MarketAssociation] standards so that they can be traded on an international market. 

Europe is well prepared for a gold standard. The U.S. less so, because most of its gold does not comply to prevailing industry standards. Thereby, the audits of the U.S. official gold reserves have been executed with an “inadequate degree of integrity.”

Last but not least, after the GFC European central banks have started communicating gold’s unparalleled stable properties, and promote gold ownership. The French central banks states on its website gold is “the ultimate store of value.” According to the President of the German central bank, Jens Weidmann, gold is “the bedrock of stability for the international monetary system.” On the website of the central bank of Italy it reads:

Gold is an excellent hedge against adversity. … Another good reason for holding a large position in gold is as protection against high inflation since gold tends to keep its value over time. Moreover, unlike foreign currencies, gold cannot depreciate or be devalued …

Gold … is not an asset ‘issued’ by a government or a central bank and so does not depend on the issuer’s solvency.

The Dutch central bank states on its website:

A bar of gold always retains its value …

Gold is the perfect piggy bank—it’s the anchor of trust for the financial system. If the system collapses, the gold stock can serve as a basis to build it up again.

Let this sink in. These are central banks that issue their own currency, and are solely tasked to ensure economic stability. Yet, they openly state gold is superior to the currency they issue and advice people to own gold as protection against “high inflation,” “adversity,” and the possibility “the system collapses.” If fiat currencies would be safer than gold, these central banks wouldn’t recommend people to own gold as “the perfect piggy bank.” But they do recommend people to own gold, because, ironically, gold “is not an asset ‘issued’ by a government or a central bank and so does not depend on the issuer’s solvency.” European central banks are confessing their own paper money system is failing. They can’t say this explicitly because it would cause instant panic in financial markets, but how much more obvious can they make it?

In my opinion, these central banks are alluding to a new monetary system based on gold.

Conclusion

We have established that since the 1970s Europe has been countering the dollar hegemony and wanted gold back in the center of a new “equitable and durable system taking into account the interests of the developing countries.” Subsequently, they have equalized official gold reserves internationally, strategically allocated their gold, upgraded their gold to current industry standards, and are now promoting gold as the “perfect piggybank” and as “protection against high inflation.”

The trend in Asia is also increasingly against dollar dominance and in favor of gold. In May, 2019, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad mooted the idea of a new international currency pegged to gold. Reuters reported in April, 2020, that the “president of the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) called for a new super-sovereign currency to offset the global dominance of the U.S. dollar, which he predicted would decline long term, while gold prices rally.” The President of the SGE also said: “The global clout of the United States will reduce, while the status of the European Union and China will rise in global affairs.”

In line with the long-term trend discussed above is that economic strength is more equal than it was in 1971. Fifty years ago, the U.S. and Western Europe (Euro Area) accounted for 59% of global GDP; currently their share is 40%. This rhymes with Pompidou’s remark on “the existence of more centers of economic and political power makes things more complicated but in the longer term has greater advantages.”

Stunningly, economic strength of the largest power blocks—the U.S., China, Euro Area, and Russia—is roughly in line with their relative official gold reserves, as you can see in the chart below. For China’s official gold reserves I have used a speculative estimate of 5,000 tonnes (in this post I explain how I have computed this number).  

The importance of the chart above can be confirmed by an American memo dating from 1974. Sidney Weintraub, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Finance and Development, wrote to Paul Volcker regarding the gold issue that “the distribution of … world [gold] reserves would be highly inequitable, with eight wealthy countries getting three-fourths, while the developing countries would get less than 10 percent.” The Europeans thought about this problem, and they helped solving it by equalizing gold reserves internationally.

The essence of the chart is that economic output (GDP) is real, and gold is too. When fiat currencies are devalued to alleviate the global debt burden, gold and GDP distribution won’t change much, which is beneficial for a shift towards an equitable gold standard.

Likely, Japan and the U.K. have been pressured by the U.S. not to increase their gold reserves. In The Prospect for Gold: The View to the Year 2000 (1987) Timothy Green writes: “For many years the Bank of Japan, wishing to keep well with the US Treasury, deliberately avoided buying gold.” Japan’s official gold reserves have been flat since 1978, while it’s the largest foreign holder of Treasuries. India, Brazil and South Korea have all bought gold after the GFC. Why Canada has zero gold is beyond me, but it can be related to the fact that they have a lot of in-ground reserves.

Although it’s clear that Europe and other nations are prepared for a new monetary system that incorporates gold, it’s unknown how this system will look like. It can be similar to the classic gold standard, or it can be a new model. We will dive into the economics of this in a future article. In any case, I think that gold will get a prominent role in a forthcoming system. Needless to say, in such a scenario the nominal gold price will be significantly higher from where it trades today.

As we are currently witnessing, a monetary system without an anchor is bound to fail, and what anchor is more suitable than gold? Gold is internationally the most evenly spread financial asset without counterparty risk and its stability has a proven track record of 5,000 years.    

There hasn’t been a lack of signals from Europe and “developing nations” for a monetary reset. Let me finish with an example from 2014. Cheng Siwei, chairman of the International FinancialForum (IFF), said at an IFF conference: “The world today is facing a revolution. It is imperative to construct a new global financial framework and to formulate new rules.” On the same conference Jean-Claude Trichet, former President of the European Central Bank and co-chairman of the IFF, stated: “The global economy and global finance is at a turning point, … new rules have been discussed not only inside the advanced economies, but with all emerging economies, including the most important emerging economies, namely, China.”

These statements are compatible with the international movement towards gold that keen observers will have noticed.  

Sources (Books, Papers, and Articles):

  • Bank of China, 1973. Punctual Delivery of Ten Research Topics Assigned by Vice Premier Chen Yun. (link)
  • Bordo, M., Monnet, E., and Naef, A. 2017. The Gold Pool (1961-1968) And the Fall of The Bretton Woods System. Lessons for Central Bank Cooperation. (link)
  • China Daily, November 5, 2014. Reform of World Financial Order Needs Strategic Thinking. (link)
  • The China Times. Mysterious Gold Exploration Unit of People’s Armed Police. (link)
  • Dam, K. D. 1982. The Rules of the Game: Reform and Evolution in the International Monetary System.
  • Financial Express, May 20, 2019. In Gold We Trust: India’s Household Gold Reserves Valued at Over 40% of GDP. (link)
  • Green, T. 1982. The New World of Gold.
  • Green, T. 1987. The Prospect for Gold: The View to the Year 2000.
  • Grabbe, J. O. 1998. Gold Market. (link)
  • Jansen, K. July 20, 2017. PBOC Gold Purchases: Separating Facts from Speculation. (link)
  • Mundell, R. A. 1997. The International Monetary System in the 21st Century: Could Gold Make a Comeback? (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. November 25, 2019. German Central Bank: Gold Is the Bedrock of Stability for the International Monetary System. (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. December 17, 2019. US Official Gold Reserves Auditor Caught Lying. (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. January 15, 2020. China’s Gold Hoarding: Will It Cause the Price of Gold to Rise? (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. February 28, 2020. What Is an SDR and Will It Be the Next World Reserve Currency? (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. April 2, 2020. Germany Hoarding Gold to Prepare for Currency Reform, Italy Dishoards. (link)
  • Nieuwenhuijs, J. June 24, 2020. Why Gold, and Why Now. (link)
  • NewYork Times, September 27, 1972. Text of Shultz Talk Before International Monetary Fund and World Bank. (link)
  • New York Times, September 24, 1973. Text of the European Economic Community’s Proposal on Relations With U.S. (link)
  • Thiele, C. L. 2018. Germany’s Gold.
  • Trachtenberg, M. 2010. The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969-1974. (link)
  • Rueff, J. 1972. The Monetary Sin of the West. (link)
  • Reuters, May 30, 2019. Malaysia’s Mahathir Proposes Common East Asia Currency Pegged to Gold. (link)
  • Reuters, April 28, 2020. Shanghai Gold Boss Wants Super-Sovereign Currency for Post-Crisis Times. (link)
  • Sun, Zhaoxue, August 1, 2012. Build a Secure Barrier for My Country’s Economy and Finance. (link)
  • Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2013. Gold Standard? China Doesn’t Set It. (link)

Sources (Others):

  • Answers from Minister of Finance de Jager inDutch parliament, September 19, 2011. Antwoorden van de minister van Financiën op de vragen van het lid E. Irrgang (SP) over de goudvoorraad (kenmerk 2011Z17888, ingezonden 19 september2011). (link)
  • Burns, A. June, 3, 1975. Memorandum For The President. (link)
  • FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969–1976,VOLUME XXIV, MIDDLE EAST REGION AND ARABIAN PENINSULA, 1969–1972; JORDAN, SEPTEMBER 1970. 168. Memorandum From the President’s Assistant forInternational Economic Affairs (Flanigan) and the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon. (link)
  • FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969–1976, VOLUME III, FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY; INTERNATIONAL MONETARY POLICY, 1969–1972. 131. Action Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon. June 25, 1969. (link)
  • Pompidou, G. and Nixon, R. February, 24, 1970. Memorandum of Conversation. (link)
  • FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969–1976, VOLUME XXXI, FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY, 1973–1976. 16. Conversation Among President Nixon, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors (Burns), the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Ash), the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (Stein), Secretary of the Treasury Shultz, and the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs (Volcker). March 3, 1973. (link)
  • FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969–1976,VOLUME XXXI, FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY, 1973–1976. 61. Note From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Finance and Development (Weintraub) to the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs (Volcker). March 6, 1974. (link)
  • FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969–1976, VOLUME XXXI, FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY, 1973–1976. 63. Minutes of Secretary of State Kissinger’s Principals and Regionals Staff Meeting. April 25, 1974. (link)
  • Kissinger, H., Simon, W. March 14, 1973. Telephone call. (link)

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The views expressed on Voima Insight are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of Voima Gold.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ct8KvT Tyler Durden

Continental Shift: The World’s Biggest Economies Over Time

Continental Shift: The World’s Biggest Economies Over Time

Tyler Durden

Mon, 07/20/2020 – 02:45

According to data from the World Bank and IMF, Asian countries are expected to make up most of the top 5 countries in the world by size of GDP in 2024, thus, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz points out, relegating European economic powerhouses to lower ranks.

China’s economic growth has been steep since the 1990s, while India and Indonesia have even more recently entered the top 10 of the biggest economies in the world and are expected to reach ranks 3 and 5 by 2024. Japan, an established economy, is expected to cling on to rank 4 in 2024, while Russia will rise to rank 6.

Infographic: Continental Shift: The World’s Biggest Economies Over Time | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Asia’s burgeoning middle class is one of the reasons for the continental shift in GDP. While China has been the posterchild of market growth in the 21st century so far, the country is expected to tackle an ageing population further down the line, which will put a damper on consumption. Indonesia, together with the Philippines and Malaysia, are expected to grow their labor forces significantly in the years to come, contributing to a rise in average disposable incomes, according to the World Economic Forum.

Asian multinationals, like China’s Huawei and India’s Tata, have already emerged in this century and more are expected to appear on the global scene. But rapid growth in Asia also comes with its own set of problems, like a quickly growing divide between rural and urban incomes, environmental degradation and new challenges for governance and institutions, according to the FAO.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Bd36xc Tyler Durden

How NATO-Member Turkey Reverted Back To Being An Islamic Dictatorship

How NATO-Member Turkey Reverted Back To Being An Islamic Dictatorship

Tyler Durden

Mon, 07/20/2020 – 02:00

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The gradual process of Turkey’s becoming an Islamic sharia-law country, again, is no longer so gradual. It has taken a sudden and sharp rightward turn, into Islamic-nationhood. Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, which had been “the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520,” has now been officially declared by the Turkish Government to be, instead, a mosque.

On July 10th, the BBC bannered “Hagia Sophia: Turkey turns iconic Istanbul museum into mosque” and reported that the biggest, oldest, and the most important, cathedral in all of Orthodox Christendom — and the world’s most important Byzantine building, which was constructed as the Saint Sophia Cathedral by the Byzantine Roman Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the year 537, and which stands on the site that had been consecrated in the year 325 by the Roman Emperor Constantine (and which cathedral was relabelled the Hagia Sophia “museum” in 1935 by Turkey’s Constitutionally secularist Government) — has now become, officially, at last, designated, by the restored Islamic Government of Turkey, a Muslim house of worship, a mosque, a Muslim house of worship.

This signals the end of Turkey’s being ruled by a secular Government, which it had been, ever since 1923. It is the end of Turkey’s secular Government and the restoration of the Islamic Mehmed the Conqueror’s 1453 order that it be a mosque. That ended the Byzantine Roman Catholic Empire, and started Islamic-ruled Turkey. It ended Constantinople and started Istanbul. Mehmet, however, allowed Christianity to continue, in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, but only as an accepted part of the Greek East (“Orthodox”), not as part of the Roman West (imperialistic), Christianity (which he had just then conquered with the fall of Constantinople on that same date, 29 May 1453). And now, even the Orthodox Christians are being marginalized in Turkey, because the Hagia Sophia had been “for almost 1,000 years the most important Orthodox cathedral.”

This is an act with huge international implications. It is an important event in human history.

Turkey’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose entire actual education was only in Islamic schools though he lies about it and claims to have received a degree from a non-Islamic university, is in the process of transforming Turkey back again into a specifically Islamic type of dictatorship, a Sharia-law-ruled state. The secularist Turkish Republic that was instituted in 1923 by the Enlightenment-inspired Kemal Attaturk has now decisively ended. The widespread speculations that Erdogan has been aiming to restore Turkey to being the imperial nation and ruler of a restored Islamic Ottoman Empire are now decisively confirmed by this brazen act of insult to Orthodox Christians, and even to Roman Christians, because — as Wikipedia notes — “Justinian has sometimes been known as the ‘Last Roman’ in mid-20th century historiography.” The Orthodox Church in America titles him as “Saint Justinian The Emperor”. However, Wikipedia also notes that Constantine XI Palaiologos, who was killed by Mehmet’s forces on that date, 29 May 1453, was actually the last Roman Emperor. That ended the Roman Empire.

In other words: the Turkish Government’s official change of Saint Sophia Cathedral, which Justinian had created in 537, into now and henceforth a mosque, is a taking ownership of, and a Turkish-Muslim declaration of supremacy over, a different religion’s main house of worship. It’s a historical dagger into the heart of Orthodox Christianity, as well as being an insult to Roman Christianity.

This is not merely an isolated act, either; it is, instead, something to which Erdogan has long been building. Erdogan’s grab of land from secularist-ruled (committedly anti-sectarian) Syria, and his recent sending of troops to help conquer the formerly secularist Libya, which land had been turned into a hellish civil war by a U.S.-and-allied invasion in 2011 and which chaos there continues to this day, all are consistent with an understanding of Erdogan in which his foremost objective is a restoration of the Ottoman Empire. And the U.S. Government has supported this objective of his (but only as Turkey being a branch of the U.S. empire), and tried to get the EU to accept it.

The question now — since the United States Government has been pushing against European resistance to accepting a military alliance with an Islamic dictatorship — is whether continuation of the NATO alliance will be ended because of the path that Erdogan and the United States Government have jointly been taking to re-impose a decidedly Sunni Islamic dictatorship upon Turkey (by means of which, Turkey will serve as a wedge against both Shiite controlled Iran, and an increasingly Orthodox-dominated Russia). However, there has been a split between Erdogan and the U.S. regime, because he does not intend his restored Ottoman empire to be a part of the U.S. or any other empire. Erdogan’s independent streak is what now threatens to break-up the Western Alliance — the U.S. empire (which is actually the Rhodesist UK-U.S. empire).

The United States Government has been preferring Erdogan’s former political partner but now enemy, Erdogan’s fellow Sunni Islamist Fethullah Gulen, who cooperates with the U.S. and is a CIA protégé (including rabidly against Shiite Iran and against Iran’s main ally Russia). Gulen is passionately endorsed by America’s aristocracy. The U.S. regime has been preferring Gulen to impose this transformation of Turkey into an Islamic U.S. satellite, because Gulen models his operation (and he has even described it in remarkable detail) upon U.S. and UK ‘intelligence’ practices (CIA & MI6), whereas Erdogan has insisted upon an independent Turkey with its own nationalistic ‘intelligence’ organization — a nationalistically transformed version of Turkey’s existing MIT or National Intelligence Organization — an ‘intelligence’ organization that’s cleansed of what the CIA praises as “Gulen is interested in slow and deep social change, including secular higher education; Erdogan as a party leader is first and foremost interested in preserving his party’s power, operating in a populist manner, trying to raise the general welfare.” (The CIA actually knows that this has nothing whatsoever to do with “trying to raise the general welfare” — the U.S. regime’s goal is to extend everywhere the U.S. empire, and Erdogan’s Turkish regime has that same goal for the Turkish empire, which doesn’t yet even exist, though it once did as the Ottoman Empire, and he wants to restore it.) Erdogan insists upon Turkey’s not being merely a vassal-state or colony within a foreign-led empire, but instead the leading nation of its own empire, starting perhaps with gobbling up Syria and Libya, but extending ultimately more globally. There is a soundly documented article titled “Why Are Gulenists Hostile Toward Iran?” and it provides much of the reason why the CIA supports Gulen (they do largely because Erdogan isn’t so obsessive against Iran — which country America’s aristocracy crave to conquer again, as they had done in 1953, and Erdogan doesn’t support that as passionately as they require).

The question now for Europe is whether it wants to be again a participant in various aristocracies’, and clergies’, imperialistic designs, or instead to declare itself finally non-aligned and to lead thereby a new global non-aligned movement, not militaristically, but instead by providing, to the entire world, an anti-imperialistic and truly democratic model, a re-start and replacement of today’s United Nations, and one that will reflect what had been Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s anti-imperialist intention, and not Harry S. Truman’s American-imperialist intention — a start from scratch that has FDR’s statements to guide it, and not Truman’s actions to guide it (such as has been the case). Perhaps even the U.S., NYC-based, U.N. would ultimately sign onto that new international global federation; but the only basis upon which nations in the old U.N. should be accepted into its successor would be if the old U.N. were gradually to dissolve itself as its individual nations would, each on its own, sign onto the new one. Ultimately, this option must be made available to all Governments, to choose to either continue in Truman’s U.N., or else join instead a new, and authentically FDR-based, authentically anti-imperialistic, replacement of it.

That is what this dictatorial Islamization of Turkey is really all about, and only Europe can make the decision — no other land can. However, such a decision will only fail if any such organization as a new U.N. is to be at all involved in the particular national issues that now are so clearly coming to the fore in the transformation of Turkey into a Sunni Islamist dictatorship.

The “international community” should have no say in Turkey’s intranational (or “domestic”) affairs — regardless of whether Turkey is in or out of Europe. Sectarian and nationalistic concerns cannot rule in the formation of any authentically democratic new international order — an authentically non-imperialistic international order. All such concerns, domestic concerns, must be strictly the domain of the authority and power of each one of the individual constituent units, each individual national Government itself controlling its own internal affairs. FDR was adamant about that. He was insistent that the U.N. not get involved in individual nations’ internal affairs. The profoundly anti-FDR, “Responsibility to Protect” idea (which now has even acquired the status of being represented by an acronym “R2P” catch-phrase), has increasingly arisen recently to become a guiding principle of international relations, and must be soundly and uncompromisingly rejected in the formulation and formation of any replacement-organization — any authentically democratic international federation of nations. Otherwise, everything would be futile, and there will be a WWIII. We are heading in exactly the opposite direction from that which FDR had intended — which was to prevent any Third World War.

This decision will be made by the individual nations of Europe. Only they collectively hold this power. They will be able to exercise it only if they will terminate their alliances outside of Europe, and proceed forward no longer bound by external alliances, but instead become a free and independent European federation of European states. Only they, collectively, will be able to make this decision, as Europeans, for the entire world, regarding what the world’s future will be. And only they will hold the ultimate responsibility — and it’s NOT the “responsibility to protect”. It is instead the responsibility to protect the future of the entire world. It’s the responsibility to protect a future for the world. And if Europe fails it, then the world will inevitably move forward to WWIII, as it is doing. A new international order is needed, and only Europe can lead it, if Europe will.

In order for Europe to do that, Europe must first define itself. Is Turkey part of Europe? Is Russia? What is Europe? If Europeans won’t be able to agree on that, then the world will continue to move forward towards WWIII, because the world will then have no center, it will continue to have only contending empires — exactly what FDR had aimed to prevent.

Europe is the key. But will Europe’s leaders place the key in the lock, and open, finally, the door to a non-imperialistic world? The present, U.S.-empire-aligned, Europe, won’t do that. Turkey’s action on the Hagia Sophia, which is an insult to all Christians, and especially to Orthodox ones, might finally force the issue — and its solution.

Other than that, however, the official designation of the Hagia Sophia as being a mosque is entirely a domestic, Turkish, matter.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BdK3Tu Tyler Durden

Media Mask-Mania, Or COVID-19 Groupthink

Media Mask-Mania, Or COVID-19 Groupthink

Tyler Durden

Sun, 07/19/2020 – 23:30

Authored by Michael Lesher via Off-Guardian.org,

I never thought I’d see the day when publicly wearing a muzzle would constitute a proof of virtue in the same country whose government, less than twenty years ago, rationalized the bloody invasion of Afghanistan as a way of saving women from veiling their faces.

But then, I never thought I’d hear American liberals proudly denounce supporters of the US Constitution as a “death cult,” nor that I’d actually start to find Donald Trump sounding almost reasonable.

But at least there’s one thing we can all be sure about: “mainstream” news media, busily cheerleading for the death of freedom, will continue to gush with absurdities, self-contradictions and victim-shaming memes in their propaganda war to Keep America Gagged. The Bill of Rights (in case you haven’t noticed) is history; today, we demonstrate our patriotism by creeping around hiding our faces. Dissenters need not apply.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I suspect you haven’t been paying attention. Recently I had the poor judgment to turn on National Public Radio for about an hour, under the impression that I was going to learn something about the day’s news.

I could have saved myself the trouble. During the hour in question, I learned nothing at all about the presidential election campaign (now in its final months), nothing about the tens of millions of my fellow citizens whose jobs have been snatched away by government fiat, nothing about climate change, nuclear arms buildups, international refugees or growing worldwide poverty – nothing even about the intensification of air and water pollution authorized by recent federal regulation, although pollution kills an estimated 100,000 Americans every year.

No – for a solid hour, I heard the following: that COVID19 – in reality, at most, a moderately serious flu virus – is the worst medical threat the United States has ever faced; that this “deadly” virus (the word “deadly” was repeated obsessively, even though the disease is fatal in a tiny percentage of cases) has been empowered by a conspiracy of Republican politicians serving the arch-demon Donald Trump; that recent data showing the rapid decline in deaths attributable to the virus may have been faked, because the numbers aren’t what the “experts” want them to be; and that a massive increase in COVID19 tests – primarily among people between 20 and 40 years of age who are subjected to swabbing because their employers demand it, not because they’re in any danger – cannot possibly have anything to do with a rise in the number of reported infections, and that anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is “putting lives at risk.”

But the real theme of the hour was masks, masks, masks: how to make them, how to wear them, their different types, who doesn’t seem to have enough of them, and why muffling our faces (even though no such thing was ever demanded of us during dozens of past viral outbreaks) is absolutely, positively good for us all.

I waited in vain for some mention of the fact that every single order requiring the wearing of muzzles in the US is probably unconstitutional, a matter that National Public Radio – which once prided itself on its legal affairs reporting – might have been expected to care about.

Nor did anyone mention that just a few months ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was explicitly advising against a general mask-wearing regime, as was Anthony Fauci, the High Priest of COVID19.

No, facts would only have complicated matters. After all, we already knew what good little boys and girls were expected to do with those muzzles. At the close of each weather forecast, just in case anyone had missed the point, the reporter said cheerily, “And when you go out – put on a mask.” “And drink milk with every meal,” I half expected him to add, but I guess self-conscious condescension would have spoiled the effect.

Put on a mask.

In well over half a century, I cannot remember a weather report that ended with a brisk piece of non-meteorological advice, let alone a patently silly one – after all, if these magical masks were to make any difference, their greatest usefulness would have been at the beginning of the outbreak, not on its heels.

Yet throughout March, while police-state fever prompted the suspension of democracy in some 40 states and most of the US population was being hustled into virtual house arrest, the pro-incarceration crowd’s loudest voices unanimously insisted that masks were of no practical value.

For anyone who has forgotten, Fauci told 60 Minutes that:

[t]here’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is. And often there are unintended consequences – people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

That was how things stood when the epidemic was new and all stops were out. And now? Contemplating the lockdown-lovers’ belated fetish for surgical gear, one can only imagine the US Navy ceremoniously issuing an air-raid warning at Pearl Harbor a hundred days or so after the Japanese attack had wiped out much of the fleet.

But you’ve got to hand it to the mask-maniacs. No matter how many of their excuses for muzzling the population go the way of the Great Auk, they keep the new ones tumbling out so fast you can hardly keep track.

Here’s one peddled on July 14 in the Los Angeles Times: even though the masks won’t really prevent infection, they may reduce the amount of the virus you breathe in – that is, just in case you happen to come across an infected person who somehow manages to breathe into your (masked) face from a very short distance and for an extended period. (No one cited in the article bothers to discuss how often such a scenario is likely to occur.) According to a Dr. Monica Gandhi:

[t]here is this theory that facial masking reduces…disease severity.”

In other words, you’ll get COVID19 with or without a mask, but the effects will probably be milder if you muffle your face.

But wait a minute – even if “this theory” is correct (note that it contradicts everything the propagandists have been telling us about masks for the last three months), wasn’t it always the case that the overwhelming majority of those who catch COVID19 have very mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all?

So what’s the big advantage of the mask? The article is silent on that point – and Dr. Gandhi herself ultimately admits that her “theory” remains unproven. But that doesn’t stop the Times from lambasting a few local California officials who have raised inconvenient questions about mandatory muzzling.

“This anti-mask rhetoric is mind-blowing, dangerous, deadly and polarizing,” the article quotes Dr. Peter Chin-Hong as responding. Why? Because masks prevent infection? No. Because they save lives? No. Criticizing the muzzle mandate is “deadly” because – wait for it – because:

[t]here is no evidence that [wearing a mask] is dangerous.”

Well, actually, there is such evidence; Anthony Fauci admitted as much to 60 Minutes in March.

But the main problem with this retort is that it misses the point: people are being forced to mask their faces in public without any evidence that it’s dangerous not to.

Dr. Chin-Hong’s implicit confession that this is so knocks the stuffing out of the mandate – and the Times’ rationale. But to say so openly is “dangerous, deadly [there’s that favorite adjective again] and polarizing.” It’s no accident that the symbol of submission currently in vogue is one that covers the mouth. The real message of the mask-maniacs is that we have no right to say what we think.

And speaking of “polarizing,” what about the personal viciousness to which mask-mania so frequently descends? I have lost track of the number of videos circulated by so-called news outlets that depict frustrated shoppers losing their cool over being forced to dress like mummies.

Apparently this is supposed to be cute – as in, “Get a load of that stupid, Trump-supporting bitch having a public meltdown.” Myself, I feel sorry for these people; I share their exasperation, and I empathize with them over the invasion of their privacy.

As for the propagandists who peddle Schadenfreude in support of governors-turned-dictators – I indict them as heartless hypocrites, who claim to value our collective welfare and prove it by publicly humiliating their victims. Would they take similar pleasure, I wonder, in mocking the reaction of a black shopper who’d just been called “nigger”?

And it gets worse. In the upside-down world of COVID19 media values, even death is no protection from victim-shaming. Recently, American news organizations “reported” the death of an Ohio man who had the misfortune to die on July 4 of what they gleefully called “complications of COVID-19.”

More than two months earlier, the victim had posted a comment on social media saying he wasn’t going to “buy a mask.” The articles – which even named the deceased (a combat veteran) – practically salivated over the fact that he had had the audacity to go to a swimming pool in mid-June, where he may have contracted the virus. You see? screamed the reporters’ moralizing subtext. The maskless, self-indulgent right-wing bastard got what he deserved!

Just for the record, let me note that there are a number of things we don’t know. We don’t know whether the poor man actually wore a mask or not. (He wrote in late April that he didn’t intend to buy one, but that’s really not the same thing.) We don’t know how he actually caught the virus. We don’t know whether he could have been saved with better treatment; it’s even possible he waited too long to seek medical help.

Given his youth and the apparently lightning pace of his descent into serious illness, his death from COVID19 is so highly unusual that its medical significance amounts to another thing we don’t know.

Most important, we don’t know whether wearing or not wearing a mask had anything at all to do with his death. (If he was infected while at a swimming pool, I doubt even the mask-maniacs would insist that he should have worn it in the water.)

What we do know is that he was targeted for savage personal attacks after he died, first on social media and now in the press.

“[P]eople have come out of the woodworks, posting nasty, hateful comments about a man they knew nothing about,” one of his friends has said. “Most of it crossed the line into harassment. When reported to Facebook, nothing was taken down nor was there ANY action taken,” he added, while “[t]hose that defended [him] faced consequences from Facebook in way of bans.”

Well, at least the pattern of the propaganda makes sense, in a way: slander the nonconformist and you can get away with murder; defend him, you’re silenced.

Even the New York Times’ resident faux progressive, Michelle Goldberg, has taken up the cry. Another “Trump fan,” she sniffed on July 14, has become a “macabre cliché” by dying of a disease she blames him for contracting.

I wonder whether Ms. Goldberg would be smirking about a woman who was raped some two months after posting a comment to the effect that “I’ll go wherever I want and dress however I like.” My guess is that the analogy hasn’t occurred to her; she knows her job, and it’s about propaganda, not consistency.

And the propaganda’s bottom line is as clear as it is grim. Forget about your personal liberties. Forget about the democracy you thought you were living in. The mask – the symbol of fear, of arbitrary rule, of the abolition of normal social life, of voiceless submission – isn’t going away any time soon.

Nor is the police state that sponsors it.

“There’s going to be no summertime lull with a big wave in the fall,” says Eric Toner, one of the boffins of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, a partner of the neoliberal American Enterprise Institute that has been instrumental in promoting lockdowns from the start.

It’s clear that we are having a significant resurgence of cases in the summer, and they’ll get bigger. And it’ll keep going until we lock things down again.

And how long before the cycle of incarceration really ends? “[S]everal years,” Toner says blandly, adding the sinister afterthought that people who resist being muzzled “will get over it.… It’s just a question of how many people get sick and die before they get over it.”

Makes you feel kind of warm and protected, doesn’t it? Thank heaven people like Toner know our needs so much better than we do.

The media ubiquity of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is another ominous feature of the current wave of propaganda.

Last October, the Center ran a coronavirus pandemic “simulation” in New York City – cosponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – for an assembly of powerful people in business and government, after which its members openly speculated about the possible need for “censoring social media content” on the theory that “[m]isinformation and disinformation are likely to be serious threats during a public health emergency.”

These facts obviously bear on the organization’s motives and credibility, at the very least. But you won’t hear them mentioned when the Center’s data are repeated as fact in mainstream media, nor when its members assure us that if we don’t wear masks for the next two years we’ll all drop dead.

Is it unreasonable to hope that reporters might want to explore why “health security” is presumed to entail censorship? Or whether the huge investment of the Gates Foundation in vaccine development has any influence on its partner organization’s bleak predictions for escaping the coronavirus without a new vaccine? Or whether, having insisted first on devastating lockdowns and now on worthless face masks, the Center will use its political leverage to demand mandatory vaccination when the time comes?

Professor Lawrence Gostin is another worrisome presence in the media, including Michelle Goldberg’s recent sanctimonious outburst in the New York Times – where, pretending to describe the consequences of the virus, she catalogs the devastation of the lockdowns instead:

[A] record 5.4 million people lost their health insurance between February and May. A generation of American kids will have their educations derailed, and many parents who don’t lose their jobs due to the economic crisis will see their careers ruined by the demands of child care

[…]

The psychological consequences alone will be incalculable. Even before the coronavirus, researchers spoke of loneliness as its own epidemic in America. A March article in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry attributed 162,000 deaths a year to the fallout of social isolation. Now people are being told that they can socialize only under the most stringent conditions. Much of what makes life sweet is lost to us, not for days or weeks, but months or years.

As I said, this is a chillingly accurate summary of the consequences of the mass incarceration foisted on us by more than 40 state governors, most of them Democrats, beginning in early March – when each one, with a unilateral declaration of a “health emergency,” seized quasi-dictatorial powers, shunted aside the Constitution and bankrupted the citizenry. Those “emergency” powers have not been relinquished to this day.

But neither Goldberg nor her hero, Professor Gostin, offers a single word of criticism for any of those governors, and certainly not for the Democratic Party leadership that has backed this democracy-destroying, economy-wrecking madness at every step. For them, everything is the exclusive fault of one man: Donald Trump.

Coming from Goldberg, that might be just another election-year screed against an incumbent the Times dislikes. But what about Gostin? Well, although Goldberg never mentions it, Professor Gostin just happens to be the author of the model version of the Emergency Health Powers Act, the adoption of which in all fifty states (if in somewhat different versions) made possible the coup the governors pulled off by claiming “emergencies” several months ago.

It’s worth remembering that Gostin’s proposed bill was sharply criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union back in 2001 as “replete with civil liberties problems” and “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness.”

In fact, some of its specific objections to the EHPA deserve quoting at length, in light of where the Act’s reckless application has brought us today:

  1. It fails to include basic checks and balances. The Act would grant extraordinary emergency powers, but that kind of authority should never go unchecked. Public health authorities make mistakes, and politicians abuse their powers…The lack of checks and balances could have serious consequences for individuals’ freedom, privacy, and equality. The Act lets a governor declare a state of emergency unilaterally and without judicial oversight, fails to provide modern due process procedures for quarantine and other emergency powers…and contains no checks on the power to order forced treatment and vaccination.

  2. It goes well beyond bioterrorism. The act includes an overbroad definition of “public health emergency”…that clearly do[es] not justify quarantine, forced treatment, or any of the other broad emergency authorities that would be granted under the Act.

  3. It lacks privacy protections. The Act requires the disclosure of massive amounts of personally identifiable health information to public health authorities, without requiring basic privacy protections and fair information practices…. That not only threatens to violate individuals’ medical privacy but undermines public trust in government activities.

It’s not hard to see why Ms. Goldberg is reluctant to give us the accurate back story for her star witness. The ACLU’s list of warnings about the potential abuses of the law Gostin drafted is a near-perfect précis of what has actually happened: unilateral declarations of an “emergency,” state by state, where none really existed; the seizure by each governor of almost unlimited power to order quarantines and forced vaccinations; the elimination of “due process” restrictions on mass confinement; the dismantling of privacy protections along with basic rights.

I don’t intend to sing the praises of the ACLU, which – like so many other liberal institutions in the US – has been missing in action since the actual coup began last March. But no one can deny the prescience of its critique. And Goldberg knows her readers aren’t stupid: once they are aware of the role Gostin played in orchestrating the overthrow of their freedoms, they’re not likely to grant him the pied piper status Goldberg wants him to have.

Why does she cite Gostin? First, to “prove” – like Eric Toner in another context – that the COVID19 outbreak, the current excuse for the denial of our liberties, will last another two years; amazingly, Goldberg claims this while insisting simultaneously that the same outbreak is practically over in New Zealand, Taiwan and Italy after just a few months.

But she also needs him to explain, albeit in somewhat indirect language, why democracy isn’t good for us.

According to Gostin, the coronavirus has proved that “health system capacity alone is almost useless unless you have a government that can unleash that capacity promptly and consistently.” Obviously, we can’t do that if we have to bother with pesky constraints like representative government or the public will. And from Gostin’s perspective, we’ve been dabbling in the utopianism of democracy for too long as it is: “It’s going to take several years for us to be able to come out of all of the trauma that we’ve had,” he warns.

And I think that suggests the real message Goldberg and the other propagandists are keen on peddling. They didn’t do this to us. It’s not that we’ve been lied to and illegally confined. It’s not that our state executives have defied their oaths of office. It’s not that their media mouthpieces have offered us one swindle after another: lockdowns, business closings, job losses, muzzling, scare-mongering, the destruction (as Goldberg herself admits) of “much of what makes life sweet” – theater, cinema, public discussion, time shared with friends.

The problem is us. We’ve been clinging to dreams of freedom – and that will cost us. The lockdown-lovers are going to punish us for our wrongheaded attachment to notions of individual rights, and they will punish us still more for continuing recalcitrance. But note this: they can only get away with it by selling us one more lie – namely, that what they’re doing to us is really the work of a disease beyond anyone’s control.

“The coronavirus is a natural disaster,” Goldberg writes.

No, it isn’t.

The coronavirus is just another flu. The real disaster has been the work of human beings. Resisting it must be, too.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eLnzqO Tyler Durden

Visualizing The Spiraling Opioid Epidemic In America

Visualizing The Spiraling Opioid Epidemic In America

Tyler Durden

Sun, 07/19/2020 – 23:00

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. opioid crisis has claimed tens of thousands of lives. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh details below, opioid overdose deaths accounted for nearly 70% of all drug overdose deaths in 2018.

Although the damage of the opioid epidemic is well documented, what people might not know is that it has escalated in three distinct waves.

We pull the latest statistics from the UN World Drug Report 2020 to uncover the scope of the opioid crisis in the U.S., and how national drug-related death rates compare to other countries.

Three Waves of the Opioid Crisis

According to the CDC, the opioid epidemic can be traced back to the 1990s, when opioids started being over-prescribed for pain relief purposes.

  • 1990s – Wave 1
    Over-prescription of opioids for pain relief, including natural opioids, semi-synthetic opioids, and methadone. Addiction risks were widely downplayed.
  • 2010 – Wave 2
    Heroin-related overdose deaths on the rise.
  • 2013 – Wave 3
    Synthetic opioid-related deaths on the rise, particularly fentanyl and tramadol.

Here’s how that breaks down in terms of opioid-related overdose deaths over the years. Note that by the year 2018, 67% of overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and tramadol shot up by over 4,000% between 1999-2018. This can be attributed to two things: their relative potency, and the minute quantities of each that qualify as a lethal dose.

As per the medical and legal standard, opioids are often compared to morphine. To that end, heroin is 2-5x stronger—while fentanyl is 50-100x more potent. Put another way, roughly a dime-size or 10-12mg of heroin is considered a lethal dose, compared to only 1-2mg of fentanyl.

What’s worse, fentanyl is typically mixed with other types of drugs such as heroin or cocaine to increase their effects, which is how it ends up unintentionally ingested. Between 2008-2017, drug-use disorders as a whole claimed the most healthy lives due to poor health or early deaths—measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)—followed in close second by opioid use disorders.

The Death Toll of U.S. Drug Overdoses

It’s undeniable that the opioid epidemic in America has caused significant harm to communities. But how does the U.S. drug crisis compare to the same issue in other countries?

The UN Drug Report further puts these numbers into perspective by comparing drug-related deaths per million population. Note that the source also compiled the total deaths across years for selected countries.

With 314.5 deaths per million, the U.S. by far had the highest proportion of drug-related deaths per million people in 2018. It also had the highest overall number at 67.4K deaths.

Elephant in the Room?

Another drug rearing its head on the streets is carfentanil. Formerly developed as ‘elephant tranquilizer’, this synthetic opioid is similar in appearance to other illicit drugs such as heroin, making it indistinguishable when mixed in. However, there’s one big problem—carfentanil is 100x more potent than fentanyl itself.

In response to the continued crisis, an additional $35.7 billion was requested for counter-drug funding efforts in the FY2021 Budget. This amount is expected to go towards prevention and treatment efforts ($18.6 billion) and law enforcement efforts ($17.1 billion) both domestically and internationally.

But will these efforts properly combat the crisis, or are we already in the midst of a fourth wave of the opioid epidemic?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZGMfMP Tyler Durden

Kanye West Launches a Presidental Campaign of Christian Morality

KanyeCoverReason

Kanye West, still running for president, spoke at his first campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday afternoon.

West, with “2020” carved along the back of his head and in a huge security vest, said a lot over his hour, some in reaction to audience questions or comments. But one major thread, predictable given his turn toward a 100 percent Christian message on his recent album Jesus Is King, was a robust Christian morality and an insistence that Jesus loves us all, and that spreading that message is more important to him than actually winning the presidency.

The general style and vibe of West’s speech was more revival meeting than political rally, with West noting he is “only afraid of God and in honor of God” (while at the same time slyly noting that things he was saying might lose him business deals or even his marriage).

The emotional high point was a story about how his wife Kim Kardashian West had to convince him to give birth to their first child North, with West weeping out loud at the thought that he might have killed his own daughter. He similarly insisted that his own father wanted to abort him and he was saved only by his mother Donda’s resolve.

When it came to policy, though, candidate West insisted abortion should remain legal, and that a way to achieve the zero abortions he’d like to see might be to offer enormous amounts of money, even a million dollars, to women who feel pushed toward abortion by lack of resources.

Over the course of the rally, West made comments that could appeal to Americans across the ideological spectrum—and comments sure to make nearly every typically stratified American voter run away.

• For the conservative right: West sincerely repeated the gun rights slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and stated how much fun it is to shoot guns. (He mentioned his ability to fire AR-15s all the livelong day if he wishes on his enormous Wyoming ranch.) He suggested that unilateral disarmament on either the personal or national level just places you at other people’s mercy. He said that Democrats have not done “shit” for blacks, and that it is highly racist to insist that Kanye in the race will split the black vote and harm Biden.

While this particular sort of conservatism is too old-fashioned even for most modern American so-called “conservatives,” West joined with his fellow earthshaking pop music genius turned hardcore Christian Bob Dylan in calling for a self-sufficient agricultural life as the best solution to most social and economic ills.

We moved to the cities because of the industrial revolution, West insisted, and that’s over. He attacks American education for not teaching us about the ease and possibilities of just living on the land and growing what you need from it. He calls on “the original Tesla” for support of the idea that the “Earth is a giant generator” and that “God has given us freedom, you can feed your family and survive on earth, wind, fire and air” with “proper engineering.”

• For the progressive left: West called American society white supremacist. He alluded to executions of innocent men, though he did not say he’s definitely against the death penalty. (It is hard to pin down a lot of West’s precise policy preferences from this speech.) He called out “homeless people in front of a Gucci store” as one of the social ills that inspired him to run. He believes that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

West does not make it easy to slot his sayings into standard political and economic categories, but he seems to allude to something like Modern Monetary Theory (the idea essentially that our government can make and distribute all the money it wants with no problems) by declaring that his dream of million-dollar giveaways to mothers can’t be limited by worrying about money. After all, he notes, our money is no longer backed by gold anyway, so nothing but will is stopping us from spending.

• For the libertarian: Besides his aforementioned comments on gun rights and the death penalty, West seems to hold the bootstrap notion that not being literal slaves is not nearly enough for black Americans; that they must achieve ownership of business and land in America to be truly free. (Or at least that’s the most charitable interpretation of his odd comment that Harriet Tubman “just had the slaves go work for other white people.”) He called out major companies for depending on black ideas or customers but having no blacks on their boards, even insisting that if the likes of Adidas did not fix that, immediately, he’d stop doing business with them. He noted that too many American blacks are “worried about embarassing themselves before an all-white country that we work for and don’t own anything in it.” He stands up firmly for maximal black participation in capitalist culture through ownership and control.

In general, in a meta-libertarian yet also Christian angle, he insisted that most of our problems were those of personal choice and personal sins, from reliance on porn to reliance on percoset to choosing to fire a weapon at another person, and that true freedom will come through obeying God’s laws, not through politicians, whether they be “Trump, Biden, or Kanye.” (Later, he grandiosely declared that if his campaign is over, “the country is over.” Hey, it’s Kanye.)

For radical kooks across the spectrum: West spoke often from a general sense of occult foreboding about the way the world works, intimating he was literally risking his life doing what he’s doing, alluding to “real powers” that no one knows about or speaks about. He said outright he doesn’t want to say he’s against Big Pharm because they have the will and wherewithal to murder him. He alluded to establishment conspiracies to fill the black community with both guns and drugs.

He displayed a general sense that media modernity is a sinister mind control and manipulation machine. (On the other hand, when he was invited to speak against George Soros he admitted he doesn’t “know much about George Soros, in all honesty” so “I will not bear false witness” by condemning him.) Because of all the weird things that have happened in 2020 America this year, West thinks there is no change, no matter how radical or weird it might seem, that might not be possible.

West had previously been a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump fan, though not one loudly and publicly for particular Trumpist policies. One of the things that dazzled him about Trump was the very improbable nerve of a political outsider running in a very unconventional manner and winning. As I quoted West in a February 2019 Reason story, he thought Trump’s victory “proves that anything is possible in America….I’m not talking about what he’s done since he’s in office. But the fact that he was able to do it.”

This is the Kanye willing, in a campaign-opening political rally, to admit that he would drive his Maybach “to Calabasas high as a motherfucker” on percocets he feels doctors pushed on him. (He then joked about his dad getting mad when he hears West saying this on Fox.) This is the Kanye willing to refer, while speaking of how Jesus loves everyone, to people “controlled by demons.” This is the Kanye whose last words before leaving the stage were “That was extremely good! That was extremely bad!”

He may not be like any other politician, but I’m willing to bet all that makes him more like more other Americans than any other American politician is. While his ability to get on any ballots other than Oklahoma remains unknown, that is an approach to campaigning that is at the least gripping and interesting.

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via IFTTT

Kanye West Launches a Presidental Campaign of Christian Morality

KanyeCoverReason

Kanye West, still running for president, spoke at his first campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday afternoon.

West, with “2020” carved along the back of his head and in a huge security vest, said a lot over his hour, some in reaction to audience questions or comments. But one major thread, predictable given his turn toward a 100 percent Christian message on his recent album Jesus Is King, was a robust Christian morality and an insistence that Jesus loves us all, and that spreading that message is more important to him than actually winning the presidency.

The general style and vibe of West’s speech was more revival meeting than political rally, with West noting he is “only afraid of God and in honor of God” (while at the same time slyly noting that things he was saying might lose him business deals or even his marriage).

The emotional high point was a story about how his wife Kim Kardashian West had to convince him to give birth to their first child North, with West weeping out loud at the thought that he might have killed his own daughter. He similarly insisted that his own father wanted to abort him and he was saved only by his mother Donda’s resolve.

When it came to policy, though, candidate West insisted abortion should remain legal, and that a way to achieve the zero abortions he’d like to see might be to offer enormous amounts of money, even a million dollars, to women who feel pushed toward abortion by lack of resources.

Over the course of the rally, West made comments that could appeal to Americans across the ideological spectrum—and comments sure to make nearly every typically stratified American voter run away.

• For the conservative right: West sincerely repeated the gun rights slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and stated how much fun it is to shoot guns. (He mentioned his ability to fire AR-15s all the livelong day if he wishes on his enormous Wyoming ranch.) He suggested that unilateral disarmament on either the personal or national level just places you at other people’s mercy. He said that Democrats have not done “shit” for blacks, and that it is highly racist to insist that Kanye in the race will split the black vote and harm Biden.

While this particular sort of conservatism is too old-fashioned even for most modern American so-called “conservatives,” West joined with his fellow earthshaking pop music genius turned hardcore Christian Bob Dylan in calling for a self-sufficient agricultural life as the best solution to most social and economic ills.

We moved to the cities because of the industrial revolution, West insisted, and that’s over. He attacks American education for not teaching us about the ease and possibilities of just living on the land and growing what you need from it. He calls on “the original Tesla” for support of the idea that the “Earth is a giant generator” and that “God has given us freedom, you can feed your family and survive on earth, wind, fire and air” with “proper engineering.”

• For the progressive left: West called American society white supremacist. He alluded to executions of innocent men, though he did not say he’s definitely against the death penalty. (It is hard to pin down a lot of West’s precise policy preferences from this speech.) He called out “homeless people in front of a Gucci store” as one of the social ills that inspired him to run. He believes that “it takes a village to raise a child.”

West does not make it easy to slot his sayings into standard political and economic categories, but he seems to allude to something like Modern Monetary Theory (the idea essentially that our government can make and distribute all the money it wants with no problems) by declaring that his dream of million-dollar giveaways to mothers can’t be limited by worrying about money. After all, he notes, our money is no longer backed by gold anyway, so nothing but will is stopping us from spending.

• For the libertarian: Besides his aforementioned comments on gun rights and the death penalty, West seems to hold the bootstrap notion that not being literal slaves is not nearly enough for black Americans; that they must achieve ownership of business and land in America to be truly free. (Or at least that’s the most charitable interpretation of his odd comment that Harriet Tubman “just had the slaves go work for other white people.”) He called out major companies for depending on black ideas or customers but having no blacks on their boards, even insisting that if the likes of Adidas did not fix that, immediately, he’d stop doing business with them. He noted that too many American blacks are “worried about embarassing themselves before an all-white country that we work for and don’t own anything in it.” He stands up firmly for maximal black participation in capitalist culture through ownership and control.

In general, in a meta-libertarian yet also Christian angle, he insisted that most of our problems were those of personal choice and personal sins, from reliance on porn to reliance on percoset to choosing to fire a weapon at another person, and that true freedom will come through obeying God’s laws, not through politicians, whether they be “Trump, Biden, or Kanye.” (Later, he grandiosely declared that if his campaign is over, “the country is over.” Hey, it’s Kanye.)

For radical kooks across the spectrum: West spoke often from a general sense of occult foreboding about the way the world works, intimating he was literally risking his life doing what he’s doing, alluding to “real powers” that no one knows about or speaks about. He said outright he doesn’t want to say he’s against Big Pharm because they have the will and wherewithal to murder him. He alluded to establishment conspiracies to fill the black community with both guns and drugs.

He displayed a general sense that media modernity is a sinister mind control and manipulation machine. (On the other hand, when he was invited to speak against George Soros he admitted he doesn’t “know much about George Soros, in all honesty” so “I will not bear false witness” by condemning him.) Because of all the weird things that have happened in 2020 America this year, West thinks there is no change, no matter how radical or weird it might seem, that might not be possible.

West had previously been a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump fan, though not one loudly and publicly for particular Trumpist policies. One of the things that dazzled him about Trump was the very improbable nerve of a political outsider running in a very unconventional manner and winning. As I quoted West in a February 2019 Reason story, he thought Trump’s victory “proves that anything is possible in America….I’m not talking about what he’s done since he’s in office. But the fact that he was able to do it.”

This is the Kanye willing, in a campaign-opening political rally, to admit that he would drive his Maybach “to Calabasas high as a motherfucker” on percocets he feels doctors pushed on him. (He then joked about his dad getting mad when he hears West saying this on Fox.) This is the Kanye willing to refer, while speaking of how Jesus loves everyone, to people “controlled by demons.” This is the Kanye whose last words before leaving the stage were “That was extremely good! That was extremely bad!”

He may not be like any other politician, but I’m willing to bet all that makes him more like more other Americans than any other American politician is. While his ability to get on any ballots other than Oklahoma remains unknown, that is an approach to campaigning that is at the least gripping and interesting.

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via IFTTT

Why We Shouldn’t Believe Polling About Trump

Why We Shouldn’t Believe Polling About Trump

Tyler Durden

Sun, 07/19/2020 – 22:30

Authored by Lord Pettigrew, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Many conservatives are concerned about polling results regarding conservative issues, especially about President Trump. For example, the latest CNN poll found that 51% of voters believe the president should be impeached. How much credence should conservatives give these polls?

Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American Association for Public Opinion Research confirms that “national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump’s support significantly more than Clinton’s.”

We are inundated with the latest polling on President Trump’s approval rating and how people are likely to vote in the 2020 election. Both bode poorly for the president, but he doesn’t believe them and neither should we. As an academic, I ran a research center that conducted local, state-wide and national public opinion polls and took a year’s leave of absence from my university to work for Lou Harris, founder of the Harris Poll.

Social Desirability

The reason why we shouldn’t believe most of the current or future polling results about President Trump can be summarized in two words: Social Desirability.

Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling, whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent’s true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially desirable way, or not answer at all. 

When it comes to President Trump, the mainstream media and academics have led us to believe that it is not socially desirable (or politically correct) to support him. When up against such sizable odds, most conservatives will do one of three things:

1) Say we support someone else when we really support the president (lie);

2) tell the truth despite the social undesirability of that response;

3) Not participate in the poll (nonresponse bias).

This situation has several real consequences for Trump polling. First, for those in the initial voter sample unwilling to participate, the pollster must replace them with people willing to take the poll. Assuming this segment is made up largely of pro-Trump supporters, finding representative replacements can be expensive, time-consuming and doing so increases the sampling error rate (SER) while decreasing the validity of the poll. Sampling error rate is the gold standard statistic in polling. It means that the results of a particular poll will vary by no more than +x% than if the entire voter population was surveyed. All else being equal, a poll with a sampling error rate of +2% is more believable than one of +4% because it has a larger sample. Immediate polling on issues like President Trump’s impeachment may provide support to journalists with a point of view to broadcast, but with a small sample and high sampling error rates, the results aren’t worthy of one’s time and consideration.

Some political pollsters often get around the necessity of repeated sampling over the course of an election by forming a panel of people who match the demographics (party affiliation, age, gender, race, location, etc.) of registered voting public. Polling companies often compensate panel members and use them across the entire election cycle. Such panels are still subject to the effects of social desirability and initial substitution error.

Interpretive Bias

Another factor to consider is the institution that is conducting the poll and those reporting the data. Their progressive sensibilities are thumbing the scale of truth. In my experience, polls conducted by media companies are less credible since they are often guilty of the same biases seen in their news reports. The perfect example of this is The New York Times’s “Poll Watch,” which provides a weekly review of their political poll. My experience is that it reflects strongly the Times’s negative opinions about President Trump and conservative ideas and the paper’s heavy political bias.

Even the Harris Poll, when Lou was alive, suffered somewhat from this bias. Lou Harris was the first person to conduct serious political polling on a national level and is credited with giving John Kennedy the competitive advantage over Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. He made political polling de require for future elections. While many people point to Nixon’s twelve o’clock shadow during the televised debate, Harris gave Kennedy the real competitive advantage—a more complete grasp of what issues voters thought were most important and how to tailor his policy pitches toward that end.

I worked for Lou between 1999-2000. During the election season we would get the daily tab read-outs. While the results were pristine, Lou would interpret those numbers on NPR and in other media in a way that showed his clear Democrat bias. His wishful thinking that Al Gore would beat George W. Bush would color his interpretation of what the numbers meant. In the end, by a razon thin margin, Bush took the White House and Gore was relegated to inconvenient environmental truths. Similarly, the 2016 election saw Trump beat favorite Hillary Clinton by a significant electoral margin, despite the vast majority of polls giving Mrs. Clinton the edge by between 3-5%.

Where We Go from Here

Public opinion polling is generally not junk science although with some companies it can be. Companies like Gallup and Pew consistently do a good job of chronicling political opinion in America. At issue is the fact that these polling stalwarts don’t work for media companies and use large national samples from current voter rolls; they also tend to not put their thumbs on the interpretation of data. President Trump is a president unlike any other and most of his supporters don’t participate in political polls. Even Trump’s own pollsters were surprised by his 2016 win. We would do well during these fractured times to ignore political opinion polls for they will continue to be much to do about nothing.

Just be sure to vote your conscience and that is nobody’s opinion but your own. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CPFyPs Tyler Durden

Boeing Is Running Out Of Space To Park Its Newly-Built 787 Dreamliners Which Nobody Wants To Buy

Boeing Is Running Out Of Space To Park Its Newly-Built 787 Dreamliners Which Nobody Wants To Buy

Tyler Durden

Sun, 07/19/2020 – 21:54

While Morgan Stanley continues to stubbornly repeat that the US economy is undergoing a jolly V-shaped recovery, one would be very hard pressed to observe that in either the number of airline passengers, or the commercial aerospace sector in general, where Boeing has become a poster child for how quickly the fate can turn… and it’s not just the company’s ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX which may or may not fly again. According to Bloomberg, Boeing is now also running out of space to stash newly-built 787 Dreamliners, as unsold jetliners are now crammed onto “every available patch of pavement on airfields near its factories in Washington and South Carolina.”

Citing people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg writes that “dozens of the planes are sitting on the company’s premises” with Uresh Sheth, a closely followed blogger who meticulously tracks the Dreamliners rolling through Boeing’s factories, putting the total somewhere above 50. That’s more than double the number of jets typically awaiting customers along Boeing’s flight lines.

According to Sheth, brand-new widebodies are lined up on a closed off runway at the airport that abuts Boeing’s hulking plant north of Seattle. In North Charleston, 787s are tucked around the delivery center and a paint hangar. The U.S. planemaker has even started sending aircraft to be stored in a desert lot in Victorville, California.

Commercial aircraft storage at Mojave Airport.

Boeing’s troubles with parked jets are nothing new: last year Boeing had so many 737 Maxes after their global ground when it emerged that Boeing had drastically cut corners to save on costs even if it meant risking people’s lives, that it commandeered an employee parking lot to store surplus aircraft. Now, as it finally starts to emerge from that crisis, another critical source of cash – the company’s marquee jet, the 787 Dreamliner – is under pressure but not do to airworthiness concerns but simply due to the global depression that commercial air traffic has found itself in.

As Bloomberg notes, Boeing has relied on the wide-body jet, produced in record numbers, to help bankroll the $20 billion in costs it has rung up since the Max was banned from commercial flight in March 2019 following two fatal crashes. But as Covid-19 sapped consumer interest in long-range travel this year, “the tally of undelivered Dreamliners has stacked up and created a new financial drag as regulators move closer to clearing the 737’s return.”

As a result of the current state of the airline industry, “the next couple of years are just going to be very hard for this airplane,” George Ferguson, a Bloomberg analyst said of the 787 Dreamliner. Some more details:

Demand for the twin-aisle 787, Boeing’s 777 and Airbus’s A350 and A330neo has been especially hard hit as cash-strapped airlines slow or cancel aircraft purchases. Some would-be buyers don’t want to send pilots to claim aircraft in the U.S., where the pandemic is raging. When they are able to start growing fleets, airlines are expected to initially focus on smaller planes for domestic flights before adding larger aircraft for continent-hopping trips.

Boeing also faces a “capacity hangover” after pushing Dreamliner production to a 14-jet monthly pace last year — a record for wide-body aircraft — in a market that was already glutted with aircraft, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with Teal Group.

“It was one of the few levers they could pull to bring in more cash during what seemed like a crisis, and now looks like a nothingburger,” Aboulafia said of Boeing’s response to the Max grounding. That scandal has been eclipsed by the unprecedented aviation collapse brought on by Covid-19. “No twin-aisle had ever been built at 14-a-month for a very good reason.”

For now, Boeing is acting as if demand will soon rebound: “We continue to closely monitor the commercial marketplace by staying very engaged with our customers around the globe to fully understand short term and long term requirements,” Greg Smith, the company’s chief financial officer and executive vice president of enterprise operations, said in a statement.

Unfortunately, such optimism remains wildly misplaced as customers took just three of Boeing’s 787 during May and June, and 36 of the aircraft in the first six months of the year, down more than 50% from 78 deliveries a year earlier.

While Boeing has already lowered 787 production to 10 jets a month, it will need to pursue far deeper cuts over the next two years, which will further sap the company’s cash flow. Even so, the manufacturer could be left holding one-third of the more than 100 Dreamliners that J.P. Morgan analyst Seth Seifman projects the company will build this year.

In short, as a result of the global economic recession, Boeing is facing a good, old inventory glut, and absent taking a machete to prices, it will have big problems clearing out the excess inventory.

“It may be difficult to clear this inventory next year,” given that Boeing would have to ramp up deliveries at a time when “when long-range travel may still be under pressure,” Seifman said in a July 15 report.

While Boeing’s stock has so far neglected the lack of demand for the company’s cash cow, that will soon change. Boeing’s ballooning 787 inventory and deferred production costs should come into sharper focus over the next two weeks as key customers like American Airlines and United Airlines report earnings, followed Boeing itself on July 29.

For years after the 787 Dreamliner made its commercial debut in 2011, taped up aircraft awaiting retrofitted parts dotted Paine Field, adjacent to Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington. For Sheth, there’s a sense of déjà vu to the growing glut.

“I have no doubt they are going to recover from that downturn,” Sheth said. “But at this point they’re probably going to have to cut production even lower because they can’t continue on this trajectory.”

All of which means even lower future income, more layoffs and – eventually – a return to the bargaining table to ask Uncle Sam for some bailout cash, which Boeing has so far managed to avoid.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CmaIOK Tyler Durden