Tag: news

We, as well as every Short-Term Interest Rate trader on Wall Street (or rather at home) is speechless at the insane action in the Eurodollar futures complex, where shortly after the Jan 2021 implied fed funds rate turned negative, the cascade of buying in ED futures has tripped above 100 in both Dec and moments ago, November 2020, meaning that the market is now expecting negative rates as soon as November.

And if one waits just a few more minutes, the Sept 2020 contract is about to flip negative too, as the market now expects the Fed to go NIRP in as soon a 4 months!

Needless to say, for ED traders to expect negative rates in months if not weeks, means that the economy is about to implode, and it appears bank stocks are starting to wake up to just how bad this news is…

How that is still positive for stocks we leave to Jerome Powell to explain who is about to have the worst summer/fall of his life.

One thing that should be abundantly clear by now is that any thoughts, opinions, or speculation which challenges the official narratives regarding COVID-19 will be promptly silenced by Silicon Valley, under the guise of protecting the public – which apparently can’t be trusted to absorb information and form their own opinions.

The most recent example of censored wrongthink is a new documentary, Plandemic, which features former chronic fatigue researcher Judy Milkovits, who claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci – head of the  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – is spewing ‘absolute propaganda’ about COVID-19.

In the video, Mikovits claimed Fauci perpetrated propaganda that led to the deaths of millions of people in the past. She also raised questions about how COVID-19 deaths are being counted.

However, one of her biggest beefs against Fauci dates to the battles for credit over the discovery of HIV in the early 1980s.

In the video, Mikovits claimed she isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of patients in France but that Fauci was involved in delaying research so a friend could take credit, which allowed the HIV virus to spread. These claims are not proven. They were also disseminated in April by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy alleged on the Children’s Health Defense website (where he is chairman) –Heavy

Google’s YouTube is currently playing whack-a-mole with a 25 minute promotional vignette for the documentary which has gone viral – deleting new versions seemingly as fast as they pop up. The original version had over 1.6 million views when it was censored.

Facebook, however, hasn’t deleted it (yet):

As noted by Heavy‘s Jessica McBride, Mikovits has a new book out, Plague of Corrpution, which currently has 4.5 / 5 stars on Amazon.

Mikovits, who has a new book out, was featured in the first vignette released to promote the movie. Her controversial career in the scientific community has been punctuated by an arrest, lawsuit, retracted research study, allegations against Fauci and clashes with the founders of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease, which is located in Reno, Nevada. -Heavy

Mikovits has claimed that she published a “blockbuster” study which revealed that “the common use of animal and human fetal tissues were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases,” and that the “minions of Big Pharma” have been waging war against her to destroy her “good name, career and personal life.”

In the Plandemic video, Mikovits makes other claims, including that patents are a conflict of interest, and she criticizes the concept of mass vaccines. “They will kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines,” she said, stressing she was not anti-vaccine. She claims there is a financial incentive in COVID-19 strategies to not use natural remedies in order to push people to use vaccines.

Mikovits co-wrote a book called Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases and claims 30% of vaccines are contaminated with retroviruses. The book contains a forward from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The book was No. 2 on the Amazon bestseller list on May 6. -Heavy

Plandemic has received both praise and criticism, however Google thinks it’s best if you leave the thinking to them.

Read more about Mikovits here.

Petrodollar panic?

As tensions between OPEC (cough – the Saudis – cough) and Washington rise over the supply (and price) of oil globally amid a pandemic-driven demand collapse, it would appears President Trump may have just gone ‘nuclear’.

“…there will be blood.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that The U.S. is removing Patriot anti-missile systems from Saudi Arabia and is considering reductions to other military capabilities – marking the end, for now, of a large-scale military buildup to counter Iran, according to U.S. officials.

As a reminder, OilPrice.com’s Simon Watkins warned last week that President Donald Trump was considering all options available to him to make the Saudis pay for the oil price war as the crash that followed has done significant damage to the U.S. oil industry.

With last month having seen the indignity of the principal U.S. oil benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), having fallen into negative pricing territory, U.S. President Donald Trump is considering all options available to him to make the Saudis pay for the oil price war that it started, according to senior figures close to the Presidential Administration spoken to by OilPrice.com last week. It is not just the likelihood that exactly the same price action will occur to each front-month WTI futures contract just before expiry until major new oil production cuts come from OPEC+ that incenses the U.S. nor the economic damage that is being done to its shale oil sector but also it is the fact that Saudi is widely seen in Washington as having betrayed the long-standing relationship between the two countries. Right now, many senior members on Trump’s closest advisory circle want the Saudis to pay for its actions, in every way, OilPrice.com understands.

This relationship was established in 1945 between the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King at the time, Abdulaziz, on board the U.S. Navy cruiser Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake segment of the Suez Canal and has defined the relationship between the two countries ever since.

As analysed in depth in my new book on the global oil markets, the deal that was struck between the two men at that time was that the U.S. would receive all of the oil supplies it needed for as long as Saudi Arabia had oil in place, in return for which the U.S. would guarantee the security of the ruling House of Saud.

The deal has altered slightly since the rise of the U.S. shale oil industry and Saudi Arabia’s attempt to destroy it from 2014 to 2016 in that the U.S. also expects the House of Saud to ensure that Saudi Arabia not only supplies the U.S. with whatever oil it needs for as long as it can but also that it also allows the U.S. shale industry to continue to function and to grow.

For the U.S., if this means that Saudi Arabia loses out to U.S. shale producers by keeping oil prices up but losing out on export opportunities to U.S. firms then that is just the price that the House of Saud must pay for the continued protection of the U.S. – politically, economically, and militarily.

And now, as The Journal reports, the U.S. is removing four Patriot missile batteries from Saudi Arabia along with dozens of military personnel sent following a series of attacks on the Saudi oil facilities last year, according to several U.S. officials. The attacks were part of hostilities that took place over several months.

President Donald Trump has made clear whenever he has sensed a lack of understanding on the part of Saudi Arabia for the huge benefit that the U.S. is doing the ruling family:

“He [Saudi King Salman] would not last in power for two weeks without the backing of the U.S. military.”

Trump has a very good point, as it is fair to say that without U.S. protection, either Israel or Iran and its proxy operatives and supporters would very soon indeed end the rule of the House of Saud, even though The Journal reports that The Pentagon’s removal of the Patriot antimissile batteries from Saudi Arabia, as well as the other reductions, are based on assessments by some officials that Tehran no longer poses an immediate threat to American strategic interests.

In a U.S. presidential election year, the last thing that a U.S. president wants is increasing diesel prices or shortages making a coronavirus-hit economy even worse. It is a fact that since the end of the First World War, the sitting U.S. president has won re-election 11 times out of 11 if the U.S. economy was not in recession within two calendar years ahead of an election whilst presidents who went into a re-election campaign with the economy in recession over the same time-frame won only once out of seven.

This said, it may be that Trump will use the threat of such military asset removals from Saudi Arabia, as his mercurial reputation may work to convince the Saudis that he is unpredictable enough to do just that, regardless of the short-term economic consequences. 

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investments,

There are two parts behind the inflation mongering. The first, noted yesterday, is the Fed’s balance sheet, particularly its supposedly monetary remainder called bank reserves. The central bank is busy doing something, a whole bunch of something, therefore how can it possibly turn out to be anything other than inflationary?

The answer: the Federal Reserve is not a central bank, not really. What it “prints” are, as Emil Kalinowski likes to call them, the equivalent of laundromat tokens (I wonder if they’re even that useful). Even Jay Powell knows this, but he’s absolutely thrilled that so many people believe otherwise.

When grasped by the dark specter of deflation, what better way (according to an Economist) to get out of it than to make people think you’re being monetarily reckless; therefore, he’s not about to correct the record as to what QE really is. As Paul Krugman once put it, credibly promise to be irresponsible.

It’s the “credible” part that goes lacking. Thus, the parade of counterexamples – “Japan 2001. America 2008. Japan 2013. Europe 2015” – each one unanswered by any inflationary breakout. Has the whole world just forgot about QQE? It’s still ongoing seven years later!

The other part or half of what’s driving fears is fiscal, governmental in general. Come hell or high water, it is told, the feds as opposed to the Fed are going to drive inflation. Why? Because, as legend has it, that’s the way you “pay down” massive debt loads. You go nuts borrowing and then, quietly, ambiguously, you screw your lenders (bond holders) by devaluing the currency.

Occasionally, as the kids say, they say the quiet part out loud.

A working paper just released (but not edited) by the Chicago branch of the Federal Reserve does just that. A taste:

The current low interest rate environment limits the Federal Reserve’s ability to stabilize the economy, while the large public debt curtails the efficacy of fiscal interventions by inducing expectations of costly fiscal adjustments. A solution to this impasse is a coordinated fiscal and monetary strategy aiming at creating a controlled rise of inflation to wear away a targeted fraction of debt. Under our coordinated strategy, the fiscal authority introduces an emergency budget with no provisions on how it will be balanced, while the monetary authority allows a temporary increase in inflation.

See!!, bond vigilantes will scream. We told you that’s what they’re up to!

Sorry, folks, this isn’t actually a surprise nor is it the matter for debate since everyone knows that’s what politicians want. It won’t make one bit of difference what authorities want to do, under cover or right out in the open, it’s what they actually can do.

And it’s just not all that much when it comes to the monetary system.

Controlled inflation, by the way, is not a new concept, either (obviously). Lost deep within the minutiae of the flurry of programs brought on by the Great Depression is something called the Thomas Amendment to FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (better known as the Farm Relief Bill).

Not just the Thomas Amendment, it was actually called the Thomas Inflation Amendment because it included a number of legal provisions which would force the costs of all manner of produce to be set (read: increased) by the diktat of federal government agencies. American farms and farmers had, like industry, been equally ravaged by deflationary prices.

But that wasn’t all, the amendment would have required the Federal Reserve to buy, at the President’s request, another $3 billion in federal government bonds (super QE) beyond those already purchased while also giving Roosevelt added authority to further lower the gold content of the dollar (statutory approval for official devaluation, meaning default, having  been given just a few months earlier).

There was more: authority to put silver on par with gold, or at any ratio in between that possible extreme and where it was priced at the time; legal approval for the Fed to issue greenbacks, $3 billion of them, to finance the bond purchases rather than use reserve bank credit (bank reserves).

On May 13, 1933, in Britain’s The Economist these provisions were soundly condemned as going way too far:

The passage of the Thomas amendment by both houses of Congress has answered the question of whether we are going to have inflation. The only topic of conversation in New York during the past week has been ‘inflation.’ It is evident that the tide of inflationary sentiment is running at full flood.

Both The Economist article and one published in BusinessWeek four days later referred to “controlled inflation”, with the former quite negative on the theory, charging, “the country has exchanged a President with little effective power for a ‘currency dictator.’”

The latter, BusinessWeek, was far more sanguine:

This inflation is different. It contains controls that can be used to prevent a runaway…

Disagreement over the wisdom behind the amendment was fierce, but the foreseeable result, inflation, was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion.

As noted yesterday, on the contrary, there was none to be found anywhere – not until the mid-sixties under very different underlying (not deflationary) circumstances.

It wasn’t up to authorities to create it, no matter how much they wanted to or how willing they were to just tear up tradition and exceed political limits. The monetary power for inflation, or deflation, as the case would be, rested within the banking system which, contrary to “recovery” expectations, wasn’t recovering.

This undercurrent would persist for decades. Though the New Deal raised the budget deficit to extreme proportions, World War II would take them even further. And still no inflation.

Fearing it anyway, because central bankers through history have continuously proved how little they understand their jobs, the Federal Reserve by the time of America’s entry into WWII, wounded and weakened by its disastrous performance throughout the decade before, was made subservient to the Treasury Department. Its primary task had been whittled down to little more than bond market policeman; beginning in 1942, enforcing a ceiling on UST yields by promising to buy bonds at predetermined prices.

And yet, even that much was never required. Low interest rates persisted; the Fed, as I recalled a few years ago, never much more than a bystander and spectator as the banking system feared liquidity and deflation regardless of the government’s condition, intent, or disposition. You can’t credibly promise to be irresponsible when everyone, including Treasury, knows you’re toothless.

If you understand why interest rates had only gone lower in the thirties you can easily understand why they didn’t just surge one day in the forties or even fifties. Yes, the Fed kept a ceiling on long rates from ’42 to ’51, but in all that time the central bank rarely had to intervene in the market; none at all over the final years. There was no artificially constrained bond bear lurking underneath.

What ended this bond “bull” market was the same thing which would end up balancing the federal government’s books. Growth and opportunity, not inflation.

Thus, the question before us today isn’t really about inflation, either, it’s whether the debt being further piled on to defeat deflation (which has zero chance of succeeding at that) simply tightens the deflationary trap that much more.

Just like all these previous periods in history. “Japan 2001. America 2008. Japan 2013. Europe 2015.” Everyone 2020.

I’ll get to Japan in the nineties hopefully at some point this week. That’ll finish up the major episodes of this un-killable interest rate fallacy.

As Western intelligence continues to investigate China’s handling of COVID-19 as it spread throughout Hubei province in December, disturbing evidence continues to emerge that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engaged in a massive cover-up of what was going on.

Now, we’ve learned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology – which was conducting controversial experiments into animal-to-human transmission of bat coronaviruses, altered their database in an apparent attempt to distance the lab from the outbreak.

“Days before the Wuhan wet market was bleached, whistleblowers were punished and virus samples were destroyed, someone at the high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology censored its virus database in an apparent attempt to disassociate the laboratory from a novel-coronavirus outbreak that would become a global pandemic,” reports the New York Post‘s Miranda Devine, citing a UK intelligence analyst who found the alterations via open-source methods.

Notably, the alteration occurred two days before a gene sequencing lab was reportedly ordered by the Health and Medical Commission of Hubei Province to destroy samples of the new disease and withhold information.

According to the report, the alterations – conducted on the evening of Dec. 30 – were substantial, and occurred the day before the CCP notified the World Health Organization about the outbreak of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan.

The primary database contact is none other than Shi Zhengli – now known as “batwoman” for her controversial experiments, including the creation of a ‘chimeric’ coronavirus that can infect humans. According to the report, Zhengli was in Shanghai for a conference when she was summoned back to Wuhan to deal with the outbreak which had been detected in two pneumonia patients. While on the overnight train back to Wuhan, the database was altered.

Most of the changes were to delete the keywords “wildlife” or “wild animals.” This is significant, because global health researchers say the virus jumped from bats to humans via another wild animal — the crucial “missing link” in the COVID-19 transmission chain.

Shi used to boast that her bat-virus database was unique because it included data on virus variants in other wild animals.

Was her database censored to keep prying eyes away from references to cross-species transmission of viruses in wild animals?

For instance, the title of the ­database was changed that night from “Wildlife-borne viral pathogen database” to “Bat and rodent-borne viral pathogen database.”

“Wild animal” was replaced with “bat and rodent” or “bat and rat” at least 10 times in the database. Also, a reference to “arthropod vectors” was removed.

Keywords that might facilitate searches potentially connecting the database with the outbreak also were deleted. “Wild animal samples,” “viral pathogen data,” “emerging infectious diseases” and “cross-species infection” were keywords associated with the original version.

On Dec. 30 they were replaced with “bat,” “rodent” and “virus.” –New York Post

“It looks like a rushed, inconsistent effort to disassociate the project from the outbreak by ­rebranding it,” according to the UK intelligence analyst who discovered the alterations. “It’s a strange thing to do within hours of being informed of a novel-coronavirus outbreak.”

“If the WIV had found the missing link between bat virus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 [the coronavirus that causes COVID-19] from an animal vector, it would have been in Shi’s database,” he added.

Read the rest of the report here.