Tag: news

Clearly, President Trump didn’t give conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh advance warning that he would be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the middle of last night’s State of the Union. Because the stunned look on Limbaugh’s face when the cameras panned back to him was something that simply can’t be faked.

“Rush, in recognition of all that you have done for our Nation, the millions of people a day that you speak to and inspire…I am proud to announce tonight that you will be receiving…the Presidential Medal of Freedom.” –@realDonaldTrump

Congratulations Rush! #SOTU #SOTU2020 pic.twitter.com/wIYdghSSHT

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) February 5, 2020

Of course, the minute Melania Trump pinned the medal on the conservative talk radio host, who recently revealed his Stage 4 Lung Cancer diagnosis, we assumed liberals across the country would be incensed into an apoplectic rage, infuriated that a “racist”, “partisan” “divider” like Limbaugh had been awarded one of the highest honors in the US, which has been reserved for such luminaries as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks.

Maureen Dowd was one of the first liberals to be openly triggered, reminding the world of that time Limbaugh called a Georgetown student a “slut”, as if anybody had forgotten about that.

Remember that time Rush Limabugh called a Georgetown student a slut? Yeah, that guy was just festooned with a medal of freedom by the nation’s chief anti-bullying advocate. https://t.co/A37C4dRPD7

— Maureen Dowd (@maureendowd) February 5, 2020

During an appearance in MSNBC (which we imagine will devote a liberal amount of airtime to lambasting Trump’s decision to honor Limbaugh), Newsweek editor Jon Meacham slammed the president for awarding the medal (remember, Bruce Springsteen has one) to a partisan culture warrior: “You have the Medal of Freedom, an emblem of the new frontier, being given to the central architect of a reflexively partisan culture in the midst of a State of the Union that had nothing to do with union.”

.@jmeacham on Rush Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom: “You have the Medal of Freedom, an emblem of the new frontier, being given to the central architect of a reflexively partisan culture in the midst of a State of the Union that had nothing to do with union.” #SOTU pic.twitter.com/kb4yTRh9aM

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 5, 2020

Even Joe Biden slammed Trump’s decision to honor Limbaugh, claiming Trump abused his duty to inform lawmakers about the state of the nation and instead turned the SOTU into a “reality show”. Biden also slammed Limbaugh for “dividing America” (whatever that means) and claimed Trump should have given the Medal to the Tuskegee Airman in the audience last night (who was also honored).

In a statement issued after Pres. Trump delivered his State of the Union address, Joe Biden criticized the president’s decision to award Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. https://t.co/i9NqFsACLE #SOTU pic.twitter.com/xTVbkxmuW5

— ABC News (@ABC) February 5, 2020

Of course, somebody had to play the race card, and last night, it was CNN, which claimed that Limbaugh has a long history of racially insulting African Americans, stoking some controversy on the right.

It’s time for CNN to either provide the list or apologize on air for another piece of FAKE NEWS. I believe @BoSnerdley knows Rush better than anyone at CNN. Will CNN have the integrity to put up or shut up? Waiting and watching. https://t.co/4ldB6sgTg6

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) February 5, 2020

One of Hollywood’s most successful directors of the last 30 years also couldn’t contain his disdain of Limbaugh.

What did Rush Limbaugh ever do to you? https://t.co/Ojf3s3LkQ1

— Kristy Swanson (@KristySwansonXO) February 5, 2020

I formally challenge @CNN and @Acosta to provide a list of statements Rush Limbaugh has made to “disparage African Americans” as @Acosta stated. I have listened to Rush for 30 years. NOT TRUE. It is RACIST for @Acosta to use black people as political fodder.

— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) February 5, 2020

AOC also mocked Limbaugh and his cancer in a post and claimed his reaction – which we thought was extremely genuine – was “disingenuous”. Clearly, we process reality in a very different way than the Congresswoman.

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez viciously *mocks* Rush Limbaugh, who has stage 4 lung cancer, calls his reaction to being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom “disingenuous”

Says that he, while having cancer, was a “joke,” needed an “Opera moment,” and was “nauseating” pic.twitter.com/VrsIj1Cmlj

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 5, 2020

Billy Baldwin (brother of Alec) compared Limbaugh to Jeffrey Epstein.

Giving Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom is one of the most disgusting this I’ve ever heard.

Who’s next… Jeffrey Epstein for his humanitarian work with runaway teens?

— Billy Baldwin (@BillyBaldwin) February 5, 2020

Remember, they’re not as smart as they think they are.

Rush Limbaugh gets a medal of freedom? Give me a break. Does all the Trumpian morons get medals? What an American disgrace. I won’t miss this idiot. pic.twitter.com/GADQk0p1rQ

— Howard H (@Howard230) February 5, 2020

Across twitter, dozens and dozens are scathing comments from enraged liberals called Limbaugh every name and insult uner the sun, with many mocking his cancer and praying for his death. We’re sure they’ll be promptly suspended for violating Twitter’s community policies, right Jack?

Everything is wonderful Wednesday morning, because an unverified report from Chinese state television sparked a massive surge in equity futures as the Communist Party-controlled media intimated that the coronavirus might soon be cured.

Cure or no cure, it’s clear the Chinese are going all-in on propaganda for the sake of preserving ‘social cohesion’. It might sound crazy, but it’s beyond the grasp of algos to process the likelihood that Beijing is simply trying to regain control of the narrative as they struggle to get in front of the inevitable reckoning with the true.

Economists have been trying to gauge the blowback from the outbreak as the virus begins to disrupt global supply chains, but as more factories on the mainland announce extended shutdowns and delays, that’s getting increasingly difficult to do.

Yesterday, we noted how Hyundai Motor Co. and its sister Kia Motors Corp. suspended production lines in South Korea after it was hit with a parts shortage from China as the virus outbreak broadened. 

Now there is a new report that could create huge problems for America’s most valuable company: Apple supplier Foxconn said Wednesday that its facilities in China could take several weeks to resume full production, or at least that’s what one source with insider knowledge told Reuters. 

Foxconn is responsible for assembling Apple iPhones in China.

We noted Monday that Foxconn halted “almost all” of its production lines until Feb. 10.

Any production delays after that could dramatically impact Apple’s iPhone shipments abroad.

Reuters’ source said full resumption for production at the company’s factories might not arrive until late February or early March.

Reports of Foxconn halting factory output in China have yet to be adequately addressed by the company, nor has Apple given details on the potential financial impact. 

Morningstar analyst Don Yew said there should be a limited impact on Foxconn’s supply chain if factories are closed down in Wuhan for an extended period.

The big concern Yew said, is that if the smartphone manufacturing hub in Guangdong is shut down for an extended period, it would then start disrupting Apple iPhone shipments, possibly creating shortages of iPhones.

Might this supply chain shock in China highlight the gulf between Apple shares’ pricing and fundamentals? Looks like we’ll soon find out.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

What we are witnessing in east Africa and across much of the Middle East right now is hard to believe.  360 billion locusts are eating everything in sight, and UN officials are warning that this plague of “Biblical proportions” could get many times worse over the next several months.  Desert locusts can travel up to 93 miles a day, and each adult can consume the equivalent of its own weight in food every 24 hours.  These voracious little creatures are traveling in absolutely colossal swarms that are up to 40 miles wide, and they continue to push into new areas.  If urgent action is not taken on a massive scale, millions upon millions of people could soon have next to nothing to eat.

I have previously written about the horrors that this plague is causing in east Africa, but many people don’t realize that this plague is devastating crops throughout the Middle East as well.

In fact, the government of Pakistan just declared a national emergency because of these locusts…

A locust plague is wreaking havoc in Pakistan as ‘unprecedented and alarming’ swarms ravage crops as shocking video shows millions of the insects sweeping through Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan’s government declared a national emergency at the weekend after an infestation of desert locusts arrived in eastern Pakistan.

In Saudi Arabia, the swarms have been so thick at times that they have completely blocked out the sun, and video footage coming out of that country is getting attention all over the world…

Meanwhile swarms of locusts have been milling the skies in Saudi Arabia, with one video circulating online showing the sky saturated with the insects.

Another shows a tree in Saudi Arabia crawling with desert locusts, which consume their own bodyweight in food each day.

But of course east Africa remains the hardest hit region, and UN officials are warning that a horrible famine could rapidly develop as a result of this plague.  The following comes from Scientific American…

Locust swarms of biblical proportions are threatening crops across a wide swath of Africa and southwest Asia—spurring alarm among top international officials.

A major concern is famine. The United Nations is warning that mass swarms of desert locusts are endangering food supplies in eastern Africa. In response, officials in Rome mobilized an emergency briefing yesterday in a bid to raise money—noting the situation has a high potential to devolve into a full-blown crisis.

It would be incredibly difficult for me to overstate the scale of this crisis.

According to the Daily Mail, the number of locusts has now reached 360 billion…

A locust plague decimating crops and livestock pastureland in east Africa, including swarms 40 miles wide, threatens to trigger a humanitarian crisis, the UN has warned.

The horde of 360 billion insects has laid waste to farmland across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, caused damage in Dijibouti and Eritrea, posing an unprecedented threat to food security.

There are less than 8 billion people living on the entire planet.

So this swarm of locusts outnumbers us by a margin of more than 45 to 1.

And what these locusts want more than anything else is food.  If you doubt the destructive power of these swarms, please consider what the FAO’s senior agriculture officer recently had to say…

“It’s certainly the most dangerous migratory pest in the world, desert locust,” said Keith Cressman, FAO’s senior agriculture officer. “A swarm the size of Rome can eat enough food in one day as everybody in Kenya.”

And some of these swarms are actually bigger than the city of Rome.

I know that may be difficult to believe, but it is true.

In Somalia, officials are calling this crisis “a national emergency” as the locusts consume “huge amounts of crops”…

Somalia’s agriculture ministry on Sunday called the outbreak a national emergency and major threat to the country’s fragile food security, saying the “uncommonly large” locust swarms are consuming huge amounts of crops.

Over in Kenya, things are even worse.  At this point the only viable way to combat these swarms is to spray them, and the UN is desperately asking for financial help to aid in that effort…

Just five planes are currently spraying as Kenyan and other authorities try to stop the locusts from spreading to neighboring Uganda and South Sudan. The United Nations has said $76 million is needed immediately to widen such efforts across East Africa.

A fast response is crucial. Experts warn that if left unchecked, the number of locusts could grow by 500 times by June, when drier weather will help bring the outbreak under control.

UN officials keep claiming that the number of locusts could get 500 times larger over the next few months, but I am having a really hard time believing that this plague could possibly get much worse than it is now.

Unfortunately, conditions are very favorable for breeding, and these locusts are constantly searching for new sources of food.  They will continue to migrate in new directions, and they will eat crops everywhere they go.

According to Scientific American, the breeding cycles over the next couple of months could push the locust swarms as far as India…

Cyclones that struck the driest parts of the Arabian Peninsula last year triggered the current crisis, creating ideal conditions for the desert locust species to multiply. Left to breed in isolated corners of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the locust swarms crossed to the Horn of Africa where they were given further support by another cyclone.

More breeding cycles are expected. The swarms increase in size twentyfold with each successive generation and could reach India by June.

When I first told my wife about this locust plague she was absolutely horrified.

She wondered what all those people would eat if all their crops were gone.  Of course the truth is that they aren’t going to have much of anything to eat.

These locusts are going to create a famine, and the more they eat the worse the famine will become.

We have never seen anything like this before, and this is yet another “unprecedented crisis” that we can add to all the others that we are currently facing.

Our planet is changing, global weather patterns are going absolutely nuts, and worldwide events are really starting to spiral out of control.

And at this point we are just a little over one month into 2020.  If you think that things are bad so far, just wait until you see what is coming over the course of the rest of the year.

Global equity futures soared around 0300 ET on reports that a Chinese university has discovered a new drug to treat coronavirus, reported Reuters.

• TRADERS CITE SPIKE IN STOCKS TO CHINESE TV REPORT THAT RESEARCH TEAM AT ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY HAS FOUND EFFECTIVE DRUG TO TREAT PEOPLE WITH THE NEW CORONAVIRUS  
• U.S. STOCK FUTURES ESc1 RISE SHARPLY, NOW UP 0.6%, ON MEDIA REPORTS OF CORONAVIRUS DRUG BREAKTHROUGHS – TRADERS

Chinese TV on Wednesday said a medical team at Zhejiang University had found a promising drug to treat infected people. 

Reuters notes that the media reports have yet to be verified.

S&P500 E-mini has jumped 70bps to 3,325 level on the report. 

Roundtrip for S&P500 E-mini despite confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths soaring in mainland China. But now it’s all on the hope of a new drug in an unverified report on Chinese TV. 

“Equity markets in Europe have had a sharp turnaround on the back of unconfirmed reports,” said David Madden, market analyst at CMC Markets UK.

“Traders have taken the view that the situation is now more likely to be under control and hopefully the spread of the health crisis will be stemmed and it hopefully leads to a return to normality in China and around the world,” Madden said.

 

 

Well that didn’t take long. Almost a decade. The New York Times earlier this week suddenly ‘discovered’ that US regime change wars lead to failed states which lead to chaos and death which in turn lead to grinding international proxy wars. 

Though Libya has long been ignored by the mainstream after Obama and Hillary’s “liberation” of the country in 2011 — when then Secretary of State Clinton gleefully and fanatically exclaimed “we came, we saw, he died!” in reference to Gaddafi’s brutal field execution at the hands of US-backed jihadists — the Times appears to now be singing a different tune, observing its latest lengthy report on the conflict: 

At least six foreign nations are fueling the mayhem in Libya, supplying weapons, mercenaries or military advisers to rival factions battling for control of the oil-rich country.

But none of these outside actors has ever been held to account, avoiding scrutiny by exploiting either international divisions over Libya or their ties to Western powers like the United States. Sometimes they manage to avoid mention at all.

The report notes that in many cases these external powers with “ties to Western powers like the United States” are responsible for mass murder, such as the July bombing of a detention center in Tripoli which killed 53 people, mostly migrants. 

And predictably those states that are close allies to the Western alliance, such as the UAE, are rarely named in investigative reports. Citing a 13-page UN report published last week which was a result of an investigation into the migrant center attack, the NYT observes: 

What it conspicuously failed to do, though, was identify the perpetrator. “A foreign state,” investigators concluded.

The United Nations’ reluctance to identify or even hint at who was behind the bombing is symptomatic, analysts say, of the weakness of its nine-year-old arms embargo on Libya, one so widely flouted that the body’s envoy to Libya last year said that it risked becoming a “cynical joke.”

And it didn’t stop at the Emirates (a key US gulf ally) – which has been a major military backer of Gen. Khalifa Haftar and his forces – but even the French were indirectly involved, given it’s believed that French-built Mirage warplanes carried out the attack on civilians. 

The UN-backed Tripoli government had described it as “an intentional massacre”. 

“At least six foreign nations are fueling the mayhem in Libya, supplying weapons, mercenaries or military advisers to rival factions battling for control of the oil-rich country.”

Yes, regime change creates power vacuums filled by warring selfish actors.https://t.co/s1c9vGp5Rn

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) February 4, 2020

Other nations routinely escaping accountability or scrutiny are mentioned by the Times as well: “On Mr. Hifter’s side, the United Arab Emirates is joined by Russia, Egypt, Jordan and France. Turkey has sided with the beleaguered Tripoli government.”

It seems that despite a UN-embargo long in effect, recently renewed and supposedly “recommitted to” by world powers at the January 19 Berlin peace conference on Libya, weaponry and foreign fighters continue pouring into war-torn Libya at rapid pace. The NYT report notes further: 

United Nations inspectors publish reports every year documenting the profusion of weapons that foreign states have injected into the Libyan battlefield: warplanes, armed drones, laser-guided artillery, missile defense systems and a huge volume of small arms.

Yet none face any real risk of punishment, or even censure. Since 2011, the inspectors have submitted dossiers with details of embargo violations by numerous countries, including the Emirates, to a Security Council sanctions committee, two officials said.

Yet of course, in a deeper irony, the Times still fails to admit the original ‘meddler’ which unleashed this current hell on Libya in the first place as it laments that in 2011 the oil-rich country was “plunged into civil war after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi”.

The previously stable country was of a sudden “Plunged into civil war”… We wonder how that happened? 

Authored by Marshall Auerback via Counterpunhc.org,

Can runaway booms descend into busts absent monetary tightening by the world’s central banks? I pose this question in the wake of an extraordinary exchange on January 22 at Davos between Bloomberg editor-at-large Tom Keene and Bob Prince, co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, in which the latter posited the notion that “we’ve probably seen the end of the boom-bust cycle.”

It is striking that one of today’s titans of finance has given us what appears to be another version of “this time it’s different,” which the famous investor Sir John Templeton once described as “the four most expensive words in investing.” My own basic take has been that the U.S. economy over the past three years has been weaker than the underlying quantitative data suggests and that there is ample historical precedent to suggest that credit cycles can end, even in the context of a low interest rate environment, notably via a deterioration in the quality of credit itself, as the great economist Hyman Minsky once explained in his financial instability hypothesis.

The truth is that for decades, the U.S.—indeed the entire global economy—has been characterized by an economically unsustainable model in which larger and larger portions of GDP gains have been going to a smaller number of people at the top (who also have a higher propensity to save than people with lower incomes, which means the “trickle-down” effect is minimal to nonexistent). Wage gains also appear to be leveling off, which could have ominous implications for sustainable future growth. Yet many investors like Prince seem to accept today’s buoyant asset bubbles as a given in the absence of a concerted effort by the central banks to “take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going” (in the famous words of former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin), via higher interest rates.

In the words of Bob Prince (quoted in Doug Noland’s Credit Bubble Bulletin):

Bob Prince…: “2018 I think was a lesson learned. The tightening of central banks all around the world wasn’t intended to cause a downturn—wasn’t intended to cause what it did. But I think lessons were learned from that. And I think it was really a marker that we’ve probably seen the end of the boom-bust cycle.”

Bloomberg’s Tom Keene: “Is it the end of the hedge fund business in modeling portfolios off the guesstimates of what central banks will do?”

Prince: “That won’t play much of a role nearly as it has. You remember the ’80s when we sat and waited for the money supply numbers. We’ve come a long way since then… Now we talk 25 plus [BPS Fed rate increase], 25 minus. We’re not even going to get 25 plus or minus and we got negative yields. That idea of the boom-bust cycle—and that history that we’ve been in for decades—is really driven by shifts in credit and monetary policy. But you’re in a situation now where the Fed is in a box. They can’t tighten, and they can’t ease—nor can other central banks, particularly the reserve currencies. And so where do you go from here? It’s not going to look like it has.”

Prince goes on to acknowledge that “cycles in growth are caused by the boom and bust in credit: Credit expansion, credit contraction,” but makes the assumption that “those expansions and contractions of credit are largely driven by changes in monetary policy.”

That may have been the case for much of the post-World War II period, but if we look back further, there is evidence to suggest that Prince’s hypothesis is another variant of the dangerous “this time it’s different” truism.

Why have so many people gotten this wrong?

The misconception probably stems from a famous statement made in 1997 by the MIT economist Rudi Dornbusch:

“None of the U.S. expansions of the past 40 years died in bed of old age; every one was murdered by the Federal Reserve,” and this was more or less true of the U.S. economy from 1946 until the 2000s.

But then economic dynamics changed. Yes, the Federal Reserve raised the Fed funds rate by 400 basis points in the mid-2000s, but it reversed almost all of that move and began opening the floodgates of bailout financing by early May 2008. Nevertheless, the U.S. and global economy fell off a cliff in the second half of that year as global financial fragility erupted into a full-blown global systemic crisis to a degree unseen since the 1930s.

Why was it different that time? The reason is that there had emerged myriad asset bubbles and a related unprecedented rise in private indebtedness in the U.S. and other economies. These supports to cyclical demand expansion were unstable and unsustainable. In other words, these were conditions very similar to those that prevail today.

Hyman Minsky and Irving Fisher described how once the debt “disease” goes metastatic there will come a “Minsky moment” when euphoria gives way to concern and then to panic liquidation and credit revulsion. When that dynamic is in full flower, the Fed is powerless, no matter how much they want to bring the punchbowl back.

The U.S. and much of the global economy still have quasi-bubbleized assets and very high levels of private (and quasi-private) indebtedness. Bob Prince and many of his investment cohorts appear to remain oblivious to the threat of a Minsky/Fisher debt deflation dynamic, which the Fed and the central banking fraternity can do little to stop, if one is to judge from today’s current buoyant stock markets.

There is yet another way in which global economic growth can slow or even falter this time around, which I have discussed before (in the context of China’s economy): This thesis dates from “a very old idea from business cycle theory prior to the Second World War that private sector over-investment can become so unsustainably high that even without a fiscal/monetary shock, there could be a fall in autonomous investment. Once that begins,” a weakening edifice of highly suspect and marginal lending activity “can lead to a cumulative economic contraction even if interest rates plummet and monetary conditions ease.”

This old idea from the history of economics has largely been forgotten due to changes in the fads and fashions in academic economics. But there are grounds for thinking it is an idea whose time has come once again.

Globally, we have a glut of consumer goods, much of it emanating from China, but given increasingly weakening demand from an economy that is growing more and more skewed to the top 1 percent, we have fewer consumers able to buy it. Moreover, in China itself, modest fiscal stimulus measures undertaken at the end of last year could well be overridden by the onset of the coronavirus, which risks undermining the impact of these recent upticks in infrastructure investment, along with the potential benefits accrued from the cessation of the trade war with the U.S. government.

It follows that the world has a condition of over-investment that is unsustainable. This means there will be less investment to produce additional goods. Much like a rickety building on shaky foundations, therefore, a decline in global autonomous investment threatens to plunge us into a global economic slowdown, independent of actions by the global or national monetary authorities.

Are there any signs of this? Over the past year, global growth “recorded its weakest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago,” according to the International Monetary Fund. This, despite buoyant risk asset markets, credit and money growth in key economies well in excess of nominal GDP, super-easy monetary policy everywhere, and an end of the fiscal restriction of recent years. Therefore, we cannot attribute this surprising softening to a “murderous Fed” (to paraphrase Dornbusch) or its cohorts in the global central banking fraternity. It is, however, possible to posit that we may be seeing a cresting of excessive global fixed investment, which eventually could cause a global recession. There is no question that our central banks and governments will try to do “whatever it takes” to postpone such a decline.

The point is that, relative to the post-war business cycle patterns in most people’s minds, the end of this global expansion does not need a “murderous Fed.” Excessive risk asset valuations and high indebtedness, even in a world of low prevailing interest rates and unprecedented central bank intervention, can nonetheless lead to negative financial and economic dynamics. And given excessive global capital spending in a world where the warranted rate of growth has now downshifted, an autonomous decline in excessive investment can do the same. Add to this the increasing risks brought about by the spread of the coronavirus, and you’ve got the ingredients for an incipient global economic calamity.

*  *  *

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

How common are real lefties across different countries?

Many studies have been conducted gauging the prevalence of left-handed people around the world and website leftyfretz.com has collected the results and compiled a country-wide comparison. Statista’s Niall McCarthy gathered the data presented in this infographic, most of which comes from separate studies from different years. For example, the European countries listed are from a 2009 study by I.C. McManus which found that the Netherlands has one of the world’s highest prevalences of left-handedness at 13.23 percent.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The United States isn’t far behind with a rate of 13.1 percent while neighboring Canada has 12.8 percent.

Elsewhere, rates of left-handedness are far lower and China is a good example. According to leftyfretz.com, only 3.5 percent of people in China predominantly use their left hand and that is actually higher than the rate recorded in many historical studies. It is thought that negative Chinese attitudes towards left-handedness are one of the primary reasons people attempt to mainly use their right hand with lefties often bullied, harassed and labelled abnormal.