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BofA: Fed Will Use Digital Dollars To Unleash Inflation, Universal Basic Income And Debt Forgiveness

BofA: Fed Will Use Digital Dollars To Unleash Inflation, Universal Basic Income And Debt Forgiveness

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 15:00

When we recently described the upcoming “Unprecedented monetary overhaul” which will come in the form of the Fed sending out digital dollars directly to “each American”, we explained that “absent a massive burst of inflation in the coming years which inflates away the hundreds of trillions in federal debt, the debt tsunami that is coming would mean the end to the American way of life as we know it. And to do that, the Fed is now finalizing the last steps of a process that revolutionizes the entire fiat monetary system, launching digital dollars which effectively remove commercial banks as financial intermediaries, as they will allow the Fed itself to make direct deposits into Americans’ “digital wallets”, in the process enabling truly universal basic income, while also making Congress and the entire Legislative branch redundant, as a handful of technocrats quietly take over the United States.”

In short, we laid out the Fed’s true reasoning behind the coming Digital Dollars not as how Fed Chair Powell recently described them, which as a reminder was as follows:

  • Faster and cheaper transactions

  • Addressing a decline in the use of physical currency

  • Modernizing the payments infrastructure

  • Reaching consumers who have been traditionally underserved by financial institutions

… but as a short circuit to a clearly broken monetary transmission mechanism, one which seeks to facilitate universal basic income and unlimited helicopter money, by completely overhauling how money reaches Americans.

Of course, it would be heresy to admit that the Fed’s true motive is to effectively spark runaway inflation as that would provoke howls of outrage from ordinary Americans if they only learned that the $1000 or so in “free money” they would receive from the Fed was not a gift, but a curse which would make their cost of living unbearable in very short notice. And yet none other than DoubleLine recently penned a scathing op-ed admitting just that, warning that “The Pandora’s Box Of Fed’s Digital Currency Will Ignite An Inflationary Conflagration.“

Today, none other than BofA chief investment strategist also takes the plunge into “tinfoil land”, which of course is where the truth can be found, and admits the truth about digital currencies.

Hartnett begins by laying out a short history of revolutionary monetary policies, writing that in the past 13 years central banks have cut interest rates 972 times, bought $19tn of financial assets via QE, introduced NIRP, ZIRP, YCC, TLTROs, resulting in a near-record $16.8tn of negatively-yielding global bonds.

Hartnett lays out the 15 key “revolutionary” events in monetary policy since the Bear Stearns collapse in the table below:

That’s the past, what about the future?

Here Hartnett echoes everything we have said recently on the matter, and there’s quite a bit of it…

… and writes that “the next frontier for central bank revolution is use of digital currencies as conduit for policies such as UBI (universal basic income), MMT (Modern Monetary Theory), student debt forgiveness, to induce sustained rise in inflation expectations.”

And since his job is to summarize trends into an actionable recommendation, he has a simple one: “own inflation assets.“

That, or just bet on continued dollar debasement as can be seen in the following:

  • US 5s30s yield curve now steepest (>125bps) since Nov’16,
  • Chinese renminbi at 2-year highs, Bitcoin >$13000,
  • gold best performing asset class 1st  time since 2010

Hartnett’s conclusion:

“big picture of bigger government, smaller world, excess debt in 2020s will be financed via currency debasement, particularly reserve currency of US dollar; own volatility.”

Too simple? Here are the parting thoughts from DoubleLine credit portolfio manager Bill Campbell, which we presented in their entirety 3 weeks ago:

With QE, central banks have printed excess reserves that have benefited  only  the  very  wealthy  and  large  institutions.  The innovation of a digital currency system as described by Mastercard could deliver stimulus directly to consumers. Such a mechanism could open veritable floodgates of liquidity into the consumer economy and accelerate the rate of inflation. While central banks have been trying without success to increase inflation for the past decade, the temptation to put CBDCs into effect might be very strong among policymakers. However, CBDCs would not only inject liquidity into the economy but also could accelerate the velocity of money. That one-two punch could bring about far more inflation than central bankers bargain for.

When first implementing QE, central banks promised that this measure would be temporary and would be unwound after the crisis ended, a pledge that I have doubted for a while.8  Central  banks as we know have perpetuated QE as part of their updated toolbox of monetary policies. The first use of digital currencies in monetary policy might start small as policymakers, out of caution, seek to calibrate this experiment in quasi-fiscal stimulus. However, such initial restraint could give way to growing complacency and greater use of the tool – just as we saw with QE. The temptations of CBDCs are not limited to excesses in monetary policy.  CBDCs  also  appear  to  be  an  effective  mechanism  for bypassing the taxation, debt issuance and spending prerogatives of government to implement a quasi-fiscal policy. Imagine, for example,  the  ease  of  enacting  Modern  Monetary  Theory  via CBDCs. With CBDCs, the central banks would possess the necessary plumbing to directly deliver a digital currency to individuals’ bank accounts, ready to be spent via debit cards.

Let me quote again from Charles I. Plosser’s warning in 2012: “Once a central bank ventures into fiscal policy, it is likely to find itself under increasing pressure from the private sector, financial markets, or the government to use its balance sheet to substitute for other fiscal decisions.” With a flick of the digital switch, CBDCs can enable policymakers to meet, or cave in to, those demands – at the risk of igniting an inflation conflagration, abandoning what little still survives of sovereign fiscal discipline and who knows what else. I hope the leaders of the world’s central banks will approach this new financial technology with extreme caution, guarding against its overuse or outright abuse. It’s hard to be optimistic. Soon our monetary Pandoras will possess their own box full of new powers, perhaps too enticing to resist.

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

On Obamacare, Biden Repeats Obama’s 2013 Lie of the Year

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In December 2013, Politifact, which bills itself as a nonpartisan political fact-checking operation, awarded its lowest honor to President Barack Obama, for “Lie of the Year.” On more than 30 occasions, Obama had promised that under the Affordable Care Act, the health law often referred to as Obamacare, no one would lose their health care plan involuntarily. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Obama said. 

This was simply not true. Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges, the government-run online portals for purchasing individual market health insurance, launched in October 2013. In the weeks and months that followed, millions of people received notices that their existing insurance plans would be canceled as a direct result of the law. The exact number of cancellations is difficult to pin down, but Politifact, in making its award, cited a figure of around 4 million. Other contemporaneous estimates suggested the number could be higher. 

“Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous,” Politifact noted years later in a review of “Lie of the Year” award winners. “Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting the claim had been misunderstood all along.”

Obama had made the promise in order to ease fears about coverage loss and health care disruption that had helped to doom a health policy overhaul under President Bill Clinton nearly two decades earlier. And he had done so knowing it wasn’t true. As the Wall Street Journal reported in November 2013, White House aides questioned the claim in internal discussions. But in the end, they didn’t want to complicate what was already a difficult political messaging operation. As the Journal noted at the time: Administration officials worried “that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.” 

Obama lied. And he did so for political reasons—to sell the public on major legislation on a promise he knew wasn’t true. 

At last night’s final presidential debate, Joe Biden, who is both the current Democratic presidential nominee and Obama’s former vice president, repeated that lie. “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare,” he said. “They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.”

Biden made this statement as a rejoinder to President Donald Trump’s accusation that Biden’s health care plan would eliminate private insurance. As Biden noted, that is not true: Biden’s proposal would set up a government-run health insurance plan known as a public option that would be sold along with private health insurance options. It might degrade private insurance options, and would likely mean that fewer people are covered via private insurance, especially as time goes on. But unlike the Medicare for All plan proposed by Biden’s one-time rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), which would outlaw virtually all private coverage in the space of just four years, Biden’s plan would not end private coverage. 

Trump’s attack on Biden’s health care plan was false, as it has been before. But Biden’s claim about Obamacare was false as well. And given the notoriety of that particular false promise—Politifact’s award was announced on CNN and covered in The Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and other major outlets, and Obama even apologized to people whose plans were canceled—Biden should have known better. 

In many ways, the health care portion of this debate resembled the health care portion of the prior debate: Trump, asked about his repeated and unfulfilled promises to put forth a replacement plan for Obamacare, dodged the question, saying that he had repealed the health law’s individual mandate without specifying what he would do instead. Biden laid out his own plan to spend $750 billion expanding Obamacare’s subsidies and building a new government-run health insurance plan.

But there was one notable difference: This time, Biden said that, under his plan, “Obamacare” would become “Bidencare.” Biden didn’t just repeat Obama’s lie. He put his name on it. 

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FDA Finally Allows AstraZeneca To Restart US COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

FDA Finally Allows AstraZeneca To Restart US COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 14:43

More than a month after US authorities halted trials for the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, the FDA has reportedly signed off on allowing AstraZeneca to move forward, despite the recent death of a patient in one of its Brazilian trials (though it appears now that the subject received a placebo, not the vaccine candidate itself).

Per WSJ, the FDA has finally finished its investigation into an incident in September where two subjects in a UK trial of the vaccine appeared to develop symptoms of a rare neurological disorder. Any connection to the vaccine has been conclusively ruled out, as the regulator corroborated findings from British regulators. The FDA has spent weeks investigating whether the symptoms of transverse myelitis, which has been linked in the past to adenirus-vector vaccines similar to the COVID-19 vaccine being tested by AZN, had any connection to the trial.

Trials were halted in the US for weeks, but have continued pretty much everywhere else, including the UK and Brazil.

Shares of the drugmaker rallied on the news.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/37zmdiX Tyler Durden

Suspense Simmers, as Does the Class Conflict, in HBO’s The Undoing

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The Undoing. HBO. Sunday, October 25, 9 p.m.

Much has been made of all the big-name TV producers like Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes who’ve left broadcast and basic cable networks for greener pastures among the streaming services like Netflix.

But the most amazing transformation of all has been that of David E. Kelley. Since freeing himself of network obsessions with Nielsen points, demos, and censors (yeah, they still exist, although your parents would probably find that hard to believe), he’s turned out a string of intelligent and exciting suspense series unequaled by any another producer I can think of in the history of the medium. Mr. Mercedes (AT&T’s now defunct Audience Network), Big Little Lies (HBO) and now The Undoing (debuting on HBO this weekend) have all been exquisitely written and acted, melding doubt, tension, wit and occasional outright terror into simmering pots of dread.

Kelley’s latest, The Undoing (based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel You Should Have Known), is a murder story so full of plot twists and turns, so many characters shedding snakish skins, that it’s nearly impossible to write about with scattering spoilers around like confetti. Yet in no way does it turn on plot gimmickry. It’s about trust and relationships, authenticity and appearances, verisimilitude and veneers.

It starts off benignly enough. At one point, New York City power couple Grace and Jonathan Fraser (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) are considering how much upheaval would result from leaving their posh Upper East Side apartment for the ‘burbs.

“We don’t have a lot of close friends,” points out Grace, somewhat wistfully.  Replies Jonathan: “It’s only because we hate everyone.” It’s a joke that’s not exactly a joke. Psychotherapist Grace’s crowd includes avocational artists and lawyers, but their real professional interests are gossip, bitchery and, in at least one case, exhibitionist pride in what admittedly are an amazing pair of breasts. Pediatric oncologist Jonathan has plenty of young patients who worship him like a god, but his only adult male companion is purely circumstantial—a cold-as-marble father-in-law (Donald Sutherland) who from the moment they met has despised him as a poseur.

But for those few mostly invisible cracks, Grace and Jonathan’s marriage seems a model of transcendent gentility—until the brutal murder of a parent at their teenage son’s elite prep school flings a shower of legal and emotional shrapnel in all directions, shattering images and exposing secrets and stresses. Not the least of them is a nascent class resentment by the plebian masses who, though largely unseen, brush up against Grace and Jonathan’s clubby little circle every day. When a cop intimates, without even a shred of evidence, that Grace is somehow lying about her entirely tangential relationship with the murder victim, the shock on her face moves him to bare populist fangs. “It’s what rich, entitled people do when threatened,” the cop sneers. “They conceal the truth … and they think they can get away with it because they’re rich.”

The cosseted delusions of the patrician upper-class is a theme to which Kelley returns again and again, in big ways and small. One starkly vicious little photographic vignette takes place at a fundraising auction at the prep school the Frasers’ son attends. As the parents prattle about their pride in the school’s diversity, the camera pulls back in a mini-version of the Atlanta crane shot in Gone with the Wind to reveal a crowd that’s as white as a Klan rally in backwoods Mississippi, though considerably more Guccified. The photography in The Undoing, in the hands of British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire), consistently explores the geometries of upscale Manhattan and ravaged Harlem to telling effect.

As remarkable as the photography are its two principal subjects, Grant and and Kidman. Whether it’s the product of his makeup crew or the 60 years since his birth,  the boyish handsomeness that marked his film performances well into middle age is nowhere on display in The Undoing. It seems to have curdled on his face—which is also what happens to his famous charm as the plot batters away.

Yet whatever deal Nicole Kidman has struck with the underworld is, happily, holding fine; she is even more gorgeous at 53 than in her earliest performances three decades ago. Her beauty is a perfect match for her character, outwardly perfect, inwardly clueless, a kind of post-feminist version of the role she played in the remake of The Stepford Wives, in which she famously proclaimed,  “This place does something to people—all of the women are always busy and perfect and smiling, and all of the men are always happy.” Until they’re not.

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Rep. Gosar Calls To Defund NPR As Backlash Grows Over Biden Laptop Coverup

Rep. Gosar Calls To Defund NPR As Backlash Grows Over Biden Laptop Coverup

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 14:40

Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar has called for defunding National Public Radio after the outlet officially refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal (while happily peddling anti-Trump rumors for years) – calling it a ‘waste of time.‘

“It’s time to defund @NPR. This is appalling. #DefundNPR,” Gosar tweeted on Thursday.

Gosar joins a growing chorus of conservative voices who are furious over the outlet’s decision to censor perhaps the biggest political bombshell in decades.

As Jack Phillips of the Epoch Times notes:

NPR public editor Kelly McBride  published an inquiry on its website Thursday from a listener who did not understand why the outlet was ignoring the story.

“Someone please explain why NPR has apparently not reported on the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden story in the last week or so that Joe did know about Hunter’s business connections in Europe that Joe had previously denied having knowledge?” listener Carolyn Abbott asked.

McBride responded in saying there are “many, many red flags” in an investigation carried out by the New York Post, which last week published reports that were sourced from the alleged laptop hard drive. NPR then went on to repeat claims that Russia is attempting to interfere in the election.

“Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered,” McBride said, adding: “But the biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much.”

Her response included a statement from NPR managing editor Terence Samuel.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way,” Samuel said.

The claims that the reports are part of a Russian disinformation plot were dismissed by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.

The FBI, meanwhile, did not dispute Ratcliffe’s statements earlier this week.

FBI Assistant Director Jill C. Tyson sent a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in response to Johnson’s request for more information about the emails, reports around which have alleged that Hunter Biden tried to introduce a Ukrainian businessman to his father when he served as vice president in the Obama administration. The law enforcement agency said it has “nothing to add at this time” to Ratcliffe’s statement.

A number of conservatives and allies of President Donald Trump criticized NPR following its decision to publish the inquiry.

“Wow. Foreign corruption from a major party is not considered news for taxpayer-funded #fakenews NPR,” wrote the America First PAC on Twitter in response.

It came as Twitter and Facebook also announced they would either block or limit the reach of the NY Post’s reports. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account and a Trump campaign account were also blocked. The Senate Judiciary Committee, as a result, voted to issue subpoenas on Thursday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear before the committee after raising concerns about censorship and election interference.

Biden’s campaign has denied that he ever met with a Ukrainian gas company official, which was allegedly revealed in a trove of emails that purportedly were found on a laptop hard drive belonging to his son, Hunter, who sat on the company’s board while his father was the vice president. The NY Post also obtained a hard drive containing the emails from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Other allegations have surfaced in recent reports over the days, including from a former Hunter Biden associate who confirmed the legitimacy of an email.

“The Attorney General of Delaware’s office indicated that the FBI has ‘ongoing investigations regarding the veracity of this entire story.’ And it would be unsurprising for an investigation of a disinformation action involving Rudy Giuliani and those assisting him to involve questions about money laundering, especially since there are other documented inquiries into his dealings,” the campaign said.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3mi7InH Tyler Durden

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Counties Can’t Reject Mail-In Ballots When Signatures Don’t Match

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Counties Can’t Reject Mail-In Ballots When Signatures Don’t Match

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 14:25

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Friday that mail-in ballots cannot be rejected when their signatures don’t match voters’ signatures on file.

“[C]ounty boards of elections are prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparison conducted by county election officials or employees, or as the result of third-party challenges based on signature analysis and comparisons,” wrote Justice Debra Todd (D) in the decision.

While the decision was unanimous, there are notably five Democrats and two Republicans on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Mismatched signatures has been the leading cause of rejected mail-in ballots across the country, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh had sued the state over counties’ use of signature matching, saying it created an unfair patchwork of policies.”

That suit was dropped after the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, issued statewide guidance to counties that ballots should be counted if they have signatures, without any analysis or comparison.

The Trump campaign challenged that in federal court and lost. –Philadelphia Inquirer

So, it appears that anyone can send a ballot for anyone in Pennsylvania.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34lxgKz Tyler Durden

On Obamacare, Biden Repeats Obama’s 2013 Lie of the Year

biden-politif-spnphotosten070429

In December 2013, Politifact, which bills itself as a nonpartisan political fact-checking operation, awarded its lowest honor to President Barack Obama, for “Lie of the Year.” On more than 30 occasions, Obama had promised that under the Affordable Care Act, the health law often referred to as Obamacare, no one would lose their health care plan involuntarily. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Obama said. 

This was simply not true. Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges, the government-run online portals for purchasing individual market health insurance, launched in October 2013. In the weeks and months that followed, millions of people received notices that their existing insurance plans would be canceled as a direct result of the law. The exact number of cancellations is difficult to pin down, but Politifact, in making its award, cited a figure of around 4 million. Other contemporaneous estimates suggested the number could be higher. 

“Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous,” Politifact noted years later in a review of “Lie of the Year” award winners. “Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting the claim had been misunderstood all along.”

Obama had made the promise in order to ease fears about coverage loss and health care disruption that had helped to doom a health policy overhaul under President Bill Clinton nearly two decades earlier. And he had done so knowing it wasn’t true. As the Wall Street Journal reported in November 2013, White House aides questioned the claim in internal discussions. But in the end, they didn’t want to complicate what was already a difficult political messaging operation. As the Journal noted at the time: Administration officials worried “that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.” 

Obama lied. And he did so for political reasons—to sell the public on major legislation on a promise he knew wasn’t true. 

At last night’s final presidential debate, Joe Biden, who is both the current Democratic presidential nominee and Obama’s former vice president, repeated that lie. “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare,” he said. “They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.”

Biden made this statement as a rejoinder to President Donald Trump’s accusation that Biden’s health care plan would eliminate private insurance. As Biden noted, that is not true: Biden’s proposal would set up a government-run health insurance plan known as a public option that would be sold along with private health insurance options. It might degrade private insurance options, and would likely mean that fewer people are covered via private insurance, especially as time goes on. But unlike the Medicare for All plan proposed by Biden’s one-time rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), which would outlaw virtually all private coverage in the space of just four years, Biden’s plan would not end private coverage. 

Trump’s attack on Biden’s health care plan was false, as it has been before. But Biden’s claim about Obamacare was false as well. And given the notoriety of that particular false promise—Politifact’s award was announced on CNN and covered in The Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and other major outlets, and Obama even apologized to people whose plans were canceled—Biden should have known better. 

In many ways, the health care portion of this debate resembled the health care portion of the prior debate: Trump, asked about his repeated and unfulfilled promises to put forth a replacement plan for Obamacare, dodged the question, saying that he had repealed the health law’s individual mandate without specifying what he would do instead. Biden laid out his own plan to spend $750 billion expanding Obamacare’s subsidies and building a new government-run health insurance plan.

But there was one notable difference: This time, Biden said that, under his plan, “Obamacare” would become “Bidencare.” Biden didn’t just repeat Obama’s lie. He put his name on it. 

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Tesla Says China Forcing Unnecessary Recall Over Model S/X Suspensions, Recalls Nearly 30,000 Cars Anyway

Tesla Says China Forcing Unnecessary Recall Over Model S/X Suspensions, Recalls Nearly 30,000 Cars Anyway

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 14:10

Potential suspension issues with Tesla’s Model S aren’t new news. Many issues regarding Tesla suspensions were discussed on Twitter and Reddit under the guise of Tesla vehicles having “whompy wheels” for the last few years.  

In fact, suspension issues are one of the oldest ongoing critiques involving Tesla’s manufacturing (before Musk shattered Cybertruck windows live on stage, before Model 3s had dirt collect in their bumper and before Model Ys saw their roofs fly off). Legacy complaints involving suspension date back years, to Tesla’s original run of Model S vehicles.

And now, what the NHTSA was too blind to see, the Chinese have clearly noticed. That’s why Tesla appears to have been forced into a recall of 30,000 Model S and Model X vehicles made for the Chinese market over suspension issues. 

Another major issue is whether the recall could prompt a similar recall – that would likely affect over 200,000 vehicles – in the U.S. 

The announcement come on Friday by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation. The government says it affected 29,193 vehicles, according to EV blog electrek:

Part of the imported Model S and Model X vehicles with a production date between September 17, 2013 and August 16, 2017 will be recalled, a total of 29,193 vehicles.

The issue surrounds “a weakness in the Model S and Model X suspension that can lead to a cracked linkage after an impact.”

We used the term “forced” into the recall because it doesn’t appear as though Tesla is “on board” with it. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Tesla has found “no defect with its Model S/Model X suspension and that China is basically forcing an unnecessary recall”. 

From a collection of suspension issues on InsideEVs

Despite the recall apparently being over nothing, “the Company has decided not to dispute a recall for the China market only,” the company’s managing counsel wrote to the NHTSA in a letter from early September. The same letter indicates that the NHTSA has known about the Chinese recall since the beginning of September – though we’re not sure why anybody would expect the NHTSA, who has sat idly by and watched one fatal wreck after another involving Teslas, to do anything about it.

In item 8 of the full letter, which you can read here, Tesla says: “Tesla has not determined that a defect exists in either the Front Suspension Aft Link or the Rear Suspension Upper Link and believes the root cause of the issue is driver abuse, including that driver usage and expectation for damageability is uniquely severe in the China market. If the customer inputs an abuse load (e.g., curb impact, severe pothole strike, etc.), then the parts may be damaged, leading either to immediate failure or delayed failure from the compounding effects of the initial abuse and subsequent load input.”

Recall, as far back as 2016, we were reporting about an investigation into the suspension of Tesla vehicles. Back then the issue wasn’t just the suspension themselves, but a potential coverup of the issue by Tesla:

As the website notes, “where Tesla crosses the line here is not the “crime” itself, but the coverup. If Tesla used a TSB rather than a recall to fix a safety problem, if it has an institutional bias against ordering recalls and if it uses NDAs as a matter of course to prevent owners from reporting defects, this could become the biggest auto safety scandal since the GM ignition switch affair. That’s a lot of “ifs,” but thus far the evidence indicates that these are very real possibilities. Watch this space for further developments in this troubling story.”

This video described some of the early suspension issues well:

The likely issue as to why Tesla doesn’t want to give ground to the Chinese recall is that it could easily prompt what would be an ugly looking U.S. recall. More than 200,000 Model S/X vehicles have been sold worldwide, mostly in the U.S, with some other sales taking place in Europe. 

And one can’t help but think: if the Chinese government is keen enough to spot this issue and act on it, unlike the NHTSA, how long will they be able to live with issues involving the Model 3, Model Y or (perhaps most importantly) Autopilot?

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

Joe Biden Envisions a Kinder, Gentler Drug War. We Should Demand Its End.

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Thursday night’s final presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was notable in that neither man rushed to the defense of America’s tendency to throw people in jail to serve long sentences for crimes, even if both men have records of wanting to do so.

Biden reiterated his position on the drug war, that rather than arresting and imprisoning people for drug use, these people should be helped via drug courts and mandatory drug treatment. (Biden also claimed that Republicans don’t support drug courts, which isn’t true: President George W. Bush’s National Drug Control Strategy touted the local use of drug courts.)

Biden probably thinks he’s advocating for something good, as do the Democrats who included this position in the party’s 2020 platform, which says that nobody should be incarcerated “solely because they use drugs” and instead calls for diversionary treatment and drug courts.

The problem is that this position is simply perpetuating the drug war, but in a way that seems kindly and more accommodating. It operates on the incorrect assumption that every single person who uses illegal drugs is an addict who needs intervention in order to stop. Biden’s view, to be fair, could be influenced by his experiences with his son Hunter’s struggles with addiction.

But the drug court system is overly reliant on the threat of incarceration as part of its very operating system. Drug courts often require that anybody who wants the “mercy” of the court plead guilty, give up the rights, and confess to an addiction—one they may not have—in order to avoid jail.

Look at this description from 2007 of a court-supervised drug diversion program in Harris County, Texas, called Success Through Addiction Recovery (STAR), praised by the Bush administration. The report brags about the fact that some people find participating in the drug court to be harsher than incarceration and turn it down:

A highly structured, 3-phase treatment program, STAR involves 12-step programs or approved alternatives, group and individual treatment and counseling programs, frequent random drug testing, and regular interaction with the judges. Although designed to last at least 12 months, there is no “automatic” graduation from STAR. To graduate and successfully reenter society, participants must take certain positive steps to become drug and crime free, including demonstrating continued sobriety through drug testing and getting an education or obtaining gainful employment. Even after graduation from the program, STAR clients must participate in aftercare for a minimum of 12 months. Graduates must continue to report to a case manager who monitors their sobriety, and successful discharge is determined on a case-by-case basis.

The report says that “the folks of STAR must be doing something right.” But subsequent research of drug court operations has shown that, in reality, drug courts in some cities have led to increased police crackdowns on drug users.

A report from 2018 from the nonprofit Social Science Research Council examined drug court systems in the United States and Latin America and found that in many cities, the existence of drug courts actually drove up arrests for simple drug possession.

And because these drug courts are so demanding, as the STAR program bragged, people sometimes fail to comply. When they do, they end up in jail, the very same place these programs are supposed to be diverting from. The 2018 report found that, in New York City, people who failed drug court ended up with jail sentences higher than those who just pleaded guilty and didn’t bother with diversion at all.

When it comes down to it, forcing everybody found to be using drugs into drug courts and treatment is putting a gloss of false kindness and caring on a harsh government system of mandates that punishes people not for harming others or their property but for what they do with their own bodies. Mandatory drug treatment means that these policies Biden supports must be backed up with additional penalties for those who aren’t cooperative.

People who are addicted and do need assistance genuinely should be able to seek out help, and government social services could be useful there. Drug courts might be a useful tool for approaching those whose drug addictions have led them to commit other crimes as well.

But a system where the drug use itself still brings with it a threat of punishment is not a system that is ending the drug war. It is admirable of Biden not to abandon Hunter to addiction and to continue to love him and try to help him as needed. But he’s also attempting to force policies on everybody that may not be as bad as the mass incarceration of the 1980s and ’90s, but nevertheless still perpetuate the failed war on drugs.

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Double-Dip Recession Imminent (Or Did The First One Ever End?)

Double-Dip Recession Imminent (Or Did The First One Ever End?)

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/23/2020 – 13:55

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

The Covid recession isn’t even over yet, but there is already talk of a double dip coming.

Double-Dip Ahead?

Sharp Contraction in France

Eastern Europe Covid Deaths

Furloughed Job Disguise

No Trade Deal

Yes, Deaths are a Problem

Due to another Covid surge in Europe and the US, the odds of a double-dip recession (or a delay in the current one ending) have increased.

Europe is also at risk from a collapse in a trade deal between the UK and EU following Brexit.

First Things First

Before you can have a double-dip recession, the current one has to end first.

And that largely depends on how one measures it.

Europe vs the US

European countries typically use a simple rule. Two consecutive quarters of contraction marks a recession.

In the US, the NBER can declare a recession even before there is one quarter of contraction. It did so in February of this year.

I have seen claims the US recession is over already. But the recovery is so uneven I doubt the NBER (the official arbiter of recessions in the US), would see it that way. But perhaps they do.

In Europe, countries  may very well declare a recession is over as soon as there is a single quarter of growth.

Whether or not there is a double-dip may be in the eyes of the beholder. 

Flash PMI Signals Renewed Economic Downturn

In Europe, Flash PMI signals renewed economic downturn at start of fourth quarter. 

Business activity fell back into decline across the eurozone in October as accelerating growth of manufacturing output was overwhelmed by a steepening deterioration in the service sector amid rising COVID-19 worries.

Germany was the only bright spot, as France and the rest of the region as a whole fell deeper into decline. The rate of job losses eased, but forward -looking indicators deteriorated: inflows of new business showed a renewed decline and business optimism for the year ahead slipped to the lowest since May.

Deflationary pressures meanwhile eased as business costs rose at a faster rate. The flash IHS Markit Eurozone Composite PMI fell for a third consecutive month in October, dropping from to 50.4 in September to 49.4 to register the first contraction of business activity since June

US Recession Over?

Some claim the US recession is already over. If so, it was the most uneven recovery in history.

An L-, K-, or W-shaped recovery isn’t much of a recovery whether or not there is a double dip.

For further discussion, please see It’s Professionals vs Everyone Else in the K-Shaped Recovery 

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