Tag: news

There’s been a flurry of threats and counter-threats after pro-Iran allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were all hit in suspected Israeli strikes in the space of less than 24 hours, signalling a new aggression out of Tel Aviv and willingness to risk yet another major Middle East war. Indeed Lebanon’s southern border with Israel is heating up once again in the worst tensions since the devastating 2006 war. 

Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to shoot down any Israeli aircraft violating Lebanon’s sovereign airspace after early Sunday a pair of drones targeted Hezbollah offices in south Beirut, and further after a follow-up drone strike reached deep into Lebanon, killing a Palestinian paramilitary commander (of the PFLP-GC) in the Bekaa Valley.

“Hezbollah will endeavor to down all Israeli drones, which may violate Lebanon’s airspace,” Nasrallah pledged in a televised speech. “The era of the Israeli military’s undeterred attacks on Lebanon has come to an end. Hezbollah will tolerate no more Israeli drones penetrating Lebanese airspace,” Nasrallah said. 

Simultaneously, Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Monday said the drone strikes amount to a “declaration of war” and convened an emergency meeting of the country’s top military and security chiefs. 

Meanwhile in a potential return to the precise lead-up to the month-long 2006 war, which saw the Israel Defense Forces conduct a heavy bombing campaign across southern Lebanon all the way into Beirut, including the international airport, Tel Aviv is now signaling its forces won’t differentiate between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state.

This according to Axios’ Barak Ravid, who described a phone call between Pompeo and Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri:

Israeli officials tell me Netanyahu told Pompeo in their phone call on Sunday that he should convey to Hariri that if Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel won’t differentiate between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government and will retaliate against the Lebanese state as a whole.

Pompeo had over the weekend expressed support for Israel’s ability to “defend itself” from the encroaching “Iran threat”. Specifically during the latest weekend Israeli strikes on Syria officials claimed to have thwarted an Iran-backed “killer drone attack” being planned. 

In 2006 Israel waged “total war” on Lebanon, bombing cities, villages, roads, and infrastructure in its failed attempt to root out Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, during the evening hours (local time) along the Israeli-Lebanon border the IDF has reportedly been releasing flares over the area amid concerns Hezbollah could be ready to launch an attack. 

Nasrallah during his Sunday speech warned that the Israeli military would soon face a reprisal attack. 

“I say to the Israeli army along the border, from tonight be ready and wait for us,” he said. “What happened yesterday will not pass.”

“We will not allow the clock to be turned back. We will not allow Lebanon to be violated by bombardment, killing or explosions, nor the violation of sanctities. This for us is a red line,” Nasrallah said.

He was specifically echoing words used by Israeli officials during the 2006 war, who said they would unleash destruction on Lebanon which would “turn back the clock” on its national development. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/321huQQ Tyler Durden

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

America’s values are shifting at a pace that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  During the 2020 election season, we are going to hear a lot about “the generation gap”, and the numbers clearly tell us that this gap is very, very real.  And as older generations of Americans slowly die off, it appears inevitable that the values that are dominant among younger generations of Americans are going to become the values of the country as a whole.  Essentially, “American values” are going to mean something completely different from what they meant to previous generations, and that should absolutely terrify all of us.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey that was just released has some very revealing results.  Among other things, those conducting the survey asked respondents about the importance of “patriotism” and “religion”, and the differences between the age groups were quite striking…

Among people 55 and older, for example, nearly 80% said patriotism was very important, compared with 42% of those ages 18-38—the millennial generation and older members of Gen-Z. Two-thirds of the older group cited religion as very important, compared with fewer than one-third of the younger group.

“There’s an emerging America where issues like children, religion and patriotism are far less important. And in America, it’s the emerging generation that calls the shots about where the country is headed,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt.

In addition, well over 50 percent of Baby Boomers rated “having children” as “very important”, while just over 30 percent of Americans under the age of 39 did.

God, family and country are clearly not as important to Americans as they used to be, and that has enormous implications for our future.  When all of the age groups in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey are combined and the results are compared to 21 years ago, we can clearly see the seismic shift that has taken place…

Some 61% in the new survey cited patriotism as very important to them, down 9 percentage points from 1998, while 50% cited religion, down 12 points. Some 43% placed a high value on having children, down 16 points from 1998.

America also used to be a “capitalist nation” that firmly rejected socialism, but now that is rapidly changing too.

According to ABC News, a recent Gallup survey discovered that 58 percent of U.S. adults under the age of 35 believe that some version of socialism “would be good for the country”….

While more than half of Americans rejected socialism in a recent Gallup poll, 43% surveyed said some version of it would be good for the country. That sentiment was held by 58% of respondents ages 18 to 34, compared with just 36% of those 55 and older.

Whether you and I like it or not, this is the direction that our nation is heading.  Given enough time, those young people would eventually be running everything.

America is clearly shifting to the left, and another survey made this even clearer.  When asked to choose the best president of their lifetimes, a whopping 62 percentof American Millennials picked Barack Obama as their first or second choice…

Millennials (born 1981 to 1996) were the most likely to choose Obama, with 62 percent naming him as their first or second choice. Reagan was the top pick for Generation X (1965 to 1980), baby boomers (1946 to 1964) and the silent generation (1928 to 1945).

Unsurprisingly, party identification was very closely tied to a person’s answer. Obama was the first or second pick of 71 percent of Democrats but only 13 percent of Republicans.

Reagan was the clear favorite among Republicans with 57 percent (12 percent among Democrats). Trump was the second pick for Republicans at 40 percent. Only 3 percent of Democrats named Trump.

Of course Barack Obama remains wildly popular among young people, and so if Michelle Obama decided to run in 2020 she would have an overwhelming amount of support among younger voters.

This “generation gap” is also huge when it comes to social issues.

Today, young adults are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage, and at this point we have almost even reached a “tipping point” with evangelical Christians.  For example, just check out the results from this very shocking survey…

Overall, white evangelical Protestants continue to stand out for their opposition to same-sex-marriage: 35% of white evangelical Protestants favor same-sex marriage, compared with a 59% majority who are opposed. But younger white evangelicals have grown more supportive: 47% of white evangelical Millennials and Gen Xers – age cohorts born after 1964 – favor same-sex marriage, up from 29% in March 2016. Views among older white evangelicals (Boomers and Silents) have shown virtually no change over the past year (26% now, 25% then).

If we are still having a “culture war”, one side is definitely winning by a landslide.

The primary reason why all of this is happening is quite obvious.  For most of our history, the United States has been an overwhelmingly Christian nation.  But in recent decades that has begun to change dramatically, and the shift has been most pronounced among young adults.

According to a survey that was conducted a while back by PRRI, 39 percent of all young adults in America are now “religiously unaffiliated”, but all the way back in 1986 that number was sitting at just 10 percent…

Today, nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated—three times the unaffiliated rate (13%) among seniors (ages 65 and older). While previous generations were also more likely to be religiously unaffiliated in their twenties, young adults today are nearly four times as likely as young adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. In 1986, for example, only 10% of young adults claimed no religious affiliation.

And of course many of our “religious institutions” have also shifted dramatically to the left during that same time frame.

Ultimately, it is quite easy to see what we need to do.  If we ever want to turn America back in the right direction, we need to return to the values and principles that this nation was founded upon.

But that is much easier said than done.

The sad truth is that America’s young adults have firmly rejected the values that we once held so dear.  They want to take this country down an entirely different path, and given enough time they would have the numbers to firmly be in control.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KXgB6w Tyler Durden

Unlike prior years, there was a distinct sense of dread and powerless foreboding in this year’s Jackson Hole meeting, starting with Jerome Powell’s “boring” speech in which he blamed Trump’s trade war for the Fed’s and culminating with Mark Carney unprecedented capitulation, effectively admitting that the fiat system has failed and the dollar can no longer be the world’s reserve currency (instead punting that obligation to “global central bankers” Mark Zuckerberg and his Libracoin).

Indeed, as even the FT concludes, “there was a sense that things will never be the same again.”

In its summary of this week’s Wyoming outing, the FT also wrote that “the developed world had experienced a “regime shift” in economic conditions, James Bullard, president of the St Louis Federal Reserve, told the Financial Times. “Something is going on, and that’s causing I think a total rethink of central banking and all our cherished notions about what we think we’re doing,” he said. “We just have to stop thinking that next year things are going to be normal.”

“They’ve priced in that there’s going to be uncertainty, there are going to be tweets, there are going to be threats and counter-threats,” said Mr Bullard. “And that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Interest rates are not going back up anytime soon, the role of the dollar is under scrutiny both as a haven asset and as a medium of exchange, and trade uncertainty has become a permanent feature of policymaking.

In short, central bankers “acknowledged they had reached a turning point in the way they viewed the global system. They cannot rely on the tools they used before the financial crisis to shape the economic environment, and the US can no longer be considered a predictable actor in economic or trade policy — even though there is no imminent replacement for the US dollar in sight.”

While long overdue, the blunt introspection by central bankers was unexpected: a paradigm shift in perception and self-appraisal usually takes place after years of failure – such as that observed ever since the financial crisis, where instead of sparking an economic rebound, central bankers only made the rich richer by creating hyperinflation in fiancial assets while keeping wages and incomes for the vast majority subdued, and inspired the greatest wealth and income divide in history, culminating in such 6-sigma events as Brexit, Trump, and the populist revolution observed across most of Europe.

Although in retrospect, perhaps it should not have been a surprise. After all, this year the symposium has an appropriate catch-all topic: “Challenges for Monetary Policy”, and as Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin said “rest assured there are challenges aplenty” adding that “arguably the basic framework for monetary policy is facing its greatest challenges since the 1970s, when the Keynesian Philips curve framework was succumbing to the Monetarist and rational expectations critique.“

Ironically, and in polar opposition to today, the debate in the second half of the 1970s was how to conquer inflation, when the short-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation was giving way to a vertical long-run Philips curve, where there was no trade-off in growth and inflation. Now the debate is exactly the reverse: how to create inflation when the Phillips curve appears to be flat! Indeed, the basic inflation framework may have lost much of its appeal, which means that the entire “conventional wisdom” upon which bankers have relied for decades has been turned on its head.

So having effectively admitted that they can no longer be replied upon to pull the world out of the next recession, with the BOE’s Mark Carney going so far as to admit that central bankers will be responsible for not only the next crisis, but the next war, something we have argued for the past decade, when he said that “past instances of very low rates have tended to coincide with high risk events such as wars, financial crises, and breaks in the monetary regime” – incidentally, the same low rates that for years central bankers said would save the world and now we learn have doomed it instead, below are 20 blunt questions (with a few implied answers in the questions themselves) for Central Bankers, courtesy of DB’s Alan Ruskin, as they prepare to be swept away by the tsunami of history:

1. If the Philips curve is so flat, and there is no serious alternative model to explain/forecast inflation, is inflation targeting even feasible? What are the intermediate targets to hit the end inflation target?
2. If goods Inflation drivers are dominated by global variables like international growth/capacity, how can a Central Bank that influences country specific variables pretend to target inflation?
3. If Central Banks hit the inflation target is that ‘the be all and end all’? The Fed did a particularly good job hitting its inflation target in the years before the Great Financial collapse in 2008 – what does that say about inflation targeting creating stability?
4. Central banks are great at creating asset inflation to which they pay lip-service, but they target goods and services inflation they struggle to create. Asset inflation that supports growth is welcomed. What are the long-term repercussions of an asymmetric bias in favor of asset inflation? As this asymmetry fans wealth/income disparity, does it matter, or, is this the least worst only solution? Who will be left exposed when the asset tide goes out again?
5. Is it the Central Banks job to do away with business cycle? And at what price? Are we witnessing the great moderation interspersed with a great collapse in confidence and wilder big credit cycle, and greater long-term misallocation of resources?
6. Can inflation be measured accurately enough to warrant distinguishing between core inflation +/-0.25% either side of target? Similarly, on hedonic pricing, how relevant to a consumer is it, that a tech device is worth a fraction of its price a decade ago when adjusted for functionality, but in practice may cost more than the old device when not quality adjusted? Is hedonic adjusted inflation indices the relevant denominator for assessing real interest rates and real money supply?
7. How is it best to measure the real cost of money? The real cost of buying a house should be based on expected house price (asset) inflation. Higher asset inflation reduces the real cost of money creating pro-cyclicality.
8. Are we reaching a natural end to the secular decline in inflation and rates that has propelled the asset cycle in the last 40 years. Has asset inflation hidden an even more meaningful deceleration in the natural rate of growth that will evident in the next decade?
9. How much are Central Banks going to be complicit in a collapse in fiscal standards, by buying public sector assets? Will a passive Central bank simply accommodate and facilitate fiscal actions related to MMT? What is the Central banks future role in pushing back against modern monetary theory.
10. How much has the unprecedented collapse in the term premia in bond market brought forward the impact of monetary policy that will support US growth in the next 6 – 12 months, but leave much less Fed capacity to ease financial conditions in H2 2020 and 2021?
11. Is ‘Japanization’ the fate of most advanced economies? How different to Japan is the rest of the developed world when their demographics turn? Do these demographics lower both the natural rate of growth and equilibrium interest rate over the cycle as seems likely?
12. Japan’s yield curve targeting has seemed to be a relative success, how would this fit in the US context. What will get the US/world out of a zero/negative rate funk? Or is that simply the future?
13. Is modest goods deflation (say -1% y/y) bad, especially when in any year a certain amount of deflation reflects technical progress? Japan per capita income strength suggests relative stable modest deflation may not be as negative for growth as assumed?
14. At what negative rate does aggregate demands interest rate elasticity turn positive? As developed countries age, are low interest rates an even less effective policy mechanism for a growing population searching for stable sources of income?
15. Will the Fed/ECB buy equities/ETFs? How far are central banks willing to distort underlying value, or is distorting value intrinsic to Central Banking as per the Austrian critique? Do the distortion to the price/quantity of credit matter in the longer-term, or, will they contribute to lower trend growth? What misallocation or reallocation of resource have unorthodox policies already caused?
16. Is r* a broken clock that is right every 24 hours, or a more useful concept? Is r* as described by the FOMC dots, really better described as ‘peak r’, and why does the Fed not acknowledge there is no stable l/t interest rates, and rates have their own cycle?
17. What is the message that we can take from record low term peremia, but a 10y risk neutral rate that is estimated to be surprisingly high near 2.8%?
18. Central Bank in a world of deglobalization, or at least a cold war in the tech sector. Will the natural rate of growth (y*) get more depressed? Has the global economy moved beyond the easiest phase of EM growth catch-up and increased financial intermediation? Are deglobalisation/enviromental degradation factors to consider?
19. Money supply: why is this getting close to no attention? M1 has been sending important leading indicator signals for all of the US, the EUR area and China. M1 has been sending the same corroborating leading indicator signals as the yield curve, yet nobody talks about money supply. Again this is another complete reversal from the late 1970s.
20. Currency Wars? What are the circumstances when the Fed should not join White House inspired intervention? What are the Fed (and Treasury’s) views on accumulating CNY assets? Do other major Central banks have any aversion to holding CNY currently?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zlk6fK Tyler Durden