California Is Blaming Its Crippled Economy On Climate Change Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/17/2020 – 21:05
With mass exodus occurring from California and the state on the verge of going broke, Democrats aren’t blaming their decades old misunderstanding of economics – but rather are using climate change as the scapegoat.
California is now turning to wildfires that have made their way through 4.1 million acres in the state to lay blame as to the state’s worsening financial state. The fires have cost just $1.1 billion to battle over the last three years, a relatively small sum for such a large state, according to Bloomberg.
But, with the pandemic throwing a true wrench into the gears of the state’s economy – and the state’s residents leaving at an alarming clip – the state needs to blame its $54 billion hole in its budget on something.
Scott Anderson, Bank of the West’s chief economist, said: “Policy action in the next one to five years would be optimal, and probably sooner rather than later to move the economy in the right direction. Otherwise we’re going to be facing a pretty bleak economic future here in California.”
Anderson says the reversal of fortune for the state’s finances should be a “wake up call” about the impacts of climate change. We wonder if he’s ever heard of less government spending.
He also predicts the fires, coupled with Covid, will push the state’s unemployment rate to 10.4% this year and 8.8% in 2021. Those numbers are higher than the current forecasts of 8.4% and 6.9%. He said the trend of people leaving the state could be “more prolonged” than in the last recession.
Patricia Healy, senior vice president of research at Cumberland Advisors, said that the wildfires: “may have inhabitants, insurers, and government questioning the viability of living there and continually rebuilding.” She also thinks the rise in “work from home” as a result of Covid will drive people out of the state.
The time to up and leave may never get better. The state has somehow managed to maintain its credit rating and sellers are able to get massive sums for their homes if they decide to pick up and leave: median home prices in August hit $706,900, a record.
Gavin Newsom, who is overseeing the exodus, said last week: “This state six, seven months ago was dominating in so many different sectors. Those core tenets of this state remain still as alive and enlivened as they ever have been despite some of these situational challenges that we face.”
The state is spending about $205 million in fire prevention and management programs this year, which is down from $354 million in the prior year. Ironically, the big government Democrats in the state seem to want massive government spending on everything but the “climate change caused” problem of wildfires.
The fire trends in the state are “only expected to intensify,” according to Bloomberg. About 69% of the state’s economic output was exposed to fire risk in 2018 and that number is estimated to rise to 71%.
Sean McCarthy, head of municipal credit research at PIMCO, said: “It’s impossible to deny that these risks are not here now. We’re going to see the collision of climate change with the recession.”
Meanwhile, Newsom’s administration has been focused on nothing but climate change since he has been in office. While the state has been “going to hell”, as President Trump put it in a recent Tweet, Newsom has been busy making sure gasoline powered cars aren’t available by 2035 and respecting the rights of transgendered prison inmates.
With efficiency like that, we’re sure the state will turn right around…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31iUXkL Tyler Durden
Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D.
But, this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which, coupled with rising populations, resulted in reduced caloric intake for many people.
This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the great Antonine Plague of 165 AD.
The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests, which reduced the caloric intake of most people and left them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague, which swept Europe in 1347.
I’ve mentioned the book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization.
It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.
In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of the debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.
Debt and Its Eventual Collapse
The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff and others. In fact, Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations.
All three are playing out globally in the present.
In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues:
The rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances, and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.
Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma.
Squandered Chances
Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.
Now the plan — for lack of any real plan — is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.
Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.
Which brings us to luck…
Luck: The Overlooked Factor
As a general rule, historians seek explanations, which leaves luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and actions and cycles. Yes, cycles and human actions influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.
If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed — like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors– then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history.
It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure in order to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power on the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse.
That was a good judgment by Pius but also good luck.
As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs.
(A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud, but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of seawater, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.)
That was bad luck for the dinosaurs and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.
A Great 75-Year Run
The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)
In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us.
We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control — technology, wise investments and policies, etc.
The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.
When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times” I mean eras of rising prosperity, which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc. — eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.
Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking have both been optimized for incremental change. But we’re facing much more than incremental change.
We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned, and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.
I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, “Born Under a Bad Sign” (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”
The next five years might have us singing this line, with feeling.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/37h4VXN Tyler Durden
Twitter Refuses To Unlock NYPost Account Unless Paper Deletes Tweets About Hunter Biden Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/17/2020 – 20:15
By immediately condemning the Hunter Biden emails and photos published by the New York Post as the work of Russian hackers colluding with Rudy Giuliani, the MSM destroyed any credibility it might have had. As we pointed out earlier, more evidence has emerged to support Giuliani’s version of events – namely, that he was given a copy of the laptop’s hard drive and all of its contents by the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop.
But despite apologizing and acknowledging “straight up blocking of URLs was wrong”, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently not finished punishing the New York Post, because three days after the account was initially frozen, the New York Post hasn’t been able to tweet, and according to a NY Post report, Twitter has frozen the New York Post’s account until the paper’s social media managers agree to delete six tweets about Hunter Biden.
Day 3 @nypost account access has not been reinstated.
“Anyone who looks at The Post’s Twitter feed can’t even see the tweets about the Biden stories, which have been replaced by messages saying, ‘This Tweet is no longer available,'” the Post wrote on Friday.
Twitter previously said the Post’s Hunter Biden stories violated the website’s Hacked Media Policy which prohibits the display of “hacked” information, an allegation that the Post called “baseless.” However, on Friday, Twitter updated that policy, saying it will start labeling content that violates its rules rather than remove it altogether “unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them.”
Confusingly, though, the company said that these changes wouldn’t apply retroactively, meaning that the NYP still must delete the tweets if it wants to use its account again, even though readers can’t even see them.
Twitter confirmed in an interview with Fox Business that the NY Post “has been informed what is necessary to unlock their account.”
Facebook, meanwhile, is temporarily restricting circulation of the story until an independent team of fact checkers has had time to investigate the claims, and certify they are real.
While social media has been rife with speculation, in the days since the first NYP story was published, nobody has offered anything in the way of evidence – however circumstantial or unconvincing – that the materials were stolen by hackers. Beyond James Clapper’s ‘professional opinion’, the MSM has nothing to support these claims.
“To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says as authorities are investigating if recently published emails are tied to a Russian disinformation effort targeting Biden. https://t.co/shyMNnJ7Yrpic.twitter.com/GFSeIWXeY4
Chinese Ambassador Makes Outrageous Veiled Threat To Canadians In Hong Kong Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/17/2020 – 19:50
Canada and China are once again in a diplomatic battle over a range of issues — this time with Beijing threatening retaliation over Canada’s acceptance of activists from Hong Kong who are seeking political asylum.
China’s ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu issued a somewhat unprecedented threat to Ottawa late this week, saying that accepting anti-China activists could jeopardize the “health and safety” of 300,000 Canadians who live in Hong Kong.
“We strongly urge the Canadian side not to grant so-called political asylum to those violent criminals in Hong Kong, because it is interference in China’s domestic affairs, and certainly it will embolden those violent criminals,” Cong said.
Ambassador Cong Peiwu
“If the Canadian side really cares about the stability and prosperity in Hong Kong, and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport holders in Hong Kong, and a large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong, you should support those efforts to fight violent crimes.” This was widely taken as an ominous threat of retaliatory action against Canadian citizens and companies in the region.
Ironically the ultra-provocative remarks came during an event marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian and Chinese diplomatic relations. When pressed over whether the statements were a threat, the ambassador left if open, replying: “That is your interpretation.”
Cong was also responding to the move among dozens of Canadian MPs and senators recently calling for their country to accept more Hong Kong activists in the wake of the over 3-month old Chinese national security law. A number of prominent pro-independence activists fled in the wake of the harsh law, given it’s rumored to apply retroactively, and can carry stiff jail sentences for mere political speech, should that speech be dubbed by authorities incitement or “terroristic”.
“Canada has accepted at least two Hong Kong activists as refugees, granting them protection in early September. More than 45 other dissidents are awaiting approval for asylum, sources have told The Globe.”
Cong had defended the national security law as ensuring “stability” after months of protests, riots, and clashes with police which turned violent and often led to massive destruction of property and temporary shutdowns to things like public transit.
A threat to Canadians anywhere, is a threat to Canadians everywhere.
My statement on the Chinese Ambassador’s remarks about those fleeing Hong Kong to seek asylum in Canada: pic.twitter.com/BqEMbBDmgl
“I want to make clear that a stable and prosperous Hong Kong … is not only in the interest of the vast majority of Hong Kong residents, but it is also conducive to the majority of those … law-abiding foreigners and enterprises in Hong Kong,” Cong emphasized.
Canada’s Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne immediately protested the deeply “inappropriate” comments. “The reported comments by the Chinese ambassador are totally unacceptable and disturbing,” he said in a statement. “I have instructed Global Affairs to call the Ambassador in to make clear in no uncertain terms that Canada will always stand up for human rights and the rights of Canadians around the world.”
Cong had also taken Trudeau’s prior statements to task alleging the mainland’s “coercive diplomacy” in its crackdown in Hong Kong. Trudeau had also mentioned arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in government-run camps.
“There is no coercive diplomacy on the Chinese side,” Cong responded Thursday. “The Hong Kong issue and the Xinjiang-related issue are not about the issue of human rights. They are purely about internal affairs of China, which brooks no interference from the outside.”
Amid ongoing political turmoil in Hong Kong, dozens of pro-democracy activists have made asylum claims in Canada. Our @jonvhernandez spoke with one Vancouver-based man who’s eagerly awaiting approval from Ottawa.https://t.co/ROuZBwxBPupic.twitter.com/21ay0EPibz
He also hit Ottawa over the still contested Huawei affair, charging that Canada is ultimately an “accomplice” to Washington in detaining Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou.
There’s been a rapidly downward spiral in diplomatic relations between China and Canada springing from the Huawei controversy, but especially following the mainland’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. Last month China walked away from free trade talks with China, which had been in process for a year.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lZSWlc Tyler Durden
The secret to the trick is accidentally revealed. The woman was always in the box. The eye is no longer deceived. And there’s no getting the audience’s sense of awe back.
Just like a bungled illusion, once trust is broken, it’s gone.
For many during 2020, the loss of their jobs and businesses — in many cases due to incompetent government management of the pandemic — has been both a blessing and a curse.
Of course nobody likes being laid off or losing a business they’d carefully built up over the years.
But for a significant number of those people, however, they’ve now been given time (against their will, admittedly) to reflect and realize how much they hated their work in the first place. For them, the illusion has been broken.
They won’t go back to pretending their former lives were acceptable or tolerable, and they’re actively looking for employment that better fits their values. Time for something new.
Others have realized how much they really disliked what air travel had devolved into. With its demeaning theater of faux displays of ‘safety’– being groped by TSA agents and having to perform a striptease to get personal items through the security scanners.
I’m one of these folks. I’ll be traveling a lot less in the future, no matter what happens with the SARS-2 virus. I’ll be content to stay local and conduct my business via Zoom calls as much as can possibly be done. I won’t miss the pat-downs, delays, crowded seats, and cancelled flights.
Similarly, social media has now been revealed to be run by petulant sociopaths whose goal is for you to see exactly what content they want you to see, because that fits their profit incentive. But they do so under the guise of “protecting” us from uninteresting or inappropriate material.
Their contradictions couldn’t be any more gaping. They’re pushing a “diversity” that requires uniformity of thought.
Living on the internet this year while researching and publishing over 100 updates about covid, I’ve seen innumerable examples of this on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — such as their promotion of the W.H.O.’s inconsistent and blatantly Big Pharma-conflicted messages while suppressing front-line doctors armed with positive real-world results.
The list goes on and on.
None of it makes any sense. At least, not once you lift your head up and shake off the consumer lifestyle blinders.
The world is literally and figuratively on fire.
We are now seeing the most profound ice loss ever in the arctic.
We’re seeing more destructive wildfires in the US than ever before.
And so many storms in the Atlantic basin that they’ve run blown through “Z” and are now working their way through the Greek alphabet.
Protests. Riots. Political and social divisions so volatile that suddenly you can read credible opinion pieces on how civil war could be ‘a thing’ in our future.
But none of this has to be this way.
There’s another path. One that begins by taking stock of the fact that the ways in which we’ve been living and running our society no longer work. The more we continue to pursue the status quo in the hopes that somehow this will all magically turns itself around, the more we waste valuable time and resources.
To change, we must first start by declaring “Not this!”
That’s what millions of people are currently doing on some level. Somewhere deep inside, they’re realizing that their old lives aren’t coming back. And good riddance too!
The illusion is broken. There’s no more fun in the show. Time to wander out of the theater and find something actually worth our time.
The illusion is broken. Our top health authorities have shown that they care more about creating the next massively profitable drug than they do about actually saving lives. Once you’ve see that, you can’t ‘unsee’ it.
Both major political parties reacted to covid by hastily shoveling trillions of dollars to Wall Street and mega corporations while only giving poorly-delivered scraps to ordinary people. Which is why the current candidates’ campaign promises aren’t believed.
“None of the above” would win in a landslide here in the USA in 2020. The illusion is broken.
If the first necessary step is to withdraw our consent, what’s the second step?
Become as resilient as you can. Control what you can and let the rest unfold as it will.
Many of our largest systems are in the process of breaking down. Not only is there nothing you can do to stop that, but nothing should be done here. Those unsustainable and deeply unfair systems are failing for a reason. They’re not worth preserving. Any efforts spent trying to prop them up simply delay our opportunity to replace them with better new models.
Sometimes it’s just best to admit that a building has lived out its full useful lifespan, tear it down, and build anew. Honor it for how it’s served us, nod once, and tear it down.
So what’s next for you? Where do you go from here?
Well, our upcoming Peak Prosperity digital seminar (Oct 24-25th) will lay out much of our best thinking — and that of our incredible faculty of guest experts — on the best steps to take now to protect and nurture your money, health, home and community.
If you haven’t registered yet do so now by clicking here (fyi: our ‘last chance to save’ discounted price of $199 expires Saturday night, after which the price rises to $249)
And for myself and my fiancée Evie, we’re up to our eyeballs in creating community, planting, raising animals, and building infrastructure. Besides giving us a much-needed sense of control during an otherwise out-of-control year, these actions align with our inner sense of integrity.
Intelligent regenerative action is what the world needs now. And even if they prove to be insufficient, they are inarguably necessary. Some of these efforts, such as planting pear trees, are being planted for whomever comes after us. We do this because it’s the right thing to do.
In a world that has gone mad, and lacks a coherent story, the need to make sense and become the author of our own story grows exponentially.
So what does a better story look like?
In Part 2: Building A Better Plan we parse through the wisdom of generations and cultures that have come before us, to rediscover some of the secrets of living a sustainable, fulfilling and integrity-rich life that modern society lost as it traded meaning for convenience.
If we don’t heed the lessons of the past, and attempt to build on and improve them as best we can, our remaining prosperity will vanish as quickly as the unfortunate illusionist’s act.
Trump Says He Won’t Force Americans To Take COVID-19 Vaccine Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/17/2020 – 19:00
It’s not every day that President Trump outflanks his progressive critics on the issue of ‘consent’.
But according to some recent comments from the president, skeptics worried about the prospect of mandatory vaccination orders in the US and in the UK have rallied to voice their opposition.
But if President Trump is reelected, Americans who are concerned about what some ‘experts’ have characterized as a ‘rushed’ approval process for the COVID-19 vaccine won’t need to worry about being forced to accept the vaccine and vaccinate their children. Because President Trump says he will not issue a mandate requiring that individuals receive the coronavirus vaccine once one becomes widely available.
President Trump is making sure essential workers and all Americans will have access to a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine. pic.twitter.com/FSlnVDpGp8
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) October 15, 2020
While Trump claimed that “essential workers” and “older people” would take priority, the president made a brief detour detour during the interview with Fox’s Stuart Varney that he won’t require vaccinations because “some people feel very strongly” about the issue, Trump said.
“I don’t believe I’d ever do a mandated vaccine,” the president told Fox’s Stuart Varney. “I just don’t think I would do that, where you have to have it, because there are some people who feel very strong about that whole situation,” Trump said.
Justice Dirk Sandefur’s majority opinion (jointed by Justices Laurie McKinnon, Beth Baker, and Ingrid Gustafson) in State v. Pelletier, decided Oct. 6 but just posted on Westlaw, involved a classic he-said/she-said dispute in a rape case. Both the defendant and the alleged victim agreed that they had sex, but disagreed about consent. In the process, defendant claimed that he wasn’t the kind of man who would have sex with a woman without her consent:
At trial, Pelletier testified … that M.V. was fully conscious throughout their sexual encounter and that it was completely consensual. Upon acknowledging to defense counsel that some of the details he gave to police in his post-arrest interrogation were not entirely accurate or consistent with his trial testimony, Pelletier explained: “I think—because of being surrounded at my house unexpectedly by the U.S. Marshals, … I know it was because of being slandered and charged with this charge because it’s … one of the worst things that a man can get charged with. And I’m just not that kind of guy. I would never do that to a female. So it was kind of … disturbing.”
On the record outside the presence of the jury, the State subsequently stated its intent to cross-examine Pelletier regarding the fact that a 14-year-old female acquaintance alleged to police in 2003 that the 15-year-old Pelletier subjected her to sexual intercourse without consent. The SIWC [sexual intercourse without consent] allegedly occurred after the two had engaged in consensual sexual foreplay and Pelletier ignored her command to go no further.
The State asserted that the mere fact of the 2003 allegation was relevant to rebut his testimony on direct that he was not the kind of person who would engage in non-consensual sexual intercourse and “would never do that to a female.” The State reasoned: “He put his character at issue and said that he was not the kind of person that would engage in this kind of offense. It is basically the whole defense. So it’s absolutely probative of the issue.”
Over Pelletier’s relevance and prejudice objections, the District Court ruled his testimony that he was “not that kind of guy” and “would never do that to a female” put his good character at issue, thereby opening the door under M. R. Evid. 404(a)(1) to cross-examination regarding the 2003 allegation for the purpose of rebutting his good character testimony….
The majority concluded this evidence shouldn’t have been admitted. The evidence here was “character evidence”—”[e]vidence regarding [a] [person]’s general personality traits or propensities, [whether] of a praiseworthy or blameworthy nature; evidence of a person’s moral standing in a community.” Such evidence is generally inadmissible “for the purpose of proving that the person acted in ‘conform[ance] therewith on a particular occasion,'” but is admissible when a defendant claims “a pertinent good character trait inconsistent with the alleged offense.” “However, by doing so, the defendant thereby ‘opens the door’ for the State to present otherwise inadmissible cross-examination or extrinsic evidence regarding specific instances of prior conduct relevant to impeach or rebut the subject good character testimony.”
Here, the court agreed that the defendant had opened the door for the evidence about the 2003 allegation—but concluded that, under the circumstances, its relevance was very slight, and substantially outweighed by the possibility of unfair prejudice:
[T]he unsubstantiated 2003 SIWC allegation would arguably have had at least some probative value to rebut Pelletier’s self-serving good character testimony under the particular circumstances in this case if in fact true. However, the truth of the 15-year-old allegation was not ascertainable without conducting a distracting mini-trial for that purpose within the larger trial of the charged offense…. [T]he unsubstantiated 2003 allegation thus had no non-speculative probative value for the offered purpose of rebutting his asserted good character.
Further, while generally going only to the weight of evidence rather than its admissibility, remoteness in time may nonetheless, depending on the nature of the evidence and purpose offered, diminish the probative value of other acts evidence on Rule 403 balancing. Here, taking the 2003 allegation as true, arguendo, the prior incident occurred when Pelletier was a 15-year-old adolescent rather than the mature 30-year-old adult he was at the time of the charged incident in 2018. The significant difference in maturity level between a 15-year-old adolescent and a 30-year-old adult at least significantly diminished any probative value that the 2003 allegation might otherwise have had, if taken as true, as propensity evidence of Pelletier’s character in 2018….
On the other side of the Rule 403 balance, prior bad acts evidence is highly prejudicial by nature due to the great risk that it will emotionally provoke the jury to desire to punish the defendant for prior bad conduct or, at least, give the prior bad acts evidence undue weight over the actual case-specific evidence of guilt or innocence centrally at issue. Here, the inherent danger that the jury would give the prior bad acts evidence undue weight over the actual case-specific evidence of guilt or innocence was particularly acute due to the largely, if not exclusively, he-said/she-said nature of the evidence and the fact that the ultimate determination of Pelletier’s guilt or innocence thus depended on jury assessment of the relative credibility of the principals’ starkly conflicting accounts of the disputed events.
Justice James Rice disagreed:
A defendant should not be able to proclaim his virtuous character is being slandered by the charges with impunity, in the face of appropriate evidence to the contrary. Here, the Court permits Pelletier on re-trial to freely pontificate about his being “slandered” by the charges because he would “never” commit such an act, knowing he is insulated from the State’s rebuttal of his testimony by reference to the prior investigation into past similar conduct.
As for the potential for a “mini-trial,” while perhaps not preferable, it is not barred as a matter of law, and a district court will well understand that potential when determining to admit the evidence. Pelletier elected to pursue a character defense, and had multiple options in response to the State’s question: he could have objected to the sufficiency of the foundation; elected not to answer the question under Rule 608 (character testimony by the accused “does not operate as a waiver of the witness’ privilege against self-incrimination”); contested the validity of the report; or emphasized that he had been cleared in the investigation.
All of these, including the time necessary to contest the validity of the prior bad act, are superior to permitting a litigant to offer a character defense that is shielded from relevant rebuttal evidence.
For those who are interested, here are more details on the facts of the criminal case (not the 2003 incident):
By Information filed August 23, 2017, the State charged Pelletier with subjecting a 20-year-old female (M.V.) to SIWC in his downtown Missoula apartment on July 6, 2017. Prior to the alleged offense, M.V., her boyfriend, a girlfriend, and a female cousin were drinking “Fireball” whiskey from a bottle at Caras Park in Missoula around 11:00 at night. Extremely intoxicated following several “giant swigs” of whiskey, M.V. walked with her girlfriend down to the bank of the Clark Fork River to put their feet in the water. Fully clothed, M.V. waded out further and later came out soaking wet from head to toe. When the group started back to the tent area of the park, M.V. ran ahead and was not present when the others arrived. After searching for several hours in downtown Missoula, they were unable to locate her.
At some point around or after midnight, Pelletier was on the sidewalk outside his downtown apartment when he heard somebody vomiting in the city parking garage across the street. He later found M.V. vomiting in the parking garage stairwell and asked if she needed assistance. He recalled that she declined his initial offer of assistance but ultimately accepted a subsequent offer to come over to his apartment for some food and water to help sober up. After walking over to Pelletier’s apartment, M.V. showered and, according to his account, drank some water and had something to eat. The accounts of M.V. and Pelletier varied sharply from there, but both agree that sexual intercourse eventually occurred.
At trial, M.V. testified that she had little or no recollection of what happened after she left the park. She said that her next recollection was waking up confused in a strange apartment with an unknown man on top of her with his penis in her vagina. She testified that she then passed out and had no further recollection until the next morning when she was sitting on a bed in her panties and bra, with a naked man standing in front of her trying to put his penis in her mouth. She testified that she immediately pushed him away and that he became “flustered” and “panicked.” She said she then asked who he was, where she was, how she got there, and where her clothes were. She testified that Pelletier told her that he found her in the parking garage covered in vomit and that he walked her to his apartment to help. She said that he then retrieved her clothes and she found her pants to be soaking wet and her sweater covered in vomit.
M.V. testified that, at that point, she was still confused, scared, without her cell phone, and told Pelletier she needed to leave to go to work. She said that he offered to walk her to the bus station and that she consented because she was afraid to say no. She then walked with him to the nearby station where he wrote his telephone number on her arm and bent in to hug her goodbye. She recalled not wanting him to touch her, but politely reciprocating with one arm. She further explained: “I was confused at the time, and I didn’t know what was going on and so I thought what had happened, like, was my fault, and that I wanted it to happen.”
She said she just wanted to go home and got on the bus with the feeling that she was in “a bad dream.” Upon arriving at her apartment, M.V. told her roommate that she had just been raped. At 8:33 a.m., she sent a text message to the girlfriend who was with her at Caras Park the night before. The text stated that she was raped, could not recall what happened, and asked the friend what happened.
Later that day at her apartment, M.V. discussed the events of the night before with her boyfriend and the friend who was with them. At her boyfriend’s urging, she accompanied him to the police station around 5:00 p.m. to report the alleged rape. After taking her report, a police officer took M.V. to a third-party sexual assault examiner. At trial, the examiner reported observing tenderness and redness about M.V.’s vulva—conditions often indicative of forced penetration, but not necessarily inconsistent with consensual intercourse. Subsequent DNA analysis of a vaginal swab taken from M.V., and a saliva swab later obtained from Pelletier, confirmed the presence of his semen in her vagina the day after the incident.
Upon subsequent police inquiry, Pelletier admitted that he had sexual intercourse with M.V. but asserted that it was consensual. He initially asserted that she initiated the sex by kissing him and that he sought and obtained her consent before engaging in intercourse. Later in the interview, however, he inconsistently stated that he awoke in the night with M.V. on top of him engaged in intercourse. At trial he testified that, after having something to eat and drink at his apartment, M.V. was “flirting” with him before laying-down on his bed in her bra and panties and passing out. He said that he covered her with a comforter and got into bed with her and went to sleep. He testified that, after waking in the morning, they briefly spoke which led to kissing and then consensual intercourse. He said he later walked her to the bus station “to be a gentleman” and wrote his number on her arm, but did not hear from her….
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Justice Dirk Sandefur’s majority opinion (jointed by Justices Laurie McKinnon, Beth Baker, and Ingrid Gustafson) in State v. Pelletier, decided Oct. 6 but just posted on Westlaw, involved a classic he-said/she-said dispute in a rape case. Both the defendant and the alleged victim agreed that they had sex, but disagreed about consent. In the process, defendant claimed that he wasn’t the kind of man who would have sex with a woman without her consent:
At trial, Pelletier testified … that M.V. was fully conscious throughout their sexual encounter and that it was completely consensual. Upon acknowledging to defense counsel that some of the details he gave to police in his post-arrest interrogation were not entirely accurate or consistent with his trial testimony, Pelletier explained: “I think—because of being surrounded at my house unexpectedly by the U.S. Marshals, … I know it was because of being slandered and charged with this charge because it’s … one of the worst things that a man can get charged with. And I’m just not that kind of guy. I would never do that to a female. So it was kind of … disturbing.”
On the record outside the presence of the jury, the State subsequently stated its intent to cross-examine Pelletier regarding the fact that a 14-year-old female acquaintance alleged to police in 2003 that the 15-year-old Pelletier subjected her to sexual intercourse without consent. The SIWC [sexual intercourse without consent] allegedly occurred after the two had engaged in consensual sexual foreplay and Pelletier ignored her command to go no further.
The State asserted that the mere fact of the 2003 allegation was relevant to rebut his testimony on direct that he was not the kind of person who would engage in non-consensual sexual intercourse and “would never do that to a female.” The State reasoned: “He put his character at issue and said that he was not the kind of person that would engage in this kind of offense. It is basically the whole defense. So it’s absolutely probative of the issue.”
Over Pelletier’s relevance and prejudice objections, the District Court ruled his testimony that he was “not that kind of guy” and “would never do that to a female” put his good character at issue, thereby opening the door under M. R. Evid. 404(a)(1) to cross-examination regarding the 2003 allegation for the purpose of rebutting his good character testimony….
The majority concluded this evidence shouldn’t have been admitted. The evidence here was “character evidence”—”[e]vidence regarding [a] [person]’s general personality traits or propensities, [whether] of a praiseworthy or blameworthy nature; evidence of a person’s moral standing in a community.” Such evidence is generally inadmissible “for the purpose of proving that the person acted in ‘conform[ance] therewith on a particular occasion,'” but is admissible when a defendant claims “a pertinent good character trait inconsistent with the alleged offense.” “However, by doing so, the defendant thereby ‘opens the door’ for the State to present otherwise inadmissible cross-examination or extrinsic evidence regarding specific instances of prior conduct relevant to impeach or rebut the subject good character testimony.”
Here, the court agreed that the defendant had opened the door for the evidence about the 2003 allegation—but concluded that, under the circumstances, its relevance was very slight, and substantially outweighed by the possibility of unfair prejudice:
[T]he unsubstantiated 2003 SIWC allegation would arguably have had at least some probative value to rebut Pelletier’s self-serving good character testimony under the particular circumstances in this case if in fact true. However, the truth of the 15-year-old allegation was not ascertainable without conducting a distracting mini-trial for that purpose within the larger trial of the charged offense…. [T]he unsubstantiated 2003 allegation thus had no non-speculative probative value for the offered purpose of rebutting his asserted good character.
Further, while generally going only to the weight of evidence rather than its admissibility, remoteness in time may nonetheless, depending on the nature of the evidence and purpose offered, diminish the probative value of other acts evidence on Rule 403 balancing. Here, taking the 2003 allegation as true, arguendo, the prior incident occurred when Pelletier was a 15-year-old adolescent rather than the mature 30-year-old adult he was at the time of the charged incident in 2018. The significant difference in maturity level between a 15-year-old adolescent and a 30-year-old adult at least significantly diminished any probative value that the 2003 allegation might otherwise have had, if taken as true, as propensity evidence of Pelletier’s character in 2018….
On the other side of the Rule 403 balance, prior bad acts evidence is highly prejudicial by nature due to the great risk that it will emotionally provoke the jury to desire to punish the defendant for prior bad conduct or, at least, give the prior bad acts evidence undue weight over the actual case-specific evidence of guilt or innocence centrally at issue. Here, the inherent danger that the jury would give the prior bad acts evidence undue weight over the actual case-specific evidence of guilt or innocence was particularly acute due to the largely, if not exclusively, he-said/she-said nature of the evidence and the fact that the ultimate determination of Pelletier’s guilt or innocence thus depended on jury assessment of the relative credibility of the principals’ starkly conflicting accounts of the disputed events.
Justice James Rice disagreed:
A defendant should not be able to proclaim his virtuous character is being slandered by the charges with impunity, in the face of appropriate evidence to the contrary. Here, the Court permits Pelletier on re-trial to freely pontificate about his being “slandered” by the charges because he would “never” commit such an act, knowing he is insulated from the State’s rebuttal of his testimony by reference to the prior investigation into past similar conduct.
As for the potential for a “mini-trial,” while perhaps not preferable, it is not barred as a matter of law, and a district court will well understand that potential when determining to admit the evidence. Pelletier elected to pursue a character defense, and had multiple options in response to the State’s question: he could have objected to the sufficiency of the foundation; elected not to answer the question under Rule 608 (character testimony by the accused “does not operate as a waiver of the witness’ privilege against self-incrimination”); contested the validity of the report; or emphasized that he had been cleared in the investigation.
All of these, including the time necessary to contest the validity of the prior bad act, are superior to permitting a litigant to offer a character defense that is shielded from relevant rebuttal evidence.
For those who are interested, here are more details on the facts of the criminal case (not the 2003 incident):
By Information filed August 23, 2017, the State charged Pelletier with subjecting a 20-year-old female (M.V.) to SIWC in his downtown Missoula apartment on July 6, 2017. Prior to the alleged offense, M.V., her boyfriend, a girlfriend, and a female cousin were drinking “Fireball” whiskey from a bottle at Caras Park in Missoula around 11:00 at night. Extremely intoxicated following several “giant swigs” of whiskey, M.V. walked with her girlfriend down to the bank of the Clark Fork River to put their feet in the water. Fully clothed, M.V. waded out further and later came out soaking wet from head to toe. When the group started back to the tent area of the park, M.V. ran ahead and was not present when the others arrived. After searching for several hours in downtown Missoula, they were unable to locate her.
At some point around or after midnight, Pelletier was on the sidewalk outside his downtown apartment when he heard somebody vomiting in the city parking garage across the street. He later found M.V. vomiting in the parking garage stairwell and asked if she needed assistance. He recalled that she declined his initial offer of assistance but ultimately accepted a subsequent offer to come over to his apartment for some food and water to help sober up. After walking over to Pelletier’s apartment, M.V. showered and, according to his account, drank some water and had something to eat. The accounts of M.V. and Pelletier varied sharply from there, but both agree that sexual intercourse eventually occurred.
At trial, M.V. testified that she had little or no recollection of what happened after she left the park. She said that her next recollection was waking up confused in a strange apartment with an unknown man on top of her with his penis in her vagina. She testified that she then passed out and had no further recollection until the next morning when she was sitting on a bed in her panties and bra, with a naked man standing in front of her trying to put his penis in her mouth. She testified that she immediately pushed him away and that he became “flustered” and “panicked.” She said she then asked who he was, where she was, how she got there, and where her clothes were. She testified that Pelletier told her that he found her in the parking garage covered in vomit and that he walked her to his apartment to help. She said that he then retrieved her clothes and she found her pants to be soaking wet and her sweater covered in vomit.
M.V. testified that, at that point, she was still confused, scared, without her cell phone, and told Pelletier she needed to leave to go to work. She said that he offered to walk her to the bus station and that she consented because she was afraid to say no. She then walked with him to the nearby station where he wrote his telephone number on her arm and bent in to hug her goodbye. She recalled not wanting him to touch her, but politely reciprocating with one arm. She further explained: “I was confused at the time, and I didn’t know what was going on and so I thought what had happened, like, was my fault, and that I wanted it to happen.”
She said she just wanted to go home and got on the bus with the feeling that she was in “a bad dream.” Upon arriving at her apartment, M.V. told her roommate that she had just been raped. At 8:33 a.m., she sent a text message to the girlfriend who was with her at Caras Park the night before. The text stated that she was raped, could not recall what happened, and asked the friend what happened.
Later that day at her apartment, M.V. discussed the events of the night before with her boyfriend and the friend who was with them. At her boyfriend’s urging, she accompanied him to the police station around 5:00 p.m. to report the alleged rape. After taking her report, a police officer took M.V. to a third-party sexual assault examiner. At trial, the examiner reported observing tenderness and redness about M.V.’s vulva—conditions often indicative of forced penetration, but not necessarily inconsistent with consensual intercourse. Subsequent DNA analysis of a vaginal swab taken from M.V., and a saliva swab later obtained from Pelletier, confirmed the presence of his semen in her vagina the day after the incident.
Upon subsequent police inquiry, Pelletier admitted that he had sexual intercourse with M.V. but asserted that it was consensual. He initially asserted that she initiated the sex by kissing him and that he sought and obtained her consent before engaging in intercourse. Later in the interview, however, he inconsistently stated that he awoke in the night with M.V. on top of him engaged in intercourse. At trial he testified that, after having something to eat and drink at his apartment, M.V. was “flirting” with him before laying-down on his bed in her bra and panties and passing out. He said that he covered her with a comforter and got into bed with her and went to sleep. He testified that, after waking in the morning, they briefly spoke which led to kissing and then consensual intercourse. He said he later walked her to the bus station “to be a gentleman” and wrote his number on her arm, but did not hear from her….
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It’s becoming increasingly clear to even mainstream media outlets that things are unlikely to return to “normal” after the 2020 election.
No matter who wins, it is likely the losing side will regard the winning side as having obtained its win using dirty tricks, foreign meddling, or through relentless propaganda offered up by a heavily biased and one-sided news media.
And if about half the country regards the winning president as illegitimate, where does one go from there?
The survey data isn’t exactly calming on this issue. As reported by Politico last week, the percentage of Americans who believe it is justified to use violence to “advance political goals” has quadrupled since 2017, for both Republicans and Democrats.
After all, political invective has reached a fever pitch since Hillary Clinton declared that a sizable portion of the United States population constituted a “basket of deplorables.” Perhaps not since the 1870s and 1880s—when Catholics, Southerners, and Irish (all core constituents of the Democratic Party) were denounced by Republicans as spies, traitors, and drunks—has half the country so despised the other half. As early as 2017, when asked of the chances of another civil war in the United States, about one-third of foreign policy scholars polled said it was likely.
Perhaps, then, it is not shocking that we are now seeing articles even in mainstream publications suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the United States can’t continue in its present form. Moreover, the view is now increasingly being promoted by writers and ideologues outside the usual conservative and libertarian groups that have long advocated in favor of decentralization and local control.
On September 18, for example, Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune asked: “Can the United States survive this election?” For the past century, the answer given by most any mainstream journalist would have been a decisive yes. The usual narrative has long been this: “Of course America will endure for centuries to come! We Americans are masters of compromise. We’ll all soon realize we are all in this together and come together in unity!”
The concept of splitting off is as American as the Fourth of July. The high point of separation sentiment came after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, resulting in the Civil War. But New England states contemplated leaving over the War of 1812….The bonds that hold Americans together have frayed, and what happens on Nov. 3 may do additional damage. No nation lasts forever, and ours won’t be the first. This election won’t be the end of the United States. But it could be the beginning of the end.
Moreover, Chapman notes that while many no doubt will continue to see the United States as strong and likely to endure indefinitely, such assumptions may be unwise given the reality of experience elsewhere:
In 1970, the Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a book titled, “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” At the time, the idea of a giant superpower disintegrating sounded like a fantasy. But it eventually came true. … Countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia also have broken apart. Britain is leaving the European Union, and Scotland could push to leave Britain. It would be folly to think the United States is immune to these forces.
Chapman is not alone.
Last month in the Philadelphia Inquirer Chuck Bonfig suspected that maybe the end is near:
The country has gone through many periods of strife in my time here: assassinations, recessions, desegregation, inflation, gas crisis, Watergate, hanging chads, the AIDS crisis, 9/11. Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle or the immediacy of social media that makes the landscape seem so bleak, but I don’t recall us ever being so divided.
No one in our country seems happy today. The right is angry. The left is despondent. Our nation reminds me of those married couples who try to stay together for “the children” but end up making everyone around them miserable.
Maybe it’s time for a breakup….Just think about it, America. I know breaking up is hard to do. We used to be good together. But what is the point of having the “greatest country in the world” if none of us actually like it?
The debate over separation and secession has been additionally pushed into the national debate by Richard Kreitner and his book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Kreitner, who writes for the leftist magazine The Nation, suggests that the United States has never been as unified as many suggest and also concludes that secession and division may be a necessary tactic in bringing about the left-wing reforms he’d like to see. In an interview with The Nation, Kreitner discussed how he began to think about secession as a serious solution:
What if the United States broke apart? Would that be such a bad thing? Is it possible that the progressive policies and programs that I wanted to see put into place might be easier to enact in a smaller entity than the United States, with its 330 million people and the need to always convince people with very different attitudes and interests? So with that question, I was curious if anybody else in American history had favored secession for noble or progressive reasons—not to perpetuate slavery but even to oppose it.
The answer, I quickly found, is yes: There were disunion abolitionists who were fiercely against slavery and who wanted the northern states to secede from the union in the 1840s and 1850s as a way not only to protest slavery but to undermine it. Taking in their arguments and their rhetoric was really, really interesting.
Kreitner goes on to note that secession has long been at the forefront of American political ideology. This, of course, goes back to the secession of the American Revolution and can also be found in the secession movement favored by abolitionists and in New England’s efforts to secede during the War of 1812.
Kreitner is right.
Secession has long been entertained by many Americans, and not just defenders of the old Confederacy. In the early days of Southern secession, many Americans—including those who didn’t like the South or slavery—were fine with the Confederacy’s departure. New Yorker George Templeton Strong, for instance, declared in 1861, “the self-amputated members [the Southern states] were diseased beyond immediate cure, and their virus will infect our system no longer.” That same year, other New Yorkers seriously discussed leaving the Union and becoming a city-state devoted to free trade. In 1876, the battle over who won the presidential election very nearly produced a national split, with the pro-Democrat governor of New York “promising state resistance” to the Republican usurpers.
Nor were the nation’s founders necessarily opposed to division. Thomas Jefferson expressed prosecessionist views, even when he was a sitting president. In an 1803 letter to John Breckinridge, Jefferson explained that if the future states of the Louisiana Territory sought to secede that was fine with him:
[If] it should become the great interest of those nations to separate from this, if their happiness should depend on it so strongly as to induce them to go through that convulsion, why should the Atlantic states dread it? But especially why should we, their present inhabitants, take a side in such a question?
And in 1804, Jefferson wrote to Joseph Priestly stating:
Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe it not very important to the happiness of either part.
Only Decentralization Can Save the Union
At this point, there is only one strategy that can prevent a continued slide toward conflict, disunion, and (possibly) violence: decentralization of political power.
Thanks to decades of growing centralization of power in Washington, DC, American policy is increasingly made by the national government and not by state and local authorities. This means American life is more and more governed by one-size-fits-all policies hatched by faraway politicians in DC. Thus, with each passing election, the stakes become higher as gun policy, healthcare, poverty relief, abortion, the drug war, education, and much more will be decided by the party that wins in DC, and not in the state capitol or in the city council. In other words, the laws that govern Arizona will be primarily made by politicians and judges from other places entirely. These faraway politicians will be more concerned with the needs and ideology of a national party, rather than with the specific needs of people who live in Arizona.
It is only natural that as the national government becomes supercharged in this way many Americans might start considering ways to get beyond the central government’s reach.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The United States could follow another path in which domestic policy is created and enforced in a decentralized manner, in which laws for Texans are made in Texas and laws for Californians are made in California. This, of course, is what Thomas Jefferson imagined when he wrote that the states should be self-governing and unified only on matters of foreign policy:
The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only.
In a decentralized political scheme such as this, the stakes in a national election are much lower. It doesn’t matter as much for Ohioans which party is in power in Washington when relatively few laws affecting Ohioans are made at the federal level.
To adopt this way of doing things, however, would require a sizable departure from the current ideology that reigns in Washington. On the left especially, it seems few can imagine a world where people in Iowa or Indiana are allowed to run their own schools and healthcare systems without meddling from Washington. While conservatives’ efforts to force marijuana prohibition on states like Colorado show that the Right is not immune from this impulse, it is abundantly clear that the Left is quite enthusiastic about the idea of sending federal enforcers to ensure the states enact abortion on demand, adopt Obamacare, and enforce drug prohibitions as dictated by Washington.
But unless Americans have a change of heart and begin to decentralize the political system, expect a growing unwillingness to accept the outcomes of national elections and growing resistance to the federal government in general. What follows is unlikely to be pleasant.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GZY1LR Tyler Durden
Russian Trade Minister Celebrates Collapsing Ruble As “Awesome” Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/17/2020 – 18:10
Over the past decade, western central banks have generated countless hours of derision, mocking and scorn because while it has become painfully obvious that their two primary objectives – pushing stocks higher and hammering the currency – have nothing to do with their stated objectives of full employment at stable prices, central bankers have been steadfastly stubborn in their baseless claims that what they do is for the greater good. So much so, that the very same Fed whose catastrophic monetary policies of the past decade have spawned the greatest wealth and class inequality in US history in their pursuit of weaker currencies and higher asset prices, are now actively pretending they are pursuing an end to racial inequality, which is nothing but pure propaganda to justify printing even more money until maybe one day, inequality somehow magically ends.
But there is one place where officials are not hypocritical about their true motives and desired outcomes: Russia, where the government minister in charge of getting companies to keep production at home thinks the ruble’s recent 20% plunge against the dollar is simply “awesome.”
Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov
In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, the Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said that companies that don’t rely heavily on imports “are in a sweet spot right now.” He was referring to the plunge in the Russian currency: the ruble is one of the worst-performing currencies this year due to a slump in global oil prices and concern the U.S. and European Union may introduce new sanctions.
And while economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said in parliament Thursday that the currency is undervalued, while the central bank has warned the devaluation may push inflation above a 4% target, Manturov disagrees.
Anticipating the weakness of its currency, the Kremlin introduced measures to get companies to be less reliant on imports since US and European sanctions curbed Russia’s access to international markets in 2014. Manturov said three years ago that a ruble rate of 62 per dollar would be an optimal level for the policy to blossom.
And with the currency was trading near 78 per dollar…
… this has meant an even faster recovery for Russia’s export-oriented business. In fact, after a deep slump in the second quarter, the Russian economy bounced back over the summer after many lockdown restrictions were lifted. Industrial production will probably only shrink 4.5% for the full year, while manufacturing will contract 2%, Manturov said.
Of course, there is the possibility that the drop will only accelerate further as Russian virus infections have surged in recent weeks with daily tallies surpassing levels reached in the spring, although unlike in the West there is little discussion of a new round of shutdowns. Furthermore, unlike many western nations, Manturov said the government isn’t discussing any plans to prolong support measures for businesses. “We hope that the peak is over,” Manturov said. “The recovery was very quick in many industries.”
But what is more important to Russia is that its goods and services are now about 20% cheaper to its foreign trading partners than they were at the start of the year, resulting in a foreign-led demand boom.
The bottom line is that while every developed nation is now engaged in massive QE precisely in hopes of devaluing their own currencies to even a modest degree of what Russia has achieved, they will never admit to it (the BOJ for example has constantly stated that a weaker yen is not one of its policy intentions, just a boost to inflation… as if yen weakness isn’t a key driver of that). Which is why in a world of endless lies and constant hypocrisy, hearing at least one financial official admit the truth that it is “awesome” to see one’s currency collapse, is delightfully refreshing.
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