Month: December 2020

Authored by Annaliese Levy via SaraACarter.com,

Homeless Antifa activists booked 16 hotel rooms at a Travelodge in Tacoma, Washington on Christmas Eve and are refusing to pay, demanding the local government pay for their accommodations and turn the motel into a shelter.

Autonomous zone: A far-left group booked 16 rooms for one night in a struggling motel near Seattle. But it was a scam. The dozens of activists are refusing to leave & won’t pay. And police won’t remove the trespassers. https://t.co/aBX4xMrmhh

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) December 29, 2020

KOMO News has reported that over 40 homeless people have moved into the hotel, with no plans on paying.

Shawn Randhawa, the motel operator, told KOMO News that if the occupants continue to stay, he will be forced to shut down and lay off his employees. Protests in the parking lot have driven away most of the other paying customers, Randhawa said.

“I’ll have to lock the doors. and if the city won’t kick them out, they can have it,” he said.

“I’ll shut off the water and I’m not fighting with these people. I believe there should be a law.”

A spokesperson for the Antifa group Tacoma Housing argued that they are bringing business to the hotel.

The Travelodge was almost entirely empty when we moved in, like all hotels during the pandemic. We’re not costing the owner business; we’re bringing him business by insisting the City and County pay him with CARES money.

— Tacoma Housing Now (@TacHousing) December 28, 2020

“Like most – or all – hotel owners, he’s struggling right now because of the pandemic, in fact we are bringing business to the hotel. We paid for the first night and now we’re demanding that the city and county pay for the other nights we’ve been here,” the spokesperson said in an interview with Andy Ngo.

“We paid for the first night and now we’re demanding that the city and county pay for the other nights we’ve been here.”

Spokesperson for antifa group Tacoma Housing Now explains the plan behind the occupation of 16 rooms at a motel near Seattle. pic.twitter.com/SlwLNH2e7a

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) December 30, 2020

“I’m just devastated,” Randhawa told The News Tribune.

“Because of the protest, I have nothing else. I was barely getting through this pandemic, and now this. This Christmas, the Grinch came.”

The city’s police department has said they would like to work with the Tacoma Housing organization, rather than remove the occupants by force.

“We’re trying to see if we can work out a resolution without having to take law enforcement action,” Police Chief Pete Fisher told The News Tribune.

“We’re talking about people with medical issues, cold weather that are homeless. So we are trying to work with our neighboring agencies to see what we can do in the form of relief, relief or temporary shelter.”

Randhawa said he does not feel supported by the police or the city.

“They are keeping me hostage. No one is out to help me,” he said. “It’s complete lawlessness in the city of Fife.”

Settling in for Night 6 warm, dry, and safe — and not at risk of freezing to death. Victory ✊

— Tacoma Housing Now (@TacHousing) December 30, 2020

It comes as no surprise, the virus pandemic, lockdowns, recession, riots, and the presidential election gave Americans plenty of reason to tune into cable news networks for the latest developments. 

On Tuesday, Nielsen published rating data that showed Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel remains the number one most-watched news network and tops all basic cable channels for the fifth consecutive year in 2020, according to Reuters. 

Fox News averaged 1.9 million viewers per day and 3.6 million during the evenings when primetime shows debut. A jump in viewership comes as a news-heavy year has transformed many Americans into news and political junkies. 

While viewership was high for the year, the last few months have seen a drop as President Trump has urged his followers to “try watching” Newsmax and One America News Network in a protest against Fox News. More than once, Trump has been angered by Fox News’ reporting. 

Newsmax’s audience was boosted during the election. In November, Newsmax primetime reached nearly 500,000 on average, though it fell to about 400,000 in early December.

The exponential jump in viewership, not just in Fox News’ viewership, but across all other major cable news networks, may not be sustainable and could slump in 2020. News flow in 2020 was utterly unprecedented. 

Maybe Trump has plans in launching his own network?

*Trump Allies Explored Buyout of Newsmax TV as Fox News Alternative, Sources Say

*Hicks Equity Partners Has Had Talks in Recent Months About Acquiring and Investing in Newsmax, Sources Say

*Hicks Also Explored Takeover of One America News Network, but Talks Cooled, Sources Say

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 15, 2020

Could a Trump News Network be a “Fox News Killer”?  

Authored by Omid Malekan via Medium.com,

A friend who is a savvy investor emailed recently to say that he thinks Bitcoin will be the best performing asset of 2021.

He then clarified that this was only for a trade, and compared its fundamental value to “voting on the Voice.”

Someone else emailed to say that another major hack was inevitable and would kill the rally.

Nouriel Roubini continues his excellent Paul Krugman circa 1998 impression (“… it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”) and Steve Mnuchin is single handedly trying to ram through farcical new rules designed to protect his once and future employers in the fiat domain.

And yet, the rally continues, in part by pulling in prominent investors who are even more influential than the folks listed above. The rally is also spreading. First Bitcoin, now Ether, later everything else. In economics, a Minsky moment is the moment when reality catches up with an overly-optimistic financial sector, leading to collapsing prices. It’s more concept than rule, but useful in understanding how human nature has a tendency to overshoot.

From Investopedia:

A Minsky Moment is based on the idea that periods of bullish speculation, if they last long enough, will eventually lead to crisis, and the longer the speculation occurs, the more severe the crisis will be.

Crypto is currently experiencing a reverse-Minsky moment: the point at which years of pent up skepticism – some of which was reasonable, most of which was willfully ignorant – blows up. The importance of permissionless blockchain networks and the digital currencies that they enable in broader society is no longer a question of whether, but rather how much. The resulting repricing will be extraordinarily volatile, but resolve to the upside.

Why now? Because of the powerful combination of the macro situation coupled with all that is increasingly unbearable with the digital domain.

Let’s start with the more obvious driver: 2020 has been a signature year for borrowing and printing. You’d be hard pressed to find a government or central bank that didn’t unleash a bazooka of liquidity. Global debt to GDP was a record even before the pandemic. Now it’s in the stratosphere.

Some of this was understandable given the circumstances. But what’s telling is that nobody believes it should stop, and many argue it’s still not enough. Remember when political conservatives were opposed to deficit spending or money printing? LOL! The outgoing Republican President has set records for both, and his biggest beef with Congress is that they won’t agree to more. In this era of severe polarization, the one thing everyone from Trump to AOC agree on is that the fundamental purpose of government is to borrow and print. European and Asian leaders agree. We are all Argentina now.

This backdrop alone is reason enough for an easy to store, easy to divide, and easy to transport scarce store of value to appreciate. Bitcoin inflation was cut in half this past year, around the same time that the Fed exploded its balance sheet by 50%. Bitcoin might be risky, but sprinkling some digital gold on your portfolio might be the responsible thing to do in this unprecedented monetary environment.

But there’s a lot more to this reverse-Minsky moment than just a new kind of store of value. Arguably even more important than the currency is the infrastructure that enables it, and the ways it can be evolved as a counter to authoritarian governments, decrepit bureaucrats and maniacal monopolists.

How about a payment system not built on the backs of small businesses? Or a banking system not designed to discriminate? Or an alternative to the slow-metastasizing cancer of corporate-owned platforms that is now ruining every corner of cyberspace? If this last bit sounds hyperbolic to you, then you either haven’t been paying attention, or are a Google/Facebook/Twitter/Uber/Lyft/Visa/PayPal/Grubhub/DoorDash shareholder (to which I tip my hat).

Online platforms — as their ad campaigns often remind us — are supposed to make the world a better place. But as we learn with every passing leak, documentary, and antitrust investigation, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the centralized, corporate-owned variety.

They go from ripe to rotten in record time, turning on the very users who helped them succeed.

There’s a reason why Google abandoned its motto of Don’t Be Evil and Facebook no longer claims the service is Free and Always Be. Lyft still claims to be Improving People’s Lives with Better Transportation, but we’ll see how long that lasts now that the hypocrisy of rideshare companies refusing to pay their drivers benefits (because they are entrepreneurs!) while insisting the government give them unemployment benefits (which entrepreneurs don’t qualify for) has been exposed.

Whether it’s surveillance capitalism, regulatory arbitrage or outright extortion, most of your favorite platforms are not what you think they are. They don’t exist to serve you, the customer, or the influencer/driver/restaurateur they pretend to empower. They serve their shareholders, and shareholders demand greater profits. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their money on the line. This misalignment of incentives drives every corporate-owned platform to eventually turn on its users. As proof, consider the following commentary from Uber’s CEO during its most recent earnings call:

Yes. I think that we don’t want to say quarter to quarter, but you’ve seen our take rates improve pretty consistently. We think that the take rate path is a positive path. So we see upside as it relates to our take rate.

The “take rate” is the percentage of every driver’s earnings that the company takes. Uber shareholders believe that the only way to achieve lasting profitability is by decreasing the pay of the drivers that the company pretends to care about. Lure them in with financial incentives, encourage them to re-orient their lives around being a driver, then pull the financial rug from under them. The CEO clearly agrees. Oh, but don’t worry, there’s now a moving ad campaign thanking drivers.

If you take the “classical” view of digital platforms and Metcalfe’s Law, then there’s nothing to be done. The pandemic has pushed digitization beyond the point of no return, and us lowly users serve at the pleasure of our corporate overlords. Your local family-owned restaurant no longer exists to make you delicious food while earning a respectable living. It exists to make the shareholders of Visa and DoorDash rich. Don’t believe me? Ask the owner of that restaurant (or virtually any restaurant) how they did in 2020. Then look up DoorDash and Visa’s stock price.

Crypto is different. It’s more than just a currency or a digital store of value. It’s an entirely different way of distributing financial rewards. It’s the belief that a digital platform meant to serve its users should be owned by them. Bitcoin is similar to VisaNet in that it’s a global payments platform. But the Bitcoin platform is owned by its users. If it grows in utility, the financial gains accrue to its users — not some corporate behemoth about to tweak its fees to further burden vulnerable merchants. Bitcoin payments also entail transaction fees, but ones designed to provide security, not fund share buybacks. Ethereum abstracts this user-owned model to pretty much everything else, including fiat payments and banking.

The current crypto rally has as much to do with the realization that the world needs a different approach to digital interaction as it does with the macroeconomic backdrop. You can hear this in Paul Tudor’s Jones remarks on what he learned about the tech after he invested in Bitcoin. You can see it in PayPal’s abrupt plunge into crypto or Visa’s subtle shift to being “a network of networks.” You can find it in Jamie Dimon’s supportive comments about blockchains for dollars and the ECB’s careful consideration of using the tech to issue a digital euro.

Most people — including the institutional investors slowly coming around to owning crypto or the platform CEOs toying with blockchain — are still years behind the curve. They can’t fully imagine the changes coming down the pipe, in the same way that Blockbuster’s leadership flirted with but ultimately walked away from streaming. But that’s their problem. Your task is to understand and embrace the coming creative destruction.

Crypto’s reverse-Minsky Moment is here. Plan accordingly.

Often times when the “too big to fail” banks are caught with their hands in the cookie jar (or placing the entire global economy on the precipice of collapse, as was the case in 2008), nobody goes to jail and the banks wind up paying a hefty fine and putting the “youthful indiscretions” behind them. This inevitably leads to jokes about how paying fines is part of the cost of doing business for big banks.

But it isn’t until you aggregate the sums paid over the last 2 decades, which FT did in a report published this weekend, that one can really see just how much these fines actually are becoming a cost of doing business for banks. Over the last 20 years, the six largest U.S. banks have paid out nearly $200 billion in fines and penalties. 

Advocacy group Better Markets found that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo have paid $195 billion, collectively, since 2000. The group claims the numbers show banks behavior deteriorating, as they have endured more fines since the global financial crisis than prior to it. 

There were 85 major legal complaints against banks between 2000 and 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, that number was 110 cases, most of which were mortgage related. But since 2012, the group found that there has been another 204 legal actions.

Better Markets chief executive Dennis Kelleher said: “They’re all major legal actions . . . It’s not like it was a ‘broken windows’ theory post-crash where prosecutors are fining every little violation. If they were held to higher standards they all would have been put out of business because the recidivism is really quite shocking.”

He continued: “It’s absolutely shocking that JPMorgan has now pleaded guilty to three separate criminal charges for egregious years-long criminal conduct.”

Banks like JP Morgan are repeating past mistakes, too. In October, the bank paid $920 million for manipulation of the metals market – this comes after the bank admitted AML failings in 2014 and pleaded guilty in 2015 to manipulating FX markets. 

JP Morgan was second only to Bank of America in fines and penalties. Bank of America has paid $91 billion for 86 legal cases since 2000, while JP Morgan has paid slightly over $40 billion as a result of 83 cases. B of A says most of those fines were “mortgage-related issues that predated Bank of America’s acquisitions of companies more than 10 years ago”.

Goldman Sachs has also entered into massive multi-billion dollar settlements, most notably for looting Malaysia’s 1MDB development fund.

When you compare the fines to the combined $1.3 trillion in net income the banks have earned over the same 20 years, it becomes clear: the “cost of doing business” in the investment banking world is well worth it. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real.

A great many people are living in bubbles that are about to pop. The largest bubble is the one inhabited by people who complacently believe in time travel, i.e. that the world of 2019 is about to replace the nightmare of 2020 and we can all go back to our carefree debt-funded consumption frenzy and illusions of ever-greater wealth forever and ever.

The greater one’s sense of security, the more durable the bubble. Those in America’s top 10% who have reaped virtually all the gains in income and wealth of the past 20 years live in a bubble that they view as unbreakable: no matter what problems arise, their personal income and wealth is secured by the government, central bank, etc.

Put another way, the top 10% are confident their position atop the wealth-power pyramid is secure no matter what happens. Any dip in stocks, bonds, real estate, bat guano futures, etc. that causes their personal wealth to decline (horrors!) will be instantly bought because the Federal Reserve will print another couple trillion dollars and funnel it into risk assets, as it has done for the past 20 years.

Any spot of bother in the gravy trains that fund the top 10%–local and state government, universities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Department of Defense, Wall Street, hedge funds, venture capital, etc.– will be doused with trillions of dollars borrowed or printed into existence by the Treasury or Fed. No matter what spot of bother arises, the solution–more trillions–is just a few keystrokes away.

The top 10% are supremely confident in the godlike powers of these agencies and solutions: the idea that these “solutions” become insoluble problems does not compute, just as a decline in asset valuations that doesn’t rebound within three weeks thanks to Fed intervention is firmly outside the realm of possibility.

The top 10% are also supremely confident in the rightness of their position atop the heap. That their position atop the heap is largely the result of a web of privilege and a long run of extraordinarily good fortune does not enter their bubble at all; in their bubble, their wealth, status, prestige and income are all the result of hard work and merit.

While this is certainly true for some, it is not true for all, and even those who scraped their way to the top the hard way do not recognize that their success over the past 20 years (and arguably the past 50 years) has been largely the result of a financialized rising tide raising all boats. In a Bull Market in virtually everything (except commodities), everyone is a hard-working genius who got it all via merit.

On top of this myopic belief that their success is all the result of their own endeavors rather than a tide of financialization, the top 10% are equally blind to the toxic consequences of the wealth/income inequality that has so richly benefited the few at the expense of the many. The idea that the bottom 90% might rebel against the financial / political system that has favored the already-wealthy for a generation is outside the top 10%’s realm of possibility.

But tides do not run in one direction forever, and a revolt against the unprecedented inequality that heavily favors the top 10% is not “impossible,” it’s a certainty. The top 10% are accustomed to being admired and respected for their accomplishments, expertise, wise investing and professional acumen. They are accustomed to viewing themselves as the essential technocrat class that keeps the U.S. system functioning.

The problem with this self-congratulatory perspective is the U.S. system is now in thrall to process rather than results. The technocrat class has been trained to follow needlessly complex procedures and compliance processes as the path to professional advancement while avoiding accountability for the increasingly dismal results of America’s bloated, sclerotic, insider-dominated systems.

All this needless complexity will be jettisoned once printing/borrowing trillions become the problem rather than the solution. The bottom 90% will demand not just a fairer distribution of income and wealth, they will also demand a system that actually functions for the greater social good rather than for insiders, parasites, leeches and technocrat processors who declare victory not from results but from their success in following approved processes / narratives.

Once costs must be cut and results take precedence over process, much of the technocrat class will find itself replaced by automated software. Those that remain will be valued for getting results by whatever means are available, up to and including ignoring all compliance procedures and bureaucratic box-ticking.

The top 10%–the rentier-technocrat class–will find the bottom 90% can no longer pay their rent, insurance, etc.–all the “services” that employ and enrich the top 10%. In other words, the losses as unproductive complexity unravels will finally fall on the top 10%, many of whom have been protected from exposure to market forces and risk.

Lastly, the top 10%’s ownership of assets will be crushed by asset deflation as insolvency can no longer be papered over by liquidity. Assets that are the foundation of top 10% wealth (that the bottom 90% own very little of) will go bidless as phantom wealth dissipates into the thin air from whence it came.

The top 10% reckon they’re untouchable, safe and protected in their asset lifeboats, and the sinking of the 90% won’t affect them. The top 10%’s bubble is about to burst. Not only will their lifeboats prove unstable, every level of government will come after whatever is left as taxes will soar on virtually every form of income and wealth.

Unlike the bottom 60%, who have few illusions about the rampant unfairness and predation of real-world America, the top 10%’s bubble is 90% illusion seasoned with 10% absolute delusion. The comfortable are about to experience some of the discomfort that is everyday life for the bottom 60%, and an increasing percentage of the next 30% who still aspire to fantasies of middle-class security will find social mobility is an escalator down.

We cannot print wealth, or borrow it into existence. All we can print/borrow is artifice, phantom representations of illusory “wealth” that will vanish into thin air, in a reverse of how the “money” was created–out of thin air.

When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real. What’s real is the tide of financialization and globalization reversed over a year ago. The tide is now running out, but few loading their “wealth” into lifeboats have noticed…yet.

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Despite all the talk about Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine being more accessible than the Pfizer-BioNTech iteration due to the less-stringent temperature requirements, it appears that several batches of the vaccine shipped out to Texas last week have effectively spoiled due to “straying from their temperature requirements,” according to Bloomberg.

With the US vaccination program lagging far behind Operation Warp Speed year-end targets, at least three shipments of spoiled Moderna vaccines arrived in Texas last week, prompting a delay in future deliveries to the Lone Star state as investigators scramble to figure out what happened.

Several shipments that had been scheduled for delivery before the holiday were held back, said Carrie Kroll, vice president of advocacy, quality and public health for the Texas Hospital Association.

It’s unclear how many doses were affected, or who might be culpable for the mistake. While the affected shipments have been replaced by the federal government, and others were held back by US officials as they looked into issues with temperature sensors, Kroll told reporters that many hospitals in the state were only just now getting doses that were expected a week ago.

“Some of the shipments for week 2 were delayed and were not received by providers until Monday and Tuesday of this week,” Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said in an email. The delay contributed to the appearance that Texas has administered a relatively small portion of the vaccine doses allocated to the state.

Kroll, the hospital association official, said hospitals were just now getting some doses that were expected a week ago, but the numbers in the states’ vaccine allocation don’t reflect the delay.

Other reporting problems may make it seem like Texas medical providers are administering fewer shots than they are in reality, she said. Some hospital systems have had trouble with the data system the state uses to track immunizations, she said. Shots they administer aren’t properly logged in the central system, and the discrepancies need to be resolved case-by-case.

“It’ll look like there’s vaccine sitting on the shelf when it’s actually been administered,” Kroll said.

As of Monday, only 2.13MM Americans had received the shots, despite the fact that 11.45MM doses of the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer have been distributed to the states.

Many of the larger states like New York and California have lagged, so West Virginia and other smaller states are reporting the highest rates so far.

Source: Bespoke

When asked by the press, officials from the Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed that doses had been delayed but didn’t directly respond to specific questions about what went wrong.

“Some of the shipments for week 2 were delayed and were not received by providers until Monday and Tuesday of this week,” Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said..

Though, if nothing else, the delays explain Texas’s conspicuously low vaccination rate…

…While offering another reminder that OWS’s optimistic vaccination timeline seems more grounded in fantasy than reality right now.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he will object during the counting of the Electoral College vote process on Jan. 6, becoming the first senator to confirm they are joining an effort launched by more than a dozen House Republicans.

“I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on Jan. 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws,” Hawley wrote in a statement on Monday.

“And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega-corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden,” he added.

Hawley said that Congress should investigate voter fraud allegations and make sure that future elections are secure. According to the Missouri Republican, both chambers have failed to act in an appropriate manner.

“For these reasons,” Hawley continued, “I will follow the same practice Democrat members of Congress have in years past and object during the certification process on Jan. 6 to raise these critical issues.”

Hawley noted that Democrats objected during the 2004 and 2016 elections “in order to raise concerns” about election integrity. “They were praised by Democratic leadership and the media when they” objected, Hawley added, saying that they “were entitled to do so” and Republicans concerned about election integrity in the Nov. 3 election “are entitled to do the same.”

For the past several weeks, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and other House GOP lawmakers have pledged to object to the counting of the Electoral College votes during the Joint Session of Congress. Their effort requires a senator and a House member that would trigger a series of debates before a vote on whether to certify a state’s Electoral College votes is held.

Some members of the GOP leadership, including Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), have said their efforts are doomed to fail. And over the past weekend, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), in comments widely publicized by news outlets, referred to Brooks’s effort as “a scam.”

And, according to anonymously sourced reports, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told GOP senators that they should not take part in the House GOP-led effort on Jan. 6. Another Republican, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), said the attempt to challenge the votes is an improbable one.

“It’s basically going through the motions,” Cornyn said, reported The Hill.

“It’s a futile exercise.”

But Brooks, for his part, indicated that “dozens” of House members back the effort. “We’re going to sponsor and co-sponsor objections to the Electoral College vote returns,” Brooks told Fox News on Dec. 28.

In a previous interview with The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, Brooks said he believes the Electoral College vote can be rejected, and the election can ultimately be decided in the House of Representatives.

Former California Sen. Barbara Boxer “tried to strike Ohio for George Bush back in 2005, so this is not unusual,” Brooks said in an interview with Fox Business on Dec. 15. “The law is very clear, the House of Representatives in combination with the United States Senate has the lawful authority to accept or reject Electoral College vote submissions from states that have such flawed election systems that they’re not worthy of our trust.”

The new Congress is slated to be sworn in on Jan. 3.

While Tesla is now facing scrutiny from both the U.S. and China over Model S suspension problems and the Model Y has been panned by Consumer Reports, the legacy issues with many Teslas – you know, either driving themselves into inanimate objects or randomly bursting into flames – have also apparently continued. 

For example, just off of a Dallas thoroughfare last month, a Tesla Model S “erupted like a flamethrower” and started “shooting flames”, according to a new article by the Washington Post. 

The flames happened after the driver heard “metallic bangs”, which he described as the sound of “if you were to drop an axle of a normal car” on the ground. He pulled the car off the road and, while standing by, watched it ignite in flames near the front passenger side wheel. 

“This was shooting out like a flamethrower,” said the driver, Usmann Ahmad. 

Experts say that a growing number of combustion incidents with older Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles could be a cause for concern. It raises specific questions about the “safety and durability” of Tesla vehicle. Ahmad’s fire is being investigated by the NHTSA.

The lawsuit that prompted an earlier, ongoing NHTSA probe about Tesla battery fires alleged an “alarming number of car fires” that appeared to be spontaneous.

Tesla has argued the opposite: that its cars are actually less likely than conventional ICE cars to catch fire. “Tesla said in 2018 that its vehicles had five fires per billion miles traveled, vs. 55 fires per billion miles traveled in the United States,” the Post noted.

Its emergency response guide for a Model S says: “Battery fires can take up to 24 hours to extinguish. Consider allowing the battery to burn while protecting exposures.”

Recall, in November, we wrote about a Tesla wrecking in Oregon and launching “scorching hot battery projectiles” into two nearby homes. “Hundreds of the Tesla’s hot batteries were thrown from the vehicle,” the report says. “Two of them crashed through windows at separate homes, starting small fires.”

A nearby neighbor who was at home watching TV said: “It was a real scary-looking wreck. There were down power lines everywhere. It’s a lot of crazy chaos.”

Additionally, in mid 2020, Business Insider published an article alleging that Tesla knowingly used Model S batteries that leaked and possibly caused fires. 

When Tesla began selling its Model S back in 2012, the cars were equipped with a “poorly designed battery” that was susceptible to leaking, the report said. The battery leaks may have been the cause of short circuits and ensuing fires. The company sold the cars despite knowing about the flaw, according to the report. The leaks became an “urgent concern” in spring 2012 due to two problems with the cooling system.

We also reported in 2019 that a Tesla Model S “spontaneously” caught on fire in a Chinese parking garage.

Via SchiffGold.com,

Peter Schiff has been saying that all of the “help” the US government and the Federal Reserve have offered up during the coronavirus pandemic isn’t helping. In fact, it’s made the situation worse. In a podcast last month, Peter said that all of the money printing and stimulus allowed people to keep spending, but they aren’t producing anything.

The problem is government doesn’t seem to understand the difference between money that is actually earned by being productive and money you get just because the Federal Reserve or some other central bank conjures out of thin air. When you’re productive, you’re helping to grow the economy. When the Fed prints money, all they’re doing is distorting the economy and increasing the cost of living.”

Over the last year, the US government has added trillions to the national debt and the Fed has monetized much of that, growing the money supply at a record pace. All of this money printing is supposed to keep the economy afloat during the crisis, but as economist Robert Murphy shows, it’s not even doing that. We may have had a rebound in GDP and unemployment has dropped since the early months of the pandemic, but as Murphy points out, the US labor market is still “in terrible shape,” and all of the money printing in the world can’t fix that. Murphy calls Federal Reserve and US government policy over the last year “scandalous.”

The following by Robert Murphy was originally published by the Mises Wire. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of ShiffGold or Peter Schiff.

This year has been a slow-motion train wreck on many levels. Americans have understandably been so preoccupied with the election and the unprecedented violations of individual liberties in the name of fighting covid-19, that there hasn’t been much attention left for what the Federal Reserve and US Treasury have been up to. Furthermore, the battles being waged over “public health” policy have obscured just how awful the US economy still is. The present article provides charts from the Federal Reserve itself (St. Louis branch) to document our alarming situation.

The US Federal Debt

We all vaguely know that tax revenues must be way down and federal spending has skyrocketed, but most Americans probably have no idea how much new debt has been added in just the last year:

Specifically, at the end of the third quarter of 2020, the federal debt “held by the public” (meaning that this figure excludes intragovernmental holdings such as the so-called Social Security trust fund) stood at $21 trillion and change. That same figure for 3q 2019 was $16.8 trillion, meaning that the Treasury’s outstanding debt increased by some $4.2 trillion in just twelve months’ time. To reiterate, this is how much more Uncle Sam spent above revenues in just one year.

The Fed’s Incredible Buying Spree

Not coincidentally, just as the US Treasury was issuing boatloads of new debt, the Federal Reserve for its part was creating new dollars with which to soak up inordinate amounts of Treasury (and mortgage-backed) debt. Here’s the chart showing total financial assets held by the Federal Reserve System:

In the chart above, as of mid-December 2020, the Fed held some $7.3 trillion in assets. Just a year earlier it had only held $4.1 trillion—a one-year growth of $3.2 trillion. Notice that the ballooning Fed balance sheet this year far surpassed what happened even in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008.

To understand why the Fed’s actions are so significant, keep in mind that when the Fed buys assets, it creates high-powered “base money” to do so. (Jay Powell didn’t have $3.2 trillion in his piggy bank when the Fed made the above-noted purchases this year.) Besides the potential for price inflation, Austrians recognize central bank monetary inflation as a crucial ingredient in modern business cycles. For more on these ideas, see my forthcoming book (which is being serially released by chapter) on Understanding Money Mechanics.

Just for fun, I took the above chart and overlaid the S&P 500 index:

In the chart above, the fit between the Fed’s assets and the height of the US stock market isn’t perfect—it truly had been hand-in-glove during the initial rounds of QE, but for some reason, they changed the data availability on the site and now the S&P index doesn’t go back that far—but it still suggests that the record-high stock prices we saw this year are due to Fed money printing rather than the fantastic prospects for US economic growth.

US Employment

Amid the breathtaking issuance of federal debt and base money, the US labor market is in terrible shape. Here’s the official civilian unemployment rate that they report in the news:

The massive spike in the spring underscores just how disruptive the initial lockdown was. However, note that even now, with the headline unemployment rate (for November) at “only” 6.7 percent, we are still worse off than during the depths of the recession in the early 2000s.

Yet as most readers of mises.org probably know, the official unemployment rate has been very misleading since the economic fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. Specifically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only counts you as unemployed if you are actively seeking work. Incidentally, this isn’t an entirely crazy procedure; my parents live in a retirement community and play golf several times a week. They aren’t working, but that’s not who we mean when we talk of “the unemployed.”

However, the unemployment figure can be very misleading when there are millions of Americans who desperately want to work but who have given up hope of finding a job. Since they are no longer actively seeking work, poof! They’re no longer counted among the unemployed.

One way to sidestep this problem is to ask: What percentage of the civilian labor force does have a job? Yet even here cultural trends can influence the significance of such a figure. For example, more women entered the official workforce in the 1970s and beyond, which tended to increase the labor-force participation rate. In addition, people are living longer while the birth rate has declined, and thus the “aging” of the population also might affect these statistics.

In an attempt to isolate what we really want to know, in the following chart I am just focusing on men aged 25–54. Out of this demographic, what percentage held a job over time? The chart below gives us the alarming result:

(Note that the y-axis starts at 75, not 0.) As this last chart reveals, among men aged 25–54, the employment rate is not much above the trough it hit following the financial crisis. More generally, we see that with each recession (the gray bars) going back to the 1980s, prime-age male employment never returned to its previous level.

Conclusion

The year 2020 has seen the Keynesian policy solutions—have the authorities print and borrow money—applied in unprecedented fashion. To be sure, no matter how bleak the economy may be, the Keynesians can always say, “It would have been worse without us.” Yet those steeped in Austrian economics understand the importance of sound money and (if we are going to have a government) fiscal prudence. On top of the outrageous lockdowns of business and even residential gatherings, what the Treasury and Fed have done this year is scandalous.