Month: June 2021

A week ago, none other than Larry Fink poured an illiberal amount of cold water on the current inflationary narrative being spewed by Powell, Yellen, and their lackeys in academia.

The Blackrock CEO – who happens to manage more than The Fed at last check – countered soothing talk that soaring prices are here and gone tomorrow, and said that investors may be underestimating the potential for a spike in inflation.

“Most people haven’t had a forty-plus year career, and they’ve only seen declining inflation over the last 30-plus years. So this is going to be a pretty big shock”, Fink said, his warning falling on deaf ears.

Alas, unlike the Fed, Fink actually know what he is talking about: he began his career at First Boston Corp. in 1976, in during runaway US inflation, with the Consumer Price Index hitting a high of 14.8% in March 1980, and forcing Volcker to hike rates as high as 20%.

Treasury Secretary Yellen was quick to dismiss this fearmongering malarkey by claiming that while she may, possibly, kinda, sorta see higher prices, it will be transitory (because The Fed is awesome) and besides, America… it’s all good!

“If we ended up with a slightly higher interest rate environment it would actually be a plus for society’s point of view and the Fed’s point of view,” Yellen said in an interview with Bloomberg. And yes, she really said that.

Is this a joke: the BIden budget sees 2.1% CPI in 2021 and 2022

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 28, 2021

That is very much not the mantra that Roger Bootle, who – a quarter century after writing the book on the death of inflation – is now warning that he is seeing signs of its reignition.

“It is the start of a sea change, I have to say. That’s not to say that we’re going to go back to the strong inflationary conditions of the 70s and early 80s. But at the very least, I think we are at the end of the crypto-deflationary period that we’ve been in for the last few years.

“The danger of deflation has passed, and the risks have definitely tilted in the other direction. How high inflation will go, and for how long, that’s debatable. But I’m not in much doubt myself that there’s been a sea change.”

However, for the real worry-warts, Bootle does not expect 1970s-style inflation…

“No, the comparison with the 1970s is not a good one. If you look at the long term history of inflation, and I’ve looked at the U.K. data going back to the 13th century, you don’t get ever a sustained period of inflation of the sort we had 1970s. You do get bursts of inflation, typically followed by much lower rates or even deflation.

“The 1970s were special. First of all, you started off at a quite a high base rate of inflation. And then several shocks appeared, two oil price shocks. The settings of monetary and fiscal policy were extremely loose. And all of this in an institutional context that was conducive to inflation — very powerful trade unions, powerful corporations, a high rate of public ownership in this country and many others.

“A closer comparison is with the 50s and 60s before the inflationary take off at the end of the 60s. We then went through a long, a prolonged period of what seemed at the time by the way to be quite high inflation — we learned subsequently it wasn’t.”

So, to summarize, in the last month or so the official narrative has shifted from inflation will be “transitory” to “inflation is good for society”…

… and the beneficiary is (drum roll please): the environment.

As Bootle explains:

“If I had to put my money on a single factor that was going to push up costs in the years to come, I would say it was the environmental emphasis and in particular the drive towards net-zero. This is going to lead to a whole series of costs and price increases across the economy.”

His explanation fits with Fink’s previous climate change view on higher prices…

“If our solution is entirely just to get a green world, we’re going to have much higher inflation, because we do not have the technology to do all this, yet,” Fink said.

“That’s going to be a big policy issue going forward too: Are we going to be willing to accept more inflation if inflation is to accelerate our green footprint?”

And don’t bank of the bankers to save the world…

“I’m not sure complacency is quite the right word. I think it’s over-optimism with regard to inflation, but on two counts. One that’s it’s not going to go up that much, at least not sustainably. And two, if it does, as and when they need to, they’re going to be able to contain it.

“Policymakers have a natural inclination to lay off and think it’s all going to get sorted out. I think actually the conclusion ought to be quite the opposite. Because of the dangers, in this world, of big rises in interest rates, they ought to start rising raising interest rates sooner and moving by low amounts stealthily, in order to get interest rates up somewhere near a more normal level rather than being forced into it.”

All of which dismantles Yellen’s extreme overconfidence that monetary policy makers can handle any potential rise in inflation if it sticks. “I know that world – they’re very good,” Yellen said in the interview. “I don’t believe they’re going to screw it up.”

This is the same clueless hack who in 2017 said she doesn’t expect another financial crisis in “our lifetimes.”

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

20 years into the US war in Afghanistan, the troops are going to leave, and the CIA is going to stay. The question right now is how that’s going to happen, and where exactly the agency is going to be basing its operations from.

There is no question that the CIA will be spying, and carrying out strikes in Afghanistan, but after decades mostly doing things out of US bases in Afghanistan, they’re going to need to find a new base, and there is no obvious choice.

Officials are describing “last-minute” efforts to find bases to operate from, which probably shouldn’t be so last-minute since the pullout has been a deal in place since at least early 2020, and could be seen coming well before that.

Pakistan is seeing consideration, as the CIA used to have a base there for their drone war. The US and Pakistan aren’t on such good terms now, however, and Pakistan reportedly wants to be able to sign off on who the CIA is attacking from their territory.

There is also a report that the CIA could try to find a host in a former Soviet republic north of Afghanistan. The upside is that those nations would be less inclined to try to manage CIA assassinations, but diplomats say they expect Russian President Vladimir Putin to oppose the idea.

CIA Director William Burns says that whatever happens, the end of US troops in Afghanistan will diminish the CIA’s ability to act there. The US clearly isn’t going to give up, wanting to maintain its ability to conduct strikes around the world, but it’s going to be complicated.

Coming off last month’s eleven day Gaza war in which there were persistent fears that a ‘northern front’ would open against Israel if Hezbollah joined the fray (and after multiple missiles launched from southern Lebanon reportedly by Palestinian factions in the country), Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz has warned that the next potential war in Lebanon will see “overwhelming force” used. 

The words were given at a ceremony marking Israel’s official recognition of the army’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which is now considered an official military campaign. Referencing the devastating latest strikes on Gaza, which killed almost 250 Palestinians – many of them children – Gantz said the campaign was “only the tip of the iceberg” in terms of military capabilities and what Lebanon’s Hezbollah would face next. 

“Whoever hides weapons in their house endangers their children,” the defense minister added, in an apparent acknowledgement of the high civilian death toll especially impacting children. 

Despite continued high tensions and a state of standoff between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in Jerusalem, particularly over evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, an uneasy Hamas-Israel truce has held since May 21.

In response to these latest threats out of Israel, Iranian state media quoted a senior Hezbollah representative who vowed that any aggressors would be met with the “fire of hell” in the instance of an invasion or attack.

“They (Israelis) should not err in their calculations again,” the official, identified as Hassan Baghdadi said. “If there is a war with Hezbollah, they will see the fire of hell as they have never imagined.”

During the 2006 war Israel took the fight far beyond southern Lebanon, where it was battling Hezbollah militants, and bombed the capital of Beirut – even including the international airport there and other civilian infrastructure across the country.

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful, brightest explosions in the universe.

They last only seconds but release immense amounts of energy – as much, in fact, as the sun will emit throughout its existence. According to scientists, there may be a way to imitate the process that leads to this explosion in what could be an energy industry game-changer. 

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are believed to occur when a black hole is formed. The first was observed in 1967, but it was only in 1991 that the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory with the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) was launched. BATSE has been discovering roughly one gamma-ray burst daily. Now, the most powerful gamma-ray burst may have given scientists the key to replicating it.

GRB 190114C, Science Alert writes, came from 4.5 billion light-years away and generated energy of some trillion electron volts. You don’t need to be versed in electricity measures to grasp the magnitude of the burst: if it’s got a trillion of anything in it, it’s bound to be powerful.

Earlier this year, scientists from Columbia University and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile reported that they had discovered a way to harvest energy from black holes by separating and rejoining magnetic lines along the event horizon—the so-called point of no return where black holes suck in everything and not even light can return.

This disconnection and reconnection process, the researchers said, could accelerate plasma particles around the black hole to negative energy. This, in turn, would generate massive amounts of energy that could be extracted.

Now, a team from the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network (ICRANet), an organization headquartered in Italy, says it had uncovered the mechanism that leads to gamma-ray bursts.

They’re calling it a binary-driven hypernova, which is a system of two stars, one carbon-oxygen star and a neutron star. The carbon-oxygen star is nearing the end of its life, and when it becomes a supernova, which is how stars die, it ejects material that the neutron star absorbs, which causes it to pass the critical mass point and turn into a black hole. The process of this happening causes gamma-ray bursts.

That’s the theory, but the team, led by Rahim Moradi, has also described how the process can be replicated. This comes down to particle acceleration along magnetic lines, which extracts rotational energy from the black hole’s ergosphere: a region where the space-time continuum is rotating so fast that every object spins in the same direction as the black hole.

“The novel engine presented in the new publication makes the job through a purely general relativistic, gravito-electrodynamical process: a rotating black hole, interacting with a surrounding magnetic field, creates an electric field that accelerates ambient electrons to ultrahigh-energies leading to high-energy radiation and ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays,” explains one of the authors of the research, Remo Ruffini, as quoted by Science Alert.

It probably sounds far-fetched and too theoretical to have any practical implications. Yet black holes have captured the imagination of scientists ever since their existence was only theorized. Then they were proven to exist. Some half a century ago, a British mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, described a future where humans or aliens would be able to harvest the energy of a black hole by dropping an object in its ergosphere and accelerating it to negative energy. Last year, scientists from the University of Glasgow devised a proof-of-concept for the process.

In other words, what seemed like a fantasy decades ago turned out to be an actual phenomenon and what sounded an impossible way to use this phenomenon to extract energy fifty years ago is hypothetically possible now. Perhaps replicating a gamma-ray burst may become possible too.

The past few weeks have seen Taiwan’s semiconductor industry hit by a variety of disasters that are creating more problems at a time when an international semiconductor shortage is creating problems around the world, including in the US, where a shortage of critical chips has hurt production of new vehicles. A worsening drought and rolling blackouts are also terrorizing the island.

Now, two more Taiwan tech suppliers have been hit by new clusters of COVID-19 cases, creating another disruption to production that’s threatening to have an outsize impact on the global supply chain. According to Nikkei, King Yuan Electronics Co suspended all domestic production on Friday, while chip packaging and testing supplier Greatek Electronics and networking gear provider Accton Technology have also reported clusters among employees that have impacted production.

Both Greatek and Accton have production sites near a King Yuan plant in Miaoli County which has confirmed at least 263 cases as of Sunday (219 involving foreign workers mainly from the Philippines. Around 30% of the company’s workers are migrants). Most of the cases have been linked to workplace outbreaks, with King Yuan workers accounting for half the infections. As a result, the company and local government officials are asking all foreign workers to shelter in place inside their dormitories (typically cramped environments).

King Yuan has finished testing and has so far reported 195 positive infections out of its workforce of more than 7,000 employees. The final number of cases will be finalized in a few days, a Miaoli health official told Nikkei Asia. The two other companies are still testing their employees.

Local health authorities have told the companies to ask all of their migrant workers to stay inside dormitories.

All the new cases prompted the government on Sunday to order King Yuan, which is a key supplier for Nvidia, Intel, MediaTek and many other top global chip developers, to stop all of its foreign laborers from working. The order was effective immediately, regardless of COVID test results.

“Foreign workers at King Yuan will have to stop working and begin quarantine for at least seven days. Only foreign workers with negative results of PCR tests after the quarantine can return to work,” the CDC director general Chuang Jen-hsiang told Nikkei Asia. “We will have another meeting to decide whether or not King Yuan can resume production later today.”

The company said it expects the two-day halt to reduce its expected revenue and output for June by up to 6%, while other down-stream companies that rely on King Yuan’s product are also struggling.

King Yuan on Friday said that its planned 48-hour production suspension was estimated to reduce revenue and output in June by around 4% to 6%. MediaTek, a customer and a leading mobile chip developer, said its revenue will be hit by King Yuan’s production halt.

“If our foreign workers could not come to work, that will further hit our production output for this month but the scale will need to be further calculated,” a King Yuan spokesperson told Nikkei Asia.

Taiwanese public-health officials must decree the working environment to be “safe” before production can ramp back up to 100%. Greatek is testing 4K of its employees, more than 1K of whom are migrant workers, while Accton is also testing its 1,500-strong staff.

As of Sunday, 11 workers at both Greatek and Accton, had been confirmed to have contracted the virus. A majority of these were migrant workers.

“We haven’t stopped our production lines, but the testing of all employees and some prevention measures will surely affect our production utilization and output,” Chen Sheng, vice president and spokesperson of Greaktek, told Nikkei Asia.

Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park, widely recognized as the most important hub for Taiwanese chipmakers, has set up a testing station and is testing around 4K out of the roughly 10K migrant workers who work in the area.

As a reminder, the chart below illustrates how production hiccups in Taiwan can quickly impact supply chains in the US and Europe.

Authored by Alexander Zhang via The Epoch Times,

Britain’s Border Force is “little more than a taxi service for illegal migrants,” a Conservative MP said on Monday, as he urged the government to take action to put an end to the “horrible trade” of people smuggling.

The Home Office is investigating an incident in which migrants attempting to cross the English Channel were reportedly picked up in French waters by the UK Border Force and taken to the English port of Dover.

The move was orchestrated between senior crew members of UK Border Force ship HMC Valiant and French patrol ship Athos on May 29, the Daily Mail reported.

Asking in the House of Commons what the Home Office is doing to tackle human smuggling, Sir Edward Leigh said: “Does the minister recognise the public anger at us being made fools of with this? Border Force is little more than a taxi service for illegal migrants, it’s ridiculous.

“So will the minister assure me that he will use his powers under the 1971 Immigration Act to arrest all illegal immigrants, put them in detention, prosecute them, imprison them, and deport them so that we can stop this horrible trade dead in its tracks?”

Responding to the question, Home Office minister Chris Philp said that he “completely” shares Sir Edward’s anger.

“We are actively prosecuting the facilitators. And in the forthcoming Sovereign Borders Bill, as part of the new plan for immigration, we plan to significantly strengthen the Section 24 illegal entry offence that he refers to in the 1971 act to make it easier to use and easier to implement in practice.

“And at the same time we are going to be increasing the sentence for illegal entry and the sentence for facilitation under Section 25 of that same act.”

According to the Home Office, the French authorities dealt with eight incidents involving 130 people on June 4, with the UK dealing with four boats involving 83 people.

This follows 201 people being stopped by Border Force officers in eight incidents on June 3.

In addition, the French authorities intercepted nine crossings on June 2 and 3, preventing 171 people from reaching the UK.

This makes a total of 585 attempting to make the crossing in just three days.

On Monday, migrants continued to arrive in Dover after crossing the English Channel.

Kent County Council has threatened legal action against Home Secretary Priti Patel, saying it faces extreme pressure on its services for unaccompanied child migrants.

The dangerous sea journey from France—made by more than 3,000 people including children so far in 2021—has claimed many lives.

Police confirmed on Monday that the body of a baby found on a Norwegian beach is that of a Kurdish-Iranian boy who went missing in the English Channel last year.

Fifteen-month-old Artin was onboard an overcrowded migrant boat heading for the UK with his parents and two siblings when it capsized on Oct. 27, 2020, claiming all five of their lives.

Artin’s family had sold their house before leaving Iran and paid £14,000 ($20,000) to get on to the boat, with a further £8,200 ($11,600) supposed to be due when they arrived safely in the UK.

Patel said at the time that the deaths were “an ultimate tragedy” and one that “could have been avoided.”

Authored by Nebojsa Malic via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Watching the media coverage – or lack thereof – of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails and what they mean for the origin of the coronavirus, one is struck by how relentlessly fake everything is, from public health experts to science.

One of the things the emails suggest is that Fauci colluded with Peter Daszak – head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled US research funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to suppress and dismiss any notion that the virus causing Covid-19 may not have evolved naturally.

Thing is, Daszak actually went around giving interviews about his work in China throughout last year, and nobody in the media thought to connect the dots. Simply put, Donald Trump said the virus came from China and might have come from a lab, therefore that had to be wrong and racist, end of story, case closed.

That’s just one, most recent and most acute example of Narrative trumping reality at all cost. Millions of deaths, widespread destruction of the economy, tectonic changes in society itself? Small price to pay for “progress” and ensuring the “correct” outcome of the 2020 election, the fortifiers of Our Democracy might say, without anyone batting an eye. “Build back better!” the press parrots instead.

Trump disagreeing with CNN is a mortal threat to democracy and free speech, but Biden telling a reporter he’d rather run her over with an electric truck than answer a question about the war currently going on in Israel is a funny joke, haha, how hilarious. What flavor of ice cream did you order, sir?

This may seem partisan at first blush, but let’s remember this is the same media that once proudly carried water for the narrative about “Saddam’s WMDs.” So the old Democrat-vs-Republican dichotomy doesn’t really work here, and misses the bigger picture to boot.

A truly free society would have no official narratives, Australian columnist Caitlin Johnstone wrote earlier this week. Thing is, modern societies are not free, and official narratives are all they really have. Where would Joe Biden’s legitimacy be without the January 6 Capitol “insurrection” narrative?

American founders codified the First Amendment because they regarded a free press necessary for a free republic. Yet the corporate media complex and their Big Tech counterparts have become a lapdog, not a watchdog, of power. Even the agencies, once thought neutral and objective, are in on it. AP literally rewrote its stylebook to limit the use of “riot” last summer. Reuters “fact-checked” Biden’s eulogy for Robert Byrd as false because the Democrat senator wasn’t a “grand wizard” of the KKK but merely an “exalted cyclops.”

What this Orwellian replacement of facts with narratives does is condition the public to echo Hillary Clinton’s infamous Benghazi defense: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

“Facts” mean nothing to this crowd. “Science” isn’t a rigorous process of finding the truth, but a word-totem invoked to grant authority and banish dissent. “Truth” is whatever they declare it is at the moment, and when it stops being convenient they’ll shamelessly go back and rewrite their own words, pretending all along that that’s what they’ve always believed. Yes, it’s literally Orwellian behavior, but they don’t seem to care.

After all, what are you going to do, change the channel? Actually, that’s happening. Month after month, ratings reports show CNN and MSNBC getting their clock cleaned by Fox News – and Tucker Carlson in particular. The response is to triple down on wokeness and Democrat talking points, while waging a veritable jihad against Fox for “misinformation.”

To think that the media will come to their senses when the reality of ratings hits them in the face, therefore, is foolish. They simply don’t give a damn. Could it be that they don’t care for money as much as they care about power? And not just proximity to political power, but the power to shape and control reality itself, to remake society according to their utopian ideas. Even assuming those ideas are good – and that’s debatable at best – having that sort of power corrupts absolutely, to borrow the expression from Lord Acton.

The media were meant to be a means through which the public collectively perceives reality – not the creators of reality itself! Yet they act as if the latter is true and intended. That’s dangerous. They believe themselves in control of reality, to the point where they’re impossible to reason with. Confront them with actual facts, or principles, or laws of physics, and they either censor you – or cackle and carry on.

Biden’s behavior starts making sense when you understand he exists in a fantasy world, entirely conjured by the press and his staff. As do thousands of activists, ‘NGOs’ and cultist consumers of US government grants around the world. How does one reach these people, who have internalized the “logic” of Who/Whom? That might be the most important question facing not just the US, but the world, very soon.

Despite having doled out nearly 800MM doses of its home-made COVID-19 vaccines, Chinese authorities are struggling with yet another stubborn outbreak in the city of Guangzhou. A week ago, we reported that local authorities had ordered China’s first lockdown since January. But while initial restrictions were relatively mild compared to the lockdowns imposed in Wuhan, and elsewhere, last year, authorities have decided to tighten restrictions as new cases have continued to be identified.

The AP reports that residents of the southern Chinese city will no longer be able to leave unless they can show that it is absolutely necessary to do so, following an outbreak of COVID-19 that has sickened dozens of people in recent days.

According to local authorities, anyone who is given permission to leave must show a negative test for the virus taken in the previous 2 days, according to rules issued by the city government that take effect Monday. The same rule applies to anyone seeking to leave the surrounding province of Guangdong.

The city also is restricting indoor dining, conducting mass testing and banning residents in high-risk neighborhoods from leaving their homes. At least two districts in the city of 18 million people have been closed off entirely. And any residents who have traveled through the Nansha, Huadu and Conghua districts of the city have been ordered to be tested for COVID immediately. Reuters added that authorities in Nansha also ordered restaurants to stop offering dine-in services while calling on gyms, pools and other public venues to temporarily cease operations.

Meanwhile, about a dozen subway stops throughout the city were also closed.

The variant causing the Guangzhou outbreak (the “delta” strain which was first identified in India and has since spread across the US and Europe and Asia) is believed to be more infectious because those who carry it are slower to display symptoms while shedding more virus particles.

And although Guangzhou hasn’t reported any deaths from the outbreak, the city reported another four locally transmitted cases in the 24 hours to Monday morning, bringing its recent total to more than 100 cases since May 21.

Nationally, the CCP has been focused on rolling out COVID-19 vaccines to an increasingly younger group of patients. And on Monday, the country revealed that it has authorized the emergency use of one of the Chinese-developed jabs, CoronaVac, for children aged between 3 and 17 years. Coronavac vaccine is being manufactured by the Beijing-based pharmaceutical firm, Sinovac Biotech. Study data show the vaccine has been found to be 51% effective against symptomatic disease and 100% effective at preventing severe COVID-19 and hospitalization on adults 18 years and above.