Month: June 2021

Former President Donald Trump planned to haul Anthony Fauci in front of a US presidential commission as part of a larger effort to hold China and its collaborators responsible for the pandemic, according to The Australian.

Trump’s team, spearheaded by adviser Peter Navarro, had gone so far as to draft an executive order and compile a reparations bill, however the advanced plans were scrapped at the last minute after Trump’s ever-helpful advisers (Larry Kudlow in particular) talked him out of it, according to an upcoming book on the origins of COVID-19, What Really Happened in Wuhan.

Mr Trump was “enthusiastic” about creating a presidential commission similar to those whichprobed the 9/11 terror attacks and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

A White House executive order was drafted in August 2020 stating: “By the authority vested inme as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: The National Commission on the Origins and Costs of COVID-19 is hereby established.” –The Australian

The executive order was adviser Peter Navaro’s idea, and had the support of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump wanted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to head up the commission, according to the draft Executive Order, while Pompeo’s senior policy adviser Mary Kissell and China adviser Miles Yu were slated to act as co-chair and vice co-chair or executive director.

Sessions on geopolitics and a general from Fort Detrick – home to the US biological defense program in Maryland, would run the virology portion of the inquiry – during which Fauci would be brought in to explain why he funded risky coronavirus research in Wuhan. Peter Daszak, head of nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (who received millions in funding from Fauci’s NIH) would be grilled on the missing WIV virus database, among other things.

Other revelations from the book include:

• President Biden scrapped a State Department effort by its Arms, Control, Verification and Compliance Unit to formally confront China in Geneva over its cover-up of the rapidly spreading virus, as well as alleged breaches of the biological weapons convention in the Wuhan lab.

• US officials suspected that China had developed a vaccine prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in a “sensitive but unclassified” internal report.

• US intelligence agencies sought advice from the highly-conflicted Daszak and Ralph Baric over whether the virus had a ‘natural origin’ or a laboratory origin. Daszak and Barick (of the University of North Carolina) both have long histories working with bat researchers at the Wuhan Institute of virology, and have insisted the virus could have only emerged via natural origin. As a result, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a statement saying it could not have been man-made.

According to the book, the executive order states that the commission would be tasked with investigating “the origins of the COVID-19pandemic; the economic, political social, human, and other costs of the pandemic borne by the United States; and whether the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party have used the pandemic to advance their own economic, geopolitical, military, or territorial agendas,” and would tally a bill to send to Beijing “to recover any damages as well as all costs estimated.”

Executive Order by Zerohedge

Pushback

Such a commission, determined to hold the Communist Party to account and ask it to pay reparations for the economic and human damage from the pandemic, would have been explosive, and significantly corrode already strained China-US relations. Mr Yu had an office setup in the White House to run the commission and Mr Navarro says, “We almost got to the finish line”.

But the presidential commission was killed off during a meeting in the Oval Office where Mr Trump’s economic advisers argued fiercely against it.

Other officials were concerned the commission would be seen as a political manoeuvre so close to the November election and be derided by the media.

One senior White House official said: “It was actually an excellent idea, just floated way too late.”

“It would’ve looked very political, and (we) had tried very, very hard to make the China issue nonpartisan.” -The Australian

“An inquiry like that is exactly the right thing but it was going to be almost impossible for President Trump to appoint a commission that was going to be viewed as bipartisan,” said one senior Trump official, adding “People were too crazed on the left. I don’t think the left would have participated in it.”

According to Navarro, killing the plan was a mistake. “They’re all China apologists,” he said, adding “(Director of the National Economic Council Larry) Kidlow is just stupid, Dumb. You can quote me on that.”

“That was the biggest heartbreak in my four years at the White House. I worked really hard to get that commission established.

“We had a presidential commission for Pearl Harbor, for the BP oil spill and for the Kennedy assassination. We need one into the origins of the coronavirus as well.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Shares in firearms related stocks nudged higher on Monday after a federal judge in California overturned the state’s ban on assault weapons late last week (which the state has 30 days to appeal before it takes effect on the 4th of July).

Vista Outdoor, American Outdoor Brands, Ammo Inc., Sturm Ruger, Smith & Wesson and Clarus all saw gains in early trading, while the S&P 500 edged down around -0.2%, according to Bloomberg.

“As a leading manufacturer of ammunition, I would imagine that anything that removes roadblocks to consumers purchasing firearms and ammunition would be a positive for Vista Outdoor (VSTO) – especially with management already recently confirming an order backlog that stands at ‘multiple’ billions,” said B. Riley analyst Eric Wold, who covers the stock and rates it a buy.

“The accessories and ammunition that would be purchased from VSTO could be viewed as a more valuable recurring revenue situation.”

The positive action in firearms also follows a Friday report that FBI background checks hit nearly 4.7 million in the month of March, the most since records began 20 years ago – a 77% increase vs. March 2019.

Background checks also hit a new record for the month of May.

According to CNN a record number of those purchasing guns are first-time buyers.

“We’ve also seen, in times of civil unrest, that we see people go out and say that they need to protect themselves,” said criminology professor, Jack McDevitt in a statement to CNN. “So they’re going to buy guns to protect themselves.“

The only question – will they learn to use them?

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

This is a time of almost supernaturally-easy money. US financial conditions, in fact, have never been this accommodative, which is why junk bonds, CLOs, NTFs, cryptos, and meme stocks have been able to attract so much hot money.

But the velocity of money – i.e., how often a given dollar is spent in a given span of time – has cratered. Consumers, it seems, aren’t nearly as enthusiastic as speculators.

This raises (at least) two questions:

1) Can the government force its citizens to spend money even when they’re terrified and/or depressed?

2) What happens if the velocity of money starts to rise, i.e., if economic behavior returns to normal? Won’t all that recently-created money careeing around the financial system be wildly inflationary and force the Fed to tighten way more aggressively than anyone now expects? If so, are we risking an inflation spike followed by an epic taper tantrum?

This could already be happening. Used cars are suddenly behaving like cryptocurrencies…

…as are houses…

Cars and houses are two of the least likely things to spike in a recession. Yet they did, right through the pandememic lockdowns and mass-layoffs.

This is, without question, inflation, but is it broad-based enough for normal people to start noticing? Yes and no. It’s definitely spreading from stocks and bonds to cars and food. But a lot of it is still hidden by governments and companies that don’t want to acknowledge it. One way this is accomplished is via “shrinkflation” in which prices stay the same but portions shrink or quality declines. The next chart shows that the process was already under way in the candy market before the pandemic.

By definition, shrinkflation can’t go on forever (or your Snickers bar will simply disappear). But quality can deteriorate for a long, long time, so it’s not clear when most people will conclude that inflation is real. Someday, though, they’ll have to.

Which brings us to gold and silver, the things that normally spike when inflation starts to run wild. Here, to take the most extreme possible example, is what gold did during Weimar Germany’s early-20th century hyperinflation.

If you think you know volatility, just wait.

Lately, a growing number of people have begun to wonder if all these strange financial trends (along with UFOs and lab-engineered viruses) are designed to achieve some broader, as yet unannounced goal. They may be right.

Guess we’ll just have to see what the man and his dog want from us next.

For once there was some good news for Angela Merkel’s CDU in the twilight of her political career, in a time when Germany’s legacy political parties are suffering from vast losses of popularity.

On Sunday, Germany held an election in the state of Saxony-Anhalt where Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were most likely to win in and fend off AfD. According to projections from public broadcaster ARD, the CDU is on course to win 36.9%, a vast improvement over the 30% it received in 2016 in the state, while the far-right AfD, which was pushing for the lead in recent polls, slumped to a distant second with 22% (24% five years ago) in the former communist region.

The Greens and Liberals (FDP) recorded minor gains, whereas in addition to AfD, the Left Party and SPD also suffered significant losses.

This was the final electoral contest before the national vote in September and will be a boost to the CDU’s Armin Laschet as he bids to succeed Merkel in the Chancellorship, because as Bloomberg notes, the result “showed he can successfully guide the Christian Democrats in a tight campaign. The outcome will help ease doubts about his suitability to lead Germany’s conservatives.”

“The national CDU under Armin Laschet now has the momentum on its side,” said Holger Schmieding, the London-based chief economist at Berenberg. “The concern that Laschet maybe a hindrance rather than a help should be deflated.”

In the run-up to the election, Laschet appealed to the state’s mainstream voters to back the CDU, saying it was important to defend democracy from the right-wing nationalist party. It was enough to gain a significant edge in Germany’s unsettled political landscape as the Merkel era draws to a close.

As Goldman notes in its post-mortem, although pundits see limited read-through to the September federal elections, “the strong showing of the CDU is likely to bolster the party’s momentum at the federal level. The results also show that despite its persistent inroads into Saxony-Anhalt’s voter base, a large majority still opposes the right-wing brand of identity politics championed by the AfD.”

Some more points from Goldman:

1. The conservative CDU won the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt—hailed as the last major political temperature check ahead of the September federal elections—by a much larger margin than the polls had suggested, garnering 36.9% of the vote according to the latest preliminary results, up 7.1 percentage points (pp) from the previous elections. The parties at both political extremes maintained their second (AfD) and third place (Left Party), but both recorded significant losses. The Greens and FDP recorded minor gains, whereas the SPD received its poorest result on record.
2. According to exit polls, the CDU’s gains reflected primarily the mobilisation of previous non-voters as well as significant net gains from the SPD, Left and AfD. Two-thirds of respondents rejected an AfD-led government, which likely explains some of the CDU’s gains especially among previous non-voters. A ‘Germany coalition’, between the CDU, SPD and FDP, is preferred in the exit polls, followed by a continuation of the current ‘Kenia coalition’ between the CDU, SPD and the Greens.
3. Although pundits downplay read-throughs to the September federal elections, the strong showing of the CDU is likely to bolster the party’s momentum at the federal level, with party members attempting to spin the result as a win for CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet (Exhibit 1). The Green party registered smaller gains than anticipated, but Saxony-Anhalt is not a traditional strong-hold. The election results also show that despite its persistent inroads into Saxony-Anhalt’s voter base, a large majority still opposes the right-wing brand of identity politics championed by the AfD, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, where it is under surveillance of Germany’s intelligence services.

As a reminder,  Laschet became the leader of Merkel’s CDU in January and stumbled out of the gate with the party suffering its worst-ever results in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate in March. That setup an ugly power struggle with Bavarian ally Markus Soeder for the right to be the bloc’s candidate for chancellor. While Laschet prevailed, he emerged bruised.

However, after Sunday’s remarkable reecovery by the CDU, Laschet can turn with renewed confidence to tackling the Greens and their candidate Annalena Baerbock, his main rival to lead Europe’s largest economy.

Separately, the environmental party’s momentum has stalled in recent weeks, and the trend was underscored by a smaller-than-expected gain in Saxony-Anhalt, which could cost the party its role in the state’s government. “We gained but not as much as we’d hoped,” the 40-year-old co-leader of the Greens said on ARD.

Germany’s political establishment, meanwhile, can breathe a sigh of relief. A victory by the AfD would have been the right-wing party’s first on the state level, triggering complex political maneuvering to keep them out of the regional government. Instead, as Bloomberg notes, Instead, Reiner Haseloff, the CDU’s state premier, has a range of choices to form a coalition for his third term. His current government consists of a three-way alliance with the Social Democrats and the Greens. He could replace the Greens with the pro-business FDP, which has also been gaining support nationally.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Another new scientific study has concluded that it is more likely than not that the COVID pandemic originated with a virus engineered inside a lab.

Dr. Stephen Quay and Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller revealed the findings in The Wall Street Journal Sunday, noting that “The most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science.”

The scientists added that “COVID-19 has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.”

The research points to the genome sequencing of the virus ‘CGG-CGG’, which is one of 36 sequencing patterns observed, but does not occur in nature.

“The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here,” the scientists assert.

“A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus,” they add, while also noting that the CGG-CGG combination IS commonly used in ‘gain of function’ research, which is known to have been used with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The scientists urge that those who believe COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans “must explain why it happened to pick its least favorite combination: CGG-CGG.”

They further ask for an explanation as to “Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?”

“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that?” the authors of the study ask, adding “At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”

This latest study comes on the heels of a revitalised focus on scientific research by Professor Angus Dalgleish of St George’s Hospital, University of London and Norwegian virologist Birger Sorensen which presents compelling evidence suggesting the virus was manufactured in a laboratory.

As the scientists noted, they were ostracised and ignored until recently when intelligence findings revealed that workers at the Wuhan lab fell sick with COVID-19 symptoms in November 2019.

As the global pandemic unfolded, scores of scientists came forward suggesting the genome sequencing of the virus was unnatural, and should be further investigated. The lab leak theory was effectively shut down, however, when scientists led by Dr Peter Daszak “orchestrated a ‘bullying’ campaign and coerced top scientists into signing off on a letter to The Lancet journal aimed at removing blame for Covid-19 from the Wuhan lab he was funding with US money.”

Daszak, who keeps appearing as the lead figure in investigations of the research he funded with US grant money via his own organisation, reportedly used his influence to get The Lancet to publish the letter, which stated that to even suggest the lab leak theory had any credibility was equal to spreading “fear, rumours, and prejudice.”

The release of Dr Fauci’s emails has also reconfirmed that Fauci was discussing the lab leak scenario with other scientists, and knew full well that it was a distinct possibility, despite making statements to the contrary in public, before any robust scientific research into the matter had been carried out.

Now former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, has revealed that Fauci briefed world health leaders in the spring of 2020 that the lab leak was a possibility.

Appearing on CBS News this past weekend, Gottlieb admitted that Fauci told government health advisors that the virus “looked unusual,” and that scientists he was working with “had suspicions” that it was manipulated.

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says he was informed by a senior Trump administration official in spring that Dr. Fauci briefed world health leaders in Europe “that this could have been a potential lab leak…so those discussions were going on.” pic.twitter.com/2OlTg8bMof

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) June 6, 2021

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On Monday a flurry of bombshell statements came out of Russia after at the end of last week Putin blasted the United States for using the dollar as a tool for waging “economic & political war” in an address before the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Amid a tightening US and EU sanctions noose, most recently surrounding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Putin also suggested a more “acceptable” scenario of European nations paying for Russian gas in euros, amid what alarmingly appears a broader de-dollarization effort which includes Russia’s sovereign wealth fund deciding to dump all of its dollars and dollar-denominated assets in favor of those denominated in euros, yuan – or further buying precious metals like gold. “The euro is completely acceptable for us in terms of gas payments. This can be done, of course, and probably should be done,” Putin calmly said Thursday.

And now Russia’s Finance Minister has announced preparations for stimulus to move FX liquidity into euros while specifying it’s mulling ordering state companies to switch to euros, according to RIA news. Additionally, Moscow said it’s responding to calls for more sanctions by “preparing” for possible disconnect from international payment systems, namely SWIFT. 

However, a mere couple hours later the Finance Ministry walked back some of the most provocative earlier official statements: “Russia will rely on economic means to encourage companies to shift from dollar to euro and doesn’t plan any restrictions on use of U.S. currency,” a follow-up report noted. 

Bloomberg noted, “RIA Novosti and Tass withdrew earlier articles citing Finance Ministry official as saying the government plans directives to order state companies to make the shift. RIA and Tass said the official retracted his quotation.” Perhaps this was yet another early “warning” signaling the West and no “mistaken” citation at all?… 

Here’s what the Monday TASS statements in questions said… “Russia is preparing for additional sanctions, and serious work has been initiated into dealing with the country’s potential disconnection from international payment systems, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin said at parliamentary hearings in the State Duma.”

“Of course, we need to prepare for additional restrictive measures, we usually call sanctions. It is clear that it is impossible to prepare for everything, but already in the economic and financial departments, serious work has been launched related to the transfer of settlements into national currencies, the introduction of payment systems,” Pankin said.

However, he also noted the Kremlin is planning for a lot of “what if” scenarios.. “you cannot get ready for all of them,” he stated. “It is clear that we cannot be completely shut down, in the current world, this is impossible… Today, nobody can fully support and develop themselves by their own efforts and means,” Pankin added.

Russia’s divestment from the Dollar is moving at an astonishing pace. https://t.co/3WYC47o2oT

— Tom Fowdy (@Tom_Fowdy) June 7, 2021

On the news the dollar briefly slipped to a session low while the euro jumped: EUR/USD jumps as much as 0.1% to 1.2176 before paring gains; trading modest ahead of U.S. CPI and ECB meeting; session range is a narrow 1.2145-1.2176, Bloomberg observed.

A few years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Washington was inadvertently accelerating de-dollarization with its aggressive financial sanctions, which were forcing its geopolitical adversaries to reduce their dependence on the greenback. Just last month, Russia reached a new milestone whereby fewer than 50% of its exports were paid for in dollars.

It appears that after years of steadily reducing its dependence on the dollar, Russia is about to intensify those efforts in a way that Washington will be forced to take notice.