“That Was A Lie”: Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots

“That Was A Lie”: Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson ripped “the utter fraudulence of Tony Fauci” Wednesday night, after BuzzFeed and the Washington Post obtained thousands of pages of emails through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, revealing that the nation’s top virologist was telling the public one thing, while furiously working on damage control and narrative-shaping as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded.

According to Carlson, Americans assumed “that the man in charge of protecting the US from COVID must be rational and impressive,” adding “We also assumed he must be honest. But we were wrong.

“It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy federal bureaucrat – deeply political and often dishonest. More shocking than that we then learned that Fauci himself was implicated in the very pandemic he’d been charged with fighting.”

Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.” -Tucker Carlson

Fauci’s emails collectively show that “from the beginning, Tony Fauci was worried that the public might conclude COVID had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

“Why would he be concerned that Americans would conclude that?” Tucker asked. “Possibly because Tony Fauci knew that he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory.

“The emails prove that Fauci lied about this under oath,” said Tucker, who highlighted an email from scientist Christian G. Anderson to Fauci, saying that he and his fellow scientists felt the virus looked ‘potentially’ engineered, and that members of his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Fauci then sent an urgent email to his deputy – Hugh Auchincloss – with the subject “IMPORTANT,” and which read “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on … You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Attached to that email was a document titled “Baric, Shi et al – Nature medicine – SARS Gain of function.pdf” referring to Dr. Ralph Baric, a US-based virologist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology under Dr. Shi Zhengly (“Bat lady”) known for manipulating bat coronaviruses to better-infect humans.

Tucker then shows a clip of Fauci denying that Baric had conducted gain-of-function research, under oath.

“In retrospect, that looks a lot like perjury,” said Carlson, adding that early last year a lot of people at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were worried that COVID-19 had not occurred naturally, and were concerned that it had been manipulated in a lab in China – facts they were ‘determined’ to hide from the Public.

Tucker then notes that a group of top-level virologists were told to keep the contents of a teleconference discussion “in total confidence” and not to share information until next steps are agreed upon.

Screenshot “Tucker Carlson Tonight”

Carlson then mentioned Zero Hedge, after UK virologist Jeremy Farrar passed along an article in which we suggested COVID-19 was man-made.

“We now know that’s a more plausible explanation than the one we believed at first, and were told by the media – which is that corona came from a pangolin. And yet for the crime of saying that out loud, a more plausible explanation, Zero Hedge was banned from social media platforms. Until recently you were not allowed to suggest that COVID might be man-made. Why couldn’t you suggest that? The fact-checkers wouldn’t allow it. Why wouldn’t they? Because Tony Fauci assured the tech monopolies that the coronavirus could not have been man-made. And so the tech monopolies shut down the topic.” -Tucker Carlson

Carlson then showed an April 17 press conference in which Fauci told the American public that COVID-19 was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.

“At that point, what Tony Fauci just asserted as known, could not conclusively have been known. That was a lie.”

Watch:

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 21:45

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New York City Paid 114,000 Highly-Compensated Public Employees Earning $100,000+

New York City Paid 114,000 Highly-Compensated Public Employees Earning $100,000+

Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via RealClear Policy (emphasis ours),

New York City had more than 114,000 municipal workers earning $100,000 or more in 2019. That is up sharply from 76,166 employees with pay exceeding $100,000 in 2016.

Data comes a year before the pandemic hit and is the latest year available.

These were not just high-level employees like agency commissioners or deputy mayors. NYC employees included thermostat repairmen making up to $198,630; regular laborers hauling away $213,169; electricians taking home $253,132; and plumbers pocketing up to $286,245.

The cost of benefits would be additional and is not included in these figures.

These large paychecks are only sustainable because Congress bailed out New York City for $4.3 billion in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The federal bailout more than covered the overstated deficits of the city.

City officials estimated a $5.5 billion gap, but actual revenues came in $2.7 billion higher. Using $1.2 billion from reserves, and finding $1 billion in unspecified labor savings, among other things closed the budget gap.

Therefore, the federal money now exists for extra spending.

In December, Fitch Ratings downgraded New York City’s bond rating and issued a negative outlook. That was after Moody’s Investors Service lowered the credit ratings of both the state and city in October.

The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 21:26

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West Virginia Offers Gun, Trucks, & Piles Of Cash To Encourage Vaccinations

West Virginia Offers Gun, Trucks, & Piles Of Cash To Encourage Vaccinations

A handful of states, including California, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, and Ohio, offer vaccine incentive programs as subtle ways to encourage reluctant adults to get vaccinated. The latest is West Virginia, offering residents who get immunized the chance to win a tricked-out truck, hunting rifle, college scholarship, and the opportunity to win a $1.588 million grand prize, according to CNN

“The faster we get people across the finish line, the more lives we save. That’s all there is to it,” Gov. Jim Justice said on Tuesday. “If the tab just keeps running, the cost is enormous. The hospitalizations are enormous. We have to get all of our folks across the finish line.”

“You could win something that would be phenomenal,” he said.

The vaccination program, funded by federal pandemic relief funds, begins on June 20 through Aug. 4. As the state reports, 51.1% of its residents are vaccinated, peak levels of vaccine demand have already arrived. 

What better way to get West Virginians out of the house and jabbed with a vaccine than to offer them a chance to win free trucks and guns. We’re surprised ammo isn’t on the list. 

The vaccine incentive scheme also offers a $588,000-second prize, lifetime hunting, and fishing licenses, and weekend vacations to state parks. Justice hopes this will drive vaccination rates in the state higher as President Biden aims to vaccinate at least 70% of the US population by July 4. 

As we mentioned above, California, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, and Ohio are offering handouts and prizes to incentivize more vaccinations. These whacky programs come as peak vaccination rates were observed in late April. 

Source: Bloomberg 

According to Bloomberg, “the latest vaccination rate is 1,230,767 doses per day, on average. At this pace, it will take another 5 months to cover 75% of the population.” 

So it’s plausible President Biden misses his July 4 vaccination target unless more states offer free money and prizes using federal funds. 

Of course, what Biden, Fauci, and their big pharma friends are afraid to admit is that (as Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Marty Makary notes) around half of the unvaccinated have natural immunity from previous infection – and thus we are much closer to herd immunity than the bureaucrats would care to admit.

Furthermore, as Dr. Harvey Risch of Yale and Dr. Peter McCullough of Texas A&M discuss with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, many Americans now have long-lasting natural immunity to COVID (and expose the needlessness and danger of vaccinating those with natural immunity, and mask mandates for children).

As Makary noted in a recent op-ed, “Don’t buy the fearmongering: The COVID-19 threat is waning.”

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 21:05

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Drivers Of The New UFO Narrative Keep Absurdly Saying They Could Be Dangerous ETs

Drivers Of The New UFO Narrative Keep Absurdly Saying They Could Be Dangerous ETs

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

I’ve been learning as much as I can about the new UFO narrative the political/media class have been pushing in conjunction with the US military to prepare for the Senate report that’s due to be released this month.

One of the disconcerting things I’ve been seeing again and again from all the major players in this new narrative like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon is the absurd assertion that not only is it entirely possible that the unknown phenomena allegedly being regularly witnessed by military personnel are extraterrestrial in origin, but that if they are extraterrestrial they may want to hurt us.

Mellon, the former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who helped get the ball rolling on UFOs entering mainstream attention back in 2017 when he leaked three Pentagon videos to The New York Timeshas stated that he sees extraterrestrial origin as an entirely possible explanation for these phenomena.

“We don’t even understand how you could do something like that,” Mellon said in a recent interview with CTV News of the inexplicable maneuvers and features these aircraft supposedly demonstrate.

“We don’t even understand the science behind it. Not like somebody’s a couple generations of fighter jet behind us; I mean this is a whole difference of kind, not degree.”

Asked why the pilots of mysterious aircraft with incomprehensible scientific advancement might want to monitor the US military, Mellon said the following:

Well probably for the same reason we do: to understand what kind of threat we could pose to them. Should a conflict arise they want to be able to engage us effectively, defeat us rapidly, at minimum cost of life and treasure, just as we would on the other side. We do similar kinds of things; we don’t have vehicles quite like this, but we’re certainly very actively monitoring military forces of other countries.”

The notion that UFOs could pose a threat to humans whether their alleged operators are from our own world or from another is being promoted by the main drivers of this strange new plotline, and it is being enthusiastically lapped up by many UFO enthusiasts who see framing these phenomena as a national security threat as the best way to get mainstream power structures to take them seriously and disclose information to the public.

This is bothersome for a couple of separate reasons.

Firstly, it is of course bothersome because one ought to be bothered any time military and intelligence insiders make unsubstantiated claims that there’s a foreign threat to US security. The added notion that this foreign threat could be from another world carries all kinds of implications for what kinds of unprecedentedly radical policy and funding adjustments would have to be made in order to counter this supposed threat, and it would take an appalling amount of gullibility to believe that those adjustments would be made for that reason at this point in time instead of the very obvious reason that the US is in a new and escalating cold war with both Russia and China.

Secondly, it’s bothersome because it just says so much about human madness that people believe UFOs could simultaneously be the product of an immensely advanced extraterrestrial civilization, and also be a threat. They could be one or the other, but not both.

Just in our own tiny blip of recorded history, humanity has matured mentally and emotionally during our time on this planet. We no longer accept it as normal for our governments to torture someone to death in the town square, for example, and owning another human being as property is now seen as reprehensible. We’ve still got a mountain of inner demons to conquer, but you also can’t deny that we’ve created a much more conscious and peaceful world for ourselves than the one we used to live in.

Imagine how much further an intelligent life form would have progressed if it began maturing millions of years earlier than ours. Imagine how emotionally and intellectually developed a civilization would have to be to make it past all the self-imposed dangers its own intelligence posed to it like the dangers human intelligence poses to us now, if it had passed the great test and cleared that hurdle in its maturation process, and then gone on maturing for thousands or millions of years past the point we’re at now.

When I bring this up online people tell me, “Well look at what the Europeans did when they met indigenous populations! That’s what happens when a more advanced civilization meets a less advanced one.”

You see this ridiculous notion pushed everywhere, including by supposedly smart people like Stephen Hawking, that Europeans meeting the indigenous people of Africa, Australia and the Americas is a good model for what we could expect from an encounter with a civilization millions of years more advanced than our own. This reveals a fallacious assumption that genocidal Europeans were in fact “more advanced” than the other humans they met around the world; they were a bit more technologically advanced, but any research on the horrific things they did to those people will show you that they were emotionally infantile by today’s standards. It also looks at humans who began developing on the same planet at the same time as comparable to extraterrestrials who would have begun developing long before us.

Beyond the fact that we have seen in our own experience that an intelligent consciousness will keep expanding its consciousness over time, the most glaring piece of evidence that UFOs could pose no threat to us if they are extraterrestrial is that if they did, they would have taken us out long ago. UFO encounters have been documented for generations; there is nothing humans could do to stop a sentient species that is orders of magnitude technologically superior to us, no matter what the movies say.

If extraterrestrials are here they clearly don’t want to hurt us, and why would they? What could we possibly have that they’d want? In the unlikely event that there is some kind of element or resource here that they need, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t get it elsewhere, or indeed that they couldn’t create it themselves at the level of scientific understanding they’d necessarily be operating from.

The idea that a civilization could attain a level of advancement comparable to ours, successfully learn to share resources and collaborate enough to avoid wiping itself out, continue maturing for a very long time, master interstellar, intergalactic, and/or interdimensional travel, create aircraft that can operate in the way people who encounter them describe, and then fly across the universe to go kill a bunch of barely-evolved primates for some reason is just absurd on its face, and even if such a thing could happen it would have happened already. This is humans projecting their own particular madness onto a hypothetical species far more mature than our own, myopically assuming that our collective insanity is some kind of immutable quality of consciousness itself.

I’ve sat through so much video footage on this subject, and I just get so frustrated listening to all these military-minded men talking about the need to know what the “capabilities” of these things are and how to prevent them from posing a threat to “national security”. If we are in fact not alone in this universe and are in fact being visited by other civilizations, these are the absolute stupidest questions we could possibly be asking ourselves about them. Not how can we contact them, not is it possible to communicate with them, not what could we learn from them, not where are they from and what is their story, but how can we kill them if we need to.

I have no idea if we are being visited by ETs, but if we are the US military is literally the worst thing our species could possibly use to relate to them.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 20:45

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Landlords Hosed After Appeals Court Tosses Bid To Resume Evictions

Landlords Hosed After Appeals Court Tosses Bid To Resume Evictions

Landlords across the country, the least-pitied group of Americans, were handed a loss on Wednesday after  a federal appeals court in Washington DC denied a request to resume evictions amid a contentious dispute over a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) moratorium during the pandemic.

To recap, last month US District Judge Dabney Friedrich struck down the CDC moratorium on evictions, finding that the agency had overstepped its authority – yet agreeing to block her own ruling from taking immediate affect in order for the Biden administration to launch an appeal, according to The Hill.

In response, the plaintiffs – which includes the Alabama Association of Realtors and several co-plaintiffs – asked the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to lift Freidrich’s stay, which was denied on Wednesday in an unsigned order. The court added that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had “made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed” in its appeal.

“HHS has demonstrated that lifting the national moratorium will exacerbate the significant public health risks identified by the CDC because, even with increased vaccinations, COVID-19 continues to spread and infect persons, and new variants are emerging,” wrote the court.

Enacted in September as a public health measure, the CDC order was designed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus by helping cash-strapped tenants avoid homeless shelters or other crowded living spaces. The eviction pause was later extended through June.

Renters can demonstrate their eligibility for CDC eviction protections by signing a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury, attesting that they would face overcrowded conditions if evicted and certifying that they have made partial rent payments to the best of their ability.

A number of other judges across the country have ruled on the eviction ban’s lawfulness, with landlords holding a slight advantage in their win-loss record against the federal government. -The Hill

Over 56,000 eviction actions have been filed since the pause took effect last September – almost half of which were filed this year according to a study by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project of seven states.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 20:25

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Biden & ‘The 1-Percent’

Biden & ‘The 1-Percent’

Authored by Andy Puzder via RealClearPolitics.com,

In a speech last week introducing his proposed $6 trillion 2022 budget, President Biden claimed that the benefits of the Republican Party’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “went to the wealthiest 1% of America.”

It’s not the first time he’s made this claim.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Biden described the TCJA as a “huge windfall” for “those at the very top.”

To right that wrong, he proposes getting rid of loopholes and raising the top tax rate from its current 37% to 39.6%.

Why? So that “the wealthiest 1% of Americans” will “pay their fair share,” a phrase that the president and his fellow Democrats repeat with abandon.  

But there’s a big problem with Biden’s claims: They are simply untrue. It’s time Republicans started more aggressively pointing that out.

Let’s start with that supposedly “huge windfall” that went to the “wealthiest 1%” of America.

While the TCJA reduced effective income tax rates for all income groups in 2018, the top 1% experienced no windfall. Rather, according to the most recent IRS income tax data, the top 1% of taxpayers paid $616 billion in 2018, roughly the same amount they paid in 2017. But the bottom 99% paid $65 billion less. Some “windfall.” If the TCJA was a tax cut for the rich, it was the weirdest one in the history of tax cuts for the rich.

But did those evil 1-percenters pay their fair share? Turns out they did – and certainly a larger share than when tax rates were last at Biden’s proposed 39.6%.

In 2018, while the top 1%’s share of adjusted gross income declined slightly to 20.9% (from 21.0% in 2017), its share of the income tax burden increased to 40.1% from 38.5%. “Fair” is in the eye of the beholder, but consider: The top 1%’s share of taxes paid nearly doubles its share of income. For more “fair share” perspective, consider that in 2018, the top 1% paid more in income taxes than the bottom 90% of taxpayers – combined.

Biden also might be surprised to learn that the top 1% actually paid a higher percentage of income taxes in 2018 under the TCJA than in any year since at least 2001 – when it paid 33.2%. That includes each of the five years from 2013 to 2017 following the Obama tax hikes, when the top rate last stood at 39.6% – the rate Biden is currently proposing.  

You read that right. The highest earners paid a greater share of income taxes after the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts than they paid after the Democrats’ 2013 tax increase.  But how can that be if the top tax rate in 2018 was only 37%?

Well, the TCJA increased taxable income for wealthier Americans by reducing the itemized deductions they could claim. High earners generally benefit more from itemizing deductions. Lower earners generally benefit more from the standard deduction. The TCJA increased the standard deduction and limited itemized deductions. 

According to IRS data, following the TCJA, the amount taxpayers claimed for itemized deductions dropped by 55%, from about $1.46 trillion in 2017 to about $650 billion in 2018. That’s over $800 billion that was taxed in 2018 but not in 2017.

The TCJA’s capping the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) at $10,000 was responsible for $480 billion of that decrease – a whopping 59%. But Biden supports restoring the SALT deduction even though that deduction benefits mostly the upper-income taxpayers he so desperately wants to tax. Why would he want to do that?

Well, the SALT deduction primarily benefits high earners in high-tax blue states. So Biden is not alone is seeking to restore it. Repealing the cap President Trump put on the SALT deduction is a top tax priority for Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who want either to increase or eliminate the $10,000 cap as part of Biden’s infrastructure bill.

Like Biden, these legislators also claim to favor closing tax loopholes for the wealthy – just not for their wealthy supporters. “Do you want to give the wealthiest people in America another tax cut?” Biden asked in his budget introduction speech. Apparently for the Democratic leadership, the answer is: Yes, we do.

So, the TCJA was not a windfall for the rich, and it did not result in the rich paying less than their fair share of income taxes. It closed loopholes – the largest of which Democrat leadership would like to restore – that primarily benefit wealthy taxpayers. Raising the top tax rate to 39.6% under Obama resulted in the rich paying a smaller share of income taxes than they paid in 2018 under the TCJA. There is certainly no guarantee that they would pay a larger share if Biden repeated Obama’s tax-increase error – particularly if the Democrats start restoring tax loopholes for their wealthy backers.

Republicans have the better part of this argument. They need to start making it.

*  *  *

Andy Puzder is the former CEO of CKE Restaurants, a board member of the Job Creators Network, and the author of “The Capitalist Comeback: The Trump Boom and the Left’s Plot to Stop It.”

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 20:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gkM2WT Tyler Durden

SoftBank-Backed Construction-Industry-“Transforming” Company Katerra Collapses After Billions In Investment

SoftBank-Backed Construction-Industry-“Transforming” Company Katerra Collapses After Billions In Investment

Oh how the mighty continue to fall.

Katerra, the construction giant that was backed by SoftBank, has officially told its employees that it is shutting down its operations. Katerra “had promised to shake up the construction industry with its efficient factories, prefab parts and modular construction units,” Bloomberg had reported on the company in the past.

But now the only thing it’s shaking up are the lives of the 8,000 employees it had globally, as of last year, according to TechCrunch, who pointed out that the company had already struggled “to find a viable business in cheaply building properties for real estate developers”.

The company was then beset by climbing labor and material costs associated with the pandemic (and perhaps now, the hyperinflation that’s succeeding the pandemic). 

“So, you guys use a lot of lumber, or no?”

SoftBank tried to bail out the struggling company, offering $200 million on top of the billions it had already invested in the company, to buy a majority stake. But, not unlike the WeWork IPO, Katerra couldn’t be saved. 

Bloomberg reports that the company is now likely going to walk away from “dozens” of projects it has already committed to. 

Among those being laid off are 117 workers in Seattle, according to The Seattle Times. The losses are expected to take effect on June 4. 

CEO Masayoshi Son had called Katerra one of his “regrets” in an interview with Barron’s last month. The company had raised more than $2 billion since its founding in 2015. 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 19:45

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Chamber Of Commerce Confirms US Labor Shortage Is A “National Economic Crisis”

Chamber Of Commerce Confirms US Labor Shortage Is A “National Economic Crisis”

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

A report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned that a recent labor shortage plaguing businesses nationwide is worsening, describing the situation as a “national economic crisis.”

The Chamber’s report released Tuesday found that the United States had a record 8.1 million vacant job openings in March—the last month where data was available—noting it was an increase of 600,000 from February.

But, the Chamber stressed that there “are approximately half as many available workers for every open job,” or 1.4 available workers per job opening, across the country “and the ratio continues to fall.” Compared with the previous 20 years, there were 2.8 available workers per job opening, according to the organization.

“In several states and several industries, including hard-hit sectors like education and health services as well as professional and business services, there are currently fewer available workers than the total number of jobs open,” the report found, adding that more than 90 percent of local Chambers of Commerce have reported that worker shortages are hurting their economies.

The report also pointed to an underwhelming April jobs report released by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found that just 266,000 jobs were created. Analysts had expected that more than 1 million would be created.

“Even with 9.7 million unemployed at the beginning of April, workers’ reluctance to return to work and fill open positions was one reason for the lackluster job creation,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote.

“Another could be that employees know just how easy it is to get a new job—the percent voluntarily leaving their current job is now above pre-pandemic levels.”

The states with the lowest worker availability rate include Vermont, Nebraska, and South Dakota, the organization found. All three states had a ratio of less than 1.

In the past several weeks, around two dozen GOP-led states have decided to opt out of the federal unemployment program that provided $300 per week during the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans have criticized the provision, which was first introduced in the March 2020 CARES Act and was extended several times in subsequent bills, as creating an incentive for people not to work.

The issue was perhaps crystallized in April when a McDonald’s franchise owner in Tampa, Florida, authorized paying people $50 just to show up for job interviews but was still struggling to find employees.

According to reports, Arizona, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma have authorized a return-to-work bonus between $500 and $2,000.

“We’re going to use federal money to encourage people to work instead of paying people not to work,” Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in May.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 19:25

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Housing Hubris: Mortgage Apps Plunge Despite Homebuilder Euphoria

Housing Hubris: Mortgage Apps Plunge Despite Homebuilder Euphoria

After a brief pause, mortgage applications tumbled again last week (-4.0% WoW after falling 4.2% WoW the prior week), to their lowest level since February 2020.

Source: Bloomberg

And while refis have now stagnated, home purchase applications have plunge to a new post-pandemic low as the ‘dopamine of collective euphoria’ in the housing market wears off…

Source: Bloomberg

As Kara Cox recently wrote at WolfStreet.com, having lived both in the Bay Area during the dotcom explosion and NYC during the MBS explosion, I know a thing or two about financial bubbles. Or at least how they feel in the moment: akin to being at a frat party at 2 am. Everyone is spewing garbage but thinks they are a genius, and the only way to make sense of it all is to drink up or take yourself home.

That’s bubbles.

And while homebuilders remain euphorically optimistic, homebuyers (according to the latest sentiment surveys from UMich and The Conference Board) have hardly ever been more gloomy in their buying attitudes…

Source: Bloomberg

As prices continue to roar ever higher on a bed of renewed lower mortgage rates and helicopter money…

Source: Bloomberg

As Christophe Barraud wrote earlier in the week, coupled with a shortage of homes for sale, low mortgage rates are supporting housing prices. On Tuesday, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index (20-City Composite) soared 13.27 percent in March (up from 12 percent in February). In the meantime, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index of national property values climbed 13.19 percent YoY, the biggest jump since December 2005. Furthermore, the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency) purchase-only price index rose 13.9 percent YoY in March, the largest jump on record.

Even though housing prices growth will slow this summer (due to unfavourable base effects, a rebound in inventory, the end of foreclosure moratorium and mortgage forbearance), the trend will gain traction in the short term. According to my proxies, the S&P Corelogic index for April — that will be released on June 29th — should increase by more then 14 percent on a YoY basis.

Focusing on monetary, the debate concerning MBS purchases from the Fed will gather more attention in the coming months. It will likely result in tapering before year-end… and go back up to the first chart above to see what happened then.

As Kara Cox concludes so poignantly, it is only in retrospect in which everyone saw it coming, knew it couldn’t last, etc. We didn’t, for the most part. It is easy to look back with derision about the Dutch and their bout with overpriced tulips, but is that so much different than what happened with Pets.com? Or when folks rushed to own homes in 2005?

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 19:05

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The Key Missing Ingredient In Biden’s $6 Trillion Budget Is Honesty

The Key Missing Ingredient In Biden’s $6 Trillion Budget Is Honesty

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

How big is Biden’s $6 trillion budget and what are the admitted implications?

That seemingly simple question is the subject of a scathing attack on Biden by the Washington Post.

WaPo Columnist Marc A. Thiessen says Biden’s Budget is a Lie.

Q: How big a lie? 
A: Another $5.8 trillion.

Thiessen calculates that by adding up all of Biden’s campaign promises and items in the budget that are not reasonable estimates. 

 Missing in Action 

  • Biden’s plan to create a “public option” for health care and lower the age at which Americans can receive Medicare, is nowhere to be.  According to Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl, Biden’s missing health proposals will cost $1.45 trillion. 

  • Biden’s plan to expand Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), as well as much of the K-12 spending and higher education spending that he promised are also missing.

  • Biden’s budget assumes the child tax credit expansion in his American Family Plan and long-term care for seniors — will expire before his 10-year budget window closes. Yeah right.

What About Tax Pledges?

The budget assumes that the Trump tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans will expire as scheduled in 2025.  That’s a hike according to Thiessen 

My take is that if it’s not in the budget then it’s not in the budget.

However, lies are still lies. I will let others debate how much is in the budget unaccounted for vs. lies that never made it to the budget. 

Secular Stagnation

The Wall Street Journal also has an interesting take on Biden’s budget.

Please consider A Future of Secular Stagnation.

One critique of President Biden’s historic spending blowout is that it steals economic growth from the future in return for a temporary surge in the next two years. Imagine our surprise to see the White House confirm this criticism in its own budget proposal.

The White House predicts a two-year growth boom of 5.2% in 2021 and 4.3% in 2022, as the country returns to normal after the pandemic and record amounts of government spending flood the economy to goose consumer demand.

But the White House says growth will sink to 2.2% in 2023, and then average below 1.9% for the next eight years. 

The White House economic analysis boils down to an assertion that slow growth is inevitable. Some on the left are even praising the Biden White House for the “honesty” of its slow-growth forecasts. 

To put it bluntly, this is a budget that is anticipating America’s economic and political decline. The question is whether the American people will settle for it.

White House Projections

That’s nine years without a recession. Anyone believe that?

And don’t forget the Lie of the Day From Biden: My Budget Will Pay for Itself

Yellen’s and Biden’s assumptions are the same as every politicians’, this debt will pay for itself.

In practice, it never does and Biden’s budget won’t pay for itself either.

From top to bottom it’s all a pack of lies, same as always. Presidents come and go and the lies persist. 

Nothing has changed except Biden’s budget lies are so big that even WaPo feels obliged to point them out.

Thiessen concluded: “From spending to taxes, Biden’s budget is a lie. He plans to tax you more and spend far more of your money than even his record-breaking budget plan admits.”

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/02/2021 – 18:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3uUdDn3 Tyler Durden