Month: August 2021

As far as financial blogs go, Bill Blain’s Morning Porridge is – as MacroVoice’s Erik Townsend put it – “one of the most intriguing investment blogs on the Internet”. Readers of Zero Hedge will likely be familiar with his writings. A little over a week ago, as market’s rebounded from the worst selloff in months, Blain wrote “there is definitely a tinge of fin de l’age about current markets.”

Since then, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has delivered what Mohamed El-Erian described as “one of the most confusing #Fed press conferences in recent memory, again stalling for time with doublespeak on inflation (still “transitory”) and a job market that has shown a lack of “substantial progress” (because the government is paying people to stay home).

Some have trouble making the connection between inflation in financial asset prices and inflation in consumer prices. But Blain lays it bare in his latest interview with MacroVoices‘ Erik Townsend.

Bill: Yeah, I rather the opinion that inflation is not only here to stay, but the most significant thing that’s going on is we have long term inflation is now being imported into the real world from distorted financial assets. Everybody tells me that there’s no inflation out there. And what we’re seeing is just a transitory spike caused by supply chains breaking down, and things like the chip shortage and people who are anticipating a faster recovery. But what we’re really seeing is all the inflation that’s been generated over the last 12 years of monetary experimentation, quantitative easing, and buying back bonds and keeping interest rates artificially low, that’s generated tremendous inflation in financial assets. And that financial asset inflation is now creeping into the real world.

Later, Blain and Townsend touched upon a structural shortcoming with contemporary markets. The fact that a plurality of the people working in the industry today don’t even remember the financial crisis, let alone what’ 70s-style stagflation might be like. Fed-backstopped markets are all they have ever known. So, how can they be expected to understand what’s happening?

Erik: Bill, you and I grew up in the 70s. But we were kids at the time. And frankly, the guys that were working in the industry, and were around in the late 60s, when the onset of secular inflation began, they’re all retired. And one of the biggest things I think about is okay, who’s going to be in charge of rounding up all the guys that have been through this before when this secular inflation really hits the tape? What’s the finance industry gonna know what to do? Because I think everybody who knows is gone or retired.

Bill: This is one of the things that really scares me because the reason we’re in this environment at the moment, is a game of consequences. Everything that happens, everything you do today will have a consequence tomorrow. And the big issue for central banks for it as they we are talking about. Central banks have been experimenting with monetary policy, since the great financial crisis began in 2007. And in 2009, they came up with this brilliant idea that they could kickstart the economy with ultra low interest rates. And they would get money to flow into the economy by buying back bonds, which means that investors would sell their bonds and then use that money to invest in the real economy. But that’s not the way that trading works. We all know what investors did was a curse. They sold their bonds to central banks, and then bought more bonds to sell to central banks. And they used money from that to buy more bonds to sell to central banks. And this is what caused massive inflation.

Later, Blain added that he sees a “great divide” between people older than 40, and those who are younger. The issue is that “if you’re younger, uou tend to think that value is all about the price set by the market.”

In financial assets, the path of that happening was very simple. Interest rates started to fall. As a result, people saw that the yields and bonds were unsustainably low for their investment purposes. So they started going what we call yield tourism. And they started buying equity. Remember, equity is a much higher risk market. And they started buying so much equity, the equity market went up, and the dividend yields and equities also came down. That has been the consequence of ultra low interest rates, massive inflation, in financial assets. But here’s the critical thing that started 12 years ago. Now, 12 years in financial markets is an incredibly long time. The result is there’s practically nobody under the age of 35. In this city, in what we in the UK called the city but the world calls global finance, who understands investment markets, where it’s not completely normal for central banks to be repressing interest rates and distorting yields through their monetary experimentation and quantitative easing.

So every single fund manager under the age of 35, thinks this is perfectly normal. And that’s why when I’m out doing my job as an alternative asset investor, I see a great divide between those of us over 40 and those below 40, who’ve got completely different perspectives on what value propositions are. If you’re younger, you tend to think that value is all about the price set by the market as in a distorted market for as anybody over 40, we’re tearing our hair out, and we’re going, what is going on here? How can we accept interest rates being so distorted? Look at the effects, look at the overvaluations, look at the crazy stories that are created. So that point you just made about where are all the old guys. Well, you know, those of us who are who’ve been around the block a few times and the first time I traded treasury bonds back in, I think 1986. I think we were talking then about the beginning of the big bull rally in bonds. Where the year before traders were frightening me with stories about how yields have been 18%. And they were dominant double digits still when I started trading, and now, where are we on the 10 year? 1.2 or something like that. This is a completely different world. And there are very few of us left who remember what it was like.

The conversation eventually turned to one of the biggest topics of the week: the souring financial relationship between the US and China. The problem with China is of course that its economy is so big, that American investors almost can’t risk not having some exposure, given the potential for growth in the coming decades, where it’s economy is expected to eclipse that of the US. Since China’s big pivot back toward capitalism int he 1980s, “they have created a very effective economy very quickly.” What we’re seeing now is “games being played”. At some point, the US and Beijing will likely need to work something out (indeed, Beijing has apparently already realized that its economy still has more to gain than to lose by participating in US financial markets, which is why they have apparently reconsidered their IPO ban).

The success of China is being able to create capitalism with Chinese characteristics, which we all take to mean means that they’re not terribly innovative, and they steal ideas from others. Well, you know, that may be or may not be true. But the fact is, they’ve created a very effective economy very quickly. And what we’re seeing in the market just now is really, games being played, people trying to understand where this is going to go in the future. The Chinese economy is absolutely massive, we know that it’s going to soon be the same size as the US economy and that’s a massive investment opportunity. But the Chinese government takes a very different view, which is why we’re seeing them clamp down, as they’ve done in the last few months.

Just in the last few days, we’ve seen them declare the education companies, which we saw as a massive opportunity to profit from the Chinese market, have been told that they are no longer for profit companies, and they are there to serve the needs for the state. Well, to us that sounds, that’s frightening. We’ve invested all this money in all these free companies, which we expected would be able to harvest enormous returns from the Chinese population who are desperate to send their kids to cramming schools to make sure they get into universities. But from the Chinese perspective, the Chinese realized that they have a whole series of regulatory, and especially social problems to solve. And one of these is the success of one parent family rules that were introduced back in communist times. As a result, you could only have one child, which meant that the Chinese favored having sons who would keep the family name going and provide for the parents as they get older. But the result is China now faces an enormous demographic well, actually two demographic problems. The first is China is getting old before it gets rich and the second is they have a massive imbalance between males and females. They are far more young males then they are young females. So don’t ask me how that occurred. But it was a form of selection that we would have not tolerated in the West. As a result, the Chinese have got to find ways of encouraging families to have more kids. And one of the ways that are going to do that is by removing the threat of ultra high costs of educating your kids by making education free, and at the same time being able to tell the population that hey, look, what we’ve done for you. Education is free, everyone has access.

So when you’re looking at the divides between Chinese capitalism and Western capitalism, you got to try and put it into some form of context. And understand why is they’ve done these things. So I’ve just explained the thing by education, clamping down on FinTech, as they did with Alipay. And the problems we’re now seeing with Tencent, you can explain these in similar ways. It’s about the Chinese Communist Party, making sure they maintain their control and relevance. But for those of us in the West, we’ve got to say, you know, sit back and look and say, can we afford to be not invested in this economy. Now, there’s lots of reasons not to be invested in China, from our sort of social and governance perspective. What they’re doing in Hong Kong opposes what they’re doing to the Uyghurs on the western fringes, POLSAs, their surveillance capitalism is something that doesn’t fit here. But at the same time, there’s lots of things we do that they don’t like either. I suspect the future is we’re going to find an accommodation for China. But it’s a very difficult market, unless you’re really prepared to take the time to understand what’s going on to try and invest in. I hope that all makes sense to kind of gallop through about 400 different points in 400 seconds.

Readers can listen to the full interview below, courtesy of MacroVoices:

By Greg Miller of FreightWaves.com,

The fear voiced by Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka earlier this year was that “we will still have vessels at anchor come midsummer,” when terminals pivot to handling the peak season rush starting around Aug. 1. It is now midsummer. There are still vessels at anchor — a lot of them.

Logistics consultant Jon Monroe warned Thursday, “Now we have a myriad of charter carriers all introducing vessels into a China-Pacific Southwest service at the same time the large carriers are adding extra loaders. Expect the West Coast to be slammed the entire month of August. We are entering gridlock plus.”

Déjà vu in San Pedro Bay

The number of container ships at anchor in San Pedro Bay off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach rose back to 30 on July 23. There were 27 at anchor on Friday.

The all-time record — 40 — was set on Feb. 1. Beginning in mid-March, San Pedro Bay anchorage numbers gradually declined as ship arrivals were curbed, both intentionally by carriers to get schedules back on track and unintentionally because their ships fell too far behind. 

The 2021 low — nine container ships at anchor in San Pedro Bay — was hit on June 18, as fallout from the port closure in Yantian, China, further pared arrivals.

The following day was the turning point. On June 19, the total number of ships in the complex (at berths in Los Angeles and Long Beach, and at anchor) fell to 30. It hadn’t been that low since mid-October, when the anchorages first started to fill.

After June 19, the respite ended. Delayed Yantian cargo started to arrive. Import demand heading into peak season brought more ships. Between June 19 and Friday, the total number of ships in the complex increased 80% and the number of ships at anchor jumped 170%.

The data confirms that more ships calling in Los Angeles/Long Beach (both at berth and anchor) equate to a higher percentage of ships at anchor. Since the trend reversed on June 19, the share of ships at anchor versus the total has risen back up to 45%-55%, moving in the direction of the 60%-65% peak seen in the first quarter. 

Anchorages across US

In the second quarter, as congestion temporarily eased in Southern California, the numbers grew in Northern California: in San Francisco Bay off Oakland, and in the Pacific, where a large number of container ships were drifting, awaiting Oakland berths. Between anchored and drifting ships, more than 20 container vessels were frequently waiting for berths in Oakland in the second quarter.

The situation in Northern California has improved, at least for now. As of Friday, automatic identification system (AIS) ship-tracking data from MarineTraffic showed only three container ships drifting in the Pacific and six at anchor in San Francisco Bay.

Further to the north, the situation is not good. According to MarineTraffic AIS data, there were 16 ships scattered in various anchorages in the Pacific Northwest on Friday awaiting berths in Seattle or Tacoma: one each off Everett, Victoria, Port Angeles and Vashon Island; two each off Seattle and Bellingham, and three each off Manchester, Bellingham and Whidbey Island.

Over on the East Coast, where dredging slowed the cargo flow at the Port of Savannah over the past month, there were 17 container ships at anchor off Georgia’s Tybee Island on Friday afternoon, according to MarineTraffic AIS data. 

Just to the north in South Carolina, off the port of Charleston, three ships were at anchor on Friday.

On the Gulf Coast, yet another cluster of ships was at anchor, awaiting berths. In the wake of a two-and-a-half-day closure of Houston’s Bayport and Barbours Cut terminals due to a “hardware failure,” MarineTraffic AIS data showed seven container ships at anchor in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday afternoon.

Altogether, around 80 container ships are awaiting berths at ports on all three U.S. coastlines. And peak season is now set to begin in earnest, implying even more congestion ahead.

“Young people have to stop flattering themselves that they’re Nostradamus and would have foreseen had they been around back then everything that is unacceptable now,” Bill Maher said in his latest commentary on what he’s dubbed the “Bummer Games” after the Olympics have gone woke.

He highlighted multiple firings of top Olympic officials over comments that in some instances they made literally decades ago on Friday night’s episode of “Real Time”. “Why do we allow the people who just want to bitch always win?… This is called a purge. It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia.”

How bad does this atmosphere we’re living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is in fact an insanity that is swallowing up the world? #WokeOlympics pic.twitter.com/P9rJNs6nrs

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 31, 2021

He had introduced the segment by decrying that wokeness exclusively wants dour audiences to meditate always on the “sad things and bad people of the world”…

“Please don’t turn the Olympics into the Oscars,” the comedian and liberal commentator said during Friday’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “Oh, what was that? They did already?”

“You know, back in April, when the Oscars aired, I commented in this space that the theme of that evening was ‘We dare you to be entertained’ — lest your mind waver from thinking about the sad things and bad people in the world,” Maher said.

Maher continued: “How bad does this atmosphere we’re living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is in fact an insanity that is swallowing up the world?”

In a particularly glaring instance, the Olympic Games ceremony director was fired for a comedy act that included a Holocaust joke after footage had surfaced from the 1990s. There were a number of other similar firings of officials for things said or done in the far distant past.

In another example, “The creative director of the Olympics, Hiroshi Sasaki, resigned in March after comments he made about a female entertainer’s weight resurfaced,” according to The Hill.

“This is yet another example of how the woke invert the very thing that used to make liberals liberals. ‘Snitches and bitches.’ That’s not being liberal,” he continued.

During the segment he further called all the outrage over cultural appropriation “the dumbest thing of all” in the “woke penal code.”

Authored by Steve Milloy via RealClearEnergy.com,

Bad weather is wreaking havoc in parts of the world. The cynical climate alarmist community hopes it will help get Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar climate agenda through Congress.

“Amid summer of fire and floods, a moment of truth for climate action,” editorialized the Washington Post. So let’s look at the “summer of fires and floods.”

Yes, it has been very hot in the Pacific Northwest.  

Is this global warming, as alarmists want you to believe, or just weather?

The temperature reality is that there is no trend from 1911-2020 in very hot (i.e., 99F+) days in the Pacific Northwest. That’s according to Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and no one’s idea of a “climate denier.”

It’s out-of-control wildfire season again, which is being fueled by ongoing drought.  Climate alarmists, of course, expect the public to believe that the drought is caused by global warming. But the natural history of the West over the past 1,100 years shows that megadroughts lasting as long as 200 years are the norm rather than the exception.

And since the federal and state governments kicked out the loggers and stopped managing public lands 40 years ago, these wildfires may come back every year until there is nothing left in the West to burn. This is not global warming; it’s a combination of Mother Nature and bad government.

Then there is the catastrophic flooding from torrential rains that have hit Germany, China and India. In none of these places is such rain and flooding novel.

The region of Germany that flooded has a history of flooding that goes back to 1348, long before SUVs were invented. German towns often record this history on buildings.

China is also no stranger to flooding. The torrential rain that recently is no worse than the torrential rain that struck the mainland in August 1975, according to the regional weather bureau. If the flooding has been worse, it’s because land use and poor storm water management have made it so.

And there is no trend in monsoon rains in India, per the most up-to-date recordkeeping from 1871 to 2017.

Despite these inconvenient truths, could these calamities still be due to global warming? Well, there isn’t even much of that right now.  According to the most recent NASA satellite data, the average global temperature for June 2021 was slightly below the 30-average.

But don’t expect climate and weather reality to dampen the alarm repeated over and over every day in the media.

President Biden and Democrats plan to pass a $3.5 trillion “stimulus” bill in the fall. About $2 trillion of the spending is earmarked for climate.

Although no one has seen the bill, it reportedly will include a “clean energy standard” that will set mandatory goals for wind and solar power with an aim to eliminating fossil fuels from the electricity grid by 2035.  It’s extreme spending and policy that will affect every American and not for the better. Think frozen Texas windmills and California blackouts.

Even if you believe the Democrat and media line on climate, you should realize that global emissions are going up with no end in sight according to a new report the International Energy Agency. Part of the reason that emissions will continue to rise is that new electricity demand can only be met by more fossil fuel generation, according to another new IEA report.

Both Joe Biden and John Kerry have openly admitted that unilateral US action on climate will achieve nothing. China has no plans to cut emissions and the G-20 just failed to agree on quitting coal and climate targets.

Yet Democrats nevertheless insist on massive climate spending and changes to our energy system even though there is no conceivable way they will accomplish their supposed underlying goal of controlling the weather.

We are not living through unprecedented bad weather so much as we are living through unprecedented exploitation of it for bad ends.

A correspondent for Al Jazeera on Sunday cited “incredibly tense” fighting surrounding three major cities – Lashkar Gah, Kandahar and Herat – which could fall to the Taliban amid huge military pressure.

“The Taliban has picked up a huge amount of rural territory in the last month and now they are putting the cities under a heap of pressure, and then they can take that leverage back to the negotiating table,” Charlotte Bellis reported from Kabul.

Also on Sunday a major airport in southern Afghanistan has came under Taliban rocket attack. All flights out of the country’s second largest city of Kandahar have been halted after multiple rockets fired by the Taliban scored direct hits on the international airport in the early morning.

The runway was damaged in the attack, used for civilian air travel, but no casualties were reported. The Taliban took responsibility for the assault, while seeking to justify that it views the airport as a legitimate military target.

“Kandahar airport was targeted by us because the enemy were using it as a center to conduct air strikes against us,” a Taliban spokesperson told Reuters.

And further Al Jazeera notes that “The facility is vital to providing the logistical and air support needed to keep the Taliban from overrunning the city, while also providing aerial cover for large tracts of southern Afghanistan.”

“After seizing large tracts of rural territory and capturing key border crossings, the Taliban has now started to besiege provincial capitals,” the report continues amid the US troop withdrawal.

It’s now been widely affirmed that the Taliban does indeed control the majority of all major border areas and crossings throughout the country. Previously defeated Afghan national troops in a number of areas fled across borders, particularly into Tajikistan, where Tajik national forces have sent thousands of reservists to secure the border.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Congress recessed for the summer passing neither the infrastructure nor spending bills that were the focus of all of Washington’s attention for weeks thanks to Krysten Sinema from Arizona. She personally torpedoed the Biden Administration’s signature piece of legislation that took months to wrangle to that point and then gave the whole thing a big John McCain-like thumbs down.

The debt ceiling suspension put in place under Trump has not been renewed. We are currently more than $6 trillion over it as I type this.

Fungal President Joe Biden looked up from his jello cup long enough to implore Congress to extend the eviction moratorium for those behind on rent and mortgage payments which has been in place for more than a year. Estimates are 6.5 million people will now face eviction who are behind on their rent.

U.S. tax-cows have drawn down their savings at an alarming rate while facing this eviction cliff. But, hey, your per child tax credit is now showing up as a monthly check as long as the Post Office stays on the job. By the way, they are refusing to go along with Biden’s plans for forcing all government employees be vaccinated against a virus which isn’t killing anyone anymore.

This is awkward… pic.twitter.com/O1cZ7LLTSC

— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) July 31, 2021

This latest wave of homeless people wandering the streets of the U.S. over the next year will be used by the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) to demonize the evil Republicans for not DOING SOMETHING about this new crisis.

Never mind that it was wholly manufactured by locking down parts of the world and blowing up both the financial markets and disrupting the natural flow of goods that is a functional economy.

The panic many will feel will be real but the question is who is actually panicking?

Is it the “dirty spreaders” and “anti-science” losers who refuse to take an experimental gene therapy or the ones who ordered all of this insanity in the first place for their own personal and political gain?

Sometimes Losing is Just Losing

At every turn the Biden Administration lost major political battles in the past week. There is no denying that. That is an unqualified good thing. It ensures the anger and frustration over the direction of the country post-Trump will be unstoppable come the mid-term elections despite even the expected voter fraud next fall.

We can count on that just like we could count on it in 2020. But the bigger question I have now is whether or not we’ll actually have those elections if it looks like we’ll have a landslide on the populist side of the political ledger?

What the little people want is anathema to those that congregate every year at Davos, Switzerland to plot out their dystopian future plans for humanity.

So, the odds rise everyday that they will suspend elections in Germany or France as a trial run for next fall’s mid-terms. Book this prediction and double down on it regularly, you might make more on it than in the coming crypto bull market, but only just barely.

When you stop to think this through in normal political calculus, how can Biden and Pelosi spin their failures as anything like victories now? The truth is plain to everyone. They lied, cheated, stole and by all rational accounts staged a coup on January 6th.

They have everything they ever wanted… all the power of the Legislative and Executive branches while simultaneously cowing the Judicial branch into irrelevance …

… and a MILF from ‘Zona undid it all with a press release?

Don’t underestimate the chutzpah of these venal people to try because in Davos’ New Normal all instances of public decency are simply a dog whistle for latent fascists and white people racists.

But given this string of failures it is no wonder Pelosi is thinking about finally giving up her House seat. After all, what’s left to do after nearly single-handedly destroying every aspect of U.S. legislative procedure. I feel her ennui, there are just no more glass ceilings to break.

Pelosi bluffed hard on the spending and infrastructure bills but forgot that having a 50-50 split in the senate and a united Republican front who knows they are in the mid-term driver’s seat meant that any single Senator with a nominal “D” after their names could take ‘awesome power of the speaker’s gavel’ and shove it right up her saggy, angry bottom.

Cue Sinema, who is truly a free spirit. She also knows the situation in Arizona is a powder keg she doesn’t want to be near when it finally explodes over the results of the election audit.

Action Jackson Reaction

The Davos-beholden Democrat and GOPe reaction to these losses has been increasingly strident and desperate jawboning about the Delta Variant bogeyman while everyone in the West is sick and tired of this nonsense.

Then remember, it was just Monday where Biden was offering $100 to ‘please get the vaccine’ and by the end of the week we’re listening to this ….

They’re saying it out loud pic.twitter.com/JAn7QCxYky

— Echo Chamber (@echo_chamberz) July 31, 2021

This is honestly a bigger needle scratch then when the media turned on a dime about the COVID Lab Leak theory two months ago.

And all of a sudden millions of voices cried out in anger and couldn’t be silenced.

* CORRECTION: Millions, based on the videos we have seen so far from across France.

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) July 31, 2021

At every turn those in the highest cabinet positions of the Biden junta embarrass themselves with doublespeak and cognitive dissonance that even the most mind-virus addled normie can see as illogical. I know there’s no getting through to some people but it doesn’t take them to have a critical mass simply step back, fold their arms and say, “You know what? No.”

Saying “No” to Davos, however, comes with a terrible price. Just ask the Brits who’ve been locked down for more than a year since winning their ‘freedom’ from the EU via Brexit.

Now add in the vagaries of Mother Nature dealing with an increasingly precarious dance between the Earth’s weakening magnetic field and the Sun’s increasing activity and we have extreme weather all over the globe making the day of every climate alarmist ninny with a diaper on their face and a stick up their ass.

The Western half of the U.S. is either on fire or suffering from a crop-destroying/herd depleting drought which has everyone there looking to a dysfunctional, if not outright paralyzed, FedGov for help but there is none forthcoming. Supply chains for basic goods like meat, lumber, electricity and water are failing and the damage done to them will take years to undo.

These natural disasters wouldn’t be so difficult to deal with if Davos hadn’t pursued this Great Reset operation in the first place and carried it through the first six months of Biden’s anti-Administration.

But, you know, in for a penny, in for millions dead for the greater good.

Davos doesn’t even care about the people who are its staunchest supporters, no less those that it wants to destroy — meat eaters, individualists, white people and Christians, you know, most Americans.

Just look at their home turf of Europe. Floods wiped out whole towns in Germany while the presumed incoming leader, hand-picked of course Davos style, cried crocodile tears over hundreds dead while virtue signaling about Climate Change and laughing at the plight of the plebes he’s expected to lead in a few months.

At the rate the protests in France are going, the ECB will go bankrupt just supplying the Gendarme with tear gas and water cannons.

If you don’t realize that the Delta Variant only exists to make the excuse to cancel any election that is set to go against Davos then you really aren’t paying any attention at all.

Do You Really Need the Jab?

We have reached the moment where Davos’ plans to vandalize the American and European people are coming to fruition.

From this week’s events forward we will be in a state of ’emergency’ described brilliantly in V for Vendetta where the media is used to ratchet up the fear beyond any reasonable level and the people increasingly say, “Oh, bollocks.”

Or, as we say here in the States, “Fuck this noise!”

The ride from here will only get worse and our only recourse is to look to shoring up our local communities rather than hope for any saviors at the ballot box.

The rules have changed.

Democracy has been outlawed and the courts neutralized. The push for total control over your movement, your thoughts and your basic right to make your way in the world is no longer protected by law.

In fact, the law is openly hostile to your very existence. Just ask Australians and Canadians.

We’ve always known that public health was the cheat code to tyranny. Now we’re seeing it weaponized in a way that isn’t just creepy, it’s chilling in its inhumanity.

But the kids still think Communists care about them.

There is an urgency to this now that wasn’t there before. In the days after neutralizing Trump they backed off thinking there was more time, that there was more than a full year to stepwise up the pressure on us.

But it turned out that COVID-19 simply wasn’t deadly enough and therapeutics for it strong enough to unmask the agenda behind the operation.

So, Don Lemon can get stuffed if he thinks we’re going to give up our livelihoods when we could just buy ivermectin over the freaking counter and man up. But, that’s not something Don’s good at.

I suggest locking Don in his office and he can Door Dash his tofurkey and bean sprouts between segments of his unwatched television gig subsidized by fake Fed funny money. But no toilet paper for him or the vaxxed. That needs to be reserved for real men eating the meat and growing the soybeans and the sprouts while we sort out the pulpwood shortage he helped create.

So while they think it’s time to turn the unvaxxed into the scapegoats for why we all can’t have nice things, it’s quickly going to turn against them.

People like Don are there to create the consensus to justify the pogroms they envision in their oxygen-starved brains.

I’d smile and say something pithy like molon labe but it would be a little too on the nose.

The Long Dark or Just Long Dollars?

In the end, it’s not all doom and gloom. The signs are everywhere that the bonds holding this cartel of oligarchs together are breaking. I’ve talked about this in previous pieces. Honestly, you have to be a complete nincompoop to think Jamie Dimon and the narcissists on Wall St. will roll over to Herr Schwab without going a few rounds in the Oligarch version of the UFC Octagon.

Yellen may be trying to destroy Wall St. for Schwab but Powell and the FOMC are still on the job, even if they sound as incoherent on inflation as the CDC Director does on, well, everything.

I ask you to think again about the last two Fed meetings.

First, he drained overseas markets of dollars by raising the Reverse Repo Rate to 0.05%. This week he created a standing Repo Facility for foreign counterparties to hand them back those dollars. They’ll do this only because they are now desperate for them but it will drain them of their high-quality Repo collateral, i.e. US. Treasuries.

Since the Fed knows there will be no new U.S. Treasuries issued for the next few months thanks to the debt ceiling kerfluffle being unresolved, they need a supply of them to hand back to the banks they know are going to be in need of them.

The result was the first $1+ trillion print of the Fed’s domestic Reverse Repo Facility, which hands Treasuries back to the banks in exchange for dollars providing them with now very scarce collateral.

Downstream this should further destabilize overseas markets (read: Europe) while handing Wall St. and domestic banks all the collateral they could ever need to cover this dangerous period we are entering.

This, to me, doesn’t seem like Powell is playing in the same key as Yellen.

My bet is that whatever the Fed says at Jackson Hole will tell us just where the Fed stands in all of this and that will tell us whether or not we have any friends at all in high places.

The storm created by Davos has made landfall. The next two months will tell us just who is and who is not still on their payroll or is compromised by them. To me the key is the Fed. We’ll find out soon enough if Wall St. really isn’t down with the Commintern.

Either way, we’ve run out of time to prepare.

*  *  *

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Tens of thousands of people across several countries, including France, the UK, and Israel, have demonstrated against new anti-COVID restrictions, with the majority of the protests held in the Paris metropolitan area.

According to Reuters, in Paris and other French cities, more than 200,000 protesters flooded streets on Saturday, outraged about COVID-19 health passes. The passports were introduced as Europe is in the midst of the fourth wave of virus infections.

VIDEO – Huge crowd gathered in #Paris to protest against COVID health pass. pic.twitter.com/Ptnkzj0MnY

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 31, 2021

President Emmanuel Macron’s latest measures have resulted in the third week of protests. The new passports are for fully vaccinated people, those who have natural immunity, and or test negative for the virus within 72 hours. The passes must be shown before entering public transportation, bars, restaurants, and other public venues. 

#Paris sees third week of protests against the #coronavirus ‘health pass’ pic.twitter.com/84oclp6Kk2

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) August 1, 2021

The health passes are directed at forcing those who are not vaccinated to get immunized. 

However, when the government treads on freedom and forces a segment of the population to take an experimental vaccine, there will be blowback, especially when the first round of vaccinations were supposed to liberate folks and return life to normal. 

Now there’s more restrictions, less freedom, and the government wants to continue feeding people an experimental drug. People are beginning to turn on the government: 

“We’re creating a segregated society and I think it is unbelievable to be doing this in the country of human rights,” Anne, a teacher who was demonstrating in Paris, told The Guardian. She refused to give her last name.

“So I took to the streets; I have never protested before in my life,” Anne added. “I think our freedom is in danger.”

Protesters were also out in other metros, including Marseille, Lyon, Montpelier, Nantes, and Toulouse, yelling “Freedom!” and “No to the health pass!”

Paris today. Absolutely insane. pic.twitter.com/7tnM9CtkIS

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) July 31, 2021

Meanwhile, hundreds of anti-vaxxers protested in the streets of downtown London Saturday. Many folks were accompanied by their children and were infuriated that the government wanted to vaccinate kids. 

Protests held signs that read “leave our children alone” and “hands-off our children.” 

In Israel, hundreds took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the government’s new virus restrictions, such as reimposed mask requirements indoors and health passes. 

Protesters held signs that read, “There’s no pandemic. It’s a con.” 

The Delta variant worldwide has forced countries to reimpose COVID restrictions and implement health passes to mitigate the virus spreading. The government interfering with the lives of its citizens and whittling their freedoms has resulted in mass unrest. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing.

As with everything else in polarized America, billionaires proclaiming space tourism is the next big thing for humanity neatly divides opinion into two camps: those who laud the initiative, hard work and innovations of the billionaires as examples of the American Can-Do Dream, and those who wished the billionaire space tourists had taken a one-way flight to a distant orbit of blissful silence.

Setting aside that bitter divide, let’s explore another divide: how our two-tier tax system enables billionaires to become billionaires while the rest of us get poorer. Whenever I discuss the taxes of the non-billionaire self-employed, armies of apologists leap to the defense of the status quo with various quibbles: the 0.9% Medicare surcharge only kicks in above $200,000, the cap on Social Security taxes is $142,800, and so on.

Setting aside the quibbles–and recall the tax code with regulatory notes is thousands of pages–let’s deal with the real issue, which is that billionaires and their corporations pay a thin slice of taxes as a percentage of total income/gains if they pay any at all, while self-employed and small business pay extraordinarily high tax rates.

To all the quibblers: please add the 15.3% Social Security/Medicare tax rate (self-employed / sole proprietors pay both the employee and employer share of this tax) to the federal tax rate of 24% for income above $85,520. It’s 39.3%.

Just how hard would it be to conclude that everyone earning more than $142,000 should pay at least the same rate the rest of us pay? Aren’t we demonstrating all those same laudable traits of the billionaires, just on a smaller scale? Why should we pay 40% and the billionaires pay essentially zero?

Gee, do you reckon paying no taxes might help folks become richer? Garsh, nobody ever asked that question before. And do you reckon paying 40% of your income might make you poorer over time? Golly gee, how come the talking heads worshiping the billionaires never ask these questions?

Since Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the bedrock of America’s social safety net, why shouldn’t billionaires pay to support these programs? Well, why not? Just how lame do the excuses have to be to be recognized as laughably self-serving?

Here’s the trick billionaires use to evade taxes. There are countless ways for the super-wealthy to evade taxes–funnel earnings through an Irish post office box, buy a tax break in Washington DC, slide the money into one of dozens of global tax havens, and so on.

But a simple one is to report no income and live large off borrowed money. As the billions of dollars in capital gains pile up as the billionaire’s stock holdings soar (thanks, Federal Reserve, for the free trillions; awful swell of you to give us all that free money), there’s no income generated until the billionaire sells some shares. No sale, no income. Just pay yourself $1 a year in salary, borrow against your billions at super-low rates of interest, and voila, you’re tax-free while you build your super-yacht, buy your private island, and so on.

Just as a thought experiment, suppose the first $50,000 in earnings for everyone were tax-free, and a 40% tax rate was collected on all income above $1 million, both earned and unearned (capital gains), not when the gains were realized in a sale but at the end of every tax year, whether the shares that rose in value were sold or not.

So Billionaire Space Tourist reaped $10 billion in capital gains from the appreciation of stocks held, then the Billionaire pays 40% of those gains: $4 billion. There is a way to not pay any taxes on capital gains–have your portfolio lose value. No gains, no taxes. And to close all the loopholes, the tax rate is on all assets and income connected in any way, shape or form with the U.S. First they pay the U.S. taxes, then if they want to pay other nations’ taxes as well, be my guest. But the 40% is due and payable regardless of any other conditions.

You don’t like it, then stop selling any products in the U.S. or holding any assets in the U.S. Why should billionaires get to set up immensely profitable monopolies, quasi-monopolies, cartels and corporations in the U.S. but pay near-zero in taxes? Why should billionaires be free to profit from America’s economy but pay nothing to support its citizenry?

What precisely is the logic of reducing taxes on the wealthiest few to near-zero? If there is no logic, then we’re left with corruption: America is a moral cesspool.

The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing. Please note Karma and Divine Retribution are not controlled by the billionaire’s lackeys and apparatchiks in the Federal Reserve. The pendulum of exploitation has reached its extreme, and the reversal to the opposite extreme is underway.

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A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

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