Month: January 2022

Move over, Tesla, Apple, and other “not just a car company” entrants into the EV market: Sony is joining the race. 

At CES 2022, Sony announced it would set up subsidiary called Sony Mobility Inc. to focus on electric vehicles, Nikkei reported overnight. They also unveiled a new SUV prototype vehicle, about two years after announcing its first plans for EVs and its first sedan prototype.

The SUV prototype is called the Vision-S 02.

Sony Chairman Kenichiro Yoshida commented: “The excitement we received after we showed off the Vision-S really encouraged us to further consider how we can bring creativity and technology to change the experience of moving from one place to another.”

“I’m excited to announce we are establishing a new company for mobility, Sony Mobility Inc., to accelerate these efforts, and we are exploring a commercial launch of Sony’s EVs,” he continued. 

The company’s Vision-S 01 sedan sports two 200 kW electric motors and Level 2 autonomy, according to the report. It began testing on public roads in 2021 and its EV platform was manufactured by Magna Steyr with parts from Bosch. 

EV is still a vision that the company is considered pursuing, according to follow up reporting from The Verge, who made it sound as though follow-through still isn’t a guarantee. 

“We are exploring a commercial launch of Sony’s EV,” Yoshida said, to find out how a “creative entertainment company” can “redefine mobility.”

Considering that today’s minutes covered a FOMC meeting that took place some three weeks ago, with numerous Fed speakers having ample opportunity to set the stage for what was to come (talk about those famous Fed “communication” skills), it is rather shocking how powerful and violent today’s stock tantrum was.

But what exactly spooked traders so badly?

Well, as JPM Michael Feroli writes in his FOMC post-mortem, the minutes portray “a Committee on the march toward removing policy accommodation” which is not a surprise to anyone except perhaps the biggest cubic zirconium hands out in Seoul. Regarding the expected path of policy rates the minutes note that meeting participants generally see rate hikes “sooner or at a faster pace” than previously expected. Of course, this too had already been hinted at by the dots released after the meeting.

What was new in these minutes, and was also unexpectedly hawkish, were the clues given to how balance sheet normalization would play out. While most favored allowing assets to run off after the first rate hike, it was generally thought that this runoff would occur sooner after liftoff relative to the 2014-17 episode. Moreover, it was generally felt that the pace of runoff would be faster than the last experience: as a reminder, last time it took two years between the first rate hike and the beginning of balance-sheet contraction (see excerpt below) so the Fed is now hinting that it could shorten this to less than nine months so that runoff begins in 2022… or at least that’s how the market reads it.

And the other big surprise is that some on the Committee felt that tightening financial conditions by relying more on balance sheet runoff and less on rate hikes would help steepen the curve, a desirable outcome in their opinion, though it’s not clear this was a widely-shared view, especially considering the catastrophic conclusion to the Fed’s tapering in Sept 2019 when JPMorgan had to crash to repo market to force the Fed to launch Not QE (narrator: it was QE) when the financial system promptly ran out of reserves. Here is the section in question:

Some participants commented that removing policy accommodation by relying more on balance sheet reduction and less on increases in the policy rate could help limit yield curve flattening during policy normalization. A few of these participants raised concerns that a relatively flat yield curve could adversely affect interest margins for some financial intermediaries, which may raise financial stability risks. However, a couple of other participants referenced staff analysis and previous experience in noting that many factors can affect longer-dated yields, making it difficult to judge how a different policy mix would affect the shape of the yield curve.

Many participants judged that the appropriate pace of balance sheet runoff would likely be faster than it was during the previous normalization episode. Many participants also judged that monthly caps on the runoff of securities could help ensure that the pace of runoff would be measured and predictable, particularly given the shorter weighted average maturity of the Federal Reserve’s Treasury security holdings.

Separately, Feroli also notes that “many” also felt the recently-authorized standing repo facility should support faster and smoother balance sheet normalization, and as has been the case recently, “some” participants favored a quicker runoff pace for agency MBS relative to US Treasuries.

There were fewer surprises regarding the Fed’s views on the economy where the staff revised up their inflation forecast for coming years, noting the “salience” of ’21 inflation outcomes. On the labor market, some on the Committee noted that the recovery was already “more inclusive.” In the discussion of the labor force participation rate, the Committee sounded more pessimistic that participation would soon recover, if ever. More generally, “several” thought the labor market was already at maximum employment, and many others thought it would “fast approach” that criterion. It was also noted by “some” participants that liftoff could happen before maximum employment had been reached if inflation expectations appeared to become unanchored.

Commenting on the maximum employment assessment, Bloomberg economist Yelene Shulyatyeba said that “the FOMC participants’ labor-market assessment suggests they see the economy at or very close to full employment. Apart from ‘a number of signs that the U.S. labor market was very tight,’ policy makers also saw little potential for a significant short-term improvement in participation. Therefore, the economy may have achieved full employment earlier and with a smaller labor force than previously foreseen, which implies the need for tighter policy sooner than anticipated.”

We disagree with this for reasons we explained in “A March Rate Hike? Not So Fast“

Finally, while virus variant risks were noted several times, the overall tone of the minutes suggests this was not expected to be a major headwind to the growth outlook.

Shifting from JPM to Goldman’s post-mortem, the bank’s Jan Hatzius cut to the chase and titled his note with the big punchline. namely that “Fed Balance Sheet Runoff Could Start “Relatively Soon” After Liftoff.” Similar to Feroli, this is how he explains it:

The December FOMC minutes indicated that participants continued to view mid-March as an appropriate end date for net asset purchases. The minutes also noted that “some” participants said that it could be appropriate to start runoff “relatively soon after beginning to raise the federal funds rate” and “many” participants judged that the appropriate pace of balance sheet runoff would likely be faster than last cycle. 

In our view, today’s minutes increase the chances that the FOMC might be ready to reach a decision on the runoff process and issue new normalization principles in the second quarter, which could mean that runoff begins somewhat earlier than our standing assumption of Q4.  We still expect that the start of runoff will substitute for a quarterly hike, so that the FOMC would still hike 3 times total in 2022 if runoff begins in Q3, but an earlier announcement of the start of runoff would be somewhat less likely to substitute for a hike than one that comes toward the end of the year.

This is all fine and good, and it is certainly far more hawkish than the market expected, but it does raise several questions, as today’s market action indicated.

First, and foremost, back in 2018 when r-star was far higher than it is today, the Fed managed to get away with 8 rate hikes before a 20% drop in stocks forced Powell into a premature easing cycle in the summer of 2019, right around the time the repo crisis emerged and the Fed realized it needs to add far more reserves (and lo and behold 7 months later, we got just the perfect Made in China excuse to inject trillions into the financial system). So the first question is how many rate hikes can the Fed get away with now that global debt is orders of magnitude higher than it was just 4 years ago. 3 hikes? 4 hikes and a run off, before the next big crash forces the Fed into early easing.

Keep a close eye on fwd OIS swaps markets for the tell on when the next rate cut cycle/QE will start.

And tied to that are two more question: while it is clear that Biden is freaking out about inflation far more than he is about the prospect of a market crash, is the president even remotely aware of what a 20%, 30% (or more) crash in the market will do to Democrats in the polls, and midterms, not to mention 2024? Something tells us the answer is no.

Last but not least is the question everyone would like answered: just how is the Fed tightening financial conditions going to ease a historic supply chain collapse which is driven by countless other factors than just excess demand sparked by Biden’s stimmies.

We doubt we will find out the answer, but we also doubt that the market’s latest freak out about much tighter financial conditions – including 3 rate hikes and balance sheet run off starting in 2022 – will ever come to pass. Because if it does, the only question then is how long before the Fed starts monetizing ETFs, cryptos and NFTs to preserve the $145 trillion or so in US net worth parked squarely in the hands of the 1%, the only legacy the US central bank will leave on this earth.

While media coverage of the Elizabeth Holmes trial – and its ensuing guilty verdicts – was robust, there was one part of the Theranos narrative that the media seemed happy to tiptoe around.

That is, of course, Joe Biden’s involvement in the now-defunct and fraudulent blood testing startup.

Among dozens of investigative reports about Theranos and hundreds of articles, somehow, nobody touched upon the fact that Biden praised Holmes in 2015 for “maintaining the highest standards”, as Breitbart pointed out this week.

In fact, then VP Joe Biden met with Elizabeth Holmes in 2015 and called her company “the laboratory of the future”. Theranos was so jazzed about the compliment, it took to social media to post a photo of Biden with Holmes.

A second tweet from Theranos proudly touts another quote from Biden, wherein he says “The POTUS and I share your vision of a health care paradigm focused on prevention”. 

At a summit where the two met, Holmes said of Biden: “It is a tremendous honor to have Vice President Biden visit Theranos and participate in a preventive health care summit.”

And the praise from Biden didn’t stop there. Breitbart reports that, after touring Holmes’ facility, Biden said: “You can see what innovation is all about just walking through this facility.”

“The fact that you’re voluntarily submitting all of your tests to the FDA demonstrates your confidence in what you’re doing,” Biden continued. “Talk about being inspired. This is inspiration. It is amazing to me, Elizabeth, what you’ve been able to do.”

In Biden’s defense, he’s hardly the first idealistic liberal to be bamboozled by futuristic sounding nonsense that doesn’t make scientific and/or economic sense. Look at fuel cell companies, wind power projects and promises of solar roof tiles, for starters. 

But the one question that begs an answer is: how would the media have reacted if it were a GOP President who had taken meetings with Holmes in 2015? And why were Biden’s comments on Holmes never reported on over the last few years of controversy surrounding the company?

Maybe the answers are on Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

Commentary authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

Dr. Robert Malone is a U.S. virologist and immunologist who has dedicated his professional existence to the development of mRNA vaccines.

In the 1980s, Malone worked as a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he conducted studies on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. In the early 1990s, Malone collaborated with Jon A. Wolff and Dennis A. Carson, two eminent scientists, on a study that involved synthesization.

In fact, Malone is the father of mRNA vaccines. He has served as an adjunct associate professor of biotechnology at Kennesaw State University, and he co-founded Atheric Pharmaceutical, a company that was contracted by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in 2016.

As you can see, Malone is no ordinary man. In fact, he’s a rather extraordinary man. Before embarking on a distinguished career in science, Malone worked as a carpenter and as a farmhand. Becoming a doctor was a lofty aspiration, but through hard work and determination, his dream became a reality. Over the course of three decades, Malone has established himself as one of the most competent people in the fields of virology and immunology.

Why, then, is he considered “a pariah” (in his own words) by so many of his peers? Why did Twitter recently suspend his account?

Malone is arguably the most qualified person in the world to speak on what we as a society should and shouldn’t be doing during the pandemic. Yet for reasons that will become abundantly clear, he finds himself ostracized, largely silenced, and cut off from the scientific community. Why?

Two months before his Twitter account was suspended, Malone wrote a rather prophetic Twitter post:

“I am going to speak bluntly,” he wrote.

“Physicians who speak out are being actively hunted via medical boards and the press. They are trying to delegitimize us and pick us off one by one.”

He finished by warning that this is “not a conspiracy theory” but “a fact.” He urged us all to “wake up.”

Sadly, many of us are still asleep.

In my research for this piece, it seems clear to me that Malone has been silenced, not because he’s some quack spouting nonsense, but because he challenged—and still challenges—the overarching narrative about vaccines and the lethality of COVID-19.

Malone was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan. For the uninitiated, Rogan is the host of one of the most influential podcasts in the world. At one point during the three-hour interview, Malone referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci as Tony Fauci, a man he knows personally. Malone, in other words, knows where all the skeletons are hidden. The same is true for Dr. Peter McCullough, another world-renowned expert who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast.

Prior to writing this piece, I consulted both Malone and McCullough.

Over the course of the past 18 months, Malone has been painted as some kind of anti-vax fringe scientist, a man of questionable merit who’s spouting nonsense.

Well, he’s not. Malone happens to be vaccinated. All he has ever asked for is the chance to have frank and honest discussions on vaccines.

In his own words, vaccines have “saved lives. Many lives.”

“But it is also increasingly clear that there are some risks associated with these vaccines,” Malone said. “Various governments have attempted to deny that this is the case. But they are wrong. Vaccination-associated coagulation is a risk. Cardiotoxicity is a risk. Those are proven and discussed in official USG communications, as well as communications from a variety of other governments.”

Malone isn’t a crazed conspiracy theorist: He’s a man who’s intimately familiar with the benefits and the risks of vaccines. He’s a proponent of informed consent. Perhaps before letting someone inject a vaccine into your body, you should be fully informed of the risks involved, he says. He isn’t an unreasonable man.

Nevertheless, in this age of faux outrage and fabricated storylines, society needs a fall guy, a boogie man, a sacrificial lamb. Malone fits the bill. He knows too much. It’s much easier to discredit a decorated physician—who challenges the overarching narrative—than it is to actually debate him.

Zero Degrees of Separation

The story goes deeper. In 2019, the BBC established the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership that now includes organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Reuters, and The Washington Post. We’re told that it was established to tackle “disinformation in real time.” TNI was ostensibly designed to wage a war on “fake news.”

Upon closer inspection, however, it appears to have been designed to promote very specific narratives and to silence any dissenting voices, such as Malone’s. Instead of trusting the TNI, we should question the motives of its members.

After all, The Washington Post recently published a piece asking people to stop criticizing President Joe Biden. The message is clear: Stop being mean to the president, even if the president is being mean to you (on more than one occasion).

Then, there’s James C. Smith, chairman of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He sits on the board of directors for Pfizer, a company that’s responsible for the creation of vaccines with questionable efficacy and that has a history of manipulating data. In short, Pfizer is a company with a questionable reputation. Nevertheless, Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla was recently named CNN’s Business CEO of the Year. Make of that what you will.

When one thinks of TNI (and the mainstream media in general), various terms instantly spring to mind. “Objectivity” isn’t one of them. “Highly compromised” and “conflict of interest” do come to mind, however.

Speaking of objectivity, or the lack thereof, in August 2021, The Atlantic ran a much-cited hit piece on Malone, which was high on accusations, but low on actual evidence. It attacked his character and credibility—repeatedly. Rather intriguingly, the article, like all of The Atlantic’s COVID-19 articles, was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The former is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation owns stock in Johnson & Johnson, a company whose vaccine has been associated with the development of blood clots—the very thing Malone has been warning us about for the better part of two years.

People might scoff. But contrary to popular belief, democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in broad daylight. Its death is slow and protracted, one by a thousand cuts rather than by one fatal stab.

As author Steve Levitsky once wrote, democracies don’t often die at the hands of military generals, “but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion,” he wrote. “Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”

Apply these lines to the pandemic, and Levitsky’s words carry more weight than ever before.

In the United States, one must not question the efficacy of masks, vaccines for kids, the logic (or lack thereof) of lockdowns, or the unconstitutional nature of vaccine mandates. What about the little matter of vaccine breakthrough deaths? Don’t ask any questions.

But wait, if science can’t be questioned, doesn’t this make it propaganda? Hush now. Don’t you love America? Don’t you want people to live, rather than die? Then shut up and get the vaccine, then the booster shot, then the booster-booster shot. We, the arbiters of truth, know what’s best for you. Somewhat ironically, these self-appointed arbiters of truth spout no shortage of lies.

Is it any surprise, then, that more and more Americans continue to lose faith in the mainstream media and the government? Yet here we are, being condescended to by the likes of CNN’s Don Lemon and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. Worse still, we’re supposed to take orders from Fauci, a man who supposedly represents science, yet goes out of his way to smear scientists. Why would a man of science attack the very thing that he’s supposed to represent?

According to numerous reports, Fauci has repeatedly deceived the American people. It’s important to remember that Fauci is, first and foremost, a talking head for the U.S. government. In reality, he’s a politician with a medical degree.

To quote the author Gillian Flynn, the author of “Gone Girl”: “The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert.”

Who better than Fauci, a highly qualified individual with his own fan club? But don’t be fooled. Fauci might act like he answers to no one, but he does. He answers to the U.S. government. Who, then, does the government answer to? Big Pharma, it seems.

In 2019, the Roosevelt Institute published a fascinating report, “The Cost of Capture: How the Pharmaceutical Industry has Corrupted Policy Makers and Harmed Patients.” The report outlines the many ways in which the pharmaceutical industry has shaped policies through corporate capture. This is a phenomenon that sees private industries use their significant financial and political influence to manipulate a state’s decision-making apparatus. The report warned about the dangers of lobbying and of deeply flawed medical research.

What we’re seeing is the convergence of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Government. Let’s call it the unholy trinity, with Big Tech doing the bidding of Big Government, and Big Government doing the bidding of Big Pharma.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, YouTube has removed the Joe Rogan episodes featuring Robert Malone and Peter McCullough. Why? Because when it comes to viruses and vaccines, these are among the most notable and accomplished experts in the world. They appear to know things that the government doesn’t want us to know. Additionally, Google, the owner of YouTube, appears to be closely involved with the U.S. government.

What we’re left with is the equivalent of a digital dictatorship, with even the most qualified people being silenced, ostracized, and, in some cases, defenestrated. Robert Malone is a wise man, an honest man, and a highly credible man. The grief that has come his way—and continues to come his way to this day—is unwarranted. But as he knows only too well, this is the price one must pay for challenging the unholy trinity.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

After authorities found more COVID cases in Ningbo, a port city and industrial hub home to one of the world’s largest ports, residents are facing a partial lockdown, and reports claim that movement of essential products has been dramatically slowed as the lockdown measures slow activity at the port.

Beijing has managed to keep reports about the situation mostly under wraps, but reports in Bloomberg and several trade journals have warned that the slowdowns at the port could have wide-ranging ramifications for international commerce.

Right now, lockdowns are affecting Xi’an and Yuzhou along with the Ningbo port, Chinese sources said. In Yuzhou, which has a population of 1.1M, authorities shut down its transport system and all but essential food stores closed overnight.

The strict lockdown measures come as Beijing braces for both the Winter Olympics and the Lunar New Year. With exactly a month to go until the Games start, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin assured reporters China had “formulated an efficient and highly effective defense system”.

Part of this system will involve thousands of staff and volunteers entering a bubble on Tuesday, which will see them have no physical contact with the outside world in order to limit the spread.

Athletes and members of the press who cover the Games will also enter the bubble on arrival in China, where they will remain for the duration of their stay.

In Yuzhou, situated some some 434 miles south-west of Beijing, officials said that “to curb and quash the epidemic within the shortest amount of time is a high-priority political task” for the local government.

Some people pointed out that the CCP’s lockdown measures might actually be making the situation worse: “People are swapping stuff with others in the same building, because they no longer have enough food to eat,” one man who spoke with Radio Free Asia on the condition of anonymity said. 

The news outlet also reported that another man had wanted to trade a smartphone and tablet for rice, according to the BBC.

What Beijing calls its “dynamic zero COVID” strategy combines mass vaccinations with a regime of constant testing, nationwide monitoring of people’s movements, temperature-taking and smartphone apps to prove individuals don’t pose a threat. This hyper-vigilance has left doctors exhausted.

Perhaps this is why the activity at the Ningbo port has slowed: one trade journal covering the business of commerce said that while no COVID cases have been reported at any of the port’s three container terminals, closures at warehouses and the container depot, as well as trucking disruptions, have made it difficult for manufacturers and suppliers to get their goods from the port, or to the port.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

Between 2017 and 2021, Environmental Progress and I researched and published dozens of articles, testified before Congress, and authored a book, Apocalypse Never, arguing that weather-dependent renewables were making electricity increasingly unreliable and expensive, and making the United States, Europe, and Asia, dangerously dependent on natural gas.

In response, there was an organized and somewhat successful effort by progressive climate-renewables activists to cut off our funding, censor us on Facebook, and prevent me from testifying before Congress.

But now, one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewables, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we have made over the years. “Europe Sleepwalked Into an Energy Crisis That Could Last Years,” screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was “years in the making” because Europe is “shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables.”

Bloomberg still pulls its punches and misdescribes the situation in some ways. The article, like many other Bloomberg articles, mislabels the deployment of renewables as an “energy transition” similar to past transitions from wood to coal and coal to natural gas, failing to acknowledge that the poor physics of energy-dilute renewables make that impossible. And it suggests that Europe’s energy crisis is the result of ignorance. “The energy crisis hit the bloc,” notes a renewable energy PR person, “when security of supply was not on the menu of EU policymakers,” ignoring the reality that I and others warned EU policymakers of this very crisis.

But, to its credit, the article acknowledges that the energy crisis is a direct result of Europe over-investing in unreliable renewables and under-investing in reliable energy sources. “Wind and solar are cleaner but sometimes fickle,” the authors admit, in the understatement of the year, “as illustrated by the sudden drop in turbine-generated power the continent recorded last year.” (I was the first U.S. journalist to report Germany saw its emissions rise 25% in the first half of 2021 due to lack of wind.)

Now, a new analysis from Environmental Progress finds Germany increased its emissions last year and will likely increase them again this year. This year, German electricity generation coming from fossil fuels will be 44% compared to 39% in 2021 and 37 percent in 2020, assuming weather conditions and electricity demand are similar to 2021. Emissions from Germany’s power sector will rise from 244 million tons in 2021 to 264 million tons in 2022.

And Bloomberg notes that Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis.

“The retired salt caverns, aquifers, and fuel depots that hold Europe’s stockpiles of natural gas have never been so empty at this point in winter,” it notes, and “the continent is grappling with a supply crunch that’s caused benchmark gas prices to more than quadruple from last year’s levels, squeezing businesses and households. The crisis has left the European Union at the mercy of the weather and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wiles, both notoriously difficult to predict.”

It’s true that American natural gas from fracking, a practice I have defended since 2013, is being shipped to Europe, and will ease Europe’s pain. And it hasn’t helped that France’s leaders have grossly mismanaged their nuclear power plants, resulting in an embarrassing 30% decline in their output during the crisis.

But, notes Bloomberg, the relief provided by American liquified natural gas (LNG) is “temporary at best…. Storage sites [for natural gas] are only 56% full, more than 15 percentage points below the 10-year average… Barring an increase in Russian exports, something that doesn’t appear to be in the cards, levels will be at less than 15% by the end of March, the lowest on record… With the two coldest months of winter still ahead, the fear is that Europe may run out of gas.”

And the lack of nuclear energy underscores the need for more nuclear plants since they are reliable and operate independently of the weather when they are managed well. No matter how well a solar farm is managed, it can’t change the weather.

And now, Russia is massing troops on its border with Ukraine, and may invade. This is a problem since one-third of Russian gas going into Europe goes through Ukraine. If war breaks out, Europe could suffer serious gas shortages. Overdependence on natural gas and renewables, and underinvestment in nuclear, has thus undermined the energy security, and thus national security, of Europe, since heads of state dependent on Russian gas will be less likely to speak out against an invasion.

Even longtime natural gas and renewable energy boosters agree there’s a crisis. “The ability of Europe and the U.S. to respond to a Russian invasion is constrained both by a desire not to exacerbate Europe’s energy crisis by sanctioning Russian energy exports and, more broadly, by the threat that Russia could retaliate to any confrontation by restricting gas flows into Europe, as Russia did in 2006 and 2009,” Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration official, told Bloomberg.

Covid accelerated many trends and one of them is the recognition that unreliable and weather-dependent renewables cannot power modern economies. Senator Joe Manchin specifically mentioned the role that renewables are playing in making America’s electricity less reliable when he killed Build Back Better legislation in December. The Netherlands mentioned the need for reliable electricity when it announced plans to expand nuclear energy.

Now, with New England at grave risk of energy shortages for the exact same reasons as Europe, it’s time for the American people and their representatives to fully wake up to the reality that modern societies cannot rely on unreliable renewables. It would also help if the renewable energy industry, and its dogmatic supporters, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Rep. Sean Casten, and Rep. Jared Huffman, would stop trying to censor and otherwise shut down the people who raised the alarm about the coming crisis in the first place.

*  *  *

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,”Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is author of just launched book San Fransicko (Harper Collins) and the best-selling book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020). Subscribe To Michael’s substack here

As part of a “bonus question” asked in Goldman’s listing of the bank’s five top FX questions for 2022 (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), Goldman FX strategist Zach Pandl speculates on the fate of bitcoin – yes, according to the most important bank in the world, bitcoin is a currency – and predicts that the token frequently cited as digital gold will continue to take market share from gold as part of broader adoption of digital assets, suggesting that the often touted price prediction of $100,000 a distinct possibility.

In response to a rhetorical question whether “Bitcoin take additional market share from gold” (one which JPM answered affirmatively back in October when it found that “Institutions Are Rotating Out Of Gold Into Bitcoin As A Better Inflation Hedge“), Goldman’s Pandl takes a hint from the iconic analysis penned by Paul Tudor Jones back in May 2020 which quickly became a bible to crypto advocates, and which looked at the absolute value of various hard assets…

… and writes that according to the World Gold Council estimates, the private sector owns 44,000 metric tonnes of gold for investment purposes (i.e. privately-held bars and ETFs, excluding jewelry, official sector holdings, and industrial uses).

So, at the current market price of $1,800 per troy ounce, this implies that the public owns about $2.6 trillion of gold for investment purposes. By comparison, Bitcoin’s float-adjusted market capitalization is currently just under $700BN. Therefore, Pandl writes, “Bitcoin currently commands a roughly 20% share of the “store of value” (gold plus Bitcoin) market”

Looking ahead, the Goldman strategist thinks that Bitcoin’s market share will most likely rise over time as a byproduct of broader adoption of digital assets, and possibly due to Bitcoin-specific scaling solutions although, as he admits, “the network’s consumption of real resources may remain an important obstacle to institutional adoption.

In any case, in a hypothetical scenario, the Goldman strategist notes that if Bitcoin’s share of the “store of value” market were to rise to 50% over the next five years – with no growth in overall demand for stores of value – “its price would increase to just over $100,000, for a compound annualized return of 17-18% (accounting for growth in Bitcoin supply over time).”

Of course, bitcoin may eventually have applications beyond simply a “store of value”—and digital asset markets are much bigger than Bitcoin — but Goldman thinks that comparing its market capitalization to gold can help put parameters on plausible outcomes for Bitcoin returns.

Finally, this is great news for web3 fans holders of Ethereum: as a reminder, Goldman has traditionally been skeptical about the long-term prospects of bitcoin while praising ethereum if for no other reason than its actual practical uses (see ““The Amazon Of Information”: Goldman Initiates On Crypto, Sees Ethereum Overtaking Bitcoin“). In fact, Goldman not too long ago said that the odds of a flipenning (the market cap of ETH surpassing that of BTC) are rising. Which means that if Bitcoin is set to double from here, then Ethereum may be looking at a $20,000 price in the not too distant future.