Month: June 2022

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A retired Texas couple said FBI agents busted through the gate of their rural home, threw flashbangs, handcuffed them, and trained lasers on them before searching their home for evidence connected to the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol.

Lora DeWolfe and Darrel Kennemer, who live on seven acres near San Marcos, Texas, told The Epoch Times they attended the Jan. 6 rally at the Capitol but did nothing wrong. They believe the FBI mistakenly identified Kennemer as someone else.

The FBI didn’t arrest them, they said. Agents eventually produced a search warrant saying Kennemer was suspected of “assaulting, resisting or impeding” officers and “entering restricted building or grounds.”

Both said they went no further than the Capitol steps on Jan. 6 and did not harm anyone or damage anything. They said the allegation of assault was false, and the FBI kept showing Kennemer a blurry photo of a man who looked similar but wasn’t Kennemer.

“I vacillate between feeling mad and helpless,” DeWolfe said. “I was really sad. We just wanted an honest election.”

“They’re corrupt, and they’re trying to scare us,” Kennemer said, adding he feels the FBI targeted him for just being at the rally.

Raid Before Dawn

Their ordeal began when their gate alarm woke them up in the pre-dawn hours of June 22, DeWolfe said. At first, they thought a deer had tripped the alarm, but DeWolfe got up and saw a white car. Kennemer got his AR-15 rifle and went outside, not knowing what to expect, she said.

“I’m seeing one single white vehicle moving pretty fast, and I was thinking someone’s going to die,” Kennemer said.

FBI officers got out of the white vehicle and told Kennemer, who had his rifle up in the air, to drop his weapon. He kept his rifle and asked the FBI to show him a warrant. Kennemer said someone threw a flash-bang at him repeatedly because he wouldn’t drop his weapon at first.

Read more here…

Who hasn’t gone all out for the random Tuesday night bender and hit the sake a little too hard after a tough start to the work week? Plenty of us.

When narrowing down that field to the workers who have also passed out on the street and lost a flash drive containing the personal information of nearly 500,000 people, the herd thins out a little bit. 

But according to Vice, that’s exactly what happened to one Japanese businessman in his 40s this past week. He ventured out for drinks in Osaka prefecture’s industrial Amagasaki city before waking up, hours later, on the street.

His bag – containing his USB drive with the sensitive information he was carrying around – was missing. The drive was encrypted, the report says, and contained the personal data of Amagasaki’s 465,177 residents.

Among the information included about the residents was dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, and tax details. The man was working for a company called BIPROGY, who was hired by the local government to seek out who was eligible for tax exemptions. 

The company put out a statement this week, telling the local press: “We deeply apologize to the citizens of Amagasaki, the city of Amagasaki, and all concerned for the inconvenience caused by the loss of important information entrusted to us.”

The drive was eventually found on Friday, but not before angering many of the city’s residents. The local city office received more than 30,000 calls in one day related to the incident, the report says. 

And who says there’s no happy endings? Vice, citing NHK, said the employee found his bag and the drive “near an apartment building he vaguely recalls passing by during his night out”. 

If you think Tuesday’s bender was bad, just wait for the weekend…

Authored by Anne Bradbury via RealClear Energy (emphasis ours),

Methane Fee, Windfall Profits Taxes, Repealing IDCs, calls for FTC investigations into price gouging, and now a federal gasoline tax suspension. The Administration’s energy policy is disjointed and often counterproductive. Rather than flailing attacks on the oil and natural gas industry, leaders in Washington need a serious energy strategy that embraces all of America’s energy resources, including oil and natural gas. 

In addition to these problematic legislative proposals, there are numerous concerning policies currently being implemented across the agencies.  The Administration is shutting down and blocking pipelines, greatly restricting oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands, slow walking LNG export permits, and issuing sweeping climate disclosure rules to discourage investment in the industry.

These bad policies do nothing to address skyrocketing inflation and are having a real effect on the President’s approval rating, putting him at low that few presidents have experienced.

Lest you dismiss this as partisan politics, let’s take a look back at the Obama White House’s statement on gasoline prices:

“The truth is that there is no silver bullet to address rising gas prices in the short term, but there are steps we can take to ensure the American people don’t fall victim to skyrocketing gas prices over the long term.  That’s why since taking office the President has been focused on a sustained, ‘all-of-the-above’ approach to developing new domestic energy sources, expanding oil and gas production, and reducing our reliance on foreign oil…”

The Obama White House advocated for an energy approach that included oil and natural gas, rather than spreading false narratives and pointing fingers.  They also knew the importance of domestic production, as they continued to hold federal lease sales for oil and gas development.  They looked to domestic producers to increase supply – rather than actively seeking foreign nations, like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, to produce more to meet our energy needs in America. 

In contrast, the Biden Administration has not embraced an “all-of-the-above” approach. Instead, they continue to make confusing statements to the markets and the American people about role of domestic energy production:

• “Let me answer your question very directly: President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands.” (Gina McCarthy, April 2022). 

• “We have to put the industry on notice: You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so, within which you’ve got to come up with a means by which you’re going to capture [emissions], and if you’re not capturing, then we have to deploy alternative sources of energy.” (Secretary John Kerry, April 2022).

• “Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too…. Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” (President Joe Biden, March 2022)

The world knows that oil and gas producers do not set the price of gasoline. The price of gasoline is determined by the price of crude oil, which is set on the global market based on supply, demand, and costs.  Prices are also affected by policies and promises – like  those the Administration has been pursing since the election.  Promises that sounded good during a campaign, like “no new fracking on federal lands” and “a transition to renewables.”  But, campaign pledges don’t always equal good policy.  The past two years have shown us that the Administration’s rhetoric, policies, and finger pointing has not created unity, and no one is better off paying $5/gallon to get to and from work. 

The answer is working together – with the oil and natural gas industry – on implementing the policies needed to bring down the cost of energy for the American people:

• Lease federal lands and waters

• Build necessary pipelines to transport oil and natural gas 

• Encourage investment and access to capital 

• Relieve supply chain bottlenecks  

The 8.6 percent overall inflation is quickly approaching what Americans faced in the 1979 energy crisis during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when prices climbed 11.4 percent, and the Carter Administration imposed gasoline rationing and wage-price controls. 

Arnold Weber, the former director of the Nixon Cost of Living Council referred to President Carter’s anti-inflation policies and efforts to sell them to the American people as a “sort of decoy operation … creating the illusion of involvement and action without creating the basis for action.”

We urge the Biden Administration to acknowledge the essential role of oil and natural gas for decades to come and focus on serious policy solutions that increase supply and help bring down energy prices. American families deserve more than the illusion of action when it comes to energy.

*  *  *

Anne Bradbury is CEO of the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) whose membership is composed of America’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies.

The key question is when supply chain congestion eases in the US. The question to that answer is not yet, as a new Bloomberg report shows the US’ largest containerized seaport in Los Angeles and Long Beach in Southern California (responsible for 42% of all containerized trade with Asia) has been hit with worsening rail delays.

Dwell times for rail-bound containers have been steadily increasing since February and are back to levels not seen since the major port bottlenecks of summer 2021. 

The Port of Los Angeles has recently enlisted help from the White House to clear a backlog of rail-bound containers that’s tripled since February, taking up space on its docks and causing congestion. As of Monday, there were more than 28,000 rail-container units on the ground, about two-thirds of which had been waiting to be picked up for nine days or more. -Bloomberg

Increasing rail congestion comes as thousands of dockworker contracts across the West Coast are about to expire following unsuccessful negotiations between labor unions and major railroads. 

If dockworkers or railroad workers strike, normalizing supply chains would be delayed. There’s also the risk of China’s reopening, and the backlog of goods headed in containers for US West Coast ports could further snarl supply chains. 

Bloomberg also outlines that trucking woes and lack of warehouse space exacerbate bottlenecks for rail networks. 

Trucking

More than half of the truck gates at the Port of Los Angeles are still going unused on average due in part to the inconsistent staffing and operation hours at the terminals and distribution centers outside of the port, on top of the lack of space at warehouses.

Moving about 70% of the US’s freight tonnage, truckers don’t feel encouraged to go in during off-peak hours because parts of the supply chain often don’t operate around the clock, said Matt Schrap, chief executive officer of the Harbor Trucking Association. Before the bottlenecks emerged, truckers could pick up containers in the early morning and then store them at truck yards until space opened up at warehouses. But these sites are now “full of empty containers and chassis, and land has become an extreme premium.”

“More trucks aren’t going to necessarily solve the thing — it’s a productivity issue,” Schrap said in an interview.

Warehousing 

The vacancy rate at Southern California facilities is now around 0.3%, with the lack of availability particularly acute in the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said at a virtual meeting of harbor commissioners last week. During normal times, the vacancy rate stood as high as 5%, he added.

“We can’t build these facilities fast enough, and even though we boast 2 billion square feet from the shores of the Pacific now out to the desert region of Southern California, we’ve got to turn that cargo out faster and have enough space under roof to manage all of these consumer and manufacturing products,” he said at a separate briefing earlier this month.

The West Coast bottleneck appears to be building inland, in rail, trucking, and warehousing networks — adding to increasing delays as the supply chain congestion shows little signs of abating.  

Authored by Rowdy Yates via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Traditionally, hard money has the two main qualities of autonomy and correlated-redeemability, but bitcoin has the former without the latter…

WHAT’S IT BACKED BY?

One of the most common criticisms from nocoiners remains, “But bitcoin isn’t backed by anything.”

This criticism targets bitcoin’s dearth of a quality that I term “correlated-redeemability.”

The most common rejoinder to this criticism is, “Your U.S. dollar isn’t backed by anything either.”

The problem with this factually correct response is that it misses a deeper point.

The deeper point is that while bitcoin lacks one traditional quality of hard money (correlated-redeemability), it possesses the primary but less visible quality of hard money: autonomy.

This article is meant to explore the scope of autonomy, how it came to be overshadowed by correlated-redeemability and the relative value of these historically tandem qualities of hard currencies.

A TALE OF TWO QUALITIES

Traditional hard money has had two qualities: correlated-redeemability and autonomy. The first is easier to understand. Conceptually, correlated-redeemability is the quality of a currency that facilitates a rapid redemption for a stable amount of a commodity (traditionally a tangible one). Precious metal coinage illustrates how easily this quality can be understood. If someone pays for your labor with a gold coin, you exchange your unit of labor for a scarce metal that you can hold in your hand. Paper notes backed by precious metals are marginally more abstract, but because of historic exchange practices, they had concrete manifestations. Consider the U.S. government’s silver certificates, issued until the 1960s, which allowed mere plebs to exchange paper notes for genuine silver. The physical nature of correlated-redeemability helps make it cognitively accessible for the broader public.

By contrast, a currency’s autonomy is considerably more abstract. Conceptually, currency autonomy is a quality that exists on a spectrum and reduces a sovereign’s capacity to manipulate the currency in a material way — think: inflation and debasement. Practically speaking, we can think of autonomy as the aggregation of barriers — tiny or big, physical or psychological — that put a check on schemes to manipulate the currency.

THE SPECTRUM OF AUTONOMY

As with any abstract idea, a parable can be a useful means of visualizing. Let’s imagine three sovereigns: Nayib, sovereign of a country that uses only bitcoin; Ike, sovereign of a country that uses only gold coinage; and Dick, sovereign of a country using a pure fiat currency.

Nayib might want to increase his spending beyond tax revenue. However, he cannot increase the supply of bitcoin beyond what is written in the code. Additionally, Nayib does not automatically benefit from any expansion of the money supply unless he engages in successful, capital-intensive, proof-of-work mining. The net result: if Nayib tries to buy a G3 jet with deficit spending, the Gulfstream Corporation will have to accept an IOU instead of bitcoin. Nayib’s currency has high autonomy and only attenuated, uncorrelated-redeemability.

Ike wants to be a profligate spender, but is constrained. If Ike’s expenses exceed his tax revenue, he has options, but none of them can be pursued in a cavalier manner. First, Ike can clip coins; as his administration comes into contact with coins, they can physically trim the edges and use the scraps to cast more coins. The upside is that this option isn’t terribly labor intensive. The downside is that even the blind of Ike’s country can detect the scheme. Second option: Ike can debase the metal of the coins. To do this, Ike needs to aggregate gold coins, schlep them to a furnace, mix gold with cheaper metals and mint newly-debased coins. This option is considerably more labor intensive, and by involving more coconspirators, the plot is increasingly subject to detection. With either option, Ike also has a psychological barrier, namely, he knows he is breaking the law regulating his own coinage. A third option is mining more gold ore to mint new coins. This third option has no psychological barrier, but it is the most labor-intensive of the three options. Ike’s currency has intermediate autonomy and immediate, correlated-redeemability — the qualities of traditional hard money.

Dick is also a profligate spender, but as we all know he is not constrained. Dick’s country uses a fiat currency, so of course Dick just needs to have his treasurer hit the money-printing button, and the deficit is solved (at least in the short term). Additionally, because this is the nature of fiat currencies, Dick’s actions are perfectly legal, so he doesn’t even face psychological stigma for his actions. At the end of the day, there is no significant short-term cost to what Dick has done, and because of that low cost, the temptation for Dick to hit “CTRL P” remains quite high in perpetuity. Dick’s currency has de minimis autonomy and attenuated, uncorrelated-redeemability.

This is the spectrum of currency autonomy: bitcoin > gold coinage > fiat.

WHY IS REDEEMABILITY AN ELUSIVE CONCEPT?

Prior to European voyages to Australia, a European would be forgiven if they believed that all mammals (animal species with lactating mothers) gave birth to live young. At the time, every mammal known to Europeans gave birth to live young. After Australian fauna became broadly known, the platypus threw a wrench into the paradigms of European biologists because the platypus is a species with lactating mothers, but the mothers laid eggs in lieu of live births. Once a real-world counterexample became available, it was relatively easy for biologists to disentangle traditionally tandem qualities of lactation and live births and then clearly identify the proper distinguishing characteristic of mammals to wit: lactating mothers.

Prior to bitcoin, you would also be forgiven if you believed that all hard money must have correlated-redeemability. At the time, every traditional hard currency had the quality, e.g., gold coins, Yap stones, sea shells. After bitcoin, a wrench was thrown into the paradigm of hard money because bitcoin had autonomy without correlated-redeemability. With this real-world counterexample, we can now disentangle the traditionally tandem qualities of autonomy and correlated-redeemability and clearly identify the proper distinguishing characteristic of hard money to wit: autonomy.

This history sheds light on why discussions of hard money have neglected autonomy and focused on correlated-redeemability. Historically, currency holders associated hard money with its most patent characteristics: the tactile and visible features of the correlated commodity. Autonomy by contrast, remained in the shadows, quietly checking schemes to manipulate the currency. To the extent autonomy was considered at all, it was probably only considered by sovereigns as an annoyance to their debasement plans.

THE ENDOGENOUS VALUE OF AUTONOMY

There is an inherent problem with valuing correlated-redeemability because this value is downstream of the integrity of the underlying monetary system. For example, if Ike debases his country’s coinage, a shop owner who is owed a single gold coin has his correlated-redeemability reduced in direct proportion to Ike’s debasement. If the shop owner receives a coin with 50% less gold, the shop owner’s correlated-redeemability for that precious commodity has been reduced by 50%. Therefore, correlated-redeemability has no endogenous value; the holders of commodities can always debase the commodities they custody.

By contrast, autonomy’s value is endogenous. All things being equal, the more difficulty a schemer has in debasing the currency, the less the system will debase, therefore, autonomy tends to bolster monetary integrity and this is the value of autonomy, i.e., autonomy is upstream of monetary integrity. In the case of bitcoin, the autonomy of the currency prevents debasement from schemers and ensures integrity over time. In the case of gold coinage, the currency’s autonomy can strengthen monetary integrity and bolster correlated-redeemability, but the reverse is not true.

BE PRECISE IN YOUR SPEECH

Marduk, the ancient god of Babylon, derived his mythic powers from the ability to see clearly and speak magic words. The importance of identifying, naming and analyzing the qualities of hard money cannot be understated. This process is critical not only because it clarifies our understanding of hard money (seeing clearly), but also because it sharpens our verbal toolkit in the process (speaking clearly). Without a rhetorical means to decouple correlated-redeemability from hard money, “What’s it backed by?” remains an elusive critique to rebut, hollow though it may be.

Bitcoiners intuitively understand the value proposition of autonomy, but this understanding is generally implicit. An explicit understanding of currency autonomy accelerates Bitcoiners’ capacity to educate and persuade nocoiners on the merits of bitcoin — the hardest extant money. Experience makes this point self-evident; reflect back on how many times you’ve had remarkable thoughts, but you lacked the words to articulate those thoughts until a meme, film or wordsmith came along and smashed the rhetorical barrier for you. A prime example of this rhetorical power is the “pill” parlance from “The Matrix” creators. Terms like “red pill,” “blue pill” and of course, “orange pill” allow you to describe a very cumbersome and abstract notion in a clear and precise way. Even if someone has never seen “The Matrix,” you can walk the newbie through the plot lines and still make your point. The cumbersome notions underpinning hard money pose similar difficulties. Through the use of anecdotes, a sharpened verbal toolkit and a clear understanding of hard money, Bitcoiners can shift the focus from correlated-redeemability to currency autonomy and push the dialogue forward.

We found out last week that Citadel Securities’ headquarters was moving from the hellhole of Chicago to the beautiful tropics of Miami. 

Bloomberg reports a more precise location where billionaire Ken Griffin plans to move Citadel’s headquarters, a 2.5-acre (1-hectare) vacant site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive. 

Sources familiar with the matter said Griffin and Citadel paid a whopping $363 million for 1201 Brickell Bay Drive. The deal closed in April and was shielded by a limited liability company with a Chicago mailing address. Last week, Citadel said it would partner with developer Sterling Bay to design and build a new office tower in Brickell. 

Griffin wrote a letter to employees last Thursday indicating he had personally moved to Florida and that his market-making business, Citadel, would also transfer. He noted that he viewed Florida as a better corporate environment and didn’t specifically cite crime as a factor. 

The Citadel founder has an estimated worth of $28.9 billion – is the wealthiest resident of Illinois, and is among the world’s top 50 wealthiest, so his departure from Chicago is a huge blow and will hurt state tax collections on both the individual and corporate side. 

In an April interview with WSJ, Griffin suggested he might move his operations out of Illinois because of a rising crime rate and incidents involving employees in the state’s largest city. 

Back in October 2021, Griffin revealed that “Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem.”

Griffin’s decision to relocate Citadel to South Florida is the most significant move for a financial firm into the Sunshine State, and more evidence ‘Wall Street South’ emerges as other financial institutions from Democratic-controlled cities filled with high taxes and crime follow Citadel’s lead. 

The S&P 500 is down nearly 18% year to date, its worst first-half performance since 1970. U.S. consumer confidence dropped to its lowest level in 16 months in June, as inflation continues to extract its due. And Google searches for “recession” have reached a new high, according to Andreas Steno Larsen. “Typically,” he adds, “that only happens during actual recessions. Are we already in one, or is the risk overstated by now?” The fear of slowing growth now supplanting the fear of inflation, markets have fresh fuel to reprice assets across the risk spectrum. Andreas Steno Larsen joins Ash Bennington to talk about inflation, recession, and recent price action, including the particular pressure on convertible bonds. We also hear from Michael Gayed about an emerging counter-trend trade based on a correction for crude oil and commodities. Want to submit questions? Drop them right here on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3u7AgGV. Watch the full conversation featuring Michael Gayed here: https://rvtv.io/3nnJefp.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

China has suggested it will maintain its controversial ‘zero COVID’ policy for at least 5 years, eschewing natural immunity and guaranteeing repeated rounds of new lockdowns.

“In the next five years, Beijing will unremittingly grasp the normalization of epidemic prevention and control,” said a story published by Beijing Daily.

The article quoted Cai Qi, the Communist Party of China’s secretary in Beijing and a former mayor of the city, who said that ‘zero COVID’ approach would remain in place for 5 years.

After the story prompted alarm, reference to “five years” was removed from the piece and the hashtag related to it was censored by social media giant Weibo.

“Monday’s announcement and the subsequent amendment sparked anger and confusion among Beijing residents online,” reports the Guardian.

“Most commenters appeared unsurprised at the prospect of the system continuing for another half-decade, but few were supportive of the idea.”

Although western experts severely doubt official numbers coming out of China, Beijing claimed success in limiting COVID deaths by enforcing the policy throughout 2021.

However, this meant that China never achieved anything like herd immunity, and at one stage the Omicron variant caused more more coronavirus cases in Shanghai in four weeks than in the previous two years of the entire pandemic.

Back in May, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested that China would be better off if it abandoned the policy, but Beijing refused to budge.

As we previously highlighted, the only way of enforcing a ‘zero COVID’ policy is via brutal authoritarianism.

In Shanghai, children were separated from their parents in quarantine facilities and others were left without urgent treatment like kidney dialysis.

Panic buying of food also became a common occurrence as the anger threatened to spill over into widespread civil unrest.

Former UK government COVID-19 advisor Neil Ferguson previously admitted that he thought “we couldn’t get away with” imposing Communist Chinese-style lockdowns in Europe because they were too draconian, and yet it happened anyway.

“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said Ferguson.

“And then Italy did it. And we realised we could,” he added.

*  *  *

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