Month: August 2022

China Condemns Newly Announced Formal US-Taiwan Trade Talks

China Condemns Newly Announced Formal US-Taiwan Trade Talks

A major Thursday announcement from the Office of the US Trade Representative is sure to continue pitting Beijing and Washington on a path of escalation and collision course over Taiwan, as the US and Taipei have agreed to begin formal talks on a trade pact. 

The Taiwan side has also confirmed that negotiations will start early this fall, with the areas to be covered including trade facilitation, regulatory practices, anticorruption, agriculture, environmental standards, and other area, according to the US executive agency’s website. 

Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Sarah Bianchi said the formal talks will aim to “deepen our trade and investment relationship, advance mutual trade priorities based on shared values, and promote innovation and inclusive economic growth for our workers and businesses.”

In addition to seeking to bolster Taiwan’s economic strength, Taiwan’s Office of Trade Negotiations has spelled out that a future trade pact would increase the self-ruled island’s participation in international pacts. China, however, has rejected this as a violation of ‘One China’ and its sovereignty.

File image: ZUMA Press/DW

Taiwan’s trade minister John Deng in a Thursday press briefing also said that high on the agenda will be strategies for standing up to China’s “economic coercion”. Naturally increase in economic formalization would further inch Taiwan and US toward formal diplomatic relations, which Beijing sees as a further erosion and abandonment of the ‘One China’ status quo.

Deng told the briefing of China’s interference, “Its economic coercion targets are not just the United States or Taiwan, it’s done to a lot of countries,” adding that “Its harm to the global economic and trade order is great.”

One recent example of the reference is blocking trade with countries in dispute with Beijing such as Lithuania for allowing Taiwan to establish a de facto embassy in the capital of Vilnius.

Additionally China and Australia have been locked in a trade war for more than a year after Beijing rolled out a series of punitive measures on key Australian agriculture and other exports to China, including sanctions on certain products, special taxes, and draconian inspection procedures – all of which started after Beijing was incensed that Australian leaders called for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19.

Predictably, an initial reaction out of China’s commerce ministry stressed it “opposes” US-Taiwan trade talks and that it will take “all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests,” according to a Thursday statement. Further according to Reuters:

“One China” policy is a prerequisite for Taiwan’s participation in economic cooperation with foreign countries, Shu Jueting, spokeswoman of the ministry, said at a regular press conference.

Military tensions continue to be on edge in waters surrounding Taiwan as the Eastern Theater Command continues ‘shows of force’…

There continues to be the backdrop of Chinese PLA military pressure on the democratic island, with groups of fighter jets said to now be buzzing the median line in the Taiwan Strait on a daily bases, following the Aug.2nd visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/18/2022 – 17:30

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Maine May Mandate Vaccines for Health Care Workers with No Religious Exemption (but with Medical Exemption)

So Judge Jon Levy (D. Me.) held today in Lowe v. Mills. An excerpt:

In this case, the amended complaint and the properly considered documents,  information, and facts before me show that the purpose of requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers is solely to protect public health. Exempting individuals whose health will be threatened if they receive a COVID-19 vaccine is an essential, constituent part of a reasoned public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It does not express or suggest a discriminatory bias against religion.

In the context of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the medical exemption is rightly viewed as an essential facet of the vaccine’s core purpose of protecting the health of patients and healthcare workers, including those who, for bona fide medical reasons, cannot be safely vaccinated. In addition, the vaccine mandate places an equal burden on all secular beliefs unrelated to protecting public health—for example, philosophical or politically-based objections to state-mandated vaccination requirements—to the same extent that it burdens religious beliefs.

Thus, the medical exemption available as to all mandatory vaccines required by Maine law does not reflect a value judgment unfairly favoring secular interests over religious interests. As an integral part of the vaccine requirement itself, the medical exemption for healthcare workers does not undermine the vaccine mandate’s general applicability. The amended complaint does not plead any facts that plausibly support the conclusion that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is not generally applicable. Because the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is both neutral and generally applicable, rational basis review applies.

The court also concludes that the mandate doesn’t violate Title VII’s duty of reasonable accommodation of religious objections; I may have more to say about that in a later post.

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Maine May Mandate Vaccines for Health Care Workers with No Religious Exemption (but with Medical Exemption)

So Judge Jon Levy (D. Me.) held today in Lowe v. Mills. An excerpt:

In this case, the amended complaint and the properly considered documents,  information, and facts before me show that the purpose of requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers is solely to protect public health. Exempting individuals whose health will be threatened if they receive a COVID-19 vaccine is an essential, constituent part of a reasoned public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It does not express or suggest a discriminatory bias against religion.

In the context of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the medical exemption is rightly viewed as an essential facet of the vaccine’s core purpose of protecting the health of patients and healthcare workers, including those who, for bona fide medical reasons, cannot be safely vaccinated. In addition, the vaccine mandate places an equal burden on all secular beliefs unrelated to protecting public health—for example, philosophical or politically-based objections to state-mandated vaccination requirements—to the same extent that it burdens religious beliefs.

Thus, the medical exemption available as to all mandatory vaccines required by Maine law does not reflect a value judgment unfairly favoring secular interests over religious interests. As an integral part of the vaccine requirement itself, the medical exemption for healthcare workers does not undermine the vaccine mandate’s general applicability. The amended complaint does not plead any facts that plausibly support the conclusion that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is not generally applicable. Because the COVID-19 vaccine mandate is both neutral and generally applicable, rational basis review applies.

The court also concludes that the mandate doesn’t violate Title VII’s duty of reasonable accommodation of religious objections; I may have more to say about that in a later post.

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Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era


9/11 beams of light from across the bridge in New York City

A year ago, the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway after 20 years of war. In February, we marked a year since President Joe Biden’s announcement that the U.S. would no longer support “offensive operations” by the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s civil war, and come December, we’ll hit the one-year anniversary of the (most recent version of the) end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. 

But those milestones don’t tell the whole story. A year ago, I worried in a post at The Week that U.S. intervention in Afghanistan wouldn’t meaningfully end when our troops left Afghan soil. Even without a residual force, “over the horizon” strikes—like the one that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri in July—could continue apace. But so far, it appears my worry was largely misplaced. Data from Airwars, which tracks U.S. strikes using independent reports as well as official acknowledgments, shows the Biden administration has dramatically wound down the drone war and other airstrikes, not only in Afghanistan but across the greater Middle East.

Then there’s the new intelligence assessment which came out this week. It reflects the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community and indicates that Al Qaeda “has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan” in the 12 months since American forces left. Indeed, there are “fewer than a dozen al Qaeda ‘core members'” left in Afghanistan, CNN reported. The terrorist organization that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks no longer has “a capability to launch attacks against the U.S. or its interests abroad from Afghanistan.”

And though the 2024 presidential race isn’t underway quite yet, it’s curious to note how absent counterterrorism and its associated wars are from the nascent contest. This is not simply the short shrift that foreign policy is habitually issued for these events; former President Donald Trump, for example, talked about wars and terrorism and murdering terrorists’ innocent family members regularly during his 2016 campaign. But now, as a Washington Post analysis of his recent rally themes suggests, those topics are rarely on his radar. Biden, meanwhile, has been remarkably quiet about his own achievement in decimating the drone war.

Taken together, this all feels like a significant shift. At the risk of jinxing things, it seems like we may have come to the end of the post-9/11 era of American foreign policy. My entire political life has taken place in the shadow of 9/11 and the excesses of Washington’s response to the horrors of that day, so I make this suggestion with caution. Still, it seems as though we may be at the start of something new, with new challenges to address and, of course, new warnings against hubris, inhumanity, and imprudence to issue.

But the old era, if indeed on its way out, is not quite gone yet. The authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) which initiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and were later stretched to provide implausible legal cover for a host of other military interventions Congress never directly approved—remain in force. These should be formally repealed so that Biden and future presidents alike must clear at least the hurdle of a vote in our usually feckless Congress if they want to expand the U.S. military presence in the Middle East again.

Relatedly, Biden’s more stringent rules for approving drone strikes are an improvement over the loose approach of the Trump administration and the higher civilian casualty counts it helped produce. But those rules aren’t law. They’re executive guidance that can be immediately altered by the next president—which could well be Trump or another Republican with a similarly nonchalant mindset about bombing children and innocent civilians. While his party has a majority in both houses of Congress, Biden should seek to codify a more careful approach in actual law.

He should also more fully end Washington’s forever wars and forever semi-wars, copying the complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the many African countries with U.S. boots on the ground. Though Biden ended the combat mission in Iraq, a residual U.S. force of several thousand is still there in an advise-and-assist role; hundreds of U.S. troops are likewise still working in Somalia and Syria; and the Yemen policy shift is not as sweeping as Biden’s obfuscatory rhetoric made it sound. All of these are points of small but needless risk that could lead to reescalation, and in Yemen, U.S. involvement continues to facilitate a criminal coalition intervention which has contributed considerably to the most acute humanitarian crisis on the planet.

Finally, leaving the post-9/11 era behind should include domestic policy updates, too, because the war on terror was never just limited to foreign policy. In February, we learned the CIA has conducted National Security Administration–style warrantless mass surveillance, including of Americans, in the name of fighting terror, and since then…nothing happened? We never even got all the details on what this unconstitutional spying entailed. Also overdue for serious reform (if not total abolition) is the Transportation Security Administration, which continues to be a cruel and demonstrated incompetent imposition on Americans’ privacy rights. It’s security theater justified by a wildly unrealistic risk assessment, and it should follow other vestiges of the post-9/11 era out the door.

The post Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Inflation Reduction Act Barely Puts a Dent in the Deficit


inflation

When President Joe Biden took office, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the federal government was on pace to run a $12.1 trillion deficit over the following 10 years.

But thanks to a boatload of new spending passed by Congress and signed by Biden during his first 16 months in the White House, that figure has climbed to about $14.5 trillion. In short, Biden has overseen a $2.4 trillion increase in America’s longterm budget deficit.

One way or another, that shortfall has to be accounted for by cutting spending, raising taxes, or printing money. So what does the new Inflation Reduction Act do to address the problem?

It doesn’t cut unnecessary spending or wasteful government programs. Instead, it raises taxes. And those tax increases will only reduce the deficit by about $300 billion. That’s just 2 percent of what the government is forecasted to borrow over the decade after Biden took office.

In other words, even if you assume Congress won’t further hike spending, we’d still need about 50 more bills just like the Inflation Reduction Act to avoid adding more debt in the next decade. And that doesn’t even address the $30 trillion in debt the country has already accumulated. 

Even that small deficit reduction requires a massive corporate tax increase that will hurt the economy. There’s also a plan to squeeze more money out of taxpayers by hiring 87,000 new IRS agents and beefing up the agency’s audit powers.

This bill is indeed the first major piece of legislation to move through congress that would have even a slightly positive impact on future federal deficits since at least the middle of the Obama years. But it’s not a serious attempt to grapple with our coming fiscal nightmare.

The actual drivers of future deficits are entitlement programs. President Biden and Congress are doing nothing to reform the programs that account for about half of the longterm budget deficit: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Thirty-six trillion of the 72 trillion dollars the federal government is expected to spend over the next 10 years goes to pay for these programs. Social Security and Medicare, in particular, are expected to ring up massive budget deficits over the next decade because they’re structured like a Ponzi scheme in which current workers are paying the benefits of today’s beneficiaries. A massive wave of older Americans are retiring and beginning to receive benefits, and there aren’t enough working-age Americans to cover what they’re owed. The system is starting to collapse.

Yes, $300 billion might sound like a lot of money, but in the context of government spending under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—as well as the exploding costs of eldercare entitlements—it’s not very much at all.

Music Credits: “Everytime,” by Ben Fox via Artlist.

Photo Credits: Neon Tommy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Ron Sachs – CNP/Polaris/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom; N Giovannucci, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tulane Public Relations, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Craig Michaud at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom.

Written and narrated by Eric Boehm. Edited by Regan Taylor.

The post The Inflation Reduction Act Barely Puts a Dent in the Deficit appeared first on Reason.com.

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Data Shows Number Of Low-Income Audits Could Triple As IRS Grows

Data Shows Number Of Low-Income Audits Could Triple As IRS Grows

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

The Internal Revenue Service Headquarters Building in Washington on Sept. 19, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The IRS audited 197 low-income families for every high-wealth family in 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a number that some experts expected to climb under an IRS turbocharged with more money and manpower.

Over the next decade, the Democrat’s new “Inflation Reduction Act” will provide the IRS with 87,000 new agents and $80 billion in funding, with nearly $46 billion earmarked for enforcement.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax and spend bill is projected to bring in $203.7 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031.

President Joe Biden’s administration has promised no new taxes or audits on households making less than $400,000 per year.

But experts say that promise may be hard to keep.

A previous CBO analysis using a similar funding plan featured in the Inflation Reduction Act found audit rates would be restored to levels around 10 years ago. The analysis showed the audit rates would rise for all taxpayers, but the ones with higher incomes would face the biggest increase.

The oldest data available in the 2022 Government Accountability Office report released this year was for 2010. That’s when the IRS was better funded and staffed with some 95,000 full time employees.

From 2010-2019, the IRS audited 0.9 percent across all income groups compared to 0.25 percent now.

Rachel Greszler, a budget and entitlements senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times that even returning to the 2010 audit levels for those making more than $400,000 per year, would still fall short of the IRS’s revenue goal.

“My rough estimate shows that returning to the 2010 audit levels for all income groups would only generate a little over 20 percent of the bills’ estimated enforcement revenues in 2031,” she said.

In her commentary on the Heritage Foundation’s website Aug. 12, Greszler wrote the numbers don’t add up using 2019 data either without the lower- and middle-class.

Even increasing recent audit rates 30-fold for taxpayers making over $400,000—including 100 percent audit rates on taxpayers with incomes over $10 million—still would fall more than 20 percent short of raising the estimated $35.3 billion in new revenues by 2031, she wrote.

So it stands to reason that taxpayers can expect audit rates more like those about a decade ago.

GAO statistics show a larger number of audits in 2010 for taxpayers in the $0-$24,999 tax bracket than the high wealth households. About 579,000 audits were performed on the lowest tax bracket in 2010, compared to 197,000 in 2019.

Yet for the wealthy, high wealth audits of $10 million or more stood at 2,800 in 2010, dipping to 1,000 in 2019.

While a higher percentage of high wealthy households is audited more than poor ones, the lower class sees more audits overall.

A better-funded IRS in 2010 audited the poor much more aggressively than the super wealthy—at a rate of 207 to 1.

In recent years, the IRS audited taxpayers with incomes below $25,000 and those with incomes of $500,000 or more at higher-than-average rates. But, audit rates have dropped for all income levels—with audit rates falling the most for taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more, according to the GAO report.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which is a scaled-down version of Build Back Better negotiated by Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), took Republicans by surprise. The measure passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and Congress last week through a reconciliation process.

President Joe Biden (C) signs the Inflation Reduction Act with (L-R) Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington on Aug. 16, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Alarm bells sounded for Republicans after Democrats shot down an amendment to the bill proposed by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) to protect the working class from more audits. Crapo’s amendment stipulated that none of the funds from the Inflation Reduction Act could be used to audit taxpayers making under $400,000 a year. Still, all 50 Democrats in the Senate voted against it.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said CBO calculated the monetary impact of Crapo’s amendment. Calculations confirmed that had lower- and middle-income taxpayers been protected by the amendment, revenue in the Democrats’ bill would have been reduced by at least $20 billion.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attempted to clear up “misinformation” about the bill in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig. She wrote new resources allocated to the IRS “shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington, on June 7, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

However, her directive isn’t included in the bill, meaning it won’t have the power of law. Tax experts and analysis from the nonpartisan scorekeeper at the CBO indicate Yellen’s promise will likely be broken if the IRS sticks to its income expectations.

“Again, this has no teeth behind it,” said Preston Brashers, a senior tax policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation.

Brashers said it would take time for the audits to start rolling, increasing as the tax agency adds tens of thousands of new agents. Proponents of the bill say a large number of those 87,000 employees will fill jobs lost through attrition, but Brashers said it appears that the agency will almost double in size.

In a press release, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) estimated that the Democrats’ bill would amount to 1.2 million new audits of taxpayers per year. Over 710,000 of these audits would fall on Americans who earn $75,000 a year or less.

House Ways and Means Minority Leader Kevin Brady (R-Texas) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 13, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

“If you’re an American worker making $75,000 a year, you are 4x more likely to see a tax hike from this bill than any tax relief at all. You’re hitting middle class families directly and through higher energy prices as well,” Brady wrote on the Ways and Means GOP Twitter feed.

Audits of Least Resistance

Another taxpayer category likely to be audited more is rural, low-income households claiming an Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the IRS.

Those who claim the EITC credits often make mistakes or don’t understand the rules, which makes auditing these returns low-hanging fruit for the IRS because they don’t require many man hours. The opposite is true of audits of wealthy families who can afford accountants and lawyers.

A much larger number of returns claiming EITC credits are audited compared to the wealthiest households. In 2019, the number of audits of low-income families claiming the EITC credit compared to high wealth audits of $10 million or more was 205 to 1.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/18/2022 – 17:00

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As If Millions Of Apes Suddenly Cried Out In Terror: Ryan Cohen Dumps Entire BBBY Stake

As If Millions Of Apes Suddenly Cried Out In Terror: Ryan Cohen Dumps Entire BBBY Stake

We tried – we really tried – to warn millions of retail traders, from the reddit apes, to the mom and pops, to the basement dwellers, to the Robinhood fanatics – that their idol “Papa Ryan” Cohen, aka “Diamondhands” was about to rugpull them.

Instead, our warning was met with idiotic accusations of being everything from Citadel shills (even though they threatened to sue us for correctly accusing them of frontrunning retail investors), to being Wall Street sellouts.

Well less than 24 hours later we were proven right when Papa Ryan dumped his entire 9.5 million share-equivalent stake in BBBY just one day after the 144 filing…

… or rather before, because what is most remarkable about the one-day liquidation is that RC Ventures, Ryan Cohen’s market manipulation fund, was actually dumping the shares on Wednesday morning, long before he even filed the 13G.

Now that there is no pied piper to lead the rats apes to their destruction, BBBY stock is crashing…

… and dragging GME – where Papa Cohen has yet to sell – with it.

As for Cohen, we can’t help but be touched by his nobility and generosity, when just a few weeks ago he was so concerned about bagholders…

… before himself leaving thousands of bagholders nursing millions of losses.

We can only hope that the outcry from this latest glaring manipulation will finally prompt the absolute morons at the SEC to finally do something about this kind of manipulative, management-driven gamma squeeze…

… but with the unprecedented amount of corruption in this administration, we are not holding our breath.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/18/2022 – 16:44

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Brace For Even Higher Beef Prices As Texas Cattle Industry Faces Historic Drought Crisis

Brace For Even Higher Beef Prices As Texas Cattle Industry Faces Historic Drought Crisis

Ranchers across Texas continue to panic sell cattle herds as the worst megadrought in 1,200 years makes it too expensive to sustain operations. 

“We’ll keep selling cows till it rains,” Texas High Plains rancher Jim Ferguson told Amarillo station KAMR, which collaborated with The Hill on the expanding cattle crisis in the state. 

America’s cattle heartland has seen pastures turn to dust, and costs for feed, fertilizer, and diesel skyrocket, threatening an entire industry that is essential to the nation’s beef supply. 

The Hill said that the devastating drought and higher cattle operation costs would result in higher beef prices for at least the next two years. And we agree with that assessment as the latest data via USDA shows supermarket prices surged to record highs earlier this year and are quickly approaching the $5 handle. 

“The lack of water in general, it’s hurting us all the way around. Any way you can think of,” cattle buyer Josh Sturgeon said. 

Sturgeon said ranchers are liquidating herds at auction because of the lack of water and soaring costs. 

But “you’re almost afraid to buy. Cattle drink a lot of water, especially this time of year. With this drought, they’re drinking a lot of water. Cattle are dying because of this. Even the best of cattle are struggling,” he noted.

Walter Kunisch of consultant group Hilltop Securities said increased cattle liquidations at auctions due to worsening drought is “nothing like we’ve seen in the last 15 years.” 

Kunisch pointed out that farmers are selling off their breeding stock, which they rely on to produce the next generation of cows. 

“That’s a big signal to me that, you know, that future supplies at some point are going to run tight,” Kunsich warned. 

USDA’s latest cattle report found herds are down 2.4% nationwide since last year — a decrease of 750,000 cows — and a decline of 2 million since the national herd peaked in 2018. 

The biggest takeaway is cattle herds moving forward are expected to shrink, meaning tight supplies and higher prices. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/18/2022 – 16:30

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Stocks Stumble, Memes Mauled In Sleepy Session Fit For Sandman

Stocks Stumble, Memes Mauled In Sleepy Session Fit For Sandman

If one had to describe today’s session with one word it would be “sleepy.”

After yesterday’s early selloff, driven by sharply higher rates, the 2pm FOMC failed to provide traders any clear direction on what the Fed plans to do, and an early dovish read of the minutes fizzled quickly, ending any upward momentum. Fast forward to today when stocks traded in a narrow range bound by the pre-FOMC lows and post-FOMC highs (yet one which nonetheless makes the Fed nervous as it is far too high to constrict financial conditions).

While most sectors were in the green – though energy led the pack thanks to a surge in oil prices…

…  volumes were dismal (to be expected with more than half of traders out on vacation) and liquidity was non-existent …

… and what little action there was, was in “meme stonks” where recent insolvent, multi-bagging superstars like BBBY crumbled after even the apes were forced to accept that it’s just a matter of time before “papa Cohen” and his diamondhands dump their BBBY stake (and who knows what else).

The news sent BBBY stock plunging more than 20% and almost half off yesterday’s $30 high….

… AMC hit ten-day lows…

… and GME was also hammered…

… as the broader basement trader space got deflated now that the Fed has made it clear it will likely hike another 75bps in September.

And speaking of September rate hikes, after odds of a 75bps hike post yesterday’s FOMC from 70% to 40%, we got the usual confusion today when former uber-hawk Esther George came out dovish today while recent uber-dove Bullard James Bullard said he backs a 75bps rate hike.

However, since not even the algos care about Fed forecasts any more, there was little impact on either the Euro$ market or risk assets.

The rest of today’s session was, as noted, boring: the dollar rose, rates went nowhere, the VIX crunch resumed, pushing it back below 20…

… gold went nowhere, same as bitcoin, while ETH saw a stead trickle of inflows as traders continue to expect outperformance from the token before (and after) the merge.

Crude was probably the only other interesting move besides memes, as it was finally able to rally out of its previous rut due to Wednesday’s EIA report, which showed that markets are still very tight and gasoline soared. Along with multiple stockpile draws, the report revealed that recessionary risks haven’t trickled over to crude consumption just yet as demand remains high. Bolstering gains were Xi’s comments about Chinese reopening (even though the comments appeared to reference globalization rather than the country’s Covid-zero policy, but whateves), as well as continued geopolitical risk with Bloomberg noting that talks between Ukrainian President Zelenskiy and Turkey’s President Erdogan didn’t prove fruitful, as Zelenskiy says he sees no end to the war without troop withdrawals. Finally, Goldman said that an Iran nuclear deal is actually not going to happen and will instead be an extended “stalemate”, which however won’t help the supply picture. As a result, WTI crude briefly rallied above $91 on Thursday after previously dropping to a seven-month low earlier in the week.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/18/2022 – 16:06

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Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era


9/11 beams of light from across the bridge in New York City

A year ago, the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway after 20 years of war. In February, we marked a year since President Joe Biden’s announcement that the U.S. would no longer support “offensive operations” by the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen’s civil war, and come December, we’ll hit the one-year anniversary of the (most recent version of the) end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq. 

But those milestones don’t tell the whole story. A year ago, I worried in a post at The Week that U.S. intervention in Afghanistan wouldn’t meaningfully end when our troops left Afghan soil. Even without a residual force, “over the horizon” strikes—like the one that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri in July—could continue apace. But so far, it appears my worry was largely misplaced. Data from Airwars, which tracks U.S. strikes using independent reports as well as official acknowledgments, shows the Biden administration has dramatically wound down the drone war and other airstrikes, not only in Afghanistan but across the greater Middle East.

Then there’s the new intelligence assessment which came out this week. It reflects the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community and indicates that Al Qaeda “has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan” in the 12 months since American forces left. Indeed, there are “fewer than a dozen al Qaeda ‘core members'” left in Afghanistan, CNN reported. The terrorist organization that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks no longer has “a capability to launch attacks against the U.S. or its interests abroad from Afghanistan.”

And though the 2024 presidential race isn’t underway quite yet, it’s curious to note how absent counterterrorism and its associated wars are from the nascent contest. This is not simply the short shrift that foreign policy is habitually issued for these events; former President Donald Trump, for example, talked about wars and terrorism and murdering terrorists’ innocent family members regularly during his 2016 campaign. But now, as a Washington Post analysis of his recent rally themes suggests, those topics are rarely on his radar. Biden, meanwhile, has been remarkably quiet about his own achievement in decimating the drone war.

Taken together, this all feels like a significant shift. At the risk of jinxing things, it seems like we may have come to the end of the post-9/11 era of American foreign policy. My entire political life has taken place in the shadow of 9/11 and the excesses of Washington’s response to the horrors of that day, so I make this suggestion with caution. Still, it seems as though we may be at the start of something new, with new challenges to address and, of course, new warnings against hubris, inhumanity, and imprudence to issue.

But the old era, if indeed on its way out, is not quite gone yet. The authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) which initiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and were later stretched to provide implausible legal cover for a host of other military interventions Congress never directly approved—remain in force. These should be formally repealed so that Biden and future presidents alike must clear at least the hurdle of a vote in our usually feckless Congress if they want to expand the U.S. military presence in the Middle East again.

Relatedly, Biden’s more stringent rules for approving drone strikes are an improvement over the loose approach of the Trump administration and the higher civilian casualty counts it helped produce. But those rules aren’t law. They’re executive guidance that can be immediately altered by the next president—which could well be Trump or another Republican with a similarly nonchalant mindset about bombing children and innocent civilians. While his party has a majority in both houses of Congress, Biden should seek to codify a more careful approach in actual law.

He should also more fully end Washington’s forever wars and forever semi-wars, copying the complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the many African countries with U.S. boots on the ground. Though Biden ended the combat mission in Iraq, a residual U.S. force of several thousand is still there in an advise-and-assist role; hundreds of U.S. troops are likewise still working in Somalia and Syria; and the Yemen policy shift is not as sweeping as Biden’s obfuscatory rhetoric made it sound. All of these are points of small but needless risk that could lead to reescalation, and in Yemen, U.S. involvement continues to facilitate a criminal coalition intervention which has contributed considerably to the most acute humanitarian crisis on the planet.

Finally, leaving the post-9/11 era behind should include domestic policy updates, too, because the war on terror was never just limited to foreign policy. In February, we learned the CIA has conducted National Security Administration–style warrantless mass surveillance, including of Americans, in the name of fighting terror, and since then…nothing happened? We never even got all the details on what this unconstitutional spying entailed. Also overdue for serious reform (if not total abolition) is the Transportation Security Administration, which continues to be a cruel and demonstrated incompetent imposition on Americans’ privacy rights. It’s security theater justified by a wildly unrealistic risk assessment, and it should follow other vestiges of the post-9/11 era out the door.

The post Welcome to the Post-Post-9/11 Era appeared first on Reason.com.

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