Month: August 2022

Authored by Rajan Laad via AmericanThinker.com,

For every election cycle, a few months prior to voting day, pollsters release surveys that show Democrats leading with wide margins. The media gleefully amplify these polls.

This isn’t a recent phenomenon.

Back in 1980, Reagan was trailing Carter trailing by 8% even in some mid-October polls. Reagan ended up winning the 1980 general election in a landslide.

In 2016, pollsters said with certitude that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. The New York Times proclaimed she has a 91 percent chance of winning. Trump won that election by a respectable margin in the electoral college.

In 2020, Trump was supposed to lose to Biden by a landslide. In reality, Trump secured 10 million more votes than in 2016, despite the media onslaught for four years, Democrat electoral malpractice, and suppression of all anti Biden stories. Trump received 7 million more votes than any sitting president in American history.

We are months before an election and various Democrat mouthpieces are doing the very same thing.

Vanity Fair magazine is claiming that Maybe Democrats Aren’t Totally Screwed in the midterms. The Atlantic is claiming that the Democrats might avoid a midterm wipeout. The New York Times reports “growing evidence against a Republican wave.” The Washington Post opines that Democrats are showing momentum coming out of special elections. NPR is claiming that Biden’s recent wins could give Democrats a boost heading into November. Even ‘conservative’ Fox News is claiming that midterms looking ‘much better’ for Democrats because of Trump.

The media is also pushing the narrative that Biden has had a resurgence. They are citing Biden’s ‘legislative accomplishments’ on tech manufacturing, guns, infrastructure, and climate change. They are lauding Biden for canceling $10,000 in student debt for borrowers making under $125,000 per year. They are even claiming his poll numbers are high. 

Dark Brandon is having a good week.

– Jobs up
– Unemployment down
– Gas prices down
– Getting Manchin and Sinema to agree on SOMETHING
– Got the Al Qaeda guy
– Even shamed Republicans into helping veterans (Jon Stewart definitely helped!) pic.twitter.com/LesAWTByFs

— Grant Stern is boosted! (@grantstern) August 5, 2022

Now for the facts.

None of his ‘legislative accomplishments’ will have any positive impact on the ground. On the contrary, they are likely to worsen the suffering. 

Pardoning student loans is discriminatory to people who have the burden of other kinds of loans such as home loans, vehicle loans, business loans, etc., plus high taxes. These people are unlikely to be pleased with Biden.

The annual inflation may have dropped marginally but it still remains at a high 8.5 percent causing the prices of regular items to skyrocket, adding to the struggle of regular Americans. The media is claiming that the Inflation Reduction Act addresses inflation, however, experts say it would only reduce annual inflation by 0.1 percentage point over the next five years. 

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll shows only 37% of Americans approve of Joe Biden’s handling of the economy while 70% thought the economy under Biden had worsened.

The Democrats are the party of open borders causing an influx of illegal immigrants some among whom are violent criminals, human traffickers, terrorists, and smugglers of illicit drugs. 

Since Biden took office, over 4.9 million illegal migrants have crossed the southern border. This is the equivalent of the combined population of states such as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, both North and South Dakota, and Biden’s home state of Delaware.

The Democrats have also shown totalitarian propensities.

They called parents who opposed the teaching of critical race theory in school domestic terrorists.

They used COVID-19 to impose lockdowns that destroyed lives not only economically but psychologically. The Democrats advocated vaccine mandates that rendered many jobless. Some who reluctantly took the vaccine to remain employed, are suffering from health issues.

The Democrats attempted to set up the Orwellian ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ that sits in judgment of the utterances of regular citizens.

The Democrats plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents who will obviously harass the middle class quite likely in states that don’t vote Democrat. The same Democrats have no funds to hire new Border Patrol agents to protect the border.

The January 6 Committee exists to persecute political opponents and their supporters. 

Democrats have shown themselves to be out of touch, bragging about expensive electric cars that are hard to recharge.

The situation abroad is catastrophic.

Biden’s withdrawal has made Afghanistan unstable and al-Qaida is once again in control. The media focused on lauding Biden for the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, but what the ignored was the fact that he was living comfortably in Kabul.

A Department of Defense whistleblower report noted that 324 of the individuals the Biden administration evacuated from Afghanistan and welcomed into the U.S. have appeared on the terror watchlist.

There is a raging war in Ukraine. The Democrats have splurged $10.6 billion and pledged $40 billion more in aid to Ukraine. All transparency and accountability measures were blocked. Recently Biden announced $3 billion in new weapons and equipment to Ukraine, once again there is no proper tracking of these weapons, let alone the money — the weapons could be sold on the black market and end up in the wrong hands.

There are also considerable tensions between China and Taiwan.

There is nothing that the Democrats can point to and claim as their accomplishment.

Yet they focus on the trivial and attempt to project themselves in favorably.

A perfect example is the senate race in Pennsylvania which is a microcosm of the entire U.S.

The race is between Republican Dr. Memet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman. 

Fetterman pledged to ban fracking which supports thousands of jobs, especially in western Pennsylvania which is the fourth-largest energy producer in America. Fetterman plans to release one-third of the state’s prisoners which will place Pennsylvanians in deep peril. Fetterman suffered a stroke that kept him away from the campaign for three months and now has impaired cognitive abilities.

But the media is focused on Dr. Oz unknowingly using the wrong word to describe a vegetable tray. The polls show Oz consistently trailing Fetterman by 11 percentage points. They are even carrying reports that Trump thinks Oz will lose, and obviously, the sources are unnamed.

Back to Biden.

There are a few polls that the media don’t like to talk about.

Axios recently ran a poll early this month that showed a startling number of Democrats are been unwilling to support Biden’s re-election in 2024 since he is old and unpopular. The New York Times carried a piece urging Biden to step aside in favor of young talent in the Democrat party. The Washington Post ran a column that revealed that few candidates want Biden to campaign for them in their state or district.

Now about those polls.

The goal behind these new polls favoring the Democrats and accompanying the media blitzkrieg is to dispirit the Republican voters and prompt them to skip voting. This is a voter suppression tactic.

The truth is the Democrats were and are behind every major suffering that regular Americans are facing from crime to inflation to dangers from abroad. The voters are unlikely to forget their past and their present.

Former U.S. representative and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA),who knows a thing or two about politics, wrote “November realities are going to be a lot friendlier to Republicans than August news media fantasies.”

All you have to do is vote.

Adults in the United States are suffering in their lives at a record level. That’s according to the latest in a survey series from Gallup.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong details below, the share of adults rating their lives poorly enough to be considered ‘suffering‘, according to Gallup’s methodology, hit a new high of 5.6 percent this July.

The survey, which goes back as far as 2008, asks respondents to rate the current and expected future state of their lives on a scale of 0 to 10, with answers in the range of 0 to 4 classified as ‘suffering, 5 to 6 ‘struggling, and 7-10 ‘thriving.

As reported, the latest result “exceeds the previous high of 4.8 percent measured in April and is statistically higher than all prior estimates in the Covid-19 era.”

You will find more infographics at Statista

Gallup suggest that “economic conditions are likely a major contributing factor to these worsening scores”, adding: “Dovetailing with economic headwinds is a rising discontentment with U.S. moral values, which has reached a record high, with 50% of Americans reporting the state of moral values is “poor” and 37% “only fair,” a sentiment that could be negatively influencing life ratings generally.”

Authored by Andrew Keir via BitcoinMagazine.com,

The fiat system is a walled garden surrounded by armed guards. Bitcoin penetrates and dissolves these walls, and helps humanity flourish in the process.

The concept of a walled garden is not a new one; they have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A precious garden enclosed by high walls serves many purposes, including providing protection from animal or human intruders. These walled gardens also create microclimates, which allow for specific things to grow and flourish that may not otherwise be able to due to the temperate climate outside the walls.

It’s no secret that walled gardens lay at the core of every major software company’s strategy, and they are built around it to generate and sustain a network effect.

Any Apple user knows first hand the way you get trapped within the ecosystem, because of the way their products interact together, but also because of the friction that is introduced when using a non-Apple product. This gives Apple incredible power as we can see with their App Store, where they have total control over who can enter and who cannot. It also creates the need for new Apple-specific products in order for you to maintain a consistent user interface, which is central to the walled garden approach. The same is true for Google, Microsoft, Facebook and most other software company giants. Many people use social media platforms as if they were the internet itself. These platforms are masterful at keeping you inside their gardens, and do everything they can to extend the amount of time you spend within their walls. If it were up to them, you would never leave.

Fundamentally, they do this by designing incentives. Presumably they try to add value, by making their products as good and as easy-to-use as possible, so you simply want to use them over others. It would seem that they also allow a certain amount of friction to exist by not using their products to disincentivize you from exploring other options and therefore exiting their ecosystem. Apple software interfaces is one of the best examples of this, where many people fear having to “learn” how to navigate a different company’s interface and migrate their images, contacts, messages, etc. The reality is that as humans, we’re (in most cases) lazy animals, and a dominant majority of people will follow the path of least resistance. Thus, due to the incentives, they stay inside Apple’s walls. Over time, the walls begin to look more like a cage.

In the same way that these software giants create walled gardens and work to keep us inside them, so too do governments and central banks with political fiat monetary systems. Central banks issue money, and the government insists this money be accepted. The fiat system is a classic example of a walled garden. The difference is that outside the walls of the fiat garden of governments and their central banks there are armed soldiers.

Software giants — while they do everything to incentivize you to stay inside their garden and prey on all your vulnerabilities to make it as unattractive to leave as possible — cannot stop you, and if you exercise your agency, you can leave and never return. Not so with the fiat walled garden. If you try to leave and venture off to explore outside the walls or even to explore a different fiat walled garden, they want to know where you have been, the reasons for leaving and every possible detail about your interactions while you were gone. To the fiat masters, it is their business. You are not simply free to explore.

The fiat standard is a walled garden, and unlike software companies it is one you are kept within by decree. By force. Outside of this garden is the open, permissionless, abundant environment of bitcoin. The fiat masters are counting on the height of the walls, and men with guns on the other side being able to perturb you from scaling the walls and exploring the vast abundant land outside. What they weren’t counting on however, was the invisible force of bitcoin being able to penetrate and then dissolve these walls, and help humanity flourish both inside the garden and outside of it. This invisible force is everywhere and it is nowhere, and it is the key to an abundant future. With bitcoin there are no walls. No borders. The very notion of a walled garden ceases to be possible. Or conversely, it is the ultimate garden in which no walls exist.

One never forgets that smell of an Amtrak coach car at 5 am – rumbling into Manhattan. At the wise old age of 18, the bags were packed for a long journey with most of my worldly possessions in tow. Coming into New York for the first time with no parents – no siblings, was a very big day indeed. When the train stopped at Penn Station, I could hardly wait to get off. It was a feeling of heart-pounding excitement with every step. With dreams, goals, and opportunities everywhere, the only thing missing was the free lollipops and candy canes. The next thing I knew, this nice gentleman with a blue coat, gold cufflinks, and even a pressed handkerchief in his top right pocket approached me. “Let me help you with all that luggage, young man. If you ́re hungry, the best 24-7 diner in this part of town is right over there.”

Famished, I glanced over toward the restaurant. Now turned around – in a full 360, I looked down and all my bags were gone with that man into a mob of humanity. Robbed right out of a scene from Trading Places, welcome to the big city.

On Friday, nearly every human being on earth with capital to invest had their eyes on the Fed. It was a “look here”, “NOT over there” kind of day. Steve Jobs always said – “it’s the scar tissue from mistakes that keeps us focused on all the pieces across the chess board – NOT just one or two.”

Surprise, the biggest news by far out of Jackson hole was coming out of the ECB NOT the Fed – who would have guessed? As the day moved on Friday, it was clear Don McLean ‘s “American Pie” was longer than Jay Powell’s torpedo of a speech – BUT more and more clients we respect in the live chat on the Bloomberg terminal – kept pointing to Europe as the driver of U.S. equity volatility.

• CIO 1: “Larry – The point is missed. Fed fund futures didn’t move that much on Powell. The afternoon pain today pain caused by ECB that signaled 75bp hike possibility for September and enhanced QT (balance sheet reduction). The reason for the hawkish signals is the explosion of energy prices in Europe in August. It’s a real problem for them that Wall St and Fed largely ignore.“
• LGM: “Heading into Powell – everyone long stocks was looking – praying for any kind of dovish shift (equity players) – the fact that Fed fund futures were unched after Powell’s 8 min song was very bearish; rate hike expectations have been ripping higher since Aug 11th! From roughly, 25bps of 1H 2023 cuts to now hikes are priced in), there was no reversal – NO profit taking on the news. This was bearish for equities. Plus – the ECB news came out at 5am, U.S. equities were higher all morning, then puked lower after Powell. look at the explosive volume past 1pm ET, especially in the 3-4pm hour, WOW. Agree 100% – energy prices – gas — are screwing the Fed, nearly guaranteeing 8% + CPI to Q2 2023 – the natural gas crisis is a massive sustainable inflation driver with countless follow-on side effects – inflation will be elevated 6% + for years. — Swiss National Bank President, Jordan latest warning – stubborn price gains are here to stay”
• CIO 2: ”It was the ECB QT piece came out in the afternoon, and the ECB officials Holzmann and Knot confirming the morning leak from Reuters when they said Friday afternoon that 75bp should be considered at the Sept meeting that fueled the ECB angst in equities. It is clear now – on September 8th the ECB is going to hike and signal QT at the same time Italy is having elections a few weeks later – is just a very bad idea. I think people finally starting to pay attention to energy crisis in Europe and how the ECB needs to fight the resulting inflation with tools that do nothing to help the underlying problem (no more gas). This speaks to near term Euro strength vs. USD.”

For most of the last 10 days, even with the much talked up “China economic slowdown” and a surge in recession certainty in Europe – global bond yields kept moving higher. In just a few weeks, Italian 10s marched from 296 to 370bps.

Since Q4 2020, negative yielding bonds on the planet have plunged from $18T to almost $2T, and much of those are in Japan.

Sovereign credit risk is on the rise in Europe – we have the ECB on September 8, the Fed on the 21st, and the all-important Italian elections on the 25th. The ECB has yet to pick its poison:

1. a plunge in the Euro is fueling runaway inflation in the periphery – this risk could place a right-leaning coalition in control of Italy for the first time in decades. Putin would be all smiles – from Moscow to Vladivostok – with that outcome.
2. aggressive rate hikes force more price discovery in Europe and put colossal pressure on a banking system – stuffed to the gills with sour loans. The tell – Jamie Dimon doesn’t suspend stock buybacks every day, he’s playing defense. Apple and Tesla are nearly 10% of the S&P (SPY) and 20% of the QQQs – have roughly $100B in sales coming out of the EU.

On August 11th – we distributed our largest – take down risk – “high conviction” trade alert sell since February of 2020, eleven positions with new shorts on the Nasdaq. U.S. equities have been priced for an American economy on Mars or Venus, NOT Earth. Into this mess – we have a Fed that is expected to do $1T of QT over the next 12 months, NO way. Bullish gold.

Bottom line: Near term inflation expectations are coming down with economic risks on the rise and a still hawkish Powell. The Fed is talking a tough game but risks a Lehman like event in Europe. Our highest conviction call looking out 6-9 months – is long the gold miners – GDX names GOLD, NEM, AEM.

At a moment the Solomon Islands continues pursuing deeper ties with China, and following a bilateral security cooperation agreement between the two countries signed in April which set off alarm bells in Washington, the island nation is taking the unprecedented decision to deny US military vessels the ability to dock. 

The US Coast Guard said in an official statement on Friday that its vessel, the USCG Oliver Henry was denied a “routine logistics port call” by the Solomon Islands government. The US statement didn’t indicate the precise day that the port call request was rejected. 

Authorities “did not respond to the US government’s request for diplomatic clearance for the vessel to refuel and provision” in the capital city of Honiara, said the Coast Guard – which in prior years had been normative and easily granted. The vessel had reportedly been on patrol in South Pacific waters looking for illegal fishing at the request of a regional fisheries agency.

Following the denial, which is somewhat unprecedented and now being widely interpreted as a sign of deepened security ties and cooperation with China, the State Department said it put the Solomon Islands on notice and in the future expects “all future clearances will be provided to US ships.” The Coast Guard cutter was further described as “part of a patrol headed south to assist partner nations in upholding and asserting their sovereignty while protecting US national interests.”

Currently the US and Chinese navies are jockeying to assert competing visions of what constitutes territorial vs. international waters in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the South Pacific. This is especially a tense issue at the moment near Taiwan.

Regarding the Taiwan issue, and a huge indicator of increasing Chinese influence over the Solomons, which has been going on for years, the tiny island-chain country had switched its diplomatic relations and formal recognition from Taipei and Beijing starting in 2019. US officials also close watched large-scale and at times violent anti-corruption protests break out in 2021 – which many observers said was sparked by Beijing’s growing reach in the country’s internal affairs.

All of this was the lead-in to what Western officials and pundits dubbed a “secretive” April 1st security pact, summarized and described by the US government institution and think tank United States Institute of Peace as follows: 

A leaked draft of a Solomon Islands-China security agreement has led to heightened concern over the island nation’s turn toward China. Washington dispatched a high-level delegation in late April to the island nation, days after China said the pact had been signed, saying it would “intensify engagement in the region.”

The United States and its regional partners, particularly Australia and New Zealand, are worried about the potential of Chinese military bases on the islands, although the details of the agreement remain vague — which is itself a source of concern. As part of its Indo-Pacific Strategy, the Biden administration aims to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific, an objective that could be complicated by China’s prospective new arrangement with Solomon Islands.

The prime minister of the Solomon Islands Manasseh Sogavare sought to reassure his population (and Western leaders) in mid-July remarks, saying there is no intent to ever allow a Chinese military base in his country, which could make “our people as targets for potential military strikes” – akin to what played out there between global powers in WWII.

But he did say at the time that he remains open to Chinese security personnel acting under a peace-keeping mission to be deployed to the islands, in the scenario where the “security partner of choice” Australia couldn’t meet these commitments.

By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves

The phrase “freight broker” is rather boring, I will admit it. As snoozy as those words may make you feel, these brokers are key to making sure stuff gets on trucks and across the country. 

Since deregulation wrested trucking from the control of the federal government in 1980, freight brokerages have become a trucking necessity. Every imaginable company — ranging from General Mills to Amazon to Starbucks — relies on freight brokers to place loads on trucks every day. 

One major transporter has tried to eschew freight brokers for years: the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Service spent nearly $10 billion moving letters and boxes in fiscal year 2021. Most of that expense is on trucks, but there are also FedEx and UPS planes, trains and even ships. 

It’s not known when exactly the Postal Service started to use freight brokers, but attorney David P. Hendel only began including brokers like C.H. Robinson on his essential top 150 Postal Service contractor list in 2013. 

A FreightWaves analysis of the Postal Service’s top suppliers reveals that the agency’s reliance on brokers has boomed in the past nine years. The Postal Service counted three brokerage firms among its top 150 suppliers in fiscal year 2013, totaling $85 million. By fiscal year 2021, at least 11 firms that primarily provide brokerage services were on that list, representing a spend of more than $620 million.

“The Postal Service is re-examining its network both long-haul and even local,” said Hendel, a partner at Culhane Meadows who specializes in government contracting work. “I think the Postal Service now views the carriage of mail as a commodity, rather than as a special service. It feels like it maybe should be taking advantage of the larger commercial marketplace.”

By using brokers, outsiders believe the Postal Service can save cash. Public data indicates that the Postal Service has intensified its freight broker spend under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who assumed his role in June 2020. DeJoy was previously CEO of New Breed Logistics, a long-time USPS contractor, which was sold to XPO Logistics in 2014. 

This cost-saving tactic won’t surprise those who have followed DeJoy’s tenure. Under his leadership, the Postal Service has doubled down on “modernizing” its transportation network. This partially means implementing tools that private-sector shippers have used for years, like a digital load board where freight bids are posted and a digital transportation management system. 

A USPS spokesperson declined to answer answers to a list of questions about the Postal Service’s new brokerage strategy, but provided a statement.

“The Postal Service continues to onboard new carriers to help us deliver as part of our Delivering for America 10-year plan for achieving financial sustainability and service excellence,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “These carriers are both asset based and non-asset based providers. The Postal Service also has one of the largest private fleets in the industry that we rely on to move freight in certain regions. When our fleet cannot handle the volume, we tender to our partner carriers. Depending on the specific circumstances to move the load, we will use either a contracted carrier or move via a spot market transaction.”

Outsiders have characterized DeJoy as a fella who wants to run the Postal Service like a corporation, not a government service. That’s a good thing if you’re, say, Nevada-based ITS Logistics, which saw its Postal Service contract nearly double from fiscal year 2020 to 2021. But it’s not so good if you’re one of the Postal Service’s hundreds of long-haul trucking partners — which are likely set to lose business as the Postal Service reimagines its trucking network. 

“I think his impact is a sea change in terms of the way in which the Postal Service thinks about transportation,”  said Greg Reed, who is the executive director of the National Star Route Mail Contractors Association, which is the trade organization that represents Postal Service transportation contractors. ”It’s obviously driven from his background in logistics and in the brokerage world. It’s driven from his knowledge and experience that there is no sophisticated supply chain that doesn’t incorporate brokers into their model. That’s about effiency, capacity and pricing.”

Wait, what the heck is a freight broker?

For the logistics neophytes among us, let’s briefly talk about what a freight broker is. 

The phrase freight broker usually refers to trucking. There are brokers, of course, to place freight on airplanes, rail and ships. Especially for international movements, they’re usually called “freight forwarders.” The trucking industry, through sheer force of will, has mostly claimed the phrase “freight broker” for itself, even though there are indeed many types of transportation brokers. 

Brokers handle most varieties of trucking freight, whether it was picked up on the so-called “spot market” or was contracted out months in advance. But it wasn’t always like this. Before 1980, regular, scheduled runs were the norm, in part because the federal government dictated the rate of each trucking route. 

Decades ago, brokers were an anomaly. The former head of the Transportation Intermediaries Association estimated that there were only 14 licensed brokers in 1980. That exploded to more than 10,000 in 2005, he said at the time. 

Nearly two decades ago, the truck brokerage market was worth some $50 billion. Today, it’s worth around $186 billion, according to the TIA. 

One reason that freight brokers have become so common is that there are way too many trucking companies for each retailer, manufacturer, farmer or whatever to form relationships with. So they turn to brokers to figure out who to work with. 

There were some 17,000 trucking companies by the end of the 1970s, when brokers were still unusual. But today, hundreds of thousands of firms comprise trucking. Many have a whopping single truck. These small companies, also called “owner-operators,” mostly run on what’s called the spot market, where they pick up jobs as it’s convenient. They don’t have regular schedules or customers. 

The other side is the contract market, where a trucking company pledges to execute, say, eight runs a week shuttling goods between Des Moines, Iowa, and Detroit for a year. 

These contracts are kind of lies, though — and both sides know it when they sign it. The retailer, manufacturer, farmer or whatever might need far more or far fewer trucks running between Des Moines and Detroit on a given week. What really ends up happening is uncertain.

The Postal Service’s old-timey transportation system

Over the decades, it’s become the norm for trucking companies and their customers to ditch the stipulations of their contracts. The Postal Service hasn’t kept up with that trend. And, as a result, its transportation network is unusually redundant. Reed said the complication of separating letter mail versus boxes has left some Postal Service trucks shuttling down the highway empty or with a single box or two inside. 

Not only does the Postal Service actually stick to its contracts, it works with a lot more contractors than other shippers. Rather than heavily relying on brokerage firms to allocate spot or contract freight, the Postal Service maintains decades-long contracts with trucking firms that mostly just haul freight for the mail agency. The agency allocates about 10% of its total transportation spend on in-house truck drivers, all of whom are unionized. 

One example of that is 10 Roads Express, which says on its website that it grew from a one-truck operation in 1946 to a 3,500-truck operation today through hauling U.S. mail. In the fiscal year 2021, the Iowa trucker made $540 million off its Postal Service business. 

Regular routes seemed to allow Postal Service carriers to eschew technologies that other carriers had to adopt upward of a decade ago. As of the past two years, the Postal Service has pushed features including a digital load board and an online transportation management system, Reed said. 

Another major factor of DeJoy’s cost-saving tactics is moving freight that would normally end up on a cargo plane to a truck instead. DeJoy recently hired a former New Breed Logistics executive to help lead this transformation. 

The Postal Service is trying to get better at not following its contracts, though. It has devised a new type of contract with a feature called “dynamic routing optimization.” With those contracts, the Postal Service assesses each week if it needs more or fewer trucks on a certain route. 

The other side of the Postal Service’s move away from contract freight is, of course, working with brokers.

The Postal Service could save a lot of money with freight brokers, but it’s a knock on its longtime carriers

Implementing new contracts and other technologies could mean cost savings at the Postal Service, but it’s spooky for long-time carriers — especially because these new products aren’t always perfect. One trucking contractor told the Washington Post last year that the Postal Service’s new software has cost them $110 million and sparked hundreds of layoffs. 

“The biggest burden in general is implementing that technology and those practices,” Reed said of long-time contractors.

The Postal Service has already ditched thousands of carriers as it’s streamlined operations, according to longtime parcel expert Satish Jindel. In 2014, the Postal Service worked with about 4,000 highway contractors. Now that’s around 1,700. That’s not because the Postal Service is trying to reduce its reliance on trucking; the Postal Service is actually focused on moving more freight off pricey cargo planes and onto trucks.

“They need larger carriers,” Jindel said. “They don’t have the ability to use small mom-and-pop carriers to rely on in the past.”

That explains why the Postal Service has turned to brokers to work with smaller trucking companies. In 2021, the Postal Service counted XPO Logistics, C.H. Robinson and ITS Logistics among its largest truck broker providers. (XPO and C.H. Robinson declined to comment for this piece, while Eve and ITS did not respond to a request for comment.)

What’s more, leaning on the spot market means you can bid truck space as needed, rather than needing a yearslong contract with carriers all over the country. That should seemingly push the Postal Service toward an efficient, modernized transportation network. 

However, perhaps 2021, famously the year that spot market rates shot to the moon, was a very bad year to turbocharge the usage of freight brokers. According to one analysis of public data, the Postal Service paid more than $50 million in extra trip dollars in January 2022, more than tenfold the spend from 2021 or 2020. 

“Anytime they can have a direct contract with a carrier, that is always a better service at a better price, because they are then buying that service through the spot market,” Jindel said. 

But, Hendel said he believes it’s unlikely that the cost-conscious Postal Service would continue to pursue freight brokerage if it didn’t have the potential to slash costs. 

Even amid the move to modernize the Postal Service, Hendel doubts the agency would ever want to ditch its old-fashioned contract carrier model — just as UPS or FedEx hasn’t opened itself entirely up to the spot market. The risk to the mail system would be too large.

“I think that could be a dangerous thing because you don’t have the dedicated reliable providers you have today and you open yourself up to spot market issues,” Hendel said. “I don’t think the Postal Service will ever be well-served by relying exclusively on brokers — that would be a recipe for disaster.”

A mint condition Mickey Mantle baseball card sold for $12.6 million Sunday – making it the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia in history.

The 1952 card is widely regarded as one of just a handful of near-perfect cards of the baseball legend. It was bought in 1991 for $50,000 by New Jersey waste management entrepreneur, Anthony Giordano, at a New York City show.

“As soon as it hit 10 million I just turned in. I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore,” said the 75-year-old Giordano on Sunday morning. “They stayed up and called me this morning bright and early to tell me that it reached where it reached.”

The card eclipsed the previous record from May, when someone paid $9.3 million for the jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the famous “Hand of God” goal in soccer’s 1986 World Cup, according to AP.

Prior to that, someone paid $7.25 million for a 100-year-old Honus Wagner baseball card in a private sale, and another buyer bought Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing belt from the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” for almost $6.2 million.

As AP notes, “Prices have risen not just for the rarest items, but also for pieces that might have been collecting dust in garages and attics. Many of those items make it onto consumer auction sites like eBay, while others are put up for bidding by auction houses.”

Because of its near-perfect condition and its legendary subject, the Mantle card was destined to be a top seller, said Chris Ivy, the director of sports auctions at Heritage Auctions, which ran the bidding.

Some saw collectibles as a hedge against inflation over the past couple years, he said, while others rekindled childhood passions.

Ivy said savvy investors saw inflation coming down the road — as it has. As a result, sports memorabilia became an alternative to traditional Wall Street investments or real estate — particularly among members of Generation X and older millennials. -AP

“There’s only so much Netflix and ‘Tiger King’ people could watch (during the pandemic). So, you know, they were getting back into hobbies, and clearly sports collecting was a part of that,” said Ivy, adding that a ‘confluence of factors’ including interest from wealthy overseas collectors, have made sports collectibles particularly attractive.

“We’ve kind of started seeing some growth and some rise in the prices that led to some media coverage. And I think it all it all just kind of built upon itself,” he added. “I would say the beginning of the pandemic really added gasoline to that fire.”

Prior to the pandemic, the sports memorabilia market was estimated at just $5.4 billion – according to a 2018 comment by David Yoken, founder of Collectable.com

Just three years later, that market is estimated to be at $26 billion according to research firm Market Decipher, which thinks it will grow to $227 billion within the next decade.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Let’s go over how you can project I-bond rates based on semi-annual CPI estimates.

Image from Diamond NestEgg (DNE) video with Mish alternate calculations

I Bond Interest Rate November 2022 Prediction

Assuming a base fixed rate of 0%, the formula for the next I-bond rate is ((September CPI-U Minus March CPI-U) Divided by March CPI-U) * 2.

The CPI numbers are unadjusted. 

DNE estimates a whopping 12.4% annualized yield. I arrive at 7.9%. 

The difference is in CPI projections. DNE assumed 1.0% inflation for July, August, and September. 

We already know July was 0.0% (technically slightly negative). 

The Cleveland Fed projects 0.09% month-over-month inflation for August.  My assumption based on utilities and rent, with gasoline mostly flat is 0.40%. 

For lack of a better number, I used 0.40% for September as well.

Mish vs DNE CPI Projections

July (subject to revision) is a known value. Tacking on 0.40 percent to July and then again for August yields a CPI-U of 298.851. 

Plugging that into the lead chart formula gets an annualized yield of 7.9%. That’s far under DNE’s calculation but a very nice yield that everyone should take advantage of.

I-Bond Details

• The limit for purchasing I-bonds is per person, so a married couple can each put up to $10,000 in the investment annually, or up to $15,000 each if they both also elect to get tax refunds in paper I-bonds.

• Also, you can purchase I bonds for each child and if you have a trust, the trust can buy them.

• An investor must hold the bonds for 12 months, and if they sell the bonds before five years, they lose three months of interest.

• You must hold the bonds for 5 years to collect all of the interest and the rates will change semi-annually.

Treasury Direct has more details on Buying Series I Savings Bonds

In a calendar year, you can acquire:

• up to $10,000 in electronic I bonds in TreasuryDirect

• up to $5,000 in paper I bonds using your federal income tax refund

Is it worth the hassle given the above limits? 

They make great gifts. But hassle is in the eyes of the beholder.

*  *  *

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NASA’s most massive rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is slated for a Monday morning launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will propel an Orion capsule on a month-long journey around the moon. 

SLS is set for the 0833 ET launch from Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, with a two-hour launch window. In the event of weather or technical issues, NASA will reschedule the launch for Sept. 2 and Sept. 5.

“As our zero hour approaches for the Artemis generation, we do have a heightened sense of anticipation, and there is definitely excitement among the team members,” Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission manager, told reporters on Saturday, quoted by Space.com. 

“We’ve noticed that the overall mood and focus within the team is definitely positive,” Sarafin said. 

“Buckle up, everybody. We are going to the moon,” Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said. 

The SLS rocket is a monstrous 322 feet tall. It has 15% more thrust than the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo program for human exploration of the moon more than half a century ago. 

“This is a very risky mission … a lot things that could go wrong during the mission in places where we may come home early, or we may have to have to abort to come home,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate director for exploration systems development.

The first of the Artemis missions will fly the uncrewed spacecraft around the moon in a 42-day mission. Onboard will be an array of sensors to collect data on what astronauts will experience in future moon trips. 

If all goes well, NASA will conduct Artemis 2 mission sometime in 2024, sending four astronauts on a flyby mission around the moon. Then by 2025, Artemis 3 mission would allow for the first crewed moon landing on the moon. 

Authored by Ian Miller via Brownstone Institute,

News that Dr. Anthony Fauci is finally leaving his post after what seemed like an endless reign at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases should be a time for celebration.

But it’s not.

Fauci has caused such tremendous damage throughout the past few years that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

In nearly every area of life in the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world, Fauci’s influence has been a key contributor to massive amounts of human suffering.

Fauci inexplicably had particular ire for children.

Long after it was abundantly clear that closing schools had no significant health benefit, Fauci continued to support shutdowns and restrictions on normal life for millions of children at little to no risk from the virus.

His capacity for outright political advocacy and activism has been breathtaking to behold and contributed to the extreme collapse of trust in public health “experts” and authorities.

So it seems worth revisiting some of the greatest hits of Fauci’s reign of incompetence. 

Unmasked is entirely reader supported. Paid subscriptions allow the work to continue in this format, and any readership is greatly appreciated.

Masks

Perhaps one of Fauci’s biggest and most dramatic failings has been on masks.

Early on, he famously opined on 60 Minutes that he was confident that masks didn’t work, that they might only block “a droplet or two,” but didn’t provide the protection people thought they did.

He then confirmed the same information to people privately asking for advice on whether they should wear masks when traveling.

He later absurdly claimed that his initial comments were made out of a desire to protect supply for healthcare workers. Except, of course, healthcare workers would never wear the types of cloth masking that Fauci and his allies at the CDC were recommending.

Not to mention that his claim is made even more ridiculous by the fact that he told people privately not to wear masks.

Had he believed they worked but wanted to protect limited availabilities, he could have easily told those who asked to wear a mask without jeopardizing any large scale supply for hospital workers.

Of course, that’s not what he did.

His claim that masking would lower transmission and would demonstrate clearly beneficial results compared to areas that didn’t mask has been proven false repeatedly:

Well after it had been confirmed, by copious amounts of data, that masks don’t work, Fauci continued to advocate for universal masking. 

Even today, he’s remained completely steadfast that masks work, despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary.

Recently, after his incessant mask-wearing was completely ineffective at preventing him from being infected with the virus, Fauci continued to recommend people wear masks while lying about their effectiveness, saying they were “recommending people when they are in indoor congregate settings to wear a mask.”

“Those are simple, doable things that can help prevent us from having even more of a problem than we’re having right now.”

Just like the mask mandates during winter 2021-2022 were able to prevent the spread of the virus, right?

Lockdowns

The incomprehensible amount of lying that Fauci has done over the past few years extends past masks to lockdowns and business closures and capacity restrictions.

Fauci now claims that he never said to lock down the country. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly what he said on the record in 2020:

In September of 2020, Fauci claimed that states like Florida that reopened were “asking for trouble,” while praising New York for having one of the “best” responses.

Almost immediately afterwards, hospitalizations in California and New York shot past Florida with businesses closed, capacity restricted, and universal masking.

His bewildering lack of awareness is bad enough, but even as late as 2021, long after lockdowns and business closures were disproven, he continued to suggest that areas that reopened were engaging in extremely risky behavior by going against his dictates.

The headline of a story out of Jacksonville in April 2021 read: “Fauci: Opening Florida for business as COVID-19 variants surge a ‘risky proposition.’”

Just a few months prior to this remark, he had pointedly criticized Florida for reopening, only to see other states that followed his advice have significantly worse results. 

You’d think that being proven wrong would create some humility, uncertainty, and willingness to admit mistakes.

But that’s not what Dr. Fauci does. 

Instead, he doubled down, and said that Florida reopening in April 2021, months after vaccines had been available, was “risky.”

Except that California reported significantly higher rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality than Florida for all of the first and second quarters of 2021, with mask mandates and capacity limits for part of that time frame:

He pulled the same thing nationally, claiming inaccurately that the country would risk a new surge due to “relaxed” restrictions and new variants:

Remember too that Fauci claims to be the singular representative of “science.” If this is what “science” is, it clearly doesn’t deserve the respect it’s been given.

Of course, even into this year, Fauci is defending his recommendations, all evidence to the contrary, while denying that lockdowns, which permanently harmed tens of millions of people, didn’t irreparably damage anyone:

Dr. Anthony Fauci doubles down on shutdown decisions, questions studies that show lockdown states fared no better than ones that did not, and insists Covid measures didn’t “forever irreparably damage[d] anyone.”

For a supposed man of ‘science,’ he hasn’t learned a damned thing. pic.twitter.com/f8rV3xZkcS

— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) August 23, 2022

Children

Perhaps Fauci’s most damaging recommendations were related to schools. 

Jordan Schachtel compiled perhaps the best timeline of his advocacy to keep schools closed or excuse those who wanted to keep them closed. 

In his capacity as a masking fanatic, Fauci’s also promoted school masking, saying children over 2 should be forced to mask in school if local officials decided it was necessary. 

No matter how many times masking in schools is disproven, he’ll never admit these statements were baseless nonsense.

Between school closures and forced masking, the damage he’s caused to children is quite literally incalculable.

Vaccinations

There’s also his incomparable track record of inaccuracies on what the vaccines would do.

Among many other issues, his prediction that reaching certain levels of vaccination would eliminate the potential for future surges was, like everything else he’s done, almost immediately proven wrong.

His failures in this area are endless.

Obviously this is nowhere close to a comprehensive list of the incomprehensible stupidity that Fauci’s demonstrated over the past few years. A full list would require a book, or several books to chronicle.

His incompetence, hubris, awe-inspiring ego and commitment to being wrong in every possible circumstance is quite literally incomparable.

The tremendous amount of flip-flopping and backtracking to defend his prior ineptitude is continuously defended by Fauci as “The Science™” changing.

Except the CDC guidelines he continuously defended and promoted were never based on changing science, as evidenced by the fact that they never ran high-quality randomized controlled trials to justify their decision-making.

“Science” can’t change when one of the key tenets of it, evidence-based recommendations, was never updated.

But that didn’t matter to Fauci. What mattered is endless media appearances, praise from the left, and maintaining a veneer of infallibility propped up by a fawning press.

While it might be tempting to think that this retirement will signal a dramatic shift in thinking about COVID at a federal level, that seems far too optimistic.

As with everything else COVID-related, the Biden Administration has committed to ensuring that whoever replaces outgoing officials will be even worse. Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky are shining examples.

At the very least, there’s a glimmer of hope that Fauci will still be called before Congress and be held accountable for the damage he’s caused and for his blatant, world-altering agenda.

*  *  *

Originally posted at Ian Miller’s ‘Unmasked’ Substack,

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.”