Month: March 2023

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Get ready for screaming headlines beginning in about two months. Why? Because the U.S. will be coming up on a double deadline of debt and deficit inflection points.

The budget deficit issue will be hotly debated from March to next September and may result in a government shutdown at midnight on Sept. 30, 2023, if progressive Democrats in the Senate and conservative Republicans in the House can’t agree on a budget for fiscal year 2024, which begins Oct. 1, 2023.

But there’s another train wreck coming even sooner.

This one involves the debt ceiling and the infamous “X-Date” when the U.S. could default on the national debt.

What exactly is the “debt ceiling”?

It’s a numeric limit on the total debt that the U.S. Treasury is allowed to issue. To be clear, the debt ceiling does not mean the Treasury cannot issue any new debt. It means that the Treasury cannot issue debt that increases the total outstanding above the ceiling.

With over $31 trillion of debt outstanding in maturities from four weeks to 30 years, there’s always some existing debt that’s maturing. The Treasury can issue new debt to pay off the old debt. It just can’t increase the total.

So if $20 billion of debt matures this week, the Treasury can issue $20 billion of new debt to keep the total constant. They just can’t issue $30 billion without breaking the ceiling. Treasury is at the ceiling now. The U.S. is still running deficits. How are the new deficits being financed if Treasury can only conduct the “rollover” operations described above?

The Treasury has to resort to “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the bills. You may have heard of the “trillion-dollar coin” idea. It won’t happen, but here’s how it works.

One Big Gimmick

The Treasury would ask the U.S. Mint to produce a solid platinum coin. The Treasury would give the coin to the Federal Reserve and simply declare that the coin was worth $1 trillion. (Assuming a one-ounce coin, the actual market price is about $1,000.)

The Fed would put the coin in a vault and credit the U.S. Treasury general account with $1 trillion. The Treasury could spend that newly printed money as it wished. The Treasury would not violate the debt ceiling because no new debt would be issued; the Fed would just create the dollars out of thin air. Easy-breezy.

Of course, the trillion-dollar coin policy would be disastrous. The arbitrary valuation of the coin would show the true Ponzi nature of the Treasury market today. Fed efforts to supply the cash would radically increase the money supply and probably trigger more inflation. The Fed and Treasury would be laughingstocks.

That’s dangerous for two institutions that rely on public confidence to go about their business. Only the simpletons in financial media believe this idea is worth discussing, but it’s good to understand it because you will be hearing more about it.

Each Side Will Try to Scare Voters

How long can this shell game go on? No one knows exactly. There are estimates that are referred to as the “X-Date.” That’s the day the Treasury really does run out of cash and can’t pay bills or pay off Treasury note holders. Right now the X-Date is estimated to be around June 5, 2023, but even that is a guess.

The real X-Date will depend on how much positive cash flow the Treasury generates during tax season around mid-April. As the day approaches, Democrats will try to scare voters with claims of debt default, lost Social Security payments and lost benefits such as pre-K.

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans will scare voters with claims of runaway deficits, higher interest rates, lost confidence in the dollar and money printing as far as the eye can see.

We’ll have better estimates of the X-Date by April, and a kind of “countdown to default” will begin.

In the meantime, get ready for more volatility in stocks, along with higher interest rates. But let’s look at the larger picture…

“The United States Is Going Broke”

Those who focus on the U.S. national debt (and I’m one of them) keep wondering how long this debt levitation act can go on.

The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is at the highest level in history (about 125%), with the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. At least in 1945, the U.S. had won the war and our economy dominated world output and production. Today, we have the debt without the global dominance.

The U.S. has always been willing to increase debt to fight and win a war, but the debt was promptly scaled down and contained once the war was over. Today, there is no war comparable to the great wars of American history (though there are many who’d like to drag us into one in Ukraine), and yet the debt keeps growing.

We’re accumulating debt at a substantially greater rate than we’re growing the economy. Basically, the United States is going broke.

I don’t say that to be hyperbolic. I’m not looking to scare people. It’s just an honest assessment, based on the numbers.

Right now, the United States is roughly $31.5 trillion in debt. Now, a $31.6 trillion debt would be fine if we had a $50 trillion economy. The debt-to-GDP ratio in that example would be manageable.

But we don’t have a $50 trillion economy. We have about a $25 trillion economy, which means our debt is bigger than our economy.

When is the debt-to-GDP ratio too high? When does a country reach the point that it either turns things around or reaches the point of no return?

The Danger Zone

Economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart carried out a long historical survey going back 800 years, looking at individual countries, or empires in some cases, that have gone broke or defaulted on their debt.

They put the danger zone at a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90%. Once it reaches 90%, they found, a turning point arrives…

At that point, a dollar of debt yields less than a dollar of output. Debt becomes an actual drag on growth. Again the current U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is about 125%.

We are deep into the red zone, in other words. And we’re only going deeper. The U.S. has a 125% debt-to-GDP ratio, trillion-dollar deficits and more spending on the way.

Ultimately, we’re heading for a sovereign debt crisis. That’s not an opinion; it’s based on the numbers.

Got Gold?

Monetary policy won’t get us out because the velocity of money, the rate at which money changes hands, is dropping. Printing more money alone will not change that.

Fiscal policy won’t work either because of the high debt ratios I just discussed. At current debt-to-GDP ratios, each additional dollar spent yields less than a dollar of growth. But because it must be borrowed, it does add a dollar to the debt. Debt becomes an actual drag on growth.

No one can say when the clock will strike midnight — people have been warning about an impending collapse for decades, and it hasn’t happened.

Many have seen that as a license to keep going deeper into debt, as if it can continue forever. Well, it can’t go on forever.

And the more debt we add, the faster the day of reckoning will arrive.

Got gold?

It’s become almost like clockwork: every two weeks we get some news that send Credit Suisse stock to new all time lows.

At the beginning of February, the stock of the second largest Swiss bank plunged after it reported its losses would unexpectedly continue well into 2023 if not 2024, and that the bank run revealed at the end of 2022 was much worse than the bank had previously admitted, prompting some analysts to call it “staggering.”

Then, two weeks later in mid-February, the stock plunged again after a report that regulators were probing if Axel Lehmann, the Chairman of the embattled bank, had lied about the full extent of the bank run in hopes of “stabilizing” outflows.

Fast forward another two weeks to today, as CS stock craters 7% to a fresh all-time low, after reports from Reuters and Bloomberg that in hopes of reversing the seemingly endless bank run – and who can blame depositors from pulling their money from a company whose stock is less than $3 from zero – Credit Suisse is now offering aggressively higher deposit rates to attract new funds from wealthy clients in Asia.

Citing sources, Reuters notes that the Swiss bank is offering a 6.5% annual rate on new three-month deposits of $5 million or above – and a rate as high as 7% for one-year deposits – far above matched maturity Bills, and suggesting that to attract a client, the bank is forced to eat a loss. The hope, of course, is that after it attracts enough new clients, the bank will then be able to quietly lower the rates and make the new accounts profitable, however as the various DeFi blow ups of 2022 showed, it never quite works out that way.

“The banking sector has been responding to global rate hikes with higher rates and Credit Suisse is fully focused on providing our clients with differentiated advice and competitive solutions,” a Credit Suisse spokesperson said.

Credit Suisse’s generous offers are not only well above risk-free rates, but also about 100 to 200 basis points higher than those of major rivals in the region such as JPMorgan, UBS and Citi Group.

Hilariously, the new deposit rates are higher than Credit Suisse’s lending rates in Asia, a Reuters source said, adding that “it raises concerns about how the business can sustain such a funding gap.” Spoiler alert: it can’t, and as explained above, the bank is willing to eat a short-term loss in hopes of attracting enough sticky money before it flees again once the teaser rates are cut. Sure enough, another source said the offers are valid until the end of this quarter and only apply to new cash deposits, not to existing portfolios.

Asked about the lender’s pricing to win back money during Credit Suisse’s earnings call last month, CEO Ullrich Koerner said the bank is trying to be “competitive” like many rivals: “But we are not buying assets, just to be clear, because that would not be very smart going forward,” he said, which is ironic because buying assets – and at a very high price – is precisely what he is doing… and it’s not working: the bank’s assets managed for wealthy clients, excluding the Swiss bank, tumbled to 540.5 billion Swiss francs ($574 billion) at the end of December, from 742.6 billion francs a year ago, contributing to a second consecutive annual loss, according to Bloomberg.

The bigger problem for CS is that while it may eventually stem the liquidity bleed – if only temporarily – with such sleight of accounting hand, it is facing a far more ominous talent bleed as at least a dozen private bankers at the managing director-level and above have left Credit Suisse in Singapore and Hong Kong since September, or are planning to leave according to Bloomberg. Worse, some senior bankers that left handled at least $1 billion in client assets, “and are likely to take at least a quarter of the funds they manage to their new employers, rising to as much as 60% in some cases, according to people familiar with the hires.”

The market was quick to read through the bank’s superficial ruse to “boost” liquidity by attracting funding at truly “high yield” levels (because at the end of the day, that’s what deposits are: a source of funding, after costing nothing for the past decade are suddenly becoming very expensive to troubled banks), and amid concerns that the bank which in late 2022 drew funds from the Fed by way of USD swaps with the SNB…

… sent its stock to a new record low…

… while blowing out its CDS although with dumb Asian “deposit” money now used as funding, the default risk has been understandably mitigated somewhat for the time being.

Authored by Michael Kern via OilPrice.com,

• Gasoline prices are affected by a variety of factors, including global oil supply and demand, government policies, and market competition.

• Oil prices are perhaps the most well-known factor impacting gasoline prices.

• Understanding the factors that impact petrol/gasoline costs can help us make better choices about consumption, especially with fossil fuels remaining our primary energy source

Gasoline prices can be unpredictable, fluctuating from day to day and even hour to hour. While it may seem like the cost of gasoline is arbitrary, there are actually several factors that impact how much you pay at the pump. In this article, we will explore the different factors that affect gasoline prices, including oil prices, refining costs, distribution costs, taxes, and more.

Oil Prices

Oil prices are perhaps the most well-known factor impacting gasoline prices. This is because gasoline is made from crude oil. As the price of crude oil increases or decreases, so does the cost of producing gasoline.

The price of crude oil is determined by a variety of supply and demand factors. These include global economic growth, political events, production decisions made by OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and more. When demand for oil outpaces its supply, oil prices increase. This can be due to a variety of reasons such as geopolitical tensions or natural disasters.

When the price of crude oil increases, it becomes more expensive for refineries to produce gasoline. This additional cost gets passed down to consumers in the form of higher gas prices. Conversely, when the price of crude oil decreases, it becomes less expensive for refineries to produce gasoline. This results in lower gas prices at the pump.

Refining Costs

Refining crude oil into usable products like gasoline requires energy and resources which can vary in price depending on market conditions. As such, refining costs are another key factor impacting gas prices.

Refineries must process crude oil into various products including gasoline and diesel fuel. However, not all crude oils are created equal – some contain more impurities than others or have different chemical compositions which can make them harder to refine.

Additionally, refining capacity can also impact how much you pay at the pump. If there aren’t enough refineries operating at full capacity in a given region or country then it may be harder for suppliers to meet demand which could drive up gas prices.

Distribution Costs

Getting gasoline from refineries to gas stations also incurs transportation costs that can fluctuate depending on market conditions such as fuel pricing policies or geopolitical tensions affecting shipping lanes.

Distribution costs include expenses associated with moving refined products from refineries to storage facilities via pipelines or tankers before they eventually reach local gas stations where customers purchase them directly.

These costs vary based on distance traveled as well as any tariffs or taxes imposed by governments along transport routes which makes distribution an important factor contributing towards fluctuations in retail fuel pricing across regions and countries worldwide.

Taxes

Both federal and state taxes contribute significantly towards final retail fuel pricing throughout North America with these taxes usually being represented as cents-per-gallon charges added onto retail fuel sales receipts printed from automated dispensing pumps located at service stations across various states within North America.

Taxes account for a significant portion of what drivers pay per gallon at the pump – typically ranging between 10% – 30% depending on state/local tax rates- making them an important factor driving up overall fuel costs that should not be ignored when considering why petrol/gasoline is priced so high today versus previous years gone by.

Other Factors That Impact Gasoline Prices

While oil prices are often considered the primary driver behind changes in gas prices there are other factors that contribute towards fluctuations in retail fuel pricing:

• Seasonal Demand: Gasoline demand tends to rise during summer months when people travel more frequently.

• Weather: Natural disasters like hurricanes can disrupt refining operations leading to shortages which drive up gas prices.

• Geopolitical Tensions: Conflicts between nations or political instability within major petroleum-producing countries can lead to supply disruptions driving up global crude oil markets

• Exchange Rates: The value of a currency relative to other currencies may also impact domestic fuel pricing since many countries import petroleum products from other nations whose currencies may fluctuate against their own currency.

Understanding the factors that impact petrol/gasoline costs can help us make better choices about consumption, especially with fossil fuels remaining our primary energy source. This knowledge can also help us prepare for unexpected price increases.

Now that soaring rates have burst the commercial real estate bubble, the carnage is coming fast and furious.

This morning Bloomberg reports that Wall Street’s largest commercial real estate landlord, private equity giant Blackstone, has defaulted on a €531 million ($562 million) bond backed by a portfolio of offices and stores owned by Sponda Oy, a Finnish landlord it acquired in 2018.

While the PE firm had sought an extension from holders of the securitized notes to allow time to dispose of assets and repay the debt, the surge in market volatility triggered by the war in Ukraine and rising interest rates interrupted the sales process and bondholders voted against a further extension, the Bloomberg sources said.

And since the security has now matured and has not been repaid, loan servicer Mount Street has determined that an event of default has occurred, according to a statement Thursday. The loan will now be transferred to a special servicer.

“This debt relates to a small portion of the Sponda portfolio,” a Blackstone representative said in an emailed statement. “We are disappointed that the servicer has not advanced our proposal, which reflects our best efforts and we believe would deliver the best outcome for note holders. We continue to have full confidence in the core Sponda portfolio and its management team, whose priority remains delivering high-quality retail and office assets.”

And while Blackstone is understandably trying to minimize the news, the PE firm clearly continues to scramble to stabilize the bleeding in its massive real estate portfolio and on Wednesday it said that it had blocked investors from cashing out their investments at its $71 billion real estate income trust (BREIT), as the private equity firm continues to grapple with a flurry of redemption requests.

BREIT said it fulfilled redemption requests of $1.4 billion in February, which represents only 35% of the approximately $3.9 billion in total withdrawal requests for the month, the firm said in a letter to investors as Reuters first reported.

The silver lining is that the total BREIT redemption requests in February were 26% lower than the approximately $5.3 billion reached in January, the firm said. However, should rates keep rising it is likely that the March redemption flood will be higher again.

“While gross redemptions for February are consistent with prior management commentary, the overarching data continue to align with our view around decelerating retail-oriented product organic growth broadly,” Credit Suisse analysts, led by Bill Katz, said in a note to investors. As we previously reported, Blackstone has been exercising its right to block investors’ withdrawals since November last year after requests hit a preset 5% net asset value of BREIT, which is marketed to mostly high net worth individuals.

Credit Suisse downgraded its rating of Blackstone’s stock to underperform in November partly because of the rise in investor redemptions from BREIT. Blackstone’s shares were down 0.25% at $90.57 per share in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The stock lost 43% of its value last year.

 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

The US State Department-funded Global Disinformation Index punished conservative websites by throttling their advertising revenue if they gave credence to the COVID-19 lab leak theory, despite it subsequently proving likely true.

The Global Disinformation Index is a British-based non-profit group that previously received $665,000 from the Global Engagement Center and National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a State Department-backed group, while it was overseeing censorship of “conspiracy theories” about COVID-19.

One of these conspiracy theories was the notion that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, which GDI claimed had “been fact-checked and proven untrue.”

GDI abused its influence to pressure Big Tech firms like Google to cut advertising from conservative websites that pushed the lab leak theory, placing them on a secret blacklist called a “dynamic exclusion list” in an effort to put them out of business.

The group targeted firms that were “providing ad revenue streams to known disinformation sites peddling coronavirus conspiracies.”

Microsoft later had to suspend its partnership with the group after the GDI had been using the company’s Xandr advertising and analytics subsidiary to freeze out conservative sites.

From 2021 onwards, the lab leak theory was no longer being treated as a “conspiracy theory,” and both the Department of Energy and the FBI recently came out and asserted it was likely true.

“GDI is part of [a] disturbing constellation of pop-up censorship organizations that all descended on stifling COVID origins discourse online simultaneously,” Mike Benz, a former State Department official told the Washington Examiner.

This once again underscores how hysteria over ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ has been weaponized to justify the censorship of awkward stories and even facilitate actual cover-ups.

As we highlighted yesterday, the Chinese Communist Party threatened Elon Musk to stop sharing stories about the Wuhan lab leak, suggesting Tesla’s business interests in China would be at risk if he kept amplifying the issue.

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A top union leader penned a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about a number of rail workers at the Norfolk Southern derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio, who have become sick, likely from the toxic chemical spill. CNBC obtained the letter on Wednesday. 

Jonathan Long, a union representative for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, titled the letter “Norfolk Southern Is Dangerous to America” and said about 40 workers were ordered by the railway to clean up the wreckage. 

Long said workers weren’t given proper personal protection equipment to clean up the toxic wreckage. He said many workers weren’t supplied respirators, protective clothing, or eye protection. 

As a result of the chemical exposure, many rail workers “reported that they continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment, and they all suspect that they were willingly exposed to these chemicals at the direction of [Norfolk Southern].”

Long added, “This lack of concern for the workers’ safety and well-being is, again, a basic tenet of NS’s cost-cutting business model.”

Norfolk Southern released a statement to CNBC about the cleanup effort. They said:

Norfolk was “on-scene immediately after the derailment and coordinated our response with hazardous material professionals who were on site continuously to ensure the work area was safe to enter and the required PPE was utilized, all in addition to air monitoring that was established within an hour.”

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and the Biden administration have ensured adequate measures have been taken to protect residents and surrounding communities from the toxic chemical spill and controlled burn of vinyl chloride. 

But perhaps the EPA and government aren’t telling rail workers and residents the truth. That’s because rail workers are getting sick, residents complain about health issues, and animals in state parks are dying. 

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The risk of a structural rise in yields has heightened as bondholders begin to demand more compensation for inflation that is increasingly ingrained.

For all the opprobrium heaped on markets for being unruly and disobedient, they’ve been remarkably pliant in believing central banks will soon return inflation to 2%. The bond vigilantes (apart from a brief appearance during the UK’s LDI crisis) have been extraordinary only by their absence.

But that looks as if it is about to change. Term premium, essentially the extra yield long-term bond holders require for inflation risks, has been rising as data show the disinflation trend in the US running out of steam, helping push 10-year yields back over 4%.

In fact, over the last six months we have seen more extreme daily rises (i.e. those in the top 0.5% of all daily moves going back to 1960) in term premium than we have since the early 1980s, when Fed Governor Volcker was in the last throes of his conclusive battle with inflation.

Term premium captures several risks for holders of long-term bonds, but key is inflation.

The 10-year ACM term premium spent most of the 1970s above 1%, and peaked at 5% in 1984. Since then it has trended consistently lower, and has remained surprisingly contained over the last few years despite inflation hitting multi-decade highs.

The disconnect can be seen most clearly by looking at the precipitous rise in the volatility of inflation – which captures the extra uncertainty bond holders are facing – and still-subdued term premium.

The implications are considerable if bond holders are worrying inflation is becoming embedded. Most immediately, yields would be biased structurally higher, and would decline less when the Fed cuts rates, lowering the control the central bank has over longer-term borrowing costs.

This was the invidious position in which Volcker found himself in the early 1980s. The Fed at that point had “imperfect credibility”: when it hiked rates, the market did not believe it would keep them there. Instead, it was forced to cut them again when the ensuing recession hit. This meant inflation persisting, term premium rising, and the yield curve steepening – even as the Fed was hiking rates aggressively.

It was only when Volcker raised rates to 20% in 1981 – despite a deep recession – that the deadlock was finally broken and inflation began to fall. Nonetheless, term premium did not peak until three years later as the market remained wary the inflation beast had not been decisively floored. Once bond markets scent inflation, it takes years before they become desensitized to it.

Rising term premium also risks a self-reinforcing feedback loop. When it is increasing, the yield curve has a steepening bias, and steeper yield curves go hand-in-hand with higher rate volatility.

This is because longer-term forward yields must converge to shorter-term yields. The steeper the yield curve, the more paths yields can take to converge, which means higher yield volatility. Higher volatility means bond holders demand a higher yield to compensate, i.e. term premium rises.

Avoiding a rise in term premium is thus highly desirable. But the cat may already be out of the bag. Term premium looks to be catching up to the much higher level currently implied by forecasters.

There is no binding constraint that the forecasters’ view need be correct, but inflation is a social and behavioral phenomenon as much as an economic one. At some point, inflation expectations become self-fulfilling and drive inflation itself. An emerging narrative that inflation is becoming persistent adds to the likelihood that that is what we will soon see.

And inflation expectations are already rising at the fastest rate in decades. As the chart below shows, this adds further confidence to the notion that term premium will keep rising.

A structural, term-premium driven rise in yields could take years to reverse as hitherto dormant bond vigilantes become conditioned to a world where inflation is persistently elevated and prone to sudden flare-ups.

It would also mean an end to the uneasy alliance between central banks and markets fostered over the last four decades. Term premium thus bears watching very closely.

Mainstream media correspondents for major US networks rarely, if ever, report from inside Crimea and certainly are nowhere near Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine. However, this week NBC News chief international correspondent Keir Simmons went to Sevastopol, surrounded by a significant Russian military presence given it is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, and in a live segment admitted that it’s not at all realistic Zelensky and Ukrainian forces can ever hope to take Crimea. 

This is especially as the “the people there… view themselves as Russian.” Simmons noted that “This is the closest that any US news crew has got to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in many many years.” He explained that “Vladimir Putin will be determined to defend that port – to not have it take it away from him – he may well do pretty much anything to try to achieve that.”

BREAKING: NBC News / MSNBC concedes that Zelensky’s goal of retaking Crimea is unrealistic and dangerous.pic.twitter.com/fb2RCRBHOn

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) March 1, 2023

“It is a very, very dangerous standoff.. it’s hard to see how you reach a negotiation over that. There’s military absolutely everywhere, it is a military town,” he continued, before saying…

“When for example Victoria Nuland talks about that at the very least we [the US] want Crimea to be demilitarized, I find myself standing there and wondering, how on earth does that happen?“

Ukrainian officials and pro-Kyiv media pundits are said to be outraged at the segment, given it repeatedly and bluntly referenced that Crimeans see themselves as Russians. Even a separate write-up filed days earlier from inside Crimea and posted to NBC’s website included the following: 

This is not Russia, according to Kyiv, its Western allies and the United Nations. It was annexed by the Kremlin in 2014, with the U.N. calling on Russia to return to its “internationally recognized borders.” And following Moscow’s broader invasion launched a year ago, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed Ukraine will take Crimea back.

But Praskovya Baranova, 73, speaks Russian, feels Russian and lives here.

But it appears that the NBC correspondent, once he was on the ground in a place that few Western reporters ever venture, couldn’t deny the plain truth he was seeing all around him.

NBC told Americans the truth about Crimea for the first time and its reporter wound up on the Ukrainian government’s kill list alongside several other US citizens, journos, clergy and even children.

Will NBC now report on this list? Will “press freedom” groups denounce it? https://t.co/rHLxjYdqos

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 2, 2023

David Sacks comments of the refreshingly truthful segment, “Not long ago, these were denounced as Putin talking points.” 

Sacks also says regarding NBC clearly conceding that Zelensky’s goal of retaking Crimea remains unrealistic and dangerous…

This is a huge admission because it means that Biden’s policy of “only the Ukrainians can decide” the objectives of the war makes no sense. We’re effectively delegating our foreign policy to Zelensky, who is pursuing objectives that we don’t agree with.

“At the same time that MSNBC is suddenly airing the truth about Crimea, its chief Ukraine pundit is lobbying for an all-out attack,” Sacks also observes of the timing of the mid-week report.

“It’s getting easier to see who are the real fanatics in this war,” Sacks concluded.