Month: March 2024

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“I think he borrowed a little something from Hunter tonight.”

– Mike Lee, US Senator, Utah

Let’s face it: as pure theater, the president’s annual address to Congress has become a disconcertingly shabby affair, bursts of gloatish barking wedged into an hour of nearly continuous hand-clapping, as if drowning public utterances in applause might divert the audience from the empty, vicious bluster “Joe Biden” served up Thursday night. You couldn’t help but be reminded of the old Supreme Soviet in the twilight hours of Konstantin Chernenko, whose country’s renowned mortuary experts managed to embalm a year or so before his actual decease and interment.

The Ruskies back in the day had a secret recipe for premature mummification of their leadership; our pharma-driven experts prefer to mummify not the body but the personality with a cocktail of adderal, clonazepam, and prednisone — the latter responsible for the ‘roid rage on view whenever “Joe Biden” is hauled out of his catacomb for public performances.

The Kid from Scranton’s most memorably mendacious line got front-loaded, so as not to be lost on the watching millions already nauseated by “JB’s” pre-speech triumphal journey from the entrance down the aisle through the mob of his elected admirers clamoring for selfies:

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” the president squawked.

True dat. The part he left out was that said assault emanates entirely from the very government he pretends to head. It’s reported (in The Epoch Times today) that since the start of this year the FBI has rounded up 93 new suspects in the event of 1-6-21 touted as “the insurrection” — most of the years-old charges related to trespassing, disorderly conduct, and parading, conduct now regarded as nation-threatening. He also left out the prodigious three-year-long campaign of his inter-agency flunkies to abolish the First Amendment by capturing all the transmitters of free speech. And never mind the regime’s banana republic style lawfare op to jail “JB’s” chief political opponent on spurious charges before the November election — rank, in-your-face election interference.

Also up front in the show: the regime’s lust to start World War Three by asserting falsely that Russia intends to invade and overrun Europe at any moment, in order to continue justifying our insane proxy war in Ukraine, now on its last legs. Putin Putin Putin is “sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” the president barked to hearty applause, as if anyone in the chamber really believes it. The truth is that our country, now effectively the Intel States of America, has sown all that chaos.

The feckless Ukraine project has failed. The end of the Zelensky fake-out is near. The CIA announced it in last week’s Sunday New York Times, and all that’s left to do is cover-up the Biden family’s private racketeering activities in that notorious money-laundry and then somehow escape the massive national humiliation that will ensue when this fiasco is concluded, finalizing America’s loss-of-standing in the world. It’s all on “Joe Biden” and everybody knows it.

Now, the catch to the adoring hoo-rah ginned up on the left side of the chamber last night is that all the wildly applauding ninnies are plotting desperately to find some way to ditch “Joe Biden” before the party’s August convention, to avoid the embarrassment of having to toss him overboard at the last minute in a smoke-filled back room there — which would be an admission that his entire reelection campaign has been a ruse all along.

As of this week, they’ve lost on the simple expedient to get Mr. Trump erased from blue state ballots. The biggest court actions against Mr. Trump are collapsing spectacularly. Fulton County DA Fani Willis has so wrecked herself that she’ll certainly be dropped from the case, could be kicked out of her job altogether, and stands to lose her law license for committing crimes ranging from perjury to conspiracy with White House lawyers to interfere with the coming election — and then lying about it under oath. The case itself is now so tainted with prosecutorial misconduct that any sane jurist would dismiss it on summary judgement

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s main case (the “insurrection” rap) is getting batted around in the sure-thang DC federal district court, and could be defenestrated altogether by the Supreme Court any day now. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the so-called Mar-a-Lago document case will get tossed by Judge Aileen Cannon on the grounds of gross procedural misconduct as “discovery” reveals that the FBI raid was a dishonest pursuit of documents other than the ones logged on Jack Smith’s warrant — namely, Mr. Trump’s archive of RussiaGate crimes committed by the very DOJ that is going mad dog on him, an obvious gross embarrassment for them.

It remains to be seen what other sort of election interference mischief can be cooked up by the Party of Chaos. We know that Rep. Jamie Raskin is grandstanding to concoct a bill to kick Mr. Trump off the ballot by an act of Congress. It’s already fulfilled its purpose of getting Jamie’s puss on MSNBC to impress the home folks in his Maryland district. Short of the CIA or some other clandestine outfit from the fathomless depths of the Intel Community gunning down Mr. Trump outright, the party’s best bet probably is to bring on the chaos needed for martial law and cancellation of the election by activating sleeper cells of the jihadists, “military-age men,” Maoist agents, convicts, and mental patients they’ve illegally ushered across the border to join with Antifa and BLM in an extravaganza of street violence as warm weather sets the stage for rioting and mayhem.

All of that could easily be mooted by what looks like a dollar and bond market crisis shaping up on the financial scene in the spring days ahead. Why, do you think Bitcoin and gold have made record leaps in recent weeks? I’ll tell you why: because a bunch of really rich people are fleeing desperately out of the dollar and things denominated in it for safe harbors as a financial ill-wind blows in from offshore. Alas, the BRICs are about to dethrone the world’s reserve currency. The value of our dollars could sink thirty percent or more overnight. The “unthinkable” approaches. So, maybe you better start thinking about it.

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

US macro data serially disappointed this week…

Source: Bloomberg

‘Bad’ news was good news for the doves and the market’s expectations for rate-cuts in 2024 ticked back up to 4 rate-cuts (from 3)…

Source: Bloomberg

Bonds were bid on the week with the belly outperforming the wings…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y Yield dropped down to almost 4.0% (closing below its 50DMA) at its lowest in almost six weeks…

Source: Bloomberg

But, while yields were lower on the week, stocks were more mixed with Nasdaq down on the week as a red-end to the week for mega-cap tech spoiled the party…

Mag7 stocks ended the week lower after fading from today’s gains…

Source: Bloomberg

Small Caps outperformed, The Dow lagged, and the S&P 500 desperately tried to close green on the week (but failed)…

If it had closed green, that would have been the 17th positive week in the last 19 – the greatest streak in stocks since 1964…

‘Most shorted’ stocks were squeezed hard at the open today, into the green for the week, before tumbling back to the lows of the week…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar is down for the sixth straight day, ending the worst week in three months for the greenback…

Source: Bloomberg

And dollar weakness helped spur gains in gold which soared to a new record high just shy of $2200 today. Gold is up for 8 straight days – the longest winning streak since July 2020…

Source: Bloomberg

Golds gains continued despite outflows from Gold ETFs (as Bitcoin ETF inflows soared)…

And in the meantime, cryptos roared higher this week with Bitcoin topping $70,000 (a new record high) for the first time…

Source: Bloomberg

But, Ethereum outperformed Bitcoin on the week (+14% vs +10%), hitting $4000 for the first time since

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices ended the week lower (at the low end of its recent range)…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, this is fucking nuts…yes a trillion dollars added YTD…

Source: Bloomberg

And this…

Source: Bloomberg

It’s fine!

Authored by Jonathan Miltimore via The Epoch Times,

John Joseph Mearsheimer recently summed up in a single sentence why Julian Assange should go free.

“Journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States,” Mr. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said in a recent video.

There has been endless ink spilled on Mr. Assange, whose lawyers on Feb. 20 made an eleventh-hour attempt to kill an effort to extradite the Australian journalist to the United States.

Since 2019, the WikiLeaks founder has been held in Belmarsh Prison in Britain and faces 17 charges of espionage and a single charge of computer misuse.

One item WikiLeaks published titled “Collateral Murder” was video footage of a U.S. military airstrike in Baghdad from July 12, 2007. The classified footage shows an Apache helicopter firing a 30 mm cannon into a group of people that included two Reuters journalists. Around a dozen people were killed, and two children were injured.

Mr. Assange’s decision to publish the footage, which he received from U.S. intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning), is why he is today in prison.

As the government’s indictment against Mr. Assange states, the WikiLeaks founder didn’t have a security clearance, which is why he allegedly “conspired” with Mr. Manning to obtain the footage and other records, including U.S. State Department cables.

Mr. Manning was convicted of 20 charges in 2013 and was sentenced to 35 years behind bars at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, a sentence that was commuted in January 2017 by President Barack Obama.

Mr. Assange, whose hearing at the British High Court in London concluded on Feb. 21, will likely find out this month whether he’ll be extradited to the United States.

State Secrets and the Pentagon Papers

Publishing state secrets is no small matter, but as Mr. Mearsheimer points out, it’s also an old game with a rich legal history.

In 1971, the New York Times published a cache of classified documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Papers, which showed that the U.S. government was lying about the Vietnam War, led to the landmark legal case New York Times Co. v. United States.

The case is well known, one most college students learn about in introductory classes to media and government. And just like the Assange case, it involves an insider delivering state secrets to a journalist.

Daniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) was a U.S. military analyst who in the early 1970s, while working for the RAND Corporation, gained access to an internal government study that showed the U.S. government’s foothold in Vietnam was far less secure than the Johnson administration had led the public to believe when it began escalating the war there.

Ellsberg leaked the study to the New York Times and other media in 1971, causing great embarrassment to the Nixon administration, which responded by leveling an array of charges against Ellsberg that carried a maximum sentence of more than a hundred years behind bars.

The charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped, but what’s important to understand is that the New York Times was not the party charged. Ellsberg was.

As Mr. Mearsheimer explains, Mr. Assange is not the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, who allegedly broke the law by sharing state secrets. He’s the equivalent of the New York Times, which published them.

“Manning was caught and punished because she was a government employee, and she broke the law by leaking material that was classified to Assange,” Mr. Mearsheimer explains. “But Assange is a journalist, and he did not break the law, as it is commonplace for journalists to publish classified information that is passed on to them by government insiders.”

‘The Number One Principle of Bureaucracy’

The parallels between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks are stunning, and Mr. Mearsheimer is not the only person to see them.

Ellsberg, who died last year, discussed the similarities between the cases during a Harvard Law School address in 2011. Though the government stated that both Ellsberg and Mr. Assange’s actions were unlawful because they jeopardized national security, Ellsberg argued that the prosecutions stemmed from the fact that in both instances the secrets shared were deeply embarrassing to the U.S. government.

“Nothing is more secret than evidence that later, retrospectively, would lead to accountability, which would lead to embarrassment, which would be a basis for blame, possibly for culpability [or] criminal prosecution,” Ellsberg said. “Avoiding blame is sort of the major number one principle of a bureaucracy or a politician.”

For anyone who doubts Ellsberg, there are Oval Office recordings of a discussion between President Richard Nixon and aide H.R. Haldeman that suggest that the government’s actions related to the Pentagon Papers were motivated not by national security, but by concerns about the government’s reputation.

“To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook,” Halderman said to President Nixon. “But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say ….”

The Collateral Murder video is even more problematic to the government than the Pentagon Papers.

The video didn’t just confirm that government officials had reportedly lied to Reuters about what happened in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. It showed a potential war crime, one many believed the government had covered up.

Dean Yates, a former Reuters journalist who was their Baghdad bureau chief at the time of the killings, said the government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange was retribution for exposing the truth.

“What [Assange] did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq looks like and how the U.S. military lied,” Mr. Yates told the Guardian in 2020. “The U.S. knows how embarrassing Collateral Murder is, how shameful it is to the military—they know that there’s potential war crimes on that tape.”

What Mr. Yates is describing is an action and cover-up that could lead to the very kind of criminal culpability Ellsberg described.

‘A Principal Pillar of a Free Government’

Viewers can view the Collateral Murder video footage and decide for themselves whether they’re watching a war crime or questionable rules of engagement that resulted in many innocent, unarmed people being killed.

What’s undeniable is that Mr. Assange was a journalist sharing secrets leaked to him by a government employee.

For that reason, Mr. Assange deserves the constitutional protections of the First Amendment, which explicitly states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

In their wisdom, America’s Founding Fathers carved out these protections because they saw free speech and a free press as fundamental to a free people, and an essential check on government power.

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government,” Benjamin Franklin once observed. “When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

This is why, as Mr. Mearsheimer says, reporters don’t go to prison in the United States for publishing state secrets. Let’s hope he’s still right.

Last month Hunter Biden’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss his tax charges, claiming among other things that his own father’s DOJ has “upped the ante” against him in a politically motivated case of “selective and vindictive prosecution” in order to do Donald Trump’s bidding.

“This case follows a nearly six-year record of [the Justice Department] changing its charging decisions and upping the ante on Mr. Biden in direct response to political pressure and its own self-interests,” Hunter’s attorneys wrote in the Feb. 20 filing.

They also wanted “salacious” portions of Biden’s personal expenditures to be redacted, claiming they are “meant to depict Mr. Biden as irresponsible, frivolous, and otherwise of questionable character and integrity.”

Weiss hits back

Fast forward nearly three weeks, and Special Counsel David Weiss just annihilated Hunter’s entire filing in a scathing response. It’s a fun read.

[T]he defendant concocts a conspiracy theory that the prosecution has “upped the ante” to appease politicians who have absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution and are not even members of the current Executive Branch.

…

“[T]o state an obvious fact that the defendant continues to ignore, former President Trump is not the President of the United States.

The defendant fails to explain how President Biden or the Attorney General, to whom the Special Counsel reports, or the Special Counsel himself, or his team of prosecutors, are acting at the direction of former President Trump or Congressional Republicans, or how this current Executive Branch approved allegedly discriminatory charges against the President’s son at the direction of former President Trump and Congressional Republicans.”

Hunter made millions, lied to his accountants, and “chose to commit serious tax crimes”

Under the “factual background” section of the response, Weiss says that Hunter “engaged in a four-year scheme not to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes.”

Meanwhile, Hunter “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes,” and “Despite receiving $1.2 million in financial support from a friend to maintain his lifestyle, the defendant did not make payments towards his tax obligations.”

Hunter again lied to his accountants in 2020.

“For example, the defendant falsely claimed extensive business travel in 2018 during a period in which he later described his crack cocaine use as “twenty-four hours a day, smoking every fifteen minutes, seven days a week.”

The defendant lied to his accountants by claiming as business expenses $43,696 in stays at the Chateau Marmont with his “merry band of crooks, creeps, and outcasts.”

More:

Weiss notes that Hunter “earned millions of dollars in income between years 2016 and 2017,” for which he “performed very little actual work for the $7 million in income he was paid during this period.”

Hunter “spent nearly $5 million on personal expenses to live an extravagant lifestyle instead of paying his taxes.”

Serious Gun Crimes

Weiss then notes that Hunter’s crimes “were not limited to tax violations.”

“In 2018, he chose to purchase a gun, he chose to lie on background check paperwork by stating he was not addicted to drugs, and he certified that his answers on the paperwork were true, when in fact, he had lied about his addiction.“

We also learn that Hunter lied about his legal interactions and negotiations with the DOJ – such as claiming that a plea agreement was approved to handle the gun charge, when in fact it was not.

“The defendant incorrectly claims that DOJ “proposed a non-prosecution agreement for the gun and tax charges, even though DOJ had already determined the charges should not be brought.”

Hunter also claimed that the DOJ “inexplicably demanded” that he plead guilty to felonies with jail time. Not true, according to Weiss:

The rest of the filing, which can be read here, shreds Hunter’s various other claims and defenses, while Weiss accuses Hunter’s legal team of attempting “to transform a seemingly bland set of plea discussions into a conspiracy theory.

In closing, Weiss asks that Hunter’s motion to dismiss be “denied in its entirety.”

Authored by Sam Bourgi via CrediTnews.com,

Most Americans intuitively know that higher education has become disproportionately expensive for younger generations—thanks to millions of graduates trapped in student debt.

But are education costs really so out of reach for younger generations, considering new career opportunities and wage inflation?

Creditnews Research put that theory to the test by comparing the college tuition costs of Baby Boomers and Millennials against what both generations earned after graduation.

Our analysis revealed a stark difference in the “purchasing power” of a college degree in the 1980s and today, driven by the growing disparity between tuition costs and wages.

Even though Baby Boomers had it much easier back in the day, student debt is catching up with them, too.

In an ironic twist, Boomers’ student debt balances have recently exploded as many Boomers take out loans to put their kids through college.

Key Findings

• Between the mid-1980s and 2010, the cost of a Bachelor’s degree in public and private colleges increased by 421% and 303%, respectively;

• Over the same period, the average post-graduation salary saw a 165% increase, while the federal minimum wage jumped by a mere 116%;

• Baby Boomers earning minimum wage could pay back their public college tuition by working just 1,410 hours—a figure that dropped to 481 hours for those earning the average post-graduation salary;

• In comparison, Millennials earning minimum wage need 3,398 working hours to pay back their public college tuition and 1,004 hours if they earn the average post-graduation salary;

• When attending private colleges, Millennials need to work five times as many hours as Baby Boomers to pay down their tuition if they earn minimum wage;

• Despite enjoying more affordable college, Baby Boomers have racked up $78.2 billion in federal student loans to put their kids through school.

How quickly each generation could have paid off their college tuition

According to our analysis, the cost of an undergraduate degree in public and private colleges soared by 421% and 303%, respectively, between the Boomer and Millennial graduation years.

What’s more striking is that Millennials didn’t just pay more in absolute dollar terms; their higher education degree came at a multi-fold higher cost relative to what they earned post-graduation.

Here’s a breakdown of public and private college costs.

Public College

Baby Boomers who attended a public college between 1982 and 1986 paid a total of $4,725 for a Bachelor’s degree.

Even if they had earned the minimum wage ($3.35 per hour), it would have taken them 1,410 hours to pay back their tuition in full. That’s equivalent to about nine months of work, assuming a typical 40-hour work week.

However, had they earned the average post-graduation salary ($20,400), they could have paid off their full tuition in 481 work hours or three months.

On the flip side, Millennials who attended a public college between 2006 and 2010 paid $24,638 in tuition costs and related fees.

Although Millennials faced a 421% increase in tuition costs compared to Baby Boomers, their post-graduation wages hardly caught up—with the federal minimum wage and median post-graduate salaries increasing by only 116% and 165%, respectively.

By the time they graduated, Millennials could earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25. At that rate, it would have taken 3,398 working hours for Millennials to pay back their tuition in full.

Even those Millennials who earned the average post-graduation salary in 2011 ($51,000) needed 1,004 hours’ worth of work— or more than six months—to pay off their tuition costs.

That’s twice as much as Boomers, even with wage inflation factored in.

Private college

Private colleges often provide smaller class sizes, specialized studies, more abundant resources, and higher rankings that may give students better career and networking opportunities after graduation.

However, this comes at a much steeper cost that is carried through both generations.

Between 1982 and 1986, Baby Boomers paid $21,409 to earn a Bachelor’s degree at a private college—more than five times higher than the cost of public tuition. But even then, private college was relatively affordable.

Earning the minimum wage, Boomers could have paid back their tuition in 6,391 hours, or roughly three years. For Boomers earning the average post-graduation salary, it would have taken 2,182 hours, or a little more than a year, to pay back the tuition.

For Millennials, the repayment timeline for private colleges is vastly different.

Attending a private college between 2006 and 2010 cost $86,253, requiring 11,897 hours, or roughly six years of minimum wage hours to pay off. For those earning median post-graduate salaries, the repayment would take 3,518 hours.

Baby Boomers are racking up student debt on behalf of their kids

It’s only natural to assume that Baby Boomers enjoyed an affordable college education, paid their tuition, and sailed off into the sunset.

Unfortunately, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Decades after graduating college, Boomers now hold some of the highest student loan debt in the country—thanks in large part to Parents PLUS Loans, a federal program that allows parents to take on student loans on behalf of their kids.

According to our analysis, Baby Boomers have amassed $78.1 billion in direct federal student loans—a 155% increase in just six years.

The number of Boomers taking on loans, presumably for their kids, doubled from 800,000 to 1.6 million over the same period.

That’s more than $48,800 per borrower or an increase of more than $10,000 compared to 2017.

Unlike all other federal student loan programs, Parents PLUS Loans don’t have a stated borrowing limit, which means parents could be racking up even more debt to cover their kids’ education.

PLUS Loans also have much higher interest rates compared to other federal loan programs. For the 2023-24 academic year, PLUS Loans carried an interest rate of 8.05%, compared to 5.5% for direct undergraduate loans.

Via SchiffGold.com,

Everyone’s heard of Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina, called by Fox News the world’s first libertarian president. He has been in the news for his denunciation of leftism, Marxism, and the sprawling bureaucracy that has trapped Argentina in debt. He’s also taken aim at run-away inflation in Argentina. Inflation in the last year was over 200% in Argentina, a rate that the United States hasn’t reached, even with Biden-levels of inflation.

But what might surprise some, given Milei’s libertarian leanings, is that he promised to get his country to use the American dollar. Why and what does it say about the future of fiat currency?

The use of the American dollar by foreign countries in place of their own is called currency substitution or dollarization. There are different reasons why a country might want to abandon its sovereign currency for the currency of the United States. Some of the countries that use the American dollar are small island nations or territories like the Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, or Micronesia. These islands depend heavily on American tourists or American military spending to keep their economies afloat. The use of the dollar is a way to appeal to their most important economic partners as well as a way to reduce transaction costs and make transactions more convenient. But Argentina is a major country, it trades with America of course, but its economy is larger and more diverse than those island states.

Argentina, or at least Milei and his supporters, want to switch to the dollar because Argentina’s currency, the Argentinian peso, has been run into the ground by constant government overspending and essentially printing money to cover the costs of government programs that are oversized relative to Argentina’s economy.  According to Stephen Matteo Miller of the Mercatus Center, Argentina has already experienced unofficial dollarization, with individual citizens of Argentina holding onto dollars or dollar-denominated assets because while the American dollar is constantly devalued by inflation it is devalued at a slower rate than the peso. Thus, dollarization would make official what rational Argentinians are already doing.

Milei has run into some setbacks with the dollarization part of the agenda and he is now claiming it’s part of a long-term agenda that will follow dramatic cuts to government spending. If Argentina dollarizes, in theory, it would benefit from “only” having to deal with American-level inflation instead of Argentina-level inflation. It would also help keep government spending under control- Argentina would not be able to run huge deficits and offset its spending by printing more dollars, only the United States can produce dollars. The strength of the currency that Argentinians use wouldn’t be undermined by Argentinian fiscal irresponsibility.

What about the situation for ordinary Americans? The Biden administration, even more so than typical politicians, has gone on a relentless spending spree, taking the federal debt to new heights and unsurprisingly we have seen high inflation to go along with it. The higher the debt, the more likely it is that the government will print money to pay it off. This fear causes inflation to rise, even before the government actually does it.

Argentina can turn to the United States for a source of a more stable and reliable fiat currency. But for the United States, there is nowhere to turn. There is no larger economy. The problems that the United States faces with its fiat currency are shared around the world. Fiat currency is constantly devalued and the existence of fiat currency makes government overspending easy. Another fiat currency will never save the United States from dangerous levels of inflation.

What could? Maybe gold. Gold can’t be printed by the government. A nation on the gold standard couldn’t spend without limit- its ability to repay debts would be limited by its store of gold and what investors thought of its long-run sustainability. A switch to hard money could be a solution to American inflation. Would it have to be gold?

In theory, gold isn’t unique. Some other assets or commodities could back a currency. But in practice, only gold (and maybe silver), have the historic, cultural role of serving as money and scarcity, fungibility, and other useful traits to serve as a currency.

Will the United States return to precious metals? Maybe. But if it does it probably won’t do so instantaneously. Instead, it would follow the path of Argentina. The unofficial use of gold and silver as money and as a store of value would spike first, far before any official adoption. A fact worth keeping in mind when considering investment options.

The US embassy in Russia has issued an unusual and somewhat mysterious warning over violent plots by ‘extremists’ that will potentially target gatherings of people in Moscow.

“The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours,” the U.S. embassy said in a Thursday alert. 

The alert offered no further details or speculation as to the expected nature of the attack or who could be behind such plotting. The embassy further advised Americans to “be aware of your surroundings” and monitor local media.

Very soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over two years ago, the State Department warned all Americans to exit Russia, given they could face arrest or unlawful detention. However, clearly some remain, likely including journalists as well as diplomatic personnel.

As for what the US embassy could be responding to, Forbes notes the timing of the alert:

The U.S. alert comes just hours after Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had thwarted a planned terrorist attack on a Moscow synagogue. The agency, a successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said the shooting had been planned by a cell from the Afghan arm of the militant Islamic State group. The FSB said the terrorists were killed when resisting arrest, adding that firearms, ammunition and components for an improvised explosive device were found and seized from the area.

And Reuters reported that the ISIS cell in question has been operating in Russia’s Kaluga region and that the thwarted plot was to include “firearms” and “improvised explosive devises”.

Russia is holding presidential elections next week, scheduled for March 15-17, in which President Putin is expected to achieve easy victory. But Moscow has issued a strong warning to Washington against ‘interference’.

International reports suggest the US Embassy is responding to the shootout between Russian security services and an ISIS cell…

ISIS plot to slaughter Jews in Moscow synagogue: Terrorists planning gun massacre are killed in shootout https://t.co/L62Aorkdua pic.twitter.com/iDR4hVmDgc

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) March 7, 2024

The Russian foreign ministry announced Thursday that it summoned US Ambassador Lynne Tracy to warn that if Washington interferes in Russia’s internal affairs it would move to expel US diplomats in the country.

The foreign ministry in particular warned over “subversive actions and the spread of information” related to the election as well as Moscow’s military operations in Ukraine.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

By some miracle – actually, by the printing of $5.4 trillion that has shown itself in persistent inflation – the United States has so far avoided a financial crisis. That’s the one sector that so far the establishment has been able to protect from disaster.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

How long can this be forestalled?

Watching the highly leveraged economic environment carefully, it seemed fairly likely that this would begin with a commercial real estate bust in the big cities. New York in particular is the hot spot and bellwether.

The story goes like this.

After a long real estate boom in the cities, with workers commuting long distances, and zero interest rate policies that massively subsidized corporate leverage and an unhinged hiring binge, the sudden lockdowns of four years ago changed everything.

Suddenly vast swaths of the professional managerial class were forced to do their fake work from home. This not only led to a sudden shortage of household toilet paper. It introduced into corporate America a new way of managing the workforce. Even after all this time, the habit of the daily commute will not come back the way it was.

Looking from the outside in, it might seem like the obvious answer was to convert huge office skyscrapers to apartments, of which there is a tremendous shortage. But that turns out not to be so easy. These office spaces are set up to be what they are and cannot simply become apartments. There was really only one choice: either get the workforce back on a full-time basis or shrink the amount of leased space.

These commercial leases typically run for 5 to 10 years. Two years ago, the clock began to tick on many of them. Many began to expire last year and many more this year. Companies are looking at their huge office spaces and realizing that they could cut their footprint by half or more. The hybrid work schedule simply didn’t require the multifloor leases that they previously had.

As a result, many are cutting back, resulting in fewer revenue flows to the mortgage holders and thus less available to service the gigantic loans on large properties as held by big financial companies.

A major player in the New York City market is New York Community Bancorp. Last year, it began reporting that it was missing its metrics and falling on some hard times. Its stock started taking a beating. As the reports grew worse, the sell order mounted.

From a high of nearly $14, the stock began to tank, falling even lower than $2. That’s when the panic began from the banking community. Its CEO was fired and replaced. Then several major lenders ponied up $1 billion in a rescue package to make things right again. The stock has recovered slightly.

Notable is the source of the funds: former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Involved are Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital, Hudson Bay Capital, and Reverence Capital Partners and including Citadel. The new CEO is the former Comptroller of the Currency.

In other words, this is a deep-state bailout, an all-hands-on-deck attempt to stop contagion. It’s very serious. And though the action did get many headlines, it might be, in the poetic phrase, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.

“Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings have both downgraded New York Community Bancorp’s credit ratings to below investment grade,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

All the bailouts in the world are not going to solve the underlying problem. The commercial real estate issue in the big cities, particularly in Boston, New York, and Chicago, is not going away. They will worsen this entire year, leading to more weakness among the major lenders. This will provoke more centralization and bailouts. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department will be watching closely throughout.

Will they be able to contain it? Not likely, not over the long term. The financial crisis is coming. They are only kicking the can down the road.

If you wonder why the Fed keeps talking up rate cuts—despite the reality that inflation is nowhere near under control by any historical marker—this is why. It’s a means by which the Fed assures markets that it is ready to crank up the printing press at a moment’s notice. They will not let the system unravel.

What does this mean for you? Well, for starters, it means that inflation is not going away, not for a very long time. It might get vastly worse starting next year and the next. We could be headed into a repeat of the 1970s with three distinct inflationary waves. We might have been through the first and only waiting for two and three.

Sophisticated investors have figured this out, which is why gold and Bitcoin have hit new highs. It’s the only real safe haven in such an environment. No matter who is elected president, this is going to be a huge problem for the next term. It might emerge as the central issue. When that happens, please remember the roots of the problem, which trace not only to lockdowns but to the response to the 2008 crisis and even earlier with the loosening of credit after 2001.

So far, it’s been a century of inflationary finance. How could this not end in financial crisis? The only question is what pathway it will take to unfold. We are only now seeing the beginning of it.

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the “most ridiculous in recent history” but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let’s take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month’s record 4-sigma beat, today’s print was “only” 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR… and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was “the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history”: it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month’s ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month’s jobs print won’t be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that’s the only tool left in the Biden admin’s box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

In the past month the Biden department of goalseeking stuff higher before revising it lower, has revised the following data sharply lower:

– Jobs
– JOLTS
– New Home sales
– Housing Starts and Permits
– Industrial Production
– PCE and core PCE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 30, 2023

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years – and thus denying expectations from Sahm’s Rule that a recession may have already started – in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years…

… for one simple reason: last month’s average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic…

… but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS’s latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month’s wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it’s more than just the Biden admin hanging its “success” on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge… such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There’s more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of “new jobs” has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that’s great… until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there’s even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers…

… but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue – especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border…

… and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened – i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden’s handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November… and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

While previewing Joe Biden’s ‘jacked up’ State of The Union address Thursday, an MSNBC talking head declared that if Biden doesn’t win the election, the US “could be a dictatorship next year.”

The network brought on ‘presidential historian’ Michael Beschloss, who compared the unhinged screaming Biden to FDR warning Americans about the rise of fascism.

Anchor Andrea Mitchell asked Beschloss “take a big picture, zoom out for us on what’s at stake for [Biden] tonight,” adding “You point to FDR’s Four Freedoms speech in 1941, obviously war time, a bigger challenge, but let’s, you know, talk about the challenges tonight.”

Beschloss proclaimed “this is a real historical moment” adding, “We could be a dictatorship next year if Donald Trump is elected and carries through on his threats and carries through on his threats to suspend the Constitution. That’s what’s at stake.”

He continued, “This is a year when we Americans have to choose whether we’re going to live as a democracy, as a republic, or as an authoritarian system.’That’s what FDR was doing in 1941, Nazis, fascists, Imperial Japanese were rampaging around the world, and he said ‘you Americans have to choose ‘”

“This is a year when we Americans have to choose whether we’re going to live as a democracy, as a republic, or as an authoritarian system,” Beschloss declared.

Watch:

MSNBC declares that by next year America “could be a dictatorship,” and compares Biden to FDR warning about Nazis. Report here: https://t.co/Ts9v8brctj pic.twitter.com/InftrtMwPk

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) March 8, 2024

Truly deranged.

MSNBC will happily suggest that Trump is going to suspend the Constitution, but then literally laugh at the notion that mass immigration on an unprecedented scale is a concern:

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