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Monday, November 4, 2024

2024-11-04

***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:


When the Fed started raising interest rates in March 2022, a lot of Fed speeches and market conversations focused on the long and variable lags of monetary policy, i.e., the time it takes before Fed hikes begin to slow down the economy.

Traditional impulse-response functions in VAR models and the Fed’s own model of the US economy, FRBUS, suggest that it should take 12 to 18 months before tighter monetary policy begins to slow the economy down.

However, it has been 30 months since the Fed started raising interest rates, and we have still not seen any sign of a slowdown. This week, we got GDP growth for the third quarter, and it came in at 2.8%. And the Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate for fourth quarter GDP is 2.3%, above the CBO’s 2% estimate for long-run growth.

This is the key issue across the S&P 500, credit, FX, and private markets: What happened to long and variable lags? Why is GDP growth still above potential, and why did Fed hikes not slow down consumer spending and capex spending the way the textbook would have predicted?

There are three reasons:
  • First, the US economy has been less sensitive to interest rate increases because consumers and firms locked in low interest rates during the pandemic.
  • Second, the US economy continues to experience a big structural boom in AI and data centers.
  • Third, fiscal policy is easy with a 6% budget deficit, driven by the CHIPS Act, the IRA, the Infrastructure Act, and defense spending.
These tailwinds combined have offset the mildly negative impact of Fed hikes on highly leveraged consumers and firms.

In addition, these three tailwinds are unique to the US, which is why the business cycle is strong in the US and weak in the rest of the world.

With the Fed now cutting rates and these three tailwinds still in place, the outlook for the US economy continues to be positive.


Aircraft equipment investment increased at a 429% annual rate in Q3, following a 647% annualized increase in Q2, a significant driver of overall GDP growth.



.............. Regarding the Federal Reserve, the downward revisions are significant, and today's number more closely matches survey evidence from the likes of ISM, the NFIB and Homebase. Remember, too, that the BLS admits to overstating employment by a third in the April 2023-March 2024 period, and there is concern that there continues to be a structural over-estimation. There are also some concerns about the quality of the jobs being added, which appear to be focused on more part-time, lower-paid roles. The chart below shows full-time employment continues to fall in YoY terms, with the gains coming from part-time jobs.




Yardeni: DEEP DIVE: Ten Useless Macroeconomic Theories


… (3) Disinverting yield curve. The Treasury yield curve has flipped positive in September, with the 10-year yield now roughly 15bps above the 2-year yield (Fig. 20 below). Historically, a recession has followed soon after such a disinversion—but only because the Fed was cutting interest rates rapidly to stem a crisis, which then morphed into a recession. This time around, the Fed is cutting rates as a preventative measure.  ........


Louis-Vincent Gave: Behind the Bond Sell-off

......... When it comes to today’s bond bear market, it’s possible to point to four main explanations.

1) Essentially, the market is slowly realizing that the post-2008 “new normal” era of depressed nominal growth is well and truly over. ............

2) It’s the issuance. Any debate about how to tackle the US government’s runaway budget deficit  ............

3) It’s the inflation. One of the more interesting developments in the past year is how resilient inflation has proved to be.  ............

4) It’s the shifting geopolitical environment. Last week saw both the IMF meeting in Washington and the Brics summit in Kazan in Russia. ............


Does the Fed Still Believe in the NAIRU?

.................................. On the other hand, the past few years have also not been kind to those who see a tight link between the unemployment rate and inflation. When inflation began rising at the start of 2021, unemployment was still over 6%; two years later, when high inflation was essentially over, unemployment was below 4%. If the Fed had focused on the unemployment rate, it would have gotten inflation wrong both coming and going.

This is reflected in the language of Powell and other FOMC members. One change in central-bank thinking that seems likely to last, is a move away from the headline unemployment rate as a measure of slack. The core of the NAIRU framework is a tight link between labor-market conditions and inflation. But even if one accepts that link conceptually, there’s no reason to think that the official unemployment rate is the best measure of those conditions. In the future, we are likely to see discussion of a broader set of labor-market indicators.  ..............

This leads to one of the central points of the paper, which I wish I’d been able to highlight more: the difference between what they call “epistemological problematization” of the NAIRU, that is doubts about how precisely we can know it and related “natural” parameters; and “ontological problematization,” or doubts that it is a relevant concept for policy at all. At a day to day operational level, the difference may not always be that great; but I think — as do the authors — that it matters a lot for the evolution of policy over longer horizons or in new conditions.



.............. Credit spreads matter because, at an index level, they need to overcompensate for future defaults. Otherwise, there would be no reason to invest in high yield bonds, as adjusted for default loss, high yield returns would be in line with the risk-free rate (or worse, if default losses were greater than credit spreads). Therefore, credit spreads have two main components: (i) default-implied spreads, which provide a forward-looking view on future defaults and recovery, and (ii) excess spreads, which, simply put, represent the overcompensation of default risk[1]. Active management will aim to reduce default loss and increase excess spread.

To calculate the actual excess spreads across the US, European, and emerging markets high yield markets, one can subtract from credit spreads the realised subsequent twelve month default rate (adjusted by recovery value). For example, the US high yield market had credit spreads of 440bps in September 2014. The subsequent 12 months (to Sep-2015) saw a 3% default rate with a recovery rate of 40%, leading to a default loss of 1.83%. Therefore, investors who bought US high yield in September 2014 enjoyed an actual excess spread of 257bps (440bps minus 183bps of default loss).

The results over time are surprising. While the excess spread in the European high yield market consistently overcompensates for default risk, US high yield and emerging markets corporate high yield excess spreads were negative during some periods, i.e. realised one-year default losses were greater than credit spreads a year earlier. However, this can be explained by one-off events, namely COVID-19 for US high yield and the Russia/Ukraine conflict for emerging markets high yield. With that in mind, we believe median numbers are more representative. Between January 2014 and September 2023, the median excess spreads of US, European and emerging markets high yield were remarkably similar, ranging from 280 to 310bps.

Taking today’s historically tight high yield credit spreads and using 300bps as our base case excess spread, we can derive the implied default loss expectation of the market for the next 12 months. As of end of September 2024, the implied default loss expectations were 0.1% for US high yield, 1.4% for European high yield, and 0.9% for emerging markets high yield. This compares to broker research expectations of 2.5-3% default rates for 2025, across the US, European and emerging markets high yield markets. Even when adjusted for recovery rates, next year’s default losses are expected to be greater than what current credit spreads are pricing in. Which will prevail in the next 12 months: excess optimism or excess spreads?


“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” – John Wooden
Countries that bungle their energy policies can’t have nice things. Among the luxuries that eventually slip out of reach are abundance, good-paying jobs, and an effective military. That leaders in the West fail to understand this—even in the face of a steady parade of evidence that points plainly to the axiomatic nature of the statement—is one of the great mysteries of our time. Energy need not be produced domestically, but unless it can be accessed cheaply and reliably from somewhere, the fate of that economy is sealed and no amount of politicking or bureaucratic reshuffling can overcome that fact.

Part of the blame for the confusion can be apportioned to a modern economic theory that fails to differentiate energy and other critical commodities in its appraisal of gross domestic product (GDP). As our friend Luke Gromen put it in his weekly Tree Rings newsletter last Friday, “Commodity and weapons production GDP is not the same as GDP created by flipping houses back and forth to each other at ever higher prices and writing financial derivatives to bet on those housing prices.”

Consider China, a country with little in the way of oil or natural gas but an abundance of domestic coal. As described in our August Doom Zoom presentation to Pro Tier members, Year of the Dragon: China Through the Lens of Energy, the country’s leaders have played their energy cards to perfection. In addition to pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy that includes a massive buildout of hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, refineries, and natural gas pipelines that connect to its neighbors, China has been happy to nod along with the West’s rejection of coal while gorging on the stuff itself. ..............



MMT Tweet of the Week:



Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


......................... But focusing on climate change alone is too narrow. Renewable energy advocates often ignore the deeper issue: overshoot—we’ve already blown past the planet’s ecological limits. The idea of a renewable-powered future that sustains endless economic growth is a dangerous delusion—a death sentence for Earth’s ecosystems and, ultimately, for human well-being. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

Indy Johar argues that climate change is just a symptom of a deeper structural failure. Our systems were built in a different era, shaped by beliefs that no longer fit. Rapid decrease in animal populations, water pollution, and other crises are feedback signals, telling us it’s time to rewrite our foundational codes—what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls society’s ‘generator functions.’ These codes got us this far, but now they’re driving the systemic breakdowns we see today.

Johar says that four hundred years ago, we thought the world was infinite, and we built our institutions—laws, language, property rights—on that assumption. Ideas like individual ownership, accounting models, and tax systems emerged from that mindset. But the world isn’t infinite, and clinging to these outdated codes is accelerating collapse. He thinks it’s time for a redesign.

Redesign might sound like the right move, but we need to tread carefully—otherwise, it risks becoming just another spin on the same reductionist thinking that landed us in this mess. ................

................................. Renewable energy mostly generates electricity, which accounts for only about 20% of our total energy use. We tell ourselves we’re replacing fossil fuels, but we’re really just stacking renewables on top of oil, gas, and coal. Making matters worse, the material resources for renewables require vast amounts of minerals that are mined, transported, manufactured and distributed using fossil fuels. And most of those material resources will not last beyond the first generation of solar panels and wind turbines.

The result? Emissions keep rising, the economy keeps growing, and Earth’s ecosystems continue to unravel. Our best efforts to decarbonize energy will have little consequence unless we change our relationship to energy and to the natural world. ..........................

We need to confront the hard truth: we may no longer be able to fix what’s broken. The time for easy solutions has passed. Now, the real work lies in mitigating damage and adapting to what’s already inevitable because we waited too long to act. ........


The transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to using alternative low-carbon energy sources could be “unstoppable and exponential,” according to some experts. A boosterish attitude by many renewable energy advocates is understandable; overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the groundswell of motivation needed to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally, a reality check is required.

In reality, energy transitions are a big deal and typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago. Given 1) the current size of the human population—there are eight times as many of us alive today compared to 1820 when the fossil fuel energy transition was underway, 2) the vast scale of the global economy, and 3) the unprecedented speed with which the transition will have to be made to avert catastrophic climate change. A rapid renewable energy transition is easily the most ambitious enterprise our species has ever undertaken.

The evidence shows that the transition is still in its earliest stages, and at the current rate, it will fail to avert a climate catastrophe. ..........................................

............................................................... 
Granted, this seven-step program appears politically unachievable today, but that’s largely because humanity hasn’t yet fully faced the failure of our current path of prioritizing immediate profits and comfort above long-term survival—and the consequences of that failure. Given better knowledge of where we’re currently headed and the alternatives, what is politically impossible today could quickly become inevitable.

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric writes that profound social transformations are often tied to wars, natural disasters, or revolutions. But crisis alone is not positively transformative. There must also be ideas for different ways to organize society, and social movements energized by those ideas must also exist. We have a crisis and (as we have just seen) some good ideas for how to do things differently. Now we need a movement.

Building a movement takes political and social organizing skills, time, and hard work. Even if you don’t have the skills for organizing, you can help the cause by learning about what a real energy transition requires and educating people you know about it, advocating for degrowth or related policies, and reducing your own energy and materials consumption.

Even with a new social movement advocating for a real energy transition, there is no guarantee that civilization will emerge from this century of unraveling in a recognizable form. But we all need to understand this is a fight for survival in which cooperation and sacrifices are required, just as in war. Until we feel that level of shared urgency, there will be no real energy transition and little prospect for a desirable human future.


Antonio Aretxabala, a geologist and natural disasters expert, analyzes the reasons behind the high death toll and devastation following the floods that killed almost a hundred people in the Valencia region.


Geoengineering: Building ethics, transparency and inclusion into climate intervention research

........ This year’s extreme weather events are a troubling preamble for the upcoming COP29. At this meeting in Azerbaijan in November, world leaders will still be grappling with the results of the first ever Global Stocktake of progress towards achieving the Paris Agreement goals. This action revealed just how far behind the world is in limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. ........................



U.S. B.S.

And am proud to do so

Eight years ago I couldn’t imagine that I would ever vote for Trump. Four years ago I considered it, but opted against, voting third party instead. This year I am voting for Trump.

There are many Americans who have followed a similar path.

Last week’s DarkHorse made a case for Trump. But I am still met with dismay and disbelief by some family and friends. Increasingly, what I hear is this:

“I understand that you can’t possibly vote for Kamala. But what are the reasons to vote for Trump?”

Here is one set of answers.

Trump is not owned. .............................................

Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots. ......................................

....................



People who think of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as decent or acceptable simply have not realized how immensely evil you have to be to become a US president.

In order to support either Harris or Trump you need to have an extreme ignorance of the murderousness and depravity of the US empire, which they both serve. Only a complete failure to see and understand the vast scale of the abusiveness of the US power structure could cause you to view these two candidates as meaningfully different from each other — let alone see one of them as decent enough to be worthy of your support.

Both Trump and Harris are auditioning for a role that will necessarily entail the creation of mountains of human corpses by US-sponsored violence, as has every viable US presidential candidate throughout our lives. ...............

Most Americans (and most westerners generally) fail to truly see and understand how profoundly evil the US-centralized empire is, which is the only thing that allows all this political energy to go into pretending there are these hugely significant differences between the Democrat and the Republican presidential candidate every four years. If they could really ingest the scale of the empire’s brutality and tyranny with a deep sense of empathy for their fellow human beings upon whom it is inflicted, they would never support anyone who is pledged to help operate the slaughter machine, and they would not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other. All they would see is the need for the slaughter machine to be dismantled.

The most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created exists to prevent this understanding from taking root, in the west generally and in the United States in particular.  ...............

❖

Back when people used to watch TV they’d complain that there’s “a hundred channels and nothing on,” and they were right: there WAS nothing on that was worth watching. Mainstream culture was just that vapid and worthless — and it still is. There’s nothing in it that fulfills us, that nourishes us in the ways we long to be nourished, that tells us real things in a real way about the world as it actually is. People would flip through TV channels disgusted at the emptiness of it all because that’s all they were being presented with: empty drivel with no edifying or transformative value.

People experience the same thing today when scrolling through their online media feeds and streaming services. They’re searching for something true and meaningful, but unless you’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a rare corner of the internet where real things are being discussed, all the algorithm feeds you is propaganda and distraction. Mindless entertainment. Celebrities. Gossip. Mainstream electoral politics. Donald Trump.

For generations we’ve been corralled toward streams of information which are designed to turn us into idiots and sociopaths. Designed to keep us from getting good information about what the powerful people who rule us are really up to. .................



My one and only position on how Americans should vote is that they should do whatever makes them feel nice, since that’s all US presidential elections are: an emotional pacifier to let the masses feel like they have some meaningful control over their country. It’s about feelings and nothing else.

If voting for Kamala Harris makes you feel nice because it lets you pretend you’re stopping fascism or protecting women and minorities or helping to secure a ceasefire in Gaza or whatever, then go right ahead. That’s what your vote is there for.

If voting for Donald Trump makes you feel nice because it lets you pretend you’re sticking it to the establishment or punishing the Democrats for their misdeeds or ending the wars or whatever, then by all means do so. This whole spectacle is exclusively about feelings.

If voting for a third party makes you feel nice because it lets you pretend there might be some answer in electoral politics or that the empire will ever allow anyone who truly opposes the abuses of capitalism, militarism and imperialism anywhere near power, then get in there and cast that vote. Whatever makes your feely bits feel nice.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re doing anything other than sucking on an emotional pacifier, because you’re not.

No matter how you vote, Democrats will continue to win approximately half the time, and Republicans will win the other half.

No matter how you vote, the ever-expanding abuses of capitalism and plutocracy will continue making life worse for ordinary Americans.

No matter how you vote, the US war machine will continue inflicting nightmarish mass military violence on people in other countries in order to maintain its globe-spanning empire.

No matter how you vote, the profit-driven systems which rule our world will continue exterminating our biosphere at an alarmingly rapid rate.

No matter how you vote, the empire’s looming confrontations with Russia and China guarantee more world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship in the near future.

No matter how you vote, people in the global south will continue to be robbed and exploited to give the western citizenry of the imperial core enough cheap stuff to keep them pacified and compliant.

No matter how you vote, the US will continue using starvation sanctions, blockades and economic warfare to bully weaker nations into obedience.

Your rulers will never give you the tools to end any of these abuses, because too much power rides on their continuation. They will only give you the tools to mollify your own frustrations and placate your discontentment by giving you a phony ritual to participate in every four years that lets you feel some degree of control.

You’re never voting your way out of this. The oligarchs and empire managers who rule you are never going to let you overthrow them by ticking a box. These sociopaths are never going to give their power to you voluntarily out of the kindness of their hearts.

Their rule will end when the project of the US empire ends — either because of outside forces beyond their control, because of inside forces beyond their control, or some combination of these two factors. It will not come about because of how anyone voted in any November. It will only happen because it was forced to happen.

You can help force this to happen by working to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist within your country. You can do this by helping to wake up as many of your countrymen as possible to the fact that their government and media are lying to them constantly, that everything they’ve been taught about their nation and their world is false, and that a better world is possible.

Lies and propaganda play an enormous role in holding the imperial power structure together, so the most effective way to help bring it down is by spreading truth and awareness. Show people how they’re being lied to, abused and stolen from. Teach them the truth about the wars, about their government, about their media, about their nation, about the people their government has designated as enemies, and about the abusive systems they all live under.

That’s real action. That kind of work matters. Your vote doesn’t matter beyond its ability to help you feel a certain way. So do whatever you need to do to feel how you want to feel on election day, and then go do some real work.



And Trump is very slightly ahead in the polls.

As is usually the case in modern American elections, much that is important isn’t at stake in this election: most notably whether or not the genocide in Palestine will continue. Both candidates and both parties are under the thumb of the Israeli lobby. Nor is an end to the terminal decline of the American Empire on the ballot, though Trump pretends it is.

That isn’t to say the election doesn’t matter, but it’s a choice between two terrible candidates. Trump is clearly senile and mercurial is the kindest word one can use to describe him. Harris is not that bright, and appears to fall into the Bush Jr. category: something happened to damage her. Plenty of rumors of alcohol problems, though I don’t know if they’re valid.

Both candidates are moral and ethical monsters, whose ambition and vanity are such that they would kill or impoverish any number of people to achieve their personal goals. (No, don’t even. This isn’t in question.)

I can’t be bothered to endorse either of them. This is a case of “would you prefer Satan or Beelzebub?” Unless you’re in a swing state I’d strongly urge you to vote third party or spoil your ballot. Even in a swing state you should seriously consider it.

About sixty percent of Americans think that the two-party system is broken, but they won’t vote for a third party because they think it’s a wasted vote, and this collective action problem makes continued decline inevitable. 

Domestically it’s clear that Harris, who says she wouldn’t have done a single thing differently than Biden, is the candidate of status quo decline. Things will keep getting worse in about the same way. Trump will shake things up, primarily because of who he will appoint to government and their plans of taking over the bureaucracy.

Democrats aren’t serious about abortion rights, but Trump will make the situation even worse. His economic policies will be disastrous in different ways than Harris’s: tariffs aren’t a bad idea, but without industrial policy and policies designed to end rent-seeking and funnel resources into industry they won’t don’t do much but cause different types of pain. His appointments to the supreme court will be awful, though that ship has sailed and until Democrats are willing to court pack it seems unlikely there will be any near-term change.

This election was Harris’s to win, but she didn’t want it enough to distance herself strategically from Biden. It wouldn’t have taken much, I’d bet that just some serious talk about taming the inflation which ordinary people feel but economists insist doesn’t exist would have done it. Or she could have come out against genocide, and courted the left instead of the right by campaigning with Liz Cheney, et al.

But at the end of the day, people like Harris would rather the right win than do anything seriously left-wing like “not mass murder”, which is now so far from the central axis of American politics that it amounts to extremism, and is treated by universities, the political class and the justice system as the hand maiden to terrorism.

In such a decaying Empire, the truth is there are few good, viable, choices left. Pick your arch-demon or vote for someone who at least isn’t into mass murder but won’t win.







Geopolitical Fare:


South Africa’s legal team has submitted hundreds of documents containing what it calls “undeniable evidence” as part of its ongoing genocide case against the state of Israel, with the South African representative to The Hague telling Al Jazeera that “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence.” ..............

................... Every day there’s more and more ugly news in the middle east, perpetrated by Israel and its powerful western backers who make its abuses possible. It’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of. There really is “too much evidence” to keep up with.



This week’s Kazan Declaration suggests that the BRICS – in its expanded composition– is ready to open a new chapter in its history. Never before have such voluminous documents been adopted as a result of the group’s summits. For the first time, the group’s unified vision of the current state of the international system is set out in detail. ........


Canada ships first armored combat support vehicles to Ukraine

............ This contribution is part of Canada’s ongoing military assistance to Ukraine, which has amounted to nearly $4.5 billion since 2022.



For more than two years we have been saying to keep an eye on Moldova in the background.  Yesterday Moldova held their national election, and while the actual number of people living in Moldova voted for the anti-war position, once the overseas ballots were added the results changed.  The nationalists became the minority and the pro-war/pro-EU globalists declared victory.

This may seem like a relatively ‘over there’ and small issue.  However, the people who control Joe Biden, the U.S. State Dept and the CIA have been positioning themselves in/around Moldova for several years now.  Watch out for Moldova to become the spark that leads to escalated conflict with Russia ...........


....................... It’s always there. If you can’t see it, it’s because you’re not looking closely enough. Beauty is just a word for the experience of having truly seen something.

That’s what keeps me going, no matter how ugly things get. Because even in the ugliness, there is immense beauty. Even in the grief. Even in the anger. Even in the waves of sadness. Beauty is always present.

It’s not hard to keep going once you have realized that everything has beauty. No matter how dark things get, you still get to dance this exhilarating dance on this strange little blue marble spinning through space, and you still get to work to make sure that future generations get to dance too. .............



Sci Fare:


I’ve said before that immunity to SARS-COV-2 in most people who were vaccinated now depends on a small number of loops in the N-Terminal Domain of Spike. This is why I wish to briefly go over this study: .....

.......................... Over time however, this part of the virus mutates. The immune system is then forced to use the antibodies it already developed against the RBD and change them, to fit the new RBD (somatic hypermutation). These tend to be of lower quality, than if it had the opportunity to develop a whole new antibody response from scratch.

This is what we call Original Antigenic Sin, a term that is exactly as intimidating as it should be, to warn humans that you have to be really sure you know what you’re doing, when you want to intervene in a complex system like this. ...........................

In hindsight, it should have been obvious something went terribly wrong, when it became clear that the mRNA vaccinated had an IgG4 response to the receptor binding domain, with no IgG3 left, whereas all(!) of the unvaccinated still had a normal IgG3 response. That’s when all the alarm bells should have gone off.

But what people did instead, back when there was still time left to come up with a solution, was to come up with excuses.



Look, this is my blog, so I get to decide what I want to write about. I don’t have a bunch of fat American MAGA boomers sending me 5 dollars a month in exchange for telling them that Joe Biden’s climate change hysteria is going to make our meat and eggs expensive.

I look at this website a bit like my legacy. I will die one day and then I’ll be able to take comfort in the fact that I sought to tell people the truth, instead of the popular lie that makes you money. I don’t have to administer you addictive brain-opioids, that lull you to sleep. I get to tell you what you don’t want to hear. I get to tell you, the truth. People don’t lie to you to deceive you. They lie to you because you prefer being lied to. ...........................

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............................... I honestly really don’t care how many people it kills, it’s going to be a horror show either way. Your endothelial cells lining your blood vessels, are basically part of your immune system. Unlike most cells, they are able to produce huge amounts of Interferon alpha, a molecule basically designed by evolution to interfere in every step of a viral reproduction cycle.

That’s what we see in this virus, it causes the infected cells to produce huge amounts of it.

So you end up with this virus in the blood vessels in your brain. They produce huge amounts of Interferon Alpha. You can reliably induce depression in a person, by injecting them with interferon alpha, which is sometimes done to treat a viral infection. They suffer severe depression for weeks afterwards, often it recurs later on.

Even if you survive it, it’s a virus that’s going to screw with your mind, by putting your immune system in your brain on high alert, kind of similar to SARS-COV-2. ..............................

Sorry, but this is the story that’s going to dominate the remainder of your life. Resource depletion and climate change are big problems, but they ramp up slowly. This one, this one ramps up fast. .............................



Fun Fare:

Are You Garbage? Know The Signs



Tweet Pic of the Week:



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Sunday, October 27, 2024

2024-10-27

 ***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

Third Quarter 2024: The Rules of the Game

…A Single Globally Weighted Monetary Barometer
The situation in these individual regions can be consolidated into a global directional indicator of monetary thrust that provides a comprehensive view of the monetary situation across these regions (Chart 3). This indicator is the most restrictive in the past twenty-two years, meaning that these five central banks, collectively, have significantly increased the risk of severe disinflation and poor economic performance. The combined detrended real M growth for these five economic regions is weighted by its contribution to world GDP. China's M is only available since 1998 and as four-year moving averages were employed, the series could only start in 2002. But it is critical to the value of the series to include China, because it is 19% of the global economy. Each country's yearly GDP, as measured by the World Bank, is weighted by its relative contribution to global economic output. Over this twenty-two year span, the four-year moving average of detrended global M has fallen to a record low in the latest reading. Although a limited sample period, it contains one extremely relevant comparison point. The slowdown in M growth during the Great Financial Crisis pales in comparison to the current situation.


PIMCO Macro Signposts: Fed Cuts and Market Responses: History Lessons (via the BondBeat)

Since 17 September – the day before the Federal Reserve cut its policy rate by 50 basis points (bps) – the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury has climbed roughly 55 bps to 4.2%. This seemingly counterintuitive trend over the past several weeks has spurred questions around the extent to which the current Fed easing cycle will potentially deliver positive returns for bond investors, as has happened in past cycles.

While historical patterns are complex and not definitive, an analysis of previous Fed easing cycles suggests that bond market price action in the first month after the Fed begins cutting interest rates does not tend to be a good predictor of either 1) the broader macroeconomic outcome that ensues over the next year and beyond, or 2) the extent to which high quality bonds are able to deliver positive returns.




You just have to love the short-term overreactions of Mr. Market. Just two months ago we get a weak employment report and investors are panicked that the Fed is too tight. Then we get a strong employment report in September and investors are panicked that the Fed is too loose. In May the 10 year interest rate was as high as 4.75%. By September it was as low as 3.6%. Today it’s bounced back to 4.2%. And as rates tick higher in recent months there’s been a growing chorus about how “bond vigilantes” are going to teach the Fed a lesson. This has been especially loud coming from Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones and Elon Musk. The basic narrative is that bond markets will teach the Fed and US government a lesson about reckless spending which will drive up interest rates and bankrupt the USA. .....................

Back to Druckenmiller and friends. This seems to be a pretty persistent thing with Druckenmiller. For example, I wrote nearly this exact same article 11 years ago in response to a WSJ op-ed in which Druckenmiller said the exact same thing. He said the USA was bankrupt and that the Fed was too loose. The 10 year yield was 2% at the time, the Fed was on 0% and rates would slowly drift lower until we got the Covid shock 8 years later. It was a dreadful prediction. I think the same exact thing is happening now.  ...............






Tight Fed policy doesn’t always equate to tight liquidity




Europeans been spendin’ most their lives livin’ in the banksta’s paradise

European Union’s eventual collapse is a certainty - it has been for a very long time. It’s been rigged for demolition through its financial architecture which institutionalizes a system of governance that’s typical of all historical eras where moneylending oligarchies gained the control of the political system. The predictable result of all this is that European economies are floundering: their entrepreneurial dynamism and competitiveness is being systematically suffocated and slowly consumed by the parasitic leech hidden behind the EU bureaucratic institutions. For the ordinary people and businesses, this system is driving a steady, inexorable descent into poverty.

One of the main components of Europe’s pathological financial architecture is the European Stability Mechanism (ESM): Eurozone’s permanent bailout fund.  ..............

This is truly a different kind of social contract. It effectively reverses one of the 19th century’s key political achievements: the transfer of fiscal sovereignty from unaccountable monarchical bureaucracies to democratically accountable parliaments. It thereby it nullifies any notion of democratic governance of the people, by the people and for the people. 

This legislation is clearly of the bankers, by the bankers and for the bankers. ...........


Sales of existing homes are on track for the worst two-year period since the mid-1990s


History rhymes as gold breaks out from Brobdingnagian base

Gold is starting to come on the radar for more and more people (after rallying some 60% off the October 2022 low), with financial pundits, hedge fund billionaires, and even mainstream media starting to talk louder about the shiny metal.

But what’s gold got going for it anyway? And after rallying more than 30% YTD, has gold got anything left in the tank — are we too late?
  • Central Bank Buying: around the world central banks have been buying up gold (diversifying reserves, managing risks), the last 2 years saw more gold purchased by central banks than the previous 5 years combined.
  • Geopolitics (1): first, there are numerous geopolitical hotspots threatening to boil-over (Russia vs Ukraine/Europe, Iran vs Israel/US, North vs South Korea, etc); gold has gotten a clear boost from the geopolitical risk premium.
  • Geopolitics (2): second, the 2022 Russian invasion + resulting sanctions proved to anyone who might ever find themselves on the wrong side of the USA that they ought to rethink reserves management and as such both boost and repatriate gold holdings to avoid sanctions risk.
  • China: for China it’s a combination of the above factors, but also their property market is in a deep and drawn-out down-turn; this has seen retail investors turn to gold as stocks slumbered and monetary stimulus gets stepped up.
  • Fed Pivot: the prospect of lower yields and a weaker dollar, potentially catalyzed by Fed easing further add to the case — easier monetary conditions and ample liquidity is generally good for gold.
  • Fiscal Fears: whichever butt lands in the seat after the 5th of November, it’s clear that neither party wants to bother with fiscal sustainability, and if anything fiscal irresponsibility seems to be a bipartisan issue!
  • Inflation Resurgence Risk: the bullish outlook for commodities (in my view), seeming resilient growth, and rush to rate cuts puts reacceleration and resurgence risk on the table into 2025.
  • Sentiment vs Positioning: one the one hand, Consensus Inc. sentiment gauge shows widespread bullishness and CoT futures positioning reports show speculators are heavily net-long (both highlighting the strong momentum in gold prices), but paradoxically; ETF flows and positioning show retail appear to be lukewarm on gold (see bonus chart below).
  • Technicals: perhaps the biggest part of the story is just plain old technicals (price tells us a lot of things), gold broke out from a major long-term basing process (aka Brobdingnagian base) — you always want to pay attention to this type of price action as it can foreshadow a long-term and significant trend change. For instance, check out the chart below and the example in the early/mid-2000’s.
So while real yields remain relatively high and the US dollar relatively resilient — and risk sentiment more broadly seems healthy as stocks punch on to new highs… i.e. all things that usually stand against gold, it sure does have a lot going for it.


The pessimistic slant is many of the factors highlighted above that benefit gold, are kind of bad… kinda potentially, like, really bad. In the words of Rick Rule, "I don't own gold because I think it might go through $2700. I own gold because I'm AFRAID it's gonna go to $9,000. Or $10,000."



AI Demand is Driving Skyrocketing US Investment in Computers, Data Centers, and Other Physical Infrastructure



Bubble Fare:




China Fare:




Quotes of the Week:

Max Euwe: “Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation.”



Charts:
1:
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4: 
6: 
7:  
ha! we'll see!
8: .
9: 




(not just) for the ESG crowd:

(uhm, too late for 2 was obvious over a decade ago... UN now says too late for 3 (if we don't DO something).... but, really, its been too late for 4 for awhile.... as per Hansen, we're headed for ...10?!, yes, 10!)


Let's play it out.

England just had its second-worst harvest on record. As far as I can tell, those records go back to the early 1800s. Wheat fell 21 percent. Barley fell 26 percent. Across the board, it was 15 percent. (The worst harvest happened in 1983.) Months of torrential rains wiped out crops. A new pattern has descended. The fall is too wet. The spring is too dry. The summer is too hot. That’s what a climate crisis does. It turns centuries of predictable weather patterns upside down. ..................

Just like many other countries, the U.S. is staving off collapse by depleting what’s left of the land’s resources. That includes pumping the Ogallala Aquifer dry. ...................






.............. The reality for the most polluting of all fossil fuels is record consumption and stronger-than-expected demand in the future. ...........



The International Energy Agency (IEA) shared some good news last week—clean energy is gaining ground, fossil fuel use is peaking, and carbon reductions look achievable.

But dig into the numbers, and a different picture emerges. The IEA’s forecast rests on shaky assumptions, wishful thinking, and contradictions that cast serious doubt on the credibility of its projections.

The biggest problem with the rosy headlines in World Energy Outlook 2024 is that coal use—the largest source of global carbon emissions—will decline by just 0.5% per year through 2030, and only 0.8% annually from 2030 to 2050.

It’s hard to believe that significant progress is being made in the transition to clean energy when coal consumption barely declines.

Adding to that disappointment, the IEA forecasts that oil consumption will increase by 0.75% annually and natural gas use will grow at 1.6% per year over the same period. .............

This disconnect highlights a fundamental problem—how can the economy expand with slower energy growth? GDP and energy consumption correlate almost perfectly so either the projections are wrong or the world economy is heading for a reality check. .............

Economic expansion requires more than just cleaner energy—it demands vast material inputs and energy yields that renewables, in their current form, struggle to provide. By focusing only on decarbonization, these projections overlook the deeper challenge: a growth-based system incompatible with planetary boundaries. Until the obsession with endless growth and consumption is confronted, energy forecasts, no matter how green they appear, will remain built on wishful thinking​







‘A flinch from reality and possibility.’

........ The elections scheduled for 5 November prompt a rethink here at The Floutist.

Are our times unprecedented in that the United States now openly arms a genocide in Gaza, the expansion of terrorist Israel's war across West Asia, and the subversion of all international norms, institutions, and laws? Or do the two mainstream candidates, setting aside honorable fringe figures with no chance of victory, stand together as the worst, most unqualified—indeed, the most ridiculous—in American history? Or is this election the first in which those who insist on voting are offered an absurd paradox—the choice of no choice—in that they will support lawless conduct no matter which lever they pull when they draw the curtain? ............



Well, Kamala Harris has had her fun with all those “progressive” voters, in and at the edge of the Democratic Party, who were much taken—or taken in, better put—as the vice president played the empathy card in her many statements of concern for the fate of the Palestinians of Gaza. Let us be clear, to borrow one of Harris’s favorite locutions: If she wins on Nov. 5 and a Harris administration comes to be next Jan. 20, there will be no deviation whatsoever from the Biden regime’s limitless, unconditional support for Zionist Israel’s expanding campaigns of terror in West Asia. 

.......................... Assiduously and cynically, Harris has cultivated delusory expectations at the left-hand end of the Democrats’ garden ever since party elites and donors imposed her as the 2024 candidate last spring.


I hope it's helpful for others

I’ve been dreading the prospect of explaining to people who I’ll be voting for in this upcoming election. There’s no quick way to explain it to people who have been living in a corporate media bubble.

So I made a video about it:

It tries to show normies how much the media lies, how the Democratic Party has changed, how they’ve become the party of censorship, war, and corruption, how the parties have essentially flipped, and how Kamala Harris is an empty suit puppet that’s been installed by establishment elites. .......



Geopolitical Fare:




................................ More and more people are seeing that the US government is much too evil to be allowed to rule the world.

More and more people are seeing that the state of Israel is much too evil to be allowed to continue to exist in its present iteration.

More and more people are seeing that the western press are propaganda services for the US power alliance and should never be trusted.

More and more people are seeing that the Democratic Party exists solely to protect the murderous and corrupt oligarchic status quo of the US empire and not to promote the interests of ordinary human beings. 

More and more people are seeing that western liberalism is just a more photogenic version of fascism. ...............



.................  It’s not until you’ve done a fair bit of research that you go, wait, okay no, we are actually quantifiably far more destructive than any other power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. We really are the bad guys. We really are the evil empire, and everyone slamming our side as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.

Whenever I say this I get westerners going “Oh yeah well I’d much rather live here then over there” or “Oh well if it’s so bad here then why don’t you go live over there?”, but the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it’s not even close.

❖

The Democratic Party really does look ready to lose yet another easily winnable election by running yet another awful, murderous candidate with awful, murderous policies, and then once again blame their loss on everyone in America who is a better person than they are.



It’s the sense of powerlessness that gets to you. Watching all these people being slaughtered and tormented in Gaza and in Lebanon with the full support of your own government and its allies, but being unable to stop it. ..............

.......................... As long as westerners are being successfully psychologically manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the insane behavior of the western empire, we are completely powerless. They may as well have steel chains around each of our necks and mind control chips in each of our brains. There is nothing we can do to stop them from ethnically cleansing Gaza, waging nonstop wars, engaging in increasingly dangerous nuclear brinkmanship, or destroying the biosphere we depend on for survival. 



If you consume news, especially, the western news, it's easy to lose hope entirely. Atrocity after atrocity, at this point they want us to see. As Colombian President Gustavo Pedro said, “The European Union, the United Kingdom and above all the United States—they all support dropping bombs on people because they want to teach a lesson to the entirety of humanity. They are telling us: look at our military power. What happens to Palestine can happen to any of you if you dare to make changes without our permission.”

So much evil, so much evil, so much evil, and they're getting away with it. The evil keeps happening and even accelerating. The ghetto that dared rebel is being exterminated, and now they're massacring Lebanese ................................

While the Empire may be winning the genocide, they are losing the war. The people they call terrorists are exclusively focused on military targets, and systematically dismantling the dismantlers. Hezbollah has systematically dismantled air defenses in the north and have gone from shelling border settlements to regularly hitting Jaffa (Haifa) and even Tel Aviv. This wasn't happening a year ago and now it is. Iran has systematically overmatched 'Israeli' air defenses and can now hit them wherever and whenever it wants. Meanwhile Yemen hits them from the south and Iraqis hit them from the east. The White Empire may still have white supremacy, but they've lost both naval and air supremacy, which are far more important. ...................











.................................. In many ways, the spectacular events of modern times are rather like Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. They are less agents of change themselves, than indications that things have changed already, and events might turn out differently. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. Does it “change” anything? Arguably not, it’s easier to understand it as a marker of the degree to which things have already changed. Let me count the ways. The West can no longer ignore Russian demands and perceptions of its security interests. Russian military technology is generally very good, and in some cases has developed in areas the West has not itself pursued. The Russians have retained military service and the intellectual and technical capability to fight sustained high-intensity wars. They have also retained a large defence industry capable of surge production. For its part, the West has moved to small conventional forces, has largely been involved in small conflicts outside the NATO area, has allowed its defence industry to deteriorate, has tended towards small numbers of highly-expensive platforms, and has massively economised on logistics. Although there have been qualitative changes, largely favouring the Russians, this set of factors was as applicable five or seven years ago, and will remain applicable for the foreseeable future.

Thus, no-one should have been surprised about Russians sensitivities and demands, since they were telegraphed so clearly. No-one should have been surprised that the Russians made quick work of the NATO-trained Ukrainian forces, nor that subsequent forces, trained but this time also equipped by NATO, should have come to grief so quickly. Likewise, the outcome of any serious military clash between Russia and NATO is now easy to forecast and, for reasons, that I have discussed on numerous occasions, it is hard to see how this can be expected to change. More generally, Russia will be the dominant military power in Europe for the foreseeable future, and the West will have to find a way of dealing with that. .......................

The international system is conservative, in the sense that it carries a great deal of inertia. It will therefore continue to operate as it does now, until sufficient pressure is brought upon it to act differently. But that requires another option to be available, and to be supported or imposed with enough force, or the existing situation will continue. To talk about the decline of the West or of the United States is reasonable enough, so long as we understand that, for that decline  to produce the kind of results that some people want and anticipate, some power or combination of powers must be able and willing to fill the vacuum created. ............................

So if we accept that there is a great deal of inertia in the international system, that decline in one area does not inevitably means a compensating rise elsewhere, and that apparent “turning points” in history may only be superficial manifestations of deeper underlying trends, can we nonetheless say anything useful about the likely shape of the future? I would suggest three tentative projections that could be made. All of them relate to general trend only: I don’t do predictions because I don’t think they are useful.

The first concerns political reactions to the increasing distribution of power which is for the moment still unduly concentrated in the hands of the West and in institutions dating from the end of the Second World War. .........................



Sci Fare:

I often say that we are losing science. We are.



... Kevin McKernan has written an article outlining the link to cancer due to the presence of SV40 (in droves) in the modified RNA COVID-19 injectable products (Pfizer). You can read that here. .............................

........................ Now here’s the scary part that the preprint addresses. SV40 enhancer, the very same one found in the vials sequenced by Kevin McKernan, the very same one acknowledged to be present as ‘residual DNA fragment[s]’ by Health Canada (HC), the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), targets SHM machinery, specifically AID which of course, is responsible for initiating SHM. ........................



Other Fare:


Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about ................................................
.....................................................
....................................... 

Whether the enemy is abroad or at home, whether they are al-Qaeda terrorists or domestic rioters, they are essentially the same, and must be confronted with the same security tools.

In February 2022, just before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the Canadian government deployed the financial weapons of war against its own citizens. Canadians who had donated to the Truckers Convoy found themselves barred from accessing their bank accounts and savings. At least 76 bank accounts were frozen, assets totaling 3.2 million CAD. Many were aghast and placed the blame for “de-banking” on Canadian prime minister ­Justin Trudeau—guilty of a dictatorial misuse of the state of emergency, just like his father. But that is obsolete thinking. The measures the ­Canadian state invoked were successfully employed because they enjoyed the enthusiastic ­cooperation of Canadian banks. State and corporate goals had been fused together long before the 2022 Truckers Convoy. Like 9/11, Covid was an opportunity. It enabled states to perfect policies that they were experimenting with and which corporations were encouraging.

Actually existing postliberalism may have advanced furthest in Canada. ....................



Every man has an opinion on Elon Musk. I never really paid any attention to the guy, because I always realized electric vehicles are a dead end, so I was never really interested in figuring out whether he’s a scam artist or not. But with every year that passes, it becomes easier to recognize the man as a scam artist. You could line up every man on the planet by the moment he figured out the guy is a swindler. The further down the line your husband finds himself, the lower his IQ happens to be. .................

The fact that someone like Musk can become the richest man in the world on paper, just speaks volumes about the decay of our society. We have really reached the point where there are no corrective mechanisms left in place for fraud. Psychopaths now just have free roam in our society. ..............

That’s essentially what’s happening all around the world, at every level of society. We invest our money in companies that promise us the sky is the limit (Nvidia, Tesla). We vote for politicians who make promises they can’t deliver upon (Geert Wilders, Donald Trump). Psychopaths and grandiose narcissists are willing to make unrealistic promises. The realistic promises are promises we don’t like to hear. So we choose to give power to the psychopaths and grandiose narcissists. ..........


Welsh: ‘Extraordinary’ Corruption at RTX (formerly Raytheon)

A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.

“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.” ...................



Pics of the Week:







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