Regular Fare:
Long-term unemployment is close to a Great Recession
record
"The Fed's Monetary Punchbowl Is Fueling Rampant Home Price Appreciation": AEI
Food inflation concerns deepen as prices reach highest level since 2014
The Bank of
Canada’s Big Nothingburger
As a small economy with open capital flows, then, the CIBC report
suggests that the Bank of Canada doesn’t really control long term yields
through QE in as significant a way as many market participants tend to assume.
The BoC can certainly impact 10-year yields through its control of very
short-term rates as they affect the Risk-Neutral component, but large-scale
asset purchases seem to be relatively low-impact. In effect, Canada essentially
surrenders much of the control of its long rates to global demand. A corollary
of this, if true, is that QE tapering won’t have a serious impact on the
10-year yield and won’t cause rates to spike in its absence – any increase
should be small and gradual.
…
The BoC, of course, has stated on multiple occasions that 25bps is their
effective lower bound, but if push comes to shove and they need another 25bp
cut, local Canadian QE probably won’t cut it as the BoC is fast approaching
their 50% ownership threshold. As such, the BoC will probably be forced to drop
their overnight rate closer to zero, despite their current unwillingness to go
there. What all of this essentially means is that the sharpest tool in the
BoC’s shed of easy money conditions is still its overnight rate.
Older Workers
Accounted for All Net Employment Growth in Past 20 Years
This age-skewed labor-market outcome was the result of two differences
between the groups:
1.
The older population (60 and older) grew much
faster than the younger population (16-59).
2.
The employment-to-population (E-P) ratio among
those 60 and older increased significantly while the E-P ratio among the younger
population declined, on balance.
Developments in the real economy have persistently challenged central
tenets of older economic thinking, such as the supposed close connection
between the money supply and inflation.
The mainstream:
meeting the historic challenges?
I don’t quite know where to start here because it seems to me that there
is still a lot to come out on this story.
That Laurentian was having persistent difficulty balancing its budgets
was well-known. Figure 1 shows that in
seven of the past eight years, Laurentian reported a loss. I am fairly sure no other university in
Canada can say that. …
There is something else going on here. Part of that something else
becomes apparent as you read through the court filing and see things like this:
… Got that? No separation between
operating funds and restricted funds.
Like, say, professors’ research grants, scholarships, and Retiree Health
Benefit. It’s all been co-mingled. ..
from: Misunderstood Dynamics Of
Negative Yields
Back-Dated Fare:
Crouching
Beliefs, Hidden Biases: The Rise and Fall of Growth Narratives. (PDF) IMF Working Papers.
“We observe the rise and fall of the ‘Washington Consensus’—privatization
and liberalization— and the rise to dominance of the ‘Washington
Constellation,’ a collection of many disparate terms such as productivity,
tourism, and inequality.”
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: Detached Parabolas and Open Trap Doors
Felder: The ‘Index Of
The Volume Of Speculation’ Blows Off
COVID-19 notes:
Tomas Pueyo: Variants v.
Vaccines.
The Race between the Tortoise and the Hare
What If Herd
Immunity Is Out of Reach?
What if it never really ends, just recedes?
When will life
return to normal? In 7 years at today's vaccine rates
In Canada it's going to take more than 10 years at
this rate
In the most comprehensive study of COVID-19 pediatric patients to date, a
research team led by HMS scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital has found
that children may play a larger role in the community spread of COVID-19 than
previously thought.
The researchers found that infected children, even those with mild or no
symptoms, carried high levels of the virus in their respiratory secretions,
especially in the first two days of symptoms, and that age did not affect the
ability to carry high amounts of virus. The higher the level of virus a person
carries, known as the viral load, the greater the risk of transmitting the
virus to others.
Study shows
young COVID survivors can get reinfected
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
The
Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record
Our climate models could be missing something big.
‘Incredibly
destructive’: Canada’s Prairies to see devastating impact of
climate change
Richard Murphy – Bank of England on Climate Crisis: The world is
being put at “extreme risk” by the failure of economics
The truth is coming out. Most economists are not capable of modelling the
real world economy. Their analyses are ideological and not scientific as they
would like us to believe.
Which references:
The Economics of
Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review
Documents relating to an independent global review on the economics of
biodiversity led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. Updated 2 February 2021.
Kerry gifts Wall
St the Green New Deal
The Biden Climate Plan: apparently powerless, stuttering
The Only Carbon
Capture Coal Plant in the U.S. Just Closed
… ironically, the carbon dioxide pulled from the plant’s emissions was
actually used to make more fossil fuels. Part of NRG’s deal with the federal
government for running Petra Nova was gaining permission to transport the
carbon dioxide scrubbed from burning coal to a separate oil field, where it was
injected underground to help release more oil.
Salt-Based
Battery Could Unleash Cleaner Energy for Electric Cars
Table of the Week:
All the mines Tesla needs to
build 20 million cars a year
COVID Tweet of the Week:
Just received an email from our school board, re: provincial COVID safety measures and protocols.
It's a longish
email, but I'll try to break it down as best as I can.
*Ahem*
There are no new
provincial COVID safety measures and protocols for Ontario schools.
The end.
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
COVID Fare:
The COVID19 vaccine has an
emergency licence (not final approval), which means that research and clinical
studies are still under way (they are to be completed in 2023)! It is
INVESTIGATIONAL, as declared by the companies themselves, and any forced
vaccination with it by any means (legal obligation, extortion, fraud) falls in
the category of coercion in research, which is BANNED under numerous laws and international
agreements and has penal and civil consequences.
3.
As indicated by doctors and
companies, the vaccines HAVE NOT BEEN STUDIED to determine whether they reduce
viral infection or to ascertain the duration of immunity and/or the effects of
their interaction with other drugs or vaccines. Therefore, neither are other
people protected from infection by the virus, nor will restrictions be lifted –
as is now announced.
Evaluating the
impact of COVID-19 on male reproduction
Political Fare:
The Gaslighting
of the American Mind
Democrats are the party of
make believe. Through their domination of the media, academia, Hollywood, and
growing swaths of corporate America, they successfully peddle propaganda as
reality. … Tell a lie long and loud enough and many accept it as truth.
… History reveals two main
reasons why factions seek to limit speech: first, because it is an effective means
to quash dissent and second because they won’t or can’t defend their own ideas.
Today’s Democrats and their allies are driven by both rationales.
Everything About
The Biden Administration Is Fake
And that’s all the US empire
ever is, really: a murderous, tyrannical planetary oppressor covered up by
varying degrees of dishonesty. During the Trump administration the depravity
was a little more honest about itself, now during the Biden administration it’s
a little more dishonest. The only major change is the thickness with which the
makeup is slathered over the skull.
Everything about life in our
current world order is dominated by phoniness. Our culture is manufactured by
Hollywood. Our dominating political structure is manufactured by think tanks.
Our perceptions of what’s going on in the world are manufactured in Langley and
Arlington. The whole thing is so fake and stupid. We’ve got to figure out a way
to snap out of these artificial boxes they are placing over our minds and these
perceptual filters they are placing over our eyes
Biden's Rescue:
Mean, Meandering, Moronic
Joe Biden's idea of bigness
and boldness is inexorably and neoliberally shrinking.
…
If there is one thing that
the Democratic Party strives for, meanwhile, it is to be seen to be doing the
right thing.
Chris Hedges: Papering Over
the Rot
All of these measures are
window dressing, masking the root cause of the demise of America — unchecked
oligarchic power and greed. The longer wealth is funneled upwards into the
hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal, who put Biden into office and whose
interests he assiduously serves, we are doomed. Once an oligarchy seizes power,
deforming governing institutions to exclusively serve their narrow interests
and turning the citizenry into serfs, there are only two options, as Aristotle
pointed out — tyranny or revolution.
Historical Fare:
Ed Curtin: A Review: Greg
Poulgrain’s JFK vs. Allen Dulles
… This makes Greg
Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful
antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen,
purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the
fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the
deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the
world over innumerable decades.
Such crimes against humanity
have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005
Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.” Of such massive crimes, he said:
But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing
ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t
matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been
systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually
talked about them.
And when one examines the
true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar
names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted. Criminals in high places whose crimes around
the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to
Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American
foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media
mouthpieces.
In his brilliant new book on
U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and
sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on
Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University
of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched book
about Indonesia.
In JFK vs. Dulles, he
exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of
the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the
policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian
regime change, and massive slaughter.
Other Fare:
The Ugly Secrets
Behind the Costco Chicken
An investigator went under cover and brought back disturbing video from a
farm growing those famous birds.
"Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest.
Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness."
Something to keep an eye out for:
The inaugural lecture will take place in March, followed by 4 lectures
over the next couple of months:
Inaugural Lecture: Economic Growth and the Environment
Lecture 2: Energy and Economic Growth and Development
Lecture 3: The Rebound Effect
Lecture 4: Energy and the Industrial Revolution
Big Thoughts:
Behind this awkwardness is
the most unmentionable fact of our time, the failure of progress to live up to
its promises. It’s worth going back a
few decades to consult the solemn predictions of qualified experts and the mass
media, and compare where we were supposed to be by 2021 with where we actually
are. The differences are stunning. It’s
not merely that we don’t have fusion power, space colonies, or a hundred other
gizmocentric fantasies that were supposed to be sure things, right on down to
the hoverboards in the imaginary 2014 of Back To The Future. It’s also worth
noting that here in the United States we have rates of infant mortality
comparable to those in Indonesia, a level of infrastructure decay reminiscent
of the last years of the Soviet Union, and a political system in the kind of
advanced rigor mortis that usually precedes cataclysmic change.
…
The same point can be made
equally well, of course, by the most misunderstood prediction of the future
made in those same years, 1973’s The Limits to Growth. So much nonsense is
still being flung about concerning that much-maligned book that it’s worth
looking yet again at the standard run, the authors’ best estimate of how
industrial society would fare as its attempts at infinite growth try to plow
through the hard limits of a finite planet.
Familiar as this graph will doubtless be to my readers, two points about it are worth repeating here. The first is that it isn’t a prediction of fast collapse—or of any other kind of collapse, for that matter. Rather, it’s a prediction of decline. Resources dwindle gradually, food supply and population rise and fall in long slow curves, and though industrial production worldwide drops more sharply than it rose, in 2050 it’s still significantly higher than it was in 1950. To borrow a turn of phrase from T.S. Eliot, this is the way that progress ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
…
the concept that needs to find a place in the imagination of our time is
that instead of living on the brink of Tomorrowland or the brink of apocalypse,
we are living in the last years of progress, well into the opening phases of
the era I’ve called the Long Descent. The future that crouches in front of us,
preparing to spring, has nothing to do with the paired fantasies of progress
and apocalypse and everything to do with the long, slow, uneven decline that
has filled the twilight of every other civilization. Venues such as Wired are still hawking the
same old technofetishistic dreams as always, with the anxious enthusiasm you’d
expect to see from true believers in any other failed prophetic religion, but
it’s taking an increasingly strenuous effort to ignore the markers of decline
and keep pretending that all those shopworn clichés out of 20th century sci-fi
really will come true someday.
Meanwhile the pace of industrial civilization’s decline picks up a bit
with each passing year, and those small but cumulative increases are adding
up. Will there be new technologies
hitting the market, a breakthrough here and there, maybe another set of human
bootprints on the Moon? Of course, but
those will take place against a backdrop of accelerating deterioration and
contraction, in which the latest heavily ballyhooed technologies never quite
manage to outweigh the slow but inexorable downside movements of an
increasingly troubled age, notional economic booms coexist comfortably with
spreading poverty and slowly failing infrastructure, and pundits and
politicians insist gamely that progress is still chugging ahead while more and
more of the population struggles for bare subsistence and the temporary
triumphs of the recent past fade gradually into memory, and then into legend.
Point: Forecast 2025
After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:
1.
The Western world success model has been built
over societies with no resilience that can barely withstand any hardship, even
a low intensity one. It was assumed but we got the full confirmation beyond any
doubt.
2.
The COVID crisis will be used to extend the
life of this dying economic system through the so called Great Reset.
The Great Reset; like the climate change, extinction rebellion, planetary
crisis, green revolution, shale oil (…) hoaxes promoted by the system; is
another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources
and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system. It can be effective
for awhile but finally won’t address the bottom-line problem and will only
delay the inevitable. The core ruling elites hope to stay in power which is in
effect the only thing that really worries them.
….
Another particularity of the Western system is that its individuals have
been brainwashed to the point that the majority accept their moral high ground
and technological edge as a given. This has given the rise of the supremacy of
the emotional arguments over the rational ones which are ignored or deprecated.
That mindset can play a key role in the upcoming catastrophic events.
Counterpoint: Forecast What?
While I don’t personally feel this is our future, I do believe the
situation as described is entirely true. There are such opinions and such plans
and such weapons. Therefore it should be dealt with in our own lives, and in
the actions of our country, in the firm, defensive preparations that Americans
are known for. Regardless of such a war, which should naturally be avoided, a
number of other responses are indicated:
1) Remove as much reliance on China as possible without crippling them
either. We already learned we do not have medicines, masks, rare earths, or
semiconductors here, as well as learning their steel and raw materials may be
intentionally substandard and undermining. This especially includes
communications infrastructure.
2) Our own nation needs much attention and support with the re-opening of
our own parallel manufacturing that must also be dispersed so as not to be a
single target for destruction or capture. ….
Quotes of the Week:
John Michael Greer: “Yes, I read Wired from time to time. It’s one of those dull faux-alternative rags that pretends to be edgy and iconoclastic while groveling at the feet of the conventional wisdom and giving enthusiastic tongue baths to whatever vapid notions happen to be in vogue among today’s corporate aristocracy, but if you want to keep up with the latest fashionable technobabble, there’s no better place to look.”
(if you replaced
“technobabble” with “econobabble”, what would you replace “Wired” with?)
Video of the Week:
Chris Hedges: American Psychosis.
Now for the Really Fun COVID-Conspiracy Great Reset Fare:
Domestic Terror
is a Government Without Constraints
Ruh Roh: That Unhinged Canadian Conspiracy Theory is
5-for-5 so far…
It was purportedly from an anonymous Liberal Party “Strategic Committee”
leaker that laid out a plan where the Canadian federal government, in collusion
with world governments everywhere, were going to use the Coronavirus pandemic
to impose a New World Order, distinctly communist in nature, replacing private
property with Universal Basic Income and immunity passports.
I wrote it up at the time pointing out the various holes in the
narrative, not the least of which was that it was completely unsourced. You had
to decide to believe something like that.
…
One of things that I’ve really had a hard time grappling with since all
this began came out of my introductory study of General Semantics. Facing the
reality that none of us really knows anything and that we only think we know is
so much harder than just stumbling through life dead certain about your
assumptions and oblivious to your own ignorance and biases. At least that way
you just bounce around between successes, failures and misadventure but at
least you think you’ve got things under control or at least understand what is
happening.
None of that is true, and when you realize that, it can be terrifying.
All the more so because when I think about a crazy, unhinged conspiracy
theory like this one, the reasons why I would normally dismiss it: that it was
just somehow untenable for governments anywhere to just rescind everybody’s
civil liberties and basic human rights at the stroke of a pen with zero due
process, no constitutional basis, no public consultation, no legal review or
any right to appeal. When I think about how things have played out over the
past year, I realize that these
assumptions weren’t actually anchored to anything.
These days I’m reading Marco Papic’s Geopolitical Alpha, and in it, his
core premise, is this:
“Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, whereas constraints
are neither optional nor subject to preferences.”
By this he means: many investors factor their assumptions around how
governments will impact their plans on what turn out to be policy preferences.
But what actually happens, and what actually does impact their activities will
be shaped by constraints, not preferences.
Said differently, a lot of capital gets allocated on what people think
governments want to do, but what actually matters is what is preventing or
constraining the government from doing what they want to do.
The five big constraints on governments are: political, economic,
financial, geo-political and legal/constitutional.
Seen in this light, even if true, that governments wanted to impose a
totalitarian communist regime globally, surely they are constrained from doing
so. Right? RIGHT? They can’t just fscking do it.
But… all kinds of things I thought governments couldn’t just come out and
do over the last year…. well they just came right out and did it. And just to
really mess with my head, Papic added two wildcard constraints to his list:
terrorism and pandemics.
The problem is, those wildcards, they aren’t wildcard constraints –
they’re wildcard enablers. Those two wildcards seem to have the ability to
trump all normal constraints. Every one of those constraints went out the
window because of the wildcards.
Where does that leave us?
Speaking for myself, I’m losing my moorings as I no longer have any clear
idea what, if any, policy constraints exist anymore.
So I have no grounding in the arena of what’s possible, how arbitrarily
policy makers can act, what’s to stop them from simply confiscating my wealth
(except for my crypto), or nationalizing the business I’ve built up over 22
years, and doing the same to everybody else. This is Canada. We’re generally
meek as fuck here.
Second passport and expat strategies won’t work if, as per the “World
Debt Reset Program” outlined in the conspiracy theory, this happens
simultaneously everywhere. Granted that seems farfetched, but the boundaries of
the word “farfetched” have shifted dramatically since all this began.
The question I keep coming back to is “What’s to stop them from trying
it?”
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