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Thursday, June 30, 2022

2022-06-30

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Grannis: The money-printing press has all but shut down

... Stop the money-printing—as seems to have occurred—and you take away a major source of inflation virtually overnight. On top of that, the mere expectation that the Fed will seek higher interest rates while also shrinking its balance is working overtime. For example, 30-yr fixed rates on mortgages have zoomed up to 6%, almost twice what they were at the end of last year. This has slammed the brakes on the housing market by boosting financing costs and rendering housing unaffordable for many. Not surprisingly, lumber prices have fallen by more than half since March, suggesting a big cutback in new construction is coming. Meanwhile, we've all heard the drumbeat of recession forecasts from nearly every quarter, so everyone is tightening their belts. Seeing all this, the bond market in recent months has repriced to the expectation that inflation will plunge next year.

[This] Chart is arguably the most important one in the universe right now. What it shows is that the huge surge in M2 growth coincided with massive federal deficit spending. ...



... [The] Chart [above] is worth a thousand words, but I'll try to use a lot less. What it shows is that commodity prices (red line) typically rise and fall in inverse relation to the value of the dollar (blue line). A strong dollar usually depresses commodity prices, and a weak dollar typically boosts commodity prices. Except for the past two years, that is, as both commodity prices and the dollar have soared. However, note the recent dive in commodity prices: this very likely reflects the repair of supply chains and less frenzied demand.  

It's also encouraging to see the dollar so strong. If the Fed were doing the wrong thing (i.e., supplying way more dollars than the world wants to hold), then the dollar would be weakening, but it's not. The Fed has not lost control of the situation, and inflation expectations are not "unmoored."


The First Cut Might Not Be The Deepest

.. what the median US CPI was at the start of the 13 hiking cycles in the last 70 years and also where it was at the first cut after these hiking cycles. Three things stand out from this and the table you can see in the chart book.
  1. Median CPI at the first hike was ‘only’ 2.5% so the Fed has always tried to lean against inflation relatively early in the upswing. However, this time round they didn’t hike until we hit 8.5%.
  2. Median CPI at the first cut was a still high 4.4%. This supports the notion that in normal times the Fed looks ahead rather than at the current level. I was still slightly surprised it was as high as this at the first cut, which offers some support to the market view of 36bps of cuts priced between March and December 2023 even if inflation is still high.
  3. The median time from last hike to first cut was only 4 months. This short time frame also surprised me. Again this would support the market view of cuts being priced in relatively soon after this hiking cycle ends.


..... Forty years of deflationary Globalization, mass outsourcing and mass immigration later and today's economic "experts" somehow believe this is 1979 all over again. Back then, the U.S. middle class was at its apex - labor share of GDP was at an all time high and union membership was at an all time high. Fast forward to today and labor share of GDP is near all time lows as is union membership. None of this multi-decade economic carnage shows up in the official (U3) unemployment rate because it's calibrated to remove discouraged workers from the calculation. Meaning the long-term unemployed are systematically taken out of the economic picture. The best way to view the U.S. economy WITH the long-term unemployed, is via capacity utilization. This indicator ALSO takes into account "underemployment", meaning people who are qualified for one type of job but are working in another lower pay type of job. Underemployment is a direct result of serial mass layoffs and its one of the BIGGEST problems this society faces, hence it's never discussed.

Coming out of the pandemic, there was a ONE TIME surge in wages, which has been conflated as the beginning of "hyper inflation". However, going forward Chipotle workers won't be getting a COLA (Cost of Living Allowance) indexed to CPI. Subsequently, today's experts have ignored the fact that wage inflation is now lagging gasoline prices, food prices, asset prices, and corporate profits. Which is why the middle class is getting crushed like a tin can by the Fed's biggest policy error. ...

... Per usual, it will take the Fed several months to figure out the economy is in recession. Therefore their current gambit of tightening at the fastest pace in history is a TOTAL disaster in progress.



... what happens when the infamous "bullwhip" effect strikes and what was formerly a scarcity of inventory becomes a glut, with inventory to sales ratios exploding higher (and in some cases reaching two-decade highs)...

... assuring inventory liquidations across the retail sector, resulting in a "deflationary tsunami" and "prices falling off a cliff", forcing the Fed to eventually pivot on its hiking plans and even restart easing.



Today I consider some statements from the Bank of International Settlements, which suggest that the mainstream inflation approach, based on the New Keynesian Phillips curve is subjected to “serious practical shortcomings”. In other words, it is unfit for purpose, which means you should not be surprised that central banks are hiking rates to stifle a transient supply-side inflation burst. Quackery leads to quackery. I also consider some recent evidence that supply disruptions are easing.






Quotes of the Week:

McElligott: "this ongoing tilt in 'upside' inflation data, and persistently reactive Central Bank “hawkish impulse” thereafter, will continue to reinforce negative impact in the rate / credit –sensitive parts of the economy…effectively “self-fulfilling” a recession"


Charts: 
1:




Bubble Fare:


We’re told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The idea is that each basket performs differently at different times. During a crash, at least some of your portfolio is supposed to hold up. But what do you do when all the baskets get hit by the same earthquake?



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


The world’s largest carbon direct air capture facility has started construction in Iceland, run by Swiss startup Climeworks AG.

When construction finishes in 18-24 months, their facility, named “Mammoth,” will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year – which is .0001% of the 36 billion tons of CO2 emitted per year by humanity.
 
Climeworks currently operates their “Orca” plant which captures 4,000 tons per year and began operations last year.





Other Fare:





Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium.


How do painkillers actually kill pain? From ibuprofen to fentanyl, it’s about meeting the pain where it’s at


Pics of the Week:

Mesmerizing Human Faces Emerge From Carefully Sculpted Metal Wires




Amazing Vid of the Week:



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t cause the food crisis. Capitalism did



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Rich country governments claim the high moral ground on climate action. But unlike before, many deny their far greater responsibility for both historic and contemporary greenhouse gas emissions.


Useful for planning

.. I was thinking that we need an economics based on facts, something with more predictive-value than "the Fed's got your back", which is the rationale of the risk-asset Ponzi scheme instituted in early 2009. 

Any workable economic model has to be based upon the actual "costs" of energy, since energy powers all production, communication, storage and transportation.

  Energy "costs" are presently expressed in monetary terms, but money verges upon "undefined". Energy extraction costs energy. The EROI (energy return on energy invested) used to be as high as 100:1 for crude oil in the USA in the 1930s. For tar sands in Canada and Venezuela it is now about 3:1

.... The predictive value of neoliberal economics is worse than nothing, because it is based upon a false and misleading premise, which has always been supported by rent-collecting wealth-interests, the "Rentier" capitalists. "GDP", gross domestic product replaced "GNP", gross national product, which was a manufacturing index,based on industrial production

.... Through a thermoeconomics lens of real-economic contraction, which cannot be honestly reconciled with perpetual-growth economic theory, these events suggest narratives for crisis-management, while keeping the broken model of perpetual growth economy.  Fiat-money promises future wealth for financial investment today, but those promises cannot be kept in real terms. The divergence can be seen in these graphs:...




I first read Limits To Growth sometime around 1982. Limits used computer models to predict possible futures of resource use, pollution and population over-shoot.

At the time I thought it was right, and everything since then has come in about as it said.

I found this chart from it, with a couple of added date lines in an excellent post on the retrospective book “Limits and Beyond.”


.... 
The point, now, is that we’re about at the peak or slightly past it. The collapse has started. Covid and Ukraine pushed us into it, but it was going to happen anyway, and there’s always an inciting event. What has changed is that there was no slack in the system (and no competence, with the single major exception of China) to deal with it.

The second point is, again, how sharp these declines become, often almost immediately after they start. ...



COVID Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts


when you adjust for testing levels (which have been dropping rapidly) the US data look ominous

...

we can now see that winter peak 2020-1 was lower than the april 2020 peak.
we can also see that current case levels are rising fast and early this summer.
the absolute level is VERY high and has already eclipsed the summer seasonal peak from last year by ~100%.
we’re not “down 25%” we’re “up 100%” and rising fast.
we’re already above the 2020-21 seasonal peak for winter and look to have a real shot at reaching/exceeding the seasonal peak from winter 2021-22, a peak that was over 3X as high as the prior year’s.
that’s deeply aberrant and it’s being masked by a plummeting testing rate.
US case counts are exploding....

... the peak of winter in 2020-1 dropped about 25% from prior year.
then vaccination started. the next winter peak was 2.29X.
the summer peak in 2021 was over 1.5X the size of the prior unvaxxed year.
and this year, in the post booster omicron age, is going absolutely wild.
it’s over 10X the same day last year.
it’s ~2X last year’s summer PEAK and peak cases are a solid 6 weeks away, maybe 8 if seasonality holds.
it looks to have a real shot at making new all time highs.
prior to vaccination, peaks were lower than prior year.
since vaccination, they have ALL been higher.
and the extent to which they are higher is increasing with each peak. ...

... this is not herd immunity, it’s the herd getting more and more vulnerable. 

.... that’s what leaky vaccines do: they select for OAS and ADE.
it’s WHY we don’t use them.

... this is all leading to some strong conclusions.
omicron is much milder than prior strains, more so even than appears in the data. intrinsic CFR is likely down about a full log. (90%)
but omi is spreading like wildfire because it’s optimized to infect the vaccinated. their antigenic fixation has frozen their immune response and it’s clear that variant based boosters are not going to help. fixated is fixated.
and this is getting worse over time likely due to continuing selective pressure in an immune fixated herd. (how bad it can get is anyone’s guess. i’m not sure we even have a valid past model for this process)
prevalence is swamping declines in virulence and this is starting to show up in hospitalization data. whether that’s scary or incidental is not yet clear.

... bottom line:
it is the vaccines driving covid evolution and superspread and they are failing faster by the day.
the reported cases data is masking this, but the magnitude of what’s starting to happen will be too big to hide from the general public much longer.



... By now readers should be familiar with how exponential growth works, and these charts should make you twitchy.

Now, since nearly the beginning of the pandemic this blog has warned about how waves of reinfections would cause spiraling Long Covid numbers. It was obvious this would be the case, both because it appears possible to get it each time you’re infected and because even when there are not obvious symptoms, Covid often does some permanent organ damage, including brain damage, which shows up when people are tested.


Miller: The Lies & Hypocrisy Are Getting Worse
"Experts" and politicians can't help themselves

One of the most disappointing aspects of the COVID pandemic has been the willingness of adults to impose untested restrictions and policies on young children, while ignoring any potential negative impacts to their mandates.

Without pushback from the media, supposed “experts” have recommended school closures, remote learning, forced masking and now, universal vaccination for children ages 6 months-<5 years.

The lack of data or evidence suggesting a benefit to these policies has seemingly never been a hindrance to their recommendations. In fact, it often feels as if they dare others to point out that their policy mandates are not based on any high quality research.

Instead of engaging with the mountains of substantive criticism of their methodology or the discrediting flaws of the “studies” they reference, they simply revert back to appeals to authority.

They’re right, because they say so. ...

..... Possibly the most important thing to know about the FDA authorizing vaccinations for young children is that there is virtually no evidence to support their decision.

When you review the FDA documents, it’s shocking to see how little data they used to make their decision and how ineffective the trials proved to be ....


similarly, 



On June 23, nearly a week after I published an article on these pages about the CDC’s response to a FOIA request admitting they did not monitor VAERS for safety signals, and two days after I published a similar article in CHD’s The Defender, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to CDC head Rochelle Walensky, demanding to know why the CDC failed to do the analyses described in the standard operating procedures briefing document they had filed on their website.


How false scientific claims are transformed into Covid “Science”

In his 1905 classic The Jungle, Upton Sinclair documents the process by which sausage is made at a meatpacking plant in turn-of-the-century Chicago.
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.
Fast forward to 2022, and instead of rusty nails, poisoned bread and rat dung, we have the work of Imperial College, the Lancet and Eric Feigl-Ding.

The process by which these delectable ingredients are transformed into Covid “science” for public consumption was illustrated most recently by the widespread dissemination of two atrocious scientific preprints. The first was a preprint in the Lancet pretending to show that Covid vaccines saved over 20 million lives, and the second a preprint falsely claiming that Covid was one of the leading causes of death in children. ...


Is there evidence of increased mortality associated with the mRNA injections?

Welcome to the 2nd episode of the Red Pill Report from Dead Man Talking.

... In other words, “Is there evidence of increased mortality associated with the mRNA injections?”

Given the glorification of the novel therapy, and incessant propaganda claiming it is “safe and effective”, you might wonder why I would even consider asking such an audacious question?

But by now, you will know that I will attempt to answer the question objectively. I hope to provide a phlegmatic response based on the evidence in the public mortality data which will contrast with the dogma spun out by the mainstream media.

With a bit of luck, I might encourage you to question for yourself if the benefits of this experimental medical intervention outweigh the risks as Boris Johnson assured us on 7th April last year.

And once you question that as well as questioning the nature of the public health threat, you will be well on your way to recognising that the official COVID narrative lacks evidence on every point. .... 


Rose: No more clinical trials needed
Because: Safe and Effective. Foreverrrrrrrrururrrurururrr

... Now please go to this document entitled: “FDA Briefing Document Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting June 28, 2022 SARS-CoV-2 strain composition of COVID-19 vaccines”. This is the meeting that these same financially-conflicted people will vote on to decide for the entire world that clinical trials are pish tosh - no need for them anymore. ..........................................................................


On June 28, the FDA decided that henceforth THEY will choose the variants for reformulated Covid-19 shots and NO clinical trials will be conducted to evaluate safety. Because $cience.




A brief historical look at Corona incidences in Germany

In the aftermath of my suggestion that Omicron BA.5 prefers hypervaccinated west Germans and avoids the lesser-vaccinated former DDR, I’ve heard a lot of theories. I’ve heard about about demography and age structures and population density and testing and masking rates, about the timing of third and fourth vaccine doses, and about many other things.

Here, I want to make one point clear: Before December 2021, no DDR Effect is visible anywhere in the German case data. The only discernible patterns are seasonal and geographical.


********** Heying: On not being a contrarian
Staying skeptical among people of faith

Consider cynicism, skepticism, and faith:
Cynicism is an uninvestigated rejection of that which is handed down by an authority.

Faith is an uninvestigated acceptance of that which is handed down by an authority.

Skepticism is an openness to the possibility that the authority might be right, and they might be wrong.
...... The Covid faithful often attack the Covid skeptics for not following the science.

Science is not a result to be followed. Science is a process to be undertaken, by which—over time, in fits and starts, with no promise of a linear progression—a better fit with reality is arrived at. When advised to #FollowTheScience during Covid, we have often been handed a consensus position that was arrived at out of view of the public, generally with no sharing of process or data, and therefore with no ability to vet the results.

Rapid consensus on complex issues like vaccine safety and efficacy is inherently suspect. Consensus is not arrived at so quickly, or so completely. Coercion is. Coercion is anti-scientific. So is faith. If you have arrived at your conclusions by trusting an authority, acknowledge the role that faith has played in your understanding of where we are, and stop attacking the skeptical.

Those of us who kept our scientific heads about us during this time have been vilified. Some of those vilifying us never made any claims to being scientists. Others vilifying us are themselves credentialed and recognized as scientists, and yet they stand strong among the ranks of the Covid faithful. I would encourage the scientists and doctors among the Covid faithful to consider that, having adopted this new faith, you may well be running counter to everything that you believe that you stand for.


CO-VIDs of the Week:


In this talk with Assaya’s founder Clas Sivertsen, Geert predicts in this video that a new flu epidemic will soon emerge from an animal reservoir, and that the world (except Africa) will experience another wave of hospitalizations and economic collapse. He also discusses vaccinated vs unvaccinated responses to infection by new and future emerging variants, as well as describing what it will take to reach herd immunity. Clas discusses his detailed tracking of eCT values during his recent Covid-19 Omicron infection, and go through some of the histopathology and disease progression, lack of symptoms, etc.





Anecdotal Fare:



The unregulated advancement of biotech is creating a new arms race and threatening our personal autonomy

... The key thing to keep in mind is that cutting-edge biotech poses a tremendous risk both to human dignity, precisely because the products of today’s biotechnology are not like old-school biowarfare agents like smallpox, for which treaties already exist that ban their usage in warfare. There are technologies being investigated, right now, that could form the basis of novel biological agents for which no treaty exists that restricts their use. This creates a new, unaddressed arms race and proliferation risk.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:




Four
While we’re on the subject of bodily sovereignty, I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that the whole “My body, my choice” position was invalidated by the way people were forced to take Covid vaccines in order to participate in society.

This is an entirely logical argument, in my opinion. It’s not logically consistent to say that bodily autonomy needs to take a back seat in one area and then claim it’s of utmost importance in another. Proponents of vaccine mandates are responsible for the fact that this argument is being used, and that it is being used effectively.

It’s very disconcerting that the law has come down on the side of subverting bodily autonomy in both of these major debates recently. As humanity gets more and more complicated, we may see the dominance of the notion that our bodies are not our own yield greater and greater consequences going forward.



... A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.



Other Quotes of the Week:

CTH: Either J6 committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson is currently working for Donald Trump in a weird effort to make the J6 committee look absolutely silly, or Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest Jussie Smollett or Christine Blasey-Ford. Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony was so outlandish only the most intellectually deficient left-wing loons could or would believe it.


Putin: Speaking to journalists in Turkmenistan on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to questions about several recent remarks from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. During the latest G7 summit, the UK leader joked that his allies should take their clothes off for the photoshoot – to show that they are “tougher than Putin.” “I don't know how they wanted to undress, waist-high or not, but I think it would be a disgusting sight either way,” the Russian president quipped. “Everything should be harmoniously developed in a person, both the body and the soul. However, in order for everything to be harmonious, one has to abandon excessive drinking and break other bad habits, start exercising, take up a sport.”



Other Fare / Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Menton: Candidate For Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever: Harry Blackmun

..... By contrast, Roe had no basis in constitutional text and, by declaring abortion to be an absolute constitutional right, left the states little to no wiggle room to reinstate restrictions that their citizens or legislatures thought appropriate.

Of all the Supreme Court’s power grabs from the Warren Court era through the 1970s, Roe is unquestionably the most dramatic and consequential.  The huge significance of the decision has to have been understood by all members of the Court when it was in the works.  And yet the decision is shockingly weak.  It’s hard even to discern a logic.  Most of the decision is history and background, and then the whole reasoning comes down to a few sentences, most of them entirely unmoored from the Constitution itself ...

... Is that really the best that our highest Court could do to justify this hugely consequential decision?

You might ask, if the basis for the decision is so slim, how did it gather seven votes?  My theory is that Warren Burger only joined the majority when it became clear that its position would prevail, and he thereby got to assign the writing of the decision to the Court’s weakest link, Blackmun.

Meanwhile, if Blackmun and his colleagues thought that they could remove the issue of abortion from the political realm by the Roe decision, the truth turned out to be the opposite.  Abortion became and has remained the hottest among hot button political issues, and has poisoned the entire process of Supreme Court appointments now for several decades.  Meanwhile, in Europe the issue worked its way through the democratic process, where most countries have come to a position of allowing the procedure through approximately the first trimester. ...


Rigger: There she blows

.......... In most of Europe abortion is illegal after about 3-4 months, except when there are very good medical reasons for the procedure. Whilst there are, obviously, disagreements about this we don’t tend to witness quite the widespread degree of passion on the issue as we’ve recently seen in the US.

I think the majority European position on this is a fair compromise. Overall I’m not too comfortable with the notion of abortion, but I recognise there are other important practical and moral considerations relating to the heath and well-being of the prospective mother. I’m not wise enough, or smart enough, to untie the Gordian knot here and so I think the European approach might be about the best and fairest compromise that can be reached.

The problem is that things, as they always seem to do these days, have kind of blown up beyond all recognition. Safe, legal and rare within the first trimester became, for some, a commonplace method of contraception, a matter of convenience that could be exercised right up until birth. A “right” that superseded any and all rights that might accrue to the unborn child.

It’s this all too common push towards the extremes of a given position that, ultimately, generates the passion. The first pride marches were a great thing - it was a movement that cried for a group of people to be de-stigmatized and allowed to be treated as utterly normal. Homosexuality, whilst statistically rare, should be no more remarkable than the choice of one’s footwear.

Pride marches today are a different beast entirely. I’m not sure what battle is being fought, still, or what we are supposed to be ‘celebrating’, but one component of today’s pride does seem to be a somewhat unwholesome public promotion of all sorts of sexual kinks and deviancies. Be as kinky and deviant as you want in the privacy of your own homes - I’m not going to judge at all - but do we really need to have this displayed so prominently in public?

..... I find myself, more and more these days, thinking this emotive polarization is being deliberately engineered. To what end, I don’t know, but if we want to make any real progress we’re going to have to try and meet folk in the middle somewhere and try to find that compromise that recognises the human value and worth of even those with whom we most profoundly disagree. ..


this short anecdotal story of healthcare in Athens, as contrasted to USA, worth a read:
Living with American healthcare



Older Fare:

***** older posts by new find Fabio Vighi (hat tip, Ugo Bardi): 

Pause for Thought: Money without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World

The acceleration of the “emergency paradigm” since 2020 has a simple yet widely disavowed purpose: to conceal socioeconomic collapse. In today’s metaverse, things are the opposite of what they seem. Inaugurating Davos 2022, IMF director Kristalina Georgieva blamed the pandemic and Putin for the “confluence of calamities” that the world economy is now facing. No surprise there. Davos itself is not a conspiracy hub, but the mouthpiece of the elites’ increasingly panicky reactions to unmanageable systemic contradictions. The Davos crowd are now hiding behind lies like a bunch of nervous children. While they continue to tell us that the coming slump is the effect of global adversities that took the world by surprise (from Covid-19 to Putin-22), the opposite is true: the tanking economy is the cause of these “misfortunes”. What we are sold as external threats is in fact the ideological projection of the internal limit and ongoing decomposition of capitalist modernity. In systemic terms, emergency addiction keeps the comatose body of capitalism artificially alive. Thus, the enemy is no longer constructed to legitimise the expansion of Empire. Instead, it serves to conceal the bankruptcy of our debt-soaked economy.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the deployment of capital’s full potential, also known as globalization, has gradually undermined capital’s own conditions of possibility. Eventually, the response to this implosive trajectory was the unleashing of global emergencies, which must be increasingly durable and supplemented by ever-larger injections of fear, chaos, and propaganda. We all remember how it all started at the turn of the millennium, with Al Qaeda, the “global war on terror”, and Colin Powell’s tiny vial of white powder. This released the Taliban, the Islamic State, Syria, the North Korean missile crisis, the trade war with China, Russiagate, and finally COVID-19 – in a crescendo of emotions. Now it appears that a new Cold War is in the making, perhaps the mother of all emergencies. The elementary reason for this course of events is that the closer the system gets to collapse, the more it requires exogenous crises to distract and manipulate populations, while deferring its downfall and laying the ground for its authoritarian changeover.

History tells us that when empires are about to fold, they ossify into oppressive regimes of crisis management. It is no coincidence that our age of serial emergencies began with the bursting of the “dot-com bubble” – the first global market crash ......

The sick theatre of the Ukrainian war, just like the wickedly hyped-up Covid affair, is therefore a consequence of the elites’ panicked awareness that collapse is now overdue. In fact, today’s managers of “crisis capitalism” know that a breakdown is necessary for a new money system to emerge. Crucially, they also recognise that the breakdown must happen as the planned demolition of the current model, which would allow them to retain and even strengthen their position of power within the impending neo-feudal capitalist normal. Food and energy rationing, mass immiseration, social credit, and monetary control via digital currency, have long been baked into the capitalist pie of the future. Arguably, this scenario is already part of our collective imagination, as we are being persuaded of its ineluctability due to force majeure. ....

The sad truth is that “Putin’s war” (like the “war on Covid”) delays the popping of the “everything bubble”, which is why Ukraine is sacrificed to the altar of a protracted massacre for freedom & democracy. The real aim is not to help Ukrainians (nor, for that matter, to destroy Russia) but to exorcise the recurring nightmare of the “Lehman shock”, which today would plunge us into chaos, wiping out the thin veneer of monetary affluence that prevents us from staring into the abyss. The bottom line is that mouse-clicked instant liquidity is the only object that matters to the debt-based financial industry. And by deflating quotas of the debt bubble through the erosion of purchasing power and the compression of demand, the financial elites stealthily set themselves up for more Quantitative Easing programmes to further inundate the system with the cash it needs. New QEs, perhaps with a different name, could soon be announced, though they might require the nudge of a controlled accident, serious enough to guarantee immediate printing action. In this respect, the 2018 precedent should not be ignored. Back then, the pretence of Quantitative Tightening (reduction of the Fed’s balance sheet) only lasted a couple of months before being forced into a U-turn. And when the gamble was attempted again in the summer of 2019, the repo market crisis of mid-September reminded everyone of how essential the Central Bank liquidity bazooka is. ...

.................. The downhill slide of the devaluation avalanche that began in autumn 2008 in now unstoppable. Somehow, the world still believes that Central Banks will solve a debt crisis by printing more money.


FROM COVID-19 TO PUTIN-22: WHO NEEDS FRIENDS WITH ENEMIES LIKE THESE?

Hyperreality
Like a textbook illustration of Hollywood continuity editing, the de-escalation of the war on Covid has transitioned seamlessly into the escalation of the Ukrainian war, with Vladimir Putin replacing Virus as public enemy number one. If the emergency changeover was predictable, the timing of the overlap seemed almost too smooth to be credible. Corporate media’s creative choreography, however, has secured a one-dimensional representation of Putin’s war, even adding special effects when needed: from video games like War Thunder, Arma 3 and Digital Combat Simulator, to clips of past disasters. In retrospect, the apocalyptic footage of people collapsing in Wuhan City in January 2020 now appears decidedly amateurish.

................. The bottom line is that our debt-soaked economies continue to need more rather than less QE, for the simple reason that their debt far outweighs their GDP. This is why the Ukrainian crisis time-bomb is an extension of the debt crisis time-bomb. What the latter requires is a perennial QE regime calibrated through a cyclical succession of global emergencies: pandemics, terrorist campaigns, nuclear threats, trade wars, military conflicts, or, why not, the landing of aliens. Chaos needs to be invoked at every given opportunity, and with it, ideally, the figure of a brutal, bloodthirsty enemy. Whether it takes place in the media or in reality, it is the emergency loop that matters, because it keeps the monetary tap open. Let us not forget that capital is a blind process that abhors stagnation: it must be in constant motion, even when motion means accruing ever-larger amounts of unsustainable debt, whichever way possible.



By now it should be clear that COVID-19 is, essentially, a symptom of financial capital running amok. More broadly, it is a symptom of a world that is no longer able to reproduce itself by profiting from human labour, thus relying on a compensatory logic of perpetual monetary doping. While the structural shrinking of the work-based economy inflates the financial sector, the latter’s volatility can only be contained through global emergencies, mass propaganda, and tyranny by biosecurity. How can we break out of this vicious cycle?

..... By appealing to our personal sense of guilt for ‘destroying the planet’, the coming climate lockdowns are the ideal continuation of Covid restrictions. If Virus was the scary appetiser, a generous portion of carbon-footprint-mixed-with-energy-scarcity ideology is already being served as main meal. ....



A year and a half after the arrival of Virus, some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s). Why all the humanitarian zeal? Cui bono? Only those who are unfamiliar with the wondrous adventures of GloboCap can delude themselves into thinking that the system chose to shut down out of compassion. Let us be clear from the start: the big predators of oil, arms, and vaccines could not care less about humanity

Follow the money
In pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown. Here is a brief chronicle of how the pressure was building up: 

June 2019: In its Annual Economic Report, the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the ‘Central Bank of all central banks’, sets the international alarm bells ringing. The document highlights “overheating […] in the leveraged loan market”, where “credit standards have been deteriorating” and “collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have surged – reminiscent of the steep rise in collateralized debt obligations [CDOs] that amplified the subprime crisis [in 2008].” Simply stated, the belly of the financial industry is once again full of junk.

9 August 2019: The BIS issues a working paper calling for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions” ...

.....

15-16 September 2019: The downturn is officially inaugurated by a sudden spike in the repo rates (from 2% to 10.5%) ...

17 September 2019: The Fed begins the emergency monetary programme, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into Wall Street, effectively executing BlackRock’s “going direct” plan. (Unsurprisingly, in March 2020 the Fed will hire BlackRock to manage the bailout package in response to the ‘COVID-19 crisis’).

19 September 2019: Donald Trump signs Executive Order 13887, establishing a National Influenza Vaccine Task Force whose aim is to develop a “5-year national plan (Plan) to promote the use of more agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies and to accelerate development of vaccines that protect against many or all influenza viruses.” This is to counteract “an influenza pandemic”, which, “unlike seasonal influenza […] has the potential to spread rapidly around the globe, infect higher numbers of people, and cause high rates of illness and death in populations that lack prior immunity”. As someone guessed, the pandemic was imminent, while in Europe too preparations were underway (see here and here).

18 October 2019: In New York, a global zoonotic pandemic is simulated during Event 201, a strategic exercise coordinated by the Johns Hopkins Biosecurity Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

21-24 January 2020: The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting takes place in Davos, Switzerland, where both the economy and vaccinations are discussed.

23 January 2020: China puts Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province in lockdown.

11 March 2020: The WHO’s director general calls Covid-19 a pandemic. The rest is history.

Joining the dots is a simple enough exercise. If we do so, we might see a well-defined narrative outline emerge, whose succinct summary reads as follows: lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to 1) Allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets with freshly printed money while deferring hyperinflation; and 2) Introduce mass vaccination programmes and health passports as pillars of a neo-feudal regime of capitalist accumulation. As we shall see, the two aims merge into one. .......



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