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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

2022-07-20

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

Economic and Market Fare:

BIS: Hard of soft landing? (PDF)


Perkins (TS Lombard): The Nightmare Scenario For Central Banks

Every investor wants to know whether central banks are prepared to cause a recession in order to force inflation down. Surely, officials are bluffing, right? But think about it from the central banker’s perspective. Yes, a recession would be bad: people would lose their jobs, and it could take a while to recover. But recessions happen all the time and they rarely ruin any central banker’s reputation. Some, such as Paul Volcker, are even celebrated for their “toughness” in the face of economic pain. And if a recession happens now, the authorities can blame Putin or say it was the only way to tame the inflation monster (they love a good counterfactual). Runaway inflation, on the other hand, would leave a darker legacy. Jerome Powell, Christine Lagarde and others would be joining Arthur Burns on university syllabuses for the semester on “historical monetary failures”. In 40 years’ time, economists would still be discussing how they “let IT (the 1970s) happen again”. No central banker wants to become a case-study in how to fail. ...



Over the past two months, the oil price rally has seriously lost momentum, with prices remaining range-bound as fears intensify that the global economy could be headed for a recession. Consequently, the highly-criticized energy inflation has cooled off, with U.S. gas prices having now dropped for more than 30 consecutive days.





So far, this year is evolving eerily similar to 2008. The year started with inflationary hysteria, and it's ending with  unforeseen deflationary collapse. Then as now, forecasters were continually behind the curve. Their predictions were outdated the moment they were printed. What follows is a comparison of 2008 risks vs. now:

First, on a relative comparison of this monetary asset bubble. Put it this way, Crypto losses in 2022 are MORE than the entire size of the subprime mortgage market equaled in 2007: $2.15 trillion vs. $1.3 trillion. 

The size of the 2021 IPO market in total IPO count and subsequent collapse is vastly larger than every other year in market history including Y2K.

Which is why this week when we learned that Goldman Sachs "beat" earnings expectations, that meant their profits DECLINED -48% year over year. Following their own standard Wall Street model of lowering earnings expectations so it always looks as if companies are beating expectations even when profits are collapsing.

Criminality is built right into the standard valuation model. 

And of course the current housing bubble features the largest two year price increase in U.S. market history. By any valuation measure - price/income, price/rent, price/CPI this bubble is larger than the one in 2007.

Not just in the U.S. but across the developed markets world (Europe, Canada, Australia) are all RECORD overpriced with central banks RECORD tightening. ....

... Which gets us to the related topic of recession denial which today has reached epic levels. The Fed as always is laser focused on stale data months old at this time. They are totally ignoring the bond market and the flattened yield curve. The difference between now and 2008 is that year over year CPI "inflation" is higher now than it was back then. However, nominal prices of commodities are LOWER now than they were back then. Either way, it's the same result. Far more focus on inflation than recession.  

I put together this comparison list of current factors pointing to recession vs. factors currently pointing to expansion. What you notice is that the expansion list is mostly comprised of lagging indicators. Whereas the recession list is driven by real-time market indicators. Except GDP, which forms the very basis of economic growth and is likely ALREADY in confirmed recession. In other words today's experts are ignoring their OWN definition of recession as I write. Similar to 2008 when the economy entered recession NINE months prior to Lehman. But the Fed thought the economy was still growing. ...


Charts: 


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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Corinne Le Quéré: ‘Could we just adapt to climate change? The answer is no’



If Russia permanently cuts off natural gas exports to Germany, it will likely send the country, the world’s fourth-largest economy, into a severe recession.

.................. Renewables actually lock in fossil fuels because they can’t finish the job. This helps explain why Germany depends heavily on Russian natural gas.

........ Renewables can’t decarbonize or power a modern economy. There’s only one source of clean power that can replace fossil fuels at scale while having minimal land-use and environmental impacts. That’s nuclear.



Other Fare:

The Future Of Working From Anywhere You Want



Pics of the Week:





Tweet Vid:




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

hat tip, Yves, who wrote: China will keep eyepoking the West every time US officials make a stink about Uighurs.
Human rights abuses by US, allies persistent, systematic: FM spokesperson


Just 3 Weeks Post-Roe, The Stories Emerging Are Worse Than Anyone Imagined
We knew it would be awful. We knew pregnant people's lives would be threatened. We didn't know it would all happen so fast

Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

The Fate Of Human Civilization

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The Disappearing Muddle-Through Option
Get our act together or Self-destruct. Eventually, it will be one or the other.



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


................ And this looks bad for the vaccine. Very bad. This graph looks nothing like I would expect to see from a widespread vaccination campaign with an effective vaccine. 

...... The only conclusion I can draw from the chart above is that not only is the vaccine not working, it is making things substantially worse. If the vaccine was just saline solution this is not the kind of chart we’d expect to see at this stage of the ‘pandemic’.

.... With covid vaccines we can directly see what the problem is. Vaccination is making people more susceptible to infection, and more frequently (the incidence of re-infections in the vaccinated appears to be much higher). In other words, this parameter b is greater than 1 for the covid vaccines.

If the vaccine reduces fatality rates by 50%, but doubles the infection rate, you’ve just stood still. Vaccination, in terms of overall efficacy, has achieved bugger all. If you now factor in side effects you’re actually in a worse position than before even with no overall effect on efficacy.

The only reason, in my view, that we’re not seeing an alarming rise in covid deaths is because Omicron is milder. We should be thankful for small mercies. But if Omicron turns into a Decepticon, like some are warning it could, we could be in for a whole world of trouble - especially if the vaccines have made us partake of the fruit of the poisoned tree and engendered Original Antigenic Sin, or immune imprinting.

I think the chart posted by Joel is compelling evidence we’ve made things worse by vaccination. The vaccination program fails the sanity check.



Most people do not know what negative vaccine efficacy is. Nor do they know the difference between vaccine efficacy and vaccine effectiveness. We’re changing that by teaching the world the Math of Vaccine Science this fall.

Measures like these require data. And Dr. Peter McCullough reviewed data for two hours in Grand Rapids, Michigan this weekend to a crowd of doctors and lay people. He sent me his slides. I’m presenting these slides to you without commentary - but with links to each resource he cites so you can share this Substack article with physicians and scientists who are beginning to scratch their heads. They are vaccinated, so why are they getting COVID? They are beginning to ask themselves: Why are such a high percentage of people who get serious COVID-19 vaccinated when the promise was that the vaccine would prevent this? And why, if the vaccine is such a success, have only 21% of Americans taken their first booster? In that setting, why is Fauci proposing a “second” booster … and boosters likely every few months? ....


And the "experts" are still getting it wrong

..... In this article I’ll go over:
  • Why mRNA lasting so long is a concern
  • The information landscape surrounding this issue
  • What’s so surprising about mRNA lasting so long
  • An unexpected wrinkle I came across while doing research for this article
  • How much we still don’t know
Why mRNA lasting so long is a concern
What would be so bad about the vaccine mRNA lasting a long time in the body?

Recall that the vaccine mRNA encodes for something called the spike protein. I previously covered the dangers of spike protein here, which linked to several studies showing that it poked holes in the blood-brain barrier in mice, poked holes in advanced in vitro models of the human blood-brain barrier, caused damage to lung or endothelial cells in Syrian hamsters, and disrupted human cardiac pericytes.

Then there was this, which went over the evidence that spike protein poked holes in cell membranes (more here), and this which showed that spike protein caused anomalous clotting in blood from healthy individuals. ..........
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A high-impact peer-reviewed scientific paper was just brought to my attention. It has been accepted for publication but has not made it into the print version of the journal yet. It was posted ‘online ahead of print’ back on April 5th, but I had not seen it until today. The paper is entitled “SARS-CoV-2 Naturally Acquired Immunity vs. Vaccine-induced Immunity, Reinfections versus Breakthrough Infections: a Retrospective Cohort Study”. It is being published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which has an impressive impact factor of 20.999. For a layperson, this means it is one of the top medical journals in the world.

Here is the take-home message as concluded by the authors in the discussion section of the paper:
“Our analysis demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant for a symptomatic disease as well.”
..... As demonstrated in this paper, people whose immune response was induced by Pfizer’s mRNA product were at 13-times greater risk of being infected with SARS-CoV-2! For those who had received Pfizer’s mRNA product, this increase in infectivity also translated into a greater incidence of the infection progressing to the disease that we call COVID-19. This news will be shocking for many. However, for many of us who have actually been following the science, this is not at all surprising. We have seen this unfolding for quite some time in public health data around the world. For example, see figure 1 below, which showed the trend in cases of COVID-19 by vaccination status in Ontario, Canada (where I live). ...


it's really starting to look that way

i’ve spoken quite a lot about why leaky vaccines drive viral evolution to select for vaccine advantage. rolling out non-sterilizing vaccines is is terrible idea. it’s like only taking half your course of antibiotics and then wondering why MRSA is suddenly everywhere. it’s just a selector for resistance and advantage. the basic mechanism is really very simple: antigens that were recessive become dominant in order to evade the fixated immune response generated by an inoculant that did not work to stop colonization, carriage, and contagion.

this is the simple, predictable, and inevitable outcome of herd level antigenic fixation whereby most people are all locked into the same increasingly ineffective immune response and fail to generate new responses when faced with novel pathogens. this gets called OAS/hoskins effect.

it’s also how you get a throwback variant like omicron which did not descend from delta but looks to be a second serotype whose last common ancestor with D was pre-alpha. ....

..... covid was already vaccine advantaged, but was rapidly becoming more and more so. full data HERE.

notoriously, this led the UK to discontinue reporting of this series. it appeared they suddenly did not want to talk about this anymore. but it’s cropping up everywhere. ...

............... all of this is strongly consistent with the idea that we have a much milder variant that is still producing a greater number of severe outcomes because the case count is so much higher and this case count is being driven by the vaccinated, not the unvaxxed. their risk ratio for catching covid looks to be 3-5X higher. 

this is the outcome no one wanted/everyone hoped against. alas, reality is not optional and the reality is that this was entirely predictable because this is how evolution works. it’s why we do not use leaky vaccines. ...

... i take no joy in this hypothesis gathering such compelling evidence and keep trying to falsify it because, frankly, i’d sleep better.

but the data is what the data is. so we must follow it. ..



Q 1: ‍What are the mechanism(s) that (largely) bypass the innate immune system upon vaccination with non-replicating vaccines (like mRNA)?  Is this simply because it is a localized injection that doesn't replicate/spread throughout other tissues and organs? Or is this due to additives in mRNA vaccines that prevent innate immune stimulation in order for the mRNA itself to not be degraded before being absorbed into target cells?

A 1: ‍Only replicating virus will present virus-derived (self-mimicking)motifs/patterns (on the surface of infected cells) that can be recognized by innate effector cells (NK cells).

‍Q 2: Why does C19 vaccination in young children prevent training of their innate immune systems for recognizing other viruses that they would later encounter? I understand how specific Abs can outcompete innate antibodies for a given virus, but why would specific Abs for SARS-CoV-2 Spike outcompete innate antibodies for something like influenza?

A 2: ‍Because innate Abs bind to all glycosylated viruses. Although innate Abs can recognize a myriad of viruses, these very same viruses will require (self-mimicking) pattern recognition by NK cells to be recognized later on. It is through this pattern recognition mechanism that NK cells can be trained more specifically for the pattern presented by a particular virus (but which has reasonable homology with self-mimicking patterns presented by other glycosylated viruses). 

Q3: ......



I've decided to: 
tie balloons to my car's antenna to help protect me in the event of an accident
put up chain link fence around my yard, to keep out mosquitoes
hold a piece of paper over my head if it looks like rain
... every little bit of risk mitigation must help!

Circling back to mitigation theater

It’s hard to believe that we’re still having to deal with masks and mask mandates in the summer of 2022.

As data became available, it was obvious by 2020 that masks and mask mandates did not work.

By 2021, it was positively confirmed that masks and mask mandates did not work.

Endless research and data accumulated over the past two years of nearly every jurisdiction on earth trying and failing to use masks to “slow the spread” of COVID should have been enough evidence.

It’s at least encouraging that many even in the scientific or medical community have moved on from masking, tacitly acknowledging that there are no benefits.

But as feared, there are seemingly limitless amounts of politicians, health officials and local administrators willing to re-engage in COVID theater.


The casket producer claims that business is booming while also seeing unprecedented orders for child-sized coffins.


A useful reminder.

As we are dealing with the another wave of contagion fearporn, I would like to revisit the topic of the “dark winter for the vaccinated” from last year.

..... None the less, right now, I don’t know of any unvaccinated people who passed away during the proverbial “dark winter.” Or later.

Unfortunately, a friend of mine who was likely vaccinated, based on his general worldview, passed away, no reason given, and no one was able to find out what happened. He was I think in his fifties. Shortly prior to his passing, he sent me a very regular email asking how I was, I got distracted and forgot to respond, and the next thing I knew, a friend in common called me and shared the tragic news about his passing. It was very weird. It is very weird because the last time I saw him was before COVID, and none of this even existed. And now he is gone, and that email is an email from a friend who is no longer here. .. And yes, it could have been anything, and it’s not like people in their fifties have never passed away before COVID injections were rolled out—but up until last year, naming the cause of passing was pretty standard but this tradition seems to be suddenly abandoned.

Young healthy people keep dropping dead on stage, at sporting arenas, in their sleep, and as they go about their lives—and it is now perfectly normal! In parallel, stats keep coming out showing that it’s mostly the boosted and the vaccinated who are currently dying from COVID—however they measure COVID (here, here and here)—and yet mainstream newspapers keep saying it’s the other way around.

And here is an absolutely horrible story about an increase in demand for children’s caskets. ...


How do you make an impossible choice?



Pushback Fare:


For the average New Yorker, the economy is in shambles. However, if you happen to be connected to the New York political elite, business is booming.

Governor Kathy Hochul’s health department has awarded a stunning $637 million in no-bid contracts to a company led by one of her major donors, for the supply of junk COVID products like tests, masks, and other “medical” devices. ...


are we seeing the warm up act?

a few weeks back, i wrote about some possible pfizer pfutures and how the low energy path for politicians would be to declare pfraud and provide all expense paid trips to the underside of the biggest buses they could find because this would allow these politicos who so avidly cheer led this project to flip sides, play the victim, claim “we wuz lied to!” and wriggle off the hook for this mess by claiming they could not have known that big pharma would tell porkie pies just to earn $30-40 billion in quick cash.

it’ll be rank mendacity with a double helping of hypocrisy, but what else is new?

these are the people who kiss your wallet and steal your baby.

.... the frisson of watching an arch-clinton loyalist accuse others of corruption is electric.


Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

******** Lawrence: The Imaginary War
It began when the Biden regime and the press misrepresented Russian aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.

....................... Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.

... This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.

This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians.


Lavrov - Extended Range Weapons In Ukraine Will Lead To More Loss Of Its Land

.....If it should be used Ukraine will lose all land that is within 300 kilometer of Crimea, the Donbas and Luhansk oblasts and Ukraine's northern border with Russia. Odessa is only 180 kilometer from Crimea and Kiev some 200 kilometer from the nearest Russian border. If we take Lavrov's words seriously those cities would come under Russian occupation should an extended range HIMARS missile be used.


No longer just an 'alternative route' on a drawing board, the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is paying dividends in a time of global crisis. And Moscow, Tehran and New Delhi are now leading players in the Eurasian competition for transportation routes.

Tectonic shifts continue to rage through the world system with nation-states quickly recognizing that the “great game” as it has been played since the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the wake of the second World War, is over.

But empires never disappear without a fight, and the Anglo-American one is no exception, overplaying its hand, threatening and bluffing its way, right to the end.

End of an order

It seems no matter how many sanctions the west imposes on Russia, the victims most affected are western civilians. Indeed, the severity of this political blunder is such that the nations of the trans-Atlantic are heading towards the greatest self-induced food and energy crisis in history.

While the representatives of the “liberal rules-based international order” continue on their trajectory to crush all nations that refuse to play by those rules, a much saner paradigm has come to light in recent months that promises to transform the global order entirely.

The multipolar solution

Here we see the alternative security-financial order which has arisen in the form of the Greater Eurasian Partnership. As recently as 30 June at the 10th St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin described this emerging new multipolar order as:

“A multipolar system of international relations is now being formed. It is an irreversible process; it is happening before our eyes and is objective in nature. The position of Russia and many other countries is that this democratic, more just world order should be built on the basis of mutual respect and trust, and, of course, on the generally accepted principles of international law and the UN Charter.” ...

............................ Although geopolitical storms continue to intensify, it is increasingly clear that only the multipolar ship of state has demonstrated the competence to navigate the hostile seas, while the sinking unipolar ship of fools has a ruptured hull held together by little more than chewing gum and heavy doses of delusion.



CaitOz Fare:


It is true that this civilization is made of lies, was grown by lies, is powered by lies, is controlled by lies.

And it is true that this civilization is woven from violence, was birthed by violence, is sustained by violence, is preserved through violence.

And it is true that this civilization is built on exploitation, is run on exploitation, exists to facilitate exploitation, is the product and the producer of exploitation.

And it is true that this civilization is flying facefirst toward collapse on myriad fronts and that any attempt to draw attention to this gets met with a “that makes me uncomfortable” hand-waving dismissal.

But it is also true that a staggering beauty rips through it all like a thunderbolt, continuously and pervasively. .......



.... The tendency of homo sapiens to overburden our ecosystem with our consumption is not unique to us, and is not new. In fact, it looks like we’ve been on this trajectory toward ecocide since our ancient evolutionary ancestors began evolving extra brain matter. ...

..... I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are moving as a species toward an adaptation that will enable us to survive in a situation which is very different from the one we first emerged in, as every species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and that a collective movement into consciousness is what that adaptation will look like. ...



Other Quotes of the Week:

Yves Smith: FWIW, the Russian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed that Nord Stream gas would be supplied as usual once scheduled routine maintenance was completed (see here in the weekly press conference on July 14). But on July 15, Wolfgang Munchau, who was once believed to be a reporter, completely misrepresents Zakharova in his July 15 post. It’s enough to make a rational person extend the Scott Ritter principle on Ukraine, that 100% of what Ukraine says is a lie, to the West’s commentary on Russia generally.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Turley: "Morally And Intellectually Corrupt": UCLA Prof Resigns In Protest Over 'Viewpoint Intolerance'

Anthropology professor Joseph Manson announced his retirement this month with a broadside blog post that detailed the loss of academic freedom and integrity at UCLA. Manson describes many of the things that I have previously addressed as standard measures used to force out dissenting or conservative voices, including the isolation and investigation of colleagues to get them to resign. He is now among that lengthening list of such faculty who have decided to cut their academic careers short rather than work under such intolerable conditions.

............ For Manson, he had enough despite a distinguished career that could have continued for many years. He wrote of his reluctance “But I strongly suspect that mainstream U.S. higher education is morally and intellectually corrupt, beyond the possibility of self-repair, and therefore no longer a worthwhile setting in which to spend my time and effort.”



Satirical Fare:




Other Pics of the Week:



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