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Thursday, October 13, 2022

2022-10-13

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


Economic and Market Fare:


........ But what if the rate hikes are pushing many units from hedge into speculative and from speculative into Ponzi positions? In that case, then we may be entering (or already in) a deviation-amplifying financial regime—i.e. one that is highly vulnerable to a breakage that spills over into the financial markets.



I’m getting a prize in economics myself this week—the Friede-Gard Prize for Sustainable Economics—and I was going to ignore the Nobel Prize for Economics, which is always awarded to economic insiders rather than rebels like me. But then they gave it to Ben Bernanke. This was just too much: to me, it was like awarding an accidental arsonist a prize for successful firefighting.

Why? Because far from having “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises”, as the Nobel Prize citation claims, Bernanke (and his two companions) have preserved false ways of thinking about banks and financial crises, and suppressed realistic models of banking and financial crises.

The realistic models were developed by Irving Fisher in the 1930s, and Hyman Minsky in the 1950s-80s. Ben Bernanke played a direct role in denigrating their work—and yet they were right about what causes financial crises, and he was wrong. ....

..... For these failures, Bernanke gets the Economics Nobel. That’s why I nicknamed it the Nobble Prize: it nobbles new thinking, and locks us into perpetual crises, thanks to the ignorance that Neoclassical economists have about the real world. So, thanks Ben. You will surely enjoy your Prize, but the rest of us will suffer from it, thanks to the ignorance the Prize rewards you for perpetuating.



WOW, awesome snark




US Core CPI Surges To 40 Year Highs; Food & Shelter Costs Soar





BofA Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett has a favorite markets phrase that may be the only one a trader in this day and age needs: "Markets stop panicking when central banks start panicking."

Well, in what may be the best news to shellshocked bulls after the worst September and worst Q3 in generations, in a harrowing year for markets, central banks are starting to panic. First it was the BOJ, then the BOE and now, it's Switzerland's turn. ...



....... Financial stability concerns will likely force all central banks to eventually support the bond prices of their respective sovereigns. Policymakers vividly remember the collapse of Lehman and will do whatever it takes to avoid a repeat. 

.... The Fed is likely to be the last major central bank to backstop bond prices due to the relative strength of the U.S. financial system. After the BOJ and BOE, the ECB looks poised to be the next central bank forced to shore up its bond market. The financial sector is opaque, but market pricing and commentary appears to be indicating growing concerns over the health of European financial institutions.








Headline news can often be misleading.



Quotes of the Week:

Burry: How anyone over the age of 40 didn't see this coming is a riddle.

Mac: Wall Street keeps downgrading their market predictions while maintaining buy ratings on every stock. They've been behind the curve all year and they will happily remain far behind the curve, selling stock to useful bagholders. 

not a fan, think he's over-rated, but I will quote him anyways here:
El-Erian: The economy is starting to go through the windshield, the financial system is starting to go through the windshield



Charts: 
1:


5:



...



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


“The French company gave up on California as it was so dysfunctional. So they went to Morocco instead.”



Sci Fare:




Other Fare:




The average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. An increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT. The results offer a lens into systemic inequities in education, in place well before the pandemic. 




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”



Endemic 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 [almost?] everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
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); later additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk & Charles Rixey & Aaron Kheriarty; and newest additions Meryl Nass and the awesome Radagast; and Spartacus is on substack now!!; 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 Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and... of course Heather Heying and Charles Eisenstein often bring their insight and wisdom to the topic as well... and if Heying's substack isn't enough, she joins her husband Bret Weinstein at their DarkHorse podcast ....
but, in any case, check out those sources directly as I will my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts



This is the question that seems to be on the minds of many these days.

The attempt to reach “zero-COVID” was a colossal failure. Original claims of mRNA vaccine efficacy have reportedly been shown to be based on falsified data. Excess mortality is spiking across the globe. And the Canadian government has finally admitted they have a multi-million dollar contract (pdf) with the World Economic Forum for Traveler Digital ID. What was fiction and then conspiracy theory is now reality.

Many believe we are approaching a tipping point, that we are on the verge of a revelatory storm, that the truth is finally coming out.

And yet most people still believe in the narrative, still cling to the idea that lockdowns and masking were necessary and effective, that their questioning friends are unstable “anti-vaxxers,” that government is noble and mainstream media unimpeachable. And from the files of the truly unfathomable, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is now urging doctors to prescribe drugs and even psychotherapy to their noncompliant patients. The tipping point is hardly a sure thing. ......


how false ascription of "your mask/vaccine/distancing protects me" inverted the morality of covid and broke the world.

......... it is pure and simply reprehensible behavior and those who did it are either morally repugnant if they did it knowingly or so dangerously incompetent as to have no business wielding such power if they did it sans comprehension.


PANDA’s comprehensive multidisciplinary review has found that mass Covid-19 vaccination has been a failed experiment.



Tweets of the Week:






Pushback Fare:

Disturbing questions remain as to who did what, when, and why in the days leading up to the lockdowns of spring 2020 and beyond.




Unvaccinated physicians protest outside of B.C.'s College of Physicians and Surgeons to call for an end to healthcare vaccine mandates
While the provincial government pledges $118 million to help the overrun healthcare system, many doctors and other healthcare professionals are ready to work — if the province would drop its vaccine mandates.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

Revealed: PR firm that represents Pfizer and Moderna also sits on CDC vaccine division - sparking major conflict of interest concerns


the pfizer CEO in his own words

there seem to be a number of people who are of the opinion that “the drug companies never said the covid vaccines would stop transmission.”

but ah how wonderful it is to live in the age of instant-on video receipts. we do not have to guess, we can ask the pfizer CEO himself.

this montage is a startling evolution of talking points. it shows a pharma kingpin who is simply making stuff up on the fly and adapting tactically to whatever works best as marketing right now.

...... (hey, you don’t become one of if not THE most fined company in history by coloring inside the lines…)



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do? Would he brush it off like a big nothingburger and move on or would he threaten the Mexican government with a military invasion that would obliterate the Mexican Army, level their biggest cities, and send the government running for cover? Which of these two options do you think Biden would choose? There’s no doubt what Biden would do nor is there any question what the 45 presidents who preceded him would do. ....



Some commentators on this site have always been impatient for more dramatic Russian military action in the Ukraine, a Red Army Blitzkrieg involving the flattening of Kiev and many other cities. I suspect that, unlike military men, they have no idea of the horrors of real war.  Unlike warmongering politicians, who do not do the fighting and do not face getting splattered by the brains and guts spilling out from inside other human-beings alive a few moments before, military men are essentially pacifists. 

That does not mean that they are cowards, it means that, as professionals, they want to achieve their aims avoiding losses as far as possible. The aim is not to kill other human-beings. All the more so in the Ukraine, where those opposing you are the same race as yourself and with similar values. Kiev is not going to be flattened, it is a Russian City, indeed, it is called ‘The Mother of Russian Cities’. The SMO is to be implemented with as few losses as possible.

The Ukraine is to be freed, not destroyed. This war is against the USA and its blind but subservient vassals, not against the Ukraine and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian people are being held hostage. The aim of any liberation is to free and save the hostages, not to kill them. The hostages are not the enemy. The enemies are the hostage-takers, Zelensky and Company. This whole operation is about saving the Ukraine, not destroying it. 

Another thing that some in Western countries forget is that Russians have Asian patience. This is quite unlike Western impatience. ....



..... While there are growing calls for peace talks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated his position that he won’t hold talks with Russia as long as Putin is president during a virtual meeting with the G7. Zelensky recently signed a decree ruling out any dialogue with Putin’s government.



Other Geopolitical Fare:


Let’s start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war.

Damascus had rejected the – American – plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed).

What followed was a vicious, concerted “Assad must go” campaign: proxy war as the road to regime change. The toxic dial went exponentially up with the instrumentalization of ISIS .....



The central mystery of our time is why, at a moment when the whole political and social system is out of control and in total chaos, no one seems able to imagine any alternative. The economic system is not delivering the good life it once promised, but is instead creating chaos and hardship for millions. Meanwhile, those in charge of the system are profiting massively from that chaos, feeding off the uncertainty. And the political class are in thrall to an economic theory that has become absurd and corrupted. I’ve just made TraumaZone, a series of films about another time when that was happening. It was in Russia in the 1990s after communism collapsed. Those in charge began an experiment to create an extreme form of capitalism. I made it because I don’t think we in the west understand what the Russians went through: a cataclysm that tore apart the foundations of society.



........................ The aim of Manicheanism (since Carl Schmitt first made the point) is to foreclose on any mediation with rivals by portraying them as sufficiently ‘evil’ that discourse with them become pointless and morally defective. ........


Philip Pilkington argues that serious conflict over Taiwan could have disastrous consequences

We are watching the world order shake before our very eyes. When the earthquake is over, the world will look very different from how it looked last year. These changes are taking place so rapidly that it is hard to keep up. Western policymakers and commentators seem disoriented and confused, desperately trying to summon into being a world that is evaporating before their eyes. This mismatch between perception and reality raises the real possibility of miscalculation. And this possibility of miscalculation, when it comes to Taiwan and U.S.-China relations, could lead to the demise of the United States itself.

......... In the twentieth century we learned that large-scale wars restructure the global economy. The First World War spelled the end of the British Empire’s influence over world trade. The Second World War allowed the United States to ascend to the position previously occupied by Britain. Yet what the Russian intervention in Ukraine is teaching us is that a full-scale global war is not required to achieve these shifts—a hybrid war waged against a geopolitical rival is more than enough.

The likely long-term consequence of the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 will be the demolition of Europe and the emergence of a rival BRICS+ bloc that will likely be more economically powerful than the United States. There is also a chance that the United States will not weather the demise of Europe well. In the 1930s the European economy collapsed and dragged America down with it, into the depths of the Great Depression. That could easily happen again. Only time will tell. ..........



Orwellian Fare:

Two new books examine the ordinary roots of our extraordinary regime of high-tech monitoring.



***** CaitOz Fare ***** :




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It is a bit hilarious that humans rapidly evolved these massive brains only to become the first species to go extinct due to stupidity.

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FYI you should always be less trusting of your government in times of war, not more.

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Analysis of the war in Ukraine which does not account for the western provocations which gave rise to it is not analysis at all. It’s propagandistic children’s literature.

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If your proxy war demands nonstop PR spin and mass media propaganda at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, maybe your proxy war is immoral and bad.

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When one side of the new cold war wants multipolarity where world power is much less centralized and the other side wants unipolar planetary domination where the entire world obeys Washington DC and its puppet masters, it’s not hard to figure out which side is the aggressor.

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Be completely dismissive of those who object to your criticisms of western imperial aggression. The one and only reason they expect their dopey opinions to be taken seriously is because their position has been artificially normalized by copious amounts of propaganda. That’s it.

The one and only thing making your worldview look strange and suspicious and the worldview of empire apologists look normal is the fact that we’ve all been swimming in empire propaganda our entire lives. It’s got nothing to do with the factuality or validity of anyone’s position. In reality, focusing one’s criticisms on the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is the normal thing to do. It’s not strange and suspicious when you do it, it’s strange and suspicious that everyone else does not.



Rigger-ous Reads (on Culture Wars, Identity Politics, etc.):




Other Quotes:

Hanania: The term “free thinker” is fine, as it has the opposite connotation. I wonder why the phrase seems to have fallen out of favor, and I suspect that it’s because we’ve grown so cynical that we don’t even believe free thinking is possible. Our options are only to be “current thing” obsessives or reflexively opposed to it.


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