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Monday, January 8, 2024

2024-01-08

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


Economic and Market Fare:





Balancing Churchill’s Caution, Truman’s Expectations, And Gandhi’s Wisdom In The Age Of Chaos

In the realm of economic forecasting, the concept of a trilemma emerges as a thought-provoking framework. This trilemma, which I refer to as the Truman-Gandhi-Churchill trilemma (or the TGC trilemma), encapsulates the perspectives of three influential figures: former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the 33rd President of the United States Harry S. Truman, and the revered Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi. It finds relevance in our current situation as we endeavor to forecast the glide path and resting point for interest rates into 2025. By navigating the TGC trilemma with caution, practicality, and humility, we seek to uncover insights that challenge consensus and shed light on the likelihood of interest rates heading lower than currently believed.

The term “trilemma” is derived from the Greek words “tri,” meaning three, and “lemma,” meaning proposition or assumption. Trilemmas can occur in various fields and contexts, including philosophy, economics, politics, and decision-making processes.

In today’s investing world, a trilemma emerges. Do we adopt Churchill’s strategy and make predictions only after events have occurred—a perspective embraced by many forecasters on Fintwit and Wall Street? On the other hand, Truman would seek a one-handed economist willing to make forward-looking calls, believing that such an approach could lead to optimal returns. Or do we follow Gandhi as he reminds us that mistakes are inevitable? It is essential to recognize the uncertainty and unpredictability when making portfolio decisions. Investing is hard and investors must navigate this trilemma, acknowledging the potential for errors and the limitations of foresight in an ever-changing world.

In light of this, it is worth considering the words of Charlie Munger, one of his generation’s top investors, who recently passed away at the age of 99. Munger once famously said, “I’m constantly making mistakes where I can, in retrospect, realize that I should have decided differently. And I think that is inevitable because it’s difficult to be a good investor.” Munger’s candid admission underscores the challenges faced by even the most seasoned investors, further emphasizing the need for humility and continuous learning in the face of uncertainty.

It is within this gripping tapestry of perspectives, where the TGC trilemma takes shape, that we find ourselves confronted with a profound question: How can we navigate this complex labyrinth and avoid the pitfalls of ambivalence while embracing the humility of uncertainty? As we delve deeper into this enigmatic conundrum, a startling revelation emerges—the case for a federal funds rate below the natural rate of interest. .......




..... The evidence is unambiguous. There never was going to be a struggle to bring inflation under control. Its return to mean, low, rates was always inevitable, and it is happening.


Hussman: The Return of Buy-Low Sell-High



Bubble Fare:



Investing Wisdom:

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Tweet Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Current lawsuits could create a framework for suing fossil fuel companies over their role in the environmental crisis





Geopolitical Fare:

Mearsheimer: Genocide in Gaza

I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.

Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.1 It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.”  That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. ......


By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it.

.................... We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.

“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.” ...........



It honestly blows my mind that there are still people adamantly supporting Israel after all this. After all the people they’ve killed. After all the lies they’ve been caught in. After all their comments endorsing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and all their actions showing they mean it. 

If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, you’re just telling everyone you don’t care about truth or morality. You’re announcing to the world that you care only about your weird ideological agendas and geopolitical control. 

You are publicly proclaiming that you are a dogshit human being. That you have lived on this earth all these years without arriving at any level of emotional or psychological maturity. That you have wasted your life on this planet.

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Wait til the Zoomers figure out that Epstein did what he did because he was running a sexual blackmail operation for Israeli intelligence.

The most significant aspect of the Epstein story is not that he helped some famous people rape minors, it’s that powerful intelligence agencies use child sex slaves and sexual blackmail to exert control over our society.

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Nothing will convince you that Israel is a racist apartheid state held together by hate and violence faster than watching the videos uploaded onto social media by Israelis themselves.



............... Here’s former British Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow saying the same thing:
My advice to all young diplomats and analysts [is that] if you want to understand Mr Putin’s foreign policy, listen to what he’s saying. You won’t like it, but you need to understand it, you need to listen to it. The place to start is the Munich speech in 2007.
“Listen to what he says”. It’s quite easy to. Putin has said a lot and most of it appears on the Presidential website in English as well as the original Russian. Never read what the Western reporters say he says – they almost always distort it – read the original. ..........

I have written many times on this site about bad Western intelligence and the unending stream of nonsense spewed in the West about Putin. Indeed, if there is one big theme of my website it’s that the Western view of Russia and Putin is almost completely false.  .......



.................. The Russian leader published a treatise in summer 2021 “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, where he also not only reaffirmed his recognition of Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state, but also endorsed it. In his words, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But on what terms?” Simply put, he made peace with the fact that Ukrainians nowadays regard themselves as separate from Russians, but he wants their states to respect each other’s interests.

Therein lies the roots of the current conflict since post-“Maidan” policymakers have consistently done the West’s bidding at Russia’s expense because they owe their power and wealth to the former. That New Cold War bloc envisaged threatening Russia through multidimensional means from Ukraine in order to coerce it into becoming their vassal. If it wasn’t for this grand strategic goal, then everything that led up to Russia’s special operation over the past decade wouldn’t have happened.

Regrettably, Ukraine’s role as the West’s “anti-Russia” was eventually embraced by a growing number of its people, whose identity was reshaped around World War II-era fascist nostalgia as a result of their post-“Maidan” regime’s socio-cultural policies and the past three decades of Western “NGO” work. Reversing this radical revision of Ukrainian identity from its pre-World War I and Soviet-era roots to today’s neo-fascist form is what Russia is referring to when it says that it wants to denazify Ukraine. ......






The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. 

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. ........





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