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Thursday, February 29, 2024

2024-03-01

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


Economic and Market Fare:


Investors are finding it increasingly pointless to be bearish as equity markets are about to lock in a fourth consecutive month of gains, the longest streak in Europe since the 2021 pandemic rally. .....

So while keeping one eye on the exit door just in case the overwhelming belief in this rally starts to weaken, more and more bears seem to be giving in now. HSBC strategists this week ended their tactical underweight stance in equities. The bank’s chief multi-asset strategist Max Kettner said that sentiment and positioning have been stretched and remain elevated but that “this isn’t enough to prompt a significant correction in risk assets” without a “clear catalyst.” .....

Some market watchers are noting that the velocity of pushing to new highs is actually a sign of caution. Point taken, yet timing the peak seems almost impossible if looking at the history of the Nasdaq index. Also, the pace of gains is slower than during the Internet bubble. ......




Major: Tail wagging dog

........ This experience has fostered over-sensitivity to tail risks which brings the idiom “tail wagging the dog” to mind. Bond yields are being pulled around by the tails. It’s more about the fear of something happening, not the conviction that it will necessarily happen. Right tails include geopolitical risk, unsustainable fiscal policy, and runaway inflation. The left side brings us deflation and hard landing risks.

Our diagram below, which is purely for illustrative purposes, presents the likely distribution of yields given a few scenarios. The x-axis starts at zero, has a midpoint of 3.0% and captures yield levels up to 6%. The likelihood of these yields being observed is measured on the y-axis. So, for example, the most likely occurrence – in the illustration it is a soft landing – is at the distribution’s peak.

Through the last decade bond yields roughly followed a normal distribution (that’s the one with the single hump) but the last five years have seen a skew to the right, and one which is not unimodal. We illustrate a bimodal distribution (the dotted line) of a bond market caught between the two extremes. It certainly feels like this sometimes. 


Our purpose is to consider how far yields could be pulled either side of an assumed baseline, assuming that policy rates will either be unchanged or go down (#42. Going binary, 11 December 2023). We know from the median path of short rate projections in the “dot plot” that the Fed’s view is consistent with this, so an obvious tail risk is that policy rates go up again, informing the scenarios on the right side of the chart.

For a baseline we imagine 10-year yields would be nearer to the 3.0% midpoint in our chart than the 4.3% in the market today. This is because the policy rate, currently at 5.25-5.50%, is projected to fall towards the 2.5% longer-run equilibrium in the dot plot, and the pure expectations yield1 on the 10-year is pulled down by the lower equilibrium. 

The yield on bonds can move a long way from the baseline because of the role of term  premium and assumptions on neutral rates. Adding and subtracting term premium, along with changing the assumptions on the equilibrium, is what gets us into the tails of the distribution, above 5% and below 1%. 

..... To generate scenarios for yields above 5.0% and below 1.0% requires only an extension of our imagination, given the market has traded at these extremes in the last five years. Whether the scenarios play out is hypothetical; it’s the change in the probabilities that matters.

In the bond market a 5-10% increase in the probability of an extreme event means yields  could move 10-20bp, assuming the actual event would result in a yield shift of 200bp in each direction. This is what’s been happening recently. At the start of the year futures markets expected US policy rates to be cut by March. Only a few weeks later the easing was repriced for June. Now, after one strong inflation print, there is the tail risk that policy rates may have to go up again.

Markets are being wagged around by the right tail. The usual suspects have been ultra-loose fiscal policy, geopolitical risk, and renewed inflation pressure at a time when it was supposed  to have been controlled. We don’t want to belittle these risks but, because we have been experiencing them in recent years, presumably they are already partly in the price. 



............... There is also the fact that the unemployment rate tends to a lagging indicator. By the time it moves substantially higher the horse has generally bolted and the economy is hurtling towards recession.

Therein lays a conundrum for central bankers: to actually achieve the soft landing that market pricing says is all but assured, rates will probably have to be cut pre-emptively.  But central bank speakers are still telling us “not so fast” on policy easing, even as the TIPS market tells us that real rates are at levels that we last saw in 2007 (immediately before a deflationary crash), and transmission lags mean that the full effect of any cuts won’t be felt for 18-24 months. Central bankers are going to try to catch a falling knife 18 months in advance. .......

Our own US Strategist, Philip Marey, continues to expect a recession in the United States later this year.

So, there is a good chance that we are now in the policy error zone. We’re comforted by model-driven forecasts that show GDP growth converging to trend, and inflation at-target over time (our own forecasts mostly suggest this), but the world of economic modelling is hostage to assumptions of Gaussian distributions, when in reality the distribution of possible outcomes often exhibits kurtosis or skew and can be hijacked by the introduction of new variables that were not incorporated into the model. That means that Keynesian DSGE models always predict a return to target, and that no problem is so great that it cannot be ‘transitoried’ away.

Consequently, one-in-a-hundred-year events have a nasty habit of occurring more frequently than they should, and seemingly small cogs in the larger economic machine can be outsized contributors to gains or losses. In an economic environment where monetary aggregates have experienced historically rapid expansion followed by historically rapid contraction in the space of just a few short years, there is plenty of scope for even the most conscientious forecasts to be mugged by the occurrence of events that were previously impossible to predict, or at least impossible to assign a probability to.

Markets continue to price for a soft-landings that history tells us almost never happen, and the economics profession, cognisant of risks in both directions, likewise adopts this as the base-case scenario. This follows the logic that if I put my head in the freezer and my feet in the oven, the room temperature is pleasant on average. Since the distribution of outcomes for important variables doesn’t always follow our assumption of a random walk, we should be mindful that forecasts are almost certain to be flawed, biased by what is known at the time, and hostage to the quality of our assumptions.

Getting those assumptions just a little bit wrong can easily result in a random walk spoiled.


Quick musings on ZIRP

A lot of people I know think that the Federal Reserve (and most other central banks) has permanently abandoned zero interest rate policy (ZIRP). While the Fed is widely expected to cut rates (at least a handful of times) this year, many of the economists I’m talking to are convinced that we are never ever getting back together with zero. (Apologies to T. Swift)

I’m not so sure.

Texting back-and-forth with a fellow economist last night, I wrote:
If the next crisis can be dealt with by cutting a few hundred basis points, standing up new lending facilities, modifying regulations, etc., then we don’t get all the way down to zero. But if the wheels are coming off big time, then down we go. I readily admit they want to avoid ever returning zero, but they will if they have to.
He replied (with a Minsky reference at the end):
I agree. I would argue that if the Fed keeps rates high, the household sector won't be able to handle it much longer. Everyone acts like 2000-2019 was the aberration. I still think that is normal. We fixed household balance sheets during COVID but then went right back to business as usual. The 2000-2019 era rates will all come back IMO until we figure out that Wall St should follow the real economy instead of lead it. It’s like people think there's no more money manager capitalism anymore.
................................ Which takes me back to something I used to say a lot: If you don’t have credible evidence of a long-term inflation problem, then you don’t have a long-term debt problem. A point I will come back to in a forthcoming post.




Noland: Overheated

“Periphery and core” and global government finance Bubble analytical frameworks continue to offer a fruitful perspective for better understanding today’s extraordinary backdrop.

At the “periphery,” China’s Bubble deflation has reached another critical stage. Here at the “core,” “Terminal Phase Excess” is also at a critical juncture.
Bloomberg’s Jonathan Ferro: “You think the biggest risk here is they hold too long, not too soon?”

Mohamed El-Erian: “Correct. If they don’t cut in June, you will hear me say, ‘oh no.’ We’re now making the opposite policy mistake that we made back in ‘20/’21.”
“Terminal Phase Excess” dynamics create great analytical and policy dilemmas. It's likely that the Fed will be viewed as having waited too long to begin easing policy. I fully expect the course of 2024 monetary policy to be debated for years and even decades. The ECB is still pilloried for a final rate hike in early-July 2008, just weeks ahead of all hell breaking loose.

The Fed, on the other hand, began aggressive easing in September 2007, having slashed rates 325 bps by April 30th, 2008. Extending the duration of “Terminal Phase Excess” only exacerbated systemic fragilities ........



Bubble Fare:


.............. Why am I highlighting how my own study & signal has underperformed? Two reasons:
  1. I am always objective and willing to think critically about my research.
  2. Many analysts (particularly the bearish analysts) continue to call this rally nonsensical and say that investors are acting irrational. They call this market exuberant and even accuse it of being in a bubble. However, the results of the current signal are dramatically underperforming historical results! Therefore, we know with certainty that the market has produced stronger returns after this signal flashed in the past. So is the market exuberant or is it actually lagging? To claim that it’s exuberant is subjective based on each person’s opinion, while the historical returns objectively imply that the market is lagging. As always, I’ll stick with the objective takeaways. The data suggests that the market is NOT exuberant and I plan on listening to the data, not the people who have been bearish for 18 months.


................... MVE/GDP is exceptionally intuitive — The stock prices ultimately reflect a claim of future profits the companies can generate, and GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced in a country. If the former goes up without a proportional rise in the latter, we can reliably assume that fundamentals are not driving the stock price.





..... My next chart only goes back to 1979. It shows US Nonfarm Business Productivity, calculated quarterly by the BLS as part of the GDP report. Obviously, the quarterly numbers are incredibly volatile – so much so, in fact, that I’ve truncated a large portion of the tails. It’s devilishly hard to measure productivity. More on that in a moment. The red line is the 20-quarter (5-year) moving average. The average over the whole period is…surprise!…1.92%, very close to the average increase in real earnings and real GDP per capita. As I said before, that’s what we expected to find.





***** Hussman: Speculative Euphoria and the Fear of Missing Out

This comment began as a brief “weekend update” to our internal team. Those have become more common in the past few weeks as market conditions have become increasingly extreme. I decided to expand the content and publish it as an interim note instead.


The reason is that even though the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 have struggled to match Treasury bill returns for over two years, investors seem to be developing an excruciating and nearly frantic “fear of missing out.” Lots of pressures are driving that fear: the recent push to nominal record highs, enthusiasm about an economic “soft landing,” an expected “pivot” to lower interest rates, and most recently, euphoria about the prospects for artificial intelligence.

While I’ve planned a deep dive into profit margins, interest costs, mega cap effects and other factors for next month’s comment, this brief note is about none of that.

Frankly, I think it’s reasonable that some of our largest investments should be related to AI, and they are, though not necessarily those with the largest market capitalizations. My impression is that the Fed will indeed pivot to lower rates late this year, though the pivot may be more consistent with the Fed’s aggressive easing during the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses than with quantitative easing and the recent zero-interest rate bubble. I do believe that current market valuations, whatever metric one chooses, are likely to be followed by weak-to-dismal 10-12 year total returns and deep full-cycle losses. Yet emphatically, nothing in our discipline requires those outcomes.

Put simply, the point of this note isn’t to change anyone’s mind, or counter bullish arguments. Though some tend to lash out at views that disagree with their own, bulls aren’t my adversaries. I expect to be one in due time, though for us, the difference between bearish, neutral, constructive, bullish and leveraged will depend on valuations and market internals, among other factors.

Passive, long-only investments are fine for those who have evaluated both their personal risk tolerance and the depth of market losses that have followed extremes similar to present. I do believe the evaluation should consider the potential for steep market losses, but some investors want to track the index, period, and that’s fine.

The intent of this note is to describe what we are doing – calmly and methodically, in our own discipline, to share the data surrounding those actions, and to remind investors how those actions will change as the data changes. ...........

............. Put simply, we are not defensive here simply because the market is overvalued on our preferred valuation measures. We could substitute those measures with the Shiller cyclically-adjusted P/E (CAPE) or even the S&P 500 forward operating P/E, and we would still be defensive. We’re defensive because market internals remain divergent, in combination with overvaluation and overextended market action. We take this combination seriously. A market collapse is nothing but risk-aversion meeting a market that’s not priced for risk.

Our investment outlook will shift as those conditions shift.

As Ben Graham observed, there is intelligent speculation, but there are many ways in which speculation may be unintelligent. In my view, chomping down on the speculative bit amid record valuations, divergent internals, euphoric sentiment, and overextended market action is among them. .............



........ In our investment discipline, the strongest market return/risk profiles emerge when a material retreat in valuations is joined by an improvement in market internals. Yet even if valuations were to maintain a permanently high plateau, improved internals and less overextended market action would be welcome enough.

In contrast, the most hostile market return/risk profiles emerge when unfavorable valuations are joined by unfavorable market internals and overextended market action. That’s the combination we presently observe, but that will also change.

This is what a market peak looks like
We can’t say with any certainty at all that stocks are at a market peak. We can also say with complete certainty that present conditions mirror what a market peak looks like.

The difference between the two statements is that one relates to the future, and one relates to the past. 

We can’t know the future, but it’s straightforward to examine history and do math. Presently, market conditions have a stronger positive correlation with historical market peaks, and a stronger negative correlation with historical market lows, than 99.9% of instances across history. As I noted in our February comment, I call this subset of history the Cluster of Woe.

The next few charts are ones I typically only circulate to our internal team. They’re part of an extensive set of flags, correlations, and overextension syndromes that are more useful at extremes than for ongoing discussion. The last time we saw a preponderance of warning signs similar to today was on the approach to the early 2022 peak .......

If there’s anything that would quickly make this worse, it would be a “leadership reversal” where the number of stocks setting new 52-week lows surges above the number of new highs, particularly within a few sessions of a record high. That’s part of a syndrome I’ve often described as a “phase transition.”

So is this a market peak? No idea. Do present conditions mirror a market peak? Absolutely.

Are we defensive because we think the rally in big tech is overdone, or we expect a recession, or we think credit risk is underestimated, or we expect a 50-70% market decline over the completion of this cycle? No. All or none of these may be valid concerns, but that’s not why we’re defensive here.

We’re defensive because we observe a preponderance of risk syndromes that feature internal divergence, particularly in our main gauge of market internals, coupled with rich valuations and overextended market action. Our view will shift as those elements change. That’s our discipline. It doesn’t rely on highly specific assumptions about valuations – even conventional measures are near historical extremes. It doesn’t rely on economic forecasts. It relies on observable, objective measures informed by a century of market cycles – every speculative episode, every market collapse, every burst of U.S. innovation since the horse and buggy .....






Quotes of the Week:

"I'm constantly fighting my bearishness about the world. One of the great hedge fund managers of all rime, Bob Wilson, greatest short seller ever, said he made 90% of his money on the long side, the math just works against you. If you're perfect on a short, you can double your money. But if you're wrong on a short, you can lose 10 times your money. If you're dead wrong on a long, you lose your money. But if you're right, you can make 10 times your money. It's a mathematical inverse of that with shorting. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. I know, therefore, that if you have a bearish bias, you have to be very aware of it. You have to work around it. And I always have." 


"As I look back now, it's obvious that studying history & philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than studying statistics. Investing is an art, not a science and those who are trained to rigidly quantify everything are at a huge disadvantage."


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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


When you meet a schizophrenic on the side of the street, who starts arguing to you that the sun is following him around, you generally don’t bother arguing against him. There’s just no point.

I kind of feel like that about the climate change “skeptics” too. I include among those ranks essentially all idiots, including the idiots who think we can just adapt to the changes. We know that every previous major episode of warming induced by the Milankovitch cycles triggered various positive feedbacks, that were responsible for most of the warming. In our case fossil fuels caused the initial warming, but it will continue with these positive feedback loops that are now starting to reveal themselves.

The planet can adjust to global warming, sure. It preserves life, by covering its surface in trees that absorb excess moisture, create shade for animals, fixate the soils, sequester carbon and reduce temperatures beneath their canopy, through evapotranspiration. But since our civilization depends on a handful of cereal grains fed to humans and to the animals we eat, rather than on mature trees in biodiverse forests, that means one of us has to go. ....


AI runs on power-hungry equipment that uses millions of gallons of fresh water. Policymakers are weighing the costs.



For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine – which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own – as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism. Yet as Alyssa Battistoni has argued, Latour nonetheless ‘inched to the left’ during the latter half of the 2010s, focusing increasingly on the climate crisis and its imbrication with capitalist production. By way of Gaia theory, he became less concerned with micro-agency and began to develop a concept of the totality of interlocking organic and inorganic planetary forces. In Down to Earth (2019), he even introduced a form of overarching social antagonism by suggesting that the primary division of the twenty-first century was between the majority of the global population, who recognized the earth’s biophysical boundaries, and the elites who transgressed and disavowed them. 

This apparent radicalization culminated in Latour’s final published work, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (2022), co-authored with the young Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz. Here, all prior reservations about terms like ‘class’, ‘society’ or ‘capitalism’ seem to have evaporated. No more sniffing the ground in search of lost microorganisms. Latour – true to his name – towers above the political landscape, scanning it in search of an ‘ecological class’ capable of salvaging the planet.



Geopolitical Fare:


............. This just might be the most American thing I have ever heard of. It’s more American than the fake bald eagle cries they put in Hollywood movies. It’s more American than monster trucks and mass shootings. You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it. ............



............. I would never do what Bushnell did, and I would never recommend anyone else does either. That said, I also can’t deny that his action is having its intended effect: drawing attention to the horrors that are happening in Gaza.


............ 
  • US liberals in 2016: Wanting universal healthcare is a pie in the sky fantasy
  • US liberals in 2020: Wanting full student loan debt forgiveness is a pie in the sky fantasy 
  • US liberals in 2024: Wanting your country not to commit genocide is a pie in the sky fantasy
❖

If the United States really was the defender of justice it purports to be and actually used its military in the way it claims to, it would have told Israel to cease its genocidal atrocities in Gaza and taken military action if Israel refused. Instead, it’s actively running support for Israel’s atrocities.

This shows you what the US empire really is, and what it has always been. This shows you that its “humanitarian interventions” have never actually had humanitarian goals. It shows you that every time the US has attacked a foreign nation under the narrative cover of freeing its people from its tyrannical government was in fact an act of mass military violence based on lies. ....

In reality, the US is the hub of a globe-spanning power structure that requires endless violence to maintain its hegemony, and what we’re seeing in Gaza is just one more expression of that violence. This isn’t some fluke aberration in the US empire’s behavior but a very normal and expected manifestation of it. The facts clash with the United States’ story about itself because the story is a lie.



....... Israel’s version of events has of course changed over the course of the day as narrative managers figure out how best to frame publicly available information in a way that doesn’t harm Israel’s PR interests. Currently we’re at Israel admitting that IDF troops did indeed fire upon the crowd after previously denying this, but claiming that this isn’t what caused most of the the casualties, saying it was actually the Palestinians trampling each other in a human “stampede” which caused them harm. Essentially the current argument is “Yes we shot them, but that’s not why they died.” .........

As terrible as the Israeli spin machine has been on this atrocity, the western imperial media have been even worse. The verbal gymnastics they’ve been performing in their headlines to avoid saying Israel massacred starving people who were waiting for food would be genuinely impressive if it wasn’t so ghoulish. ........

This happens because the western mass media do not exist to report the news and give you information about what’s been going on in the world, but to manufacture consent for the political status quo and the globe-dominating power structure it supports. The only difference between our propaganda and the propaganda of a ruthless dictatorship is that the people who live under a dictatorship know they are being fed propaganda, whereas westerners are trained to believe they are ingesting impartial factual reporting. ..........

The only good thing about what’s happening in Gaza is that it’s waking westerners up to the fact that everything they’ve been told about their society, their media and their world is a lie. Cracks are appearing in the illusion, and those of us who care about truth, peace and justice need to help draw attention to them. From there, real change becomes a genuine possibility.


Here’s who the West should really be ‘decolonizing’

............................... We could add more examples. But the problem should be clear by now: Too many Western intellectuals are betraying the first obligation of their professions: to at least strive to be honest. The almost compulsive urge to weaponize themselves, their positions, and reputations against Russia has overcome any respect for facts and consistent standards. That alone is a sad picture of ethical decline. But their response – or often complete failure to respond – to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, is so much worse again. It is at that point – that is now – that their blatant disregard for the Palestinian victims and their needs and rights reveals them not only as biased careerists and ideologues, but as bereft of conscience and compassion.


Kiev's War on Donbass: A Personal Journey to Find the Truth

Last week marked ten years since the U.S. sponsored a violent insurrection in Kiev that toppled President Victor Yanukovich — Ukraine’s democratically elected and internationally recognized leader.

Taking control of Kiev in 2014 was just one step in a bigger U.S. plan to expand NATO and absorb Ukraine; then to be followed by an effort to subjugate Russia, overthrow President Vladimir Putin and install a puppet such as the recently deceased American asset Alexei Navalny, a position taken up by his widow Yulya Navalnaya.

Since Putin is a strong leader who defends Russia’s interests, the ruling class in the West named him Public Enemy # 1. The U.S. seeks a return to the 1990s, with a leader in the Kremlin who would let American and European oligarchs to once again pillage Russia with ease.

The bloody events in Ukraine during 2014 that were carried out by Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers, but orchestrated and paid for by the U.S., forever changed the way I saw my country. .........................................


A New York Times exposé outs years of unsavory details about the Ukraine's relationship with the CIA, while a Ukrainian spy chief swats down U.S. messaging. Is a breakup at hand?



Sci Fare:

for J.I.:



When you vaccinate people against a virus they’re subsequently going to get infected by twice a year or more, then you want the induced immune response to be suitable for the long term. Everything suggests however, that the SARS2 vaccines induce an immune response that is not suitable for the long term. This is not just problematic for the people who received these vaccines, it is problematic because it is encouraging the evolution of more virulent SARS2 variants, as I will demonstrate in this post.

This is an important post, where I will explain three important points in successive order:
  1. Vaccination has induced an inappropriate immune response to SARS2, that damages the body. Experts who observe this inappropriate immune response in patients are now openly calling in the scientific literature for an end to the use of these vaccines.
  2. The inappropriate immune response has started encouraging the evolution of successively more virulent variants of SARS2, ever since the first Omicron variants emerged. This is in contrast to the natural immune response, which selects against virulence.
  3. We can identify the molecular changes that will encourage a dramatic increase in virulence. These are mutations that would normally fail to spread themselves, but are now starting to be selected because of very strong antibody pressure on a specific region of the Spike protein and likely facilitated by the unique new insertion mutation seen in BA.2.86.
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.................. As always, I’m all in favor of people just reading what I am explaining here and trying to falsify it. ............................

We have an innate immune system for a reason, that picks the tools it picks for a reason. All of this would have been academic, if these vaccines had delivered what they were promised to do: Protection from infection. But they don’t achieve this and more importantly, don’t even turn their recipients into dead-end hosts.

So why isn’t anyone serious warning about any of this? Why do you have to find out about this stuff through an obscure Dutch blog? Well, more and more people are willing to speak out. I’m going to quote a study looking at antibody responses that was released a month ago: ...............................

It’s not difficult to interpret these results, the trend is obvious. They show that ever since the first two Omicrons (BA.1 and BA.2), the virus is getting slowly but steadily better at fusing cells together, reaching the level seen in the pre-Omicron versions.

That’s what you get, when you force the adaptive immune system to do a job meant for the innate immune system. Fusogenicity is the main determinant of intrinsic virulence we know of. And so, we arrive at the conclusion that we’re encouraging the evolution of ever more virulent variants of this virus. ..................................

Virologists who recognized early on that vaccination with inactivated vaccines against a virus like this is bad news and felt a strong moral obligation to warn against it, do not like looking at these statistics, because it clearly reveals to them where this is now headed.

But for outsiders like me, who had to teach themselves what’s going on, these numbers are important to discuss, because it is the evidence we need, to prove the severe consequences mass vaccination with inadequate vaccines has had. As a simple guy, you receive conflicting messages from experts, with the majority claiming these vaccines are the best thing ever.

That’s why I’m sharing this data with you: Because it reveals that the warnings of a small minority against this endeavor were correct. ................................

I understand this is not pleasant information and distressing for some. I want people to understand what is happening and why it is happening however, for multiple reasons. To start with, the people who brought this misery upon the world need to be held accountable. I have these statistics available, they’re easy to find, it should be easy to find for public health officials and vaccine manufacturers too. I don’t want people to pretend that this is some sort of mystery that emerged out of the blue, you can see clearly what is happening.

Second, if people understand what is emerging and if more people look at this, then people have a better chance of preparing themselves for it and looking for solutions to this problem.





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Sunday, February 25, 2024

2024-02-25

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Analysts have picked apart a string of hot reports on economic growth, the labor market and inflation


Kolanovic: 1970s and Risk of a Second Wave, Elections and Markets, Positioning, via TheBondBeat

.... We believe Investors should be open-minded that there is a scenario in which rates need to stay higher for longer, and the Fed may need to tighten financial conditions. The ~25% stock market rally since October was predicated on a repricing of the Fed (from cutting only 2 times in 2024, to cutting ~7 times in January). While most of those incremental cuts are now priced out, the stock market did not correct at all. Volatility has been unusually low, and risk positioning has increased substantially over the past year (see below). Many investors pursue momentum strategies on a cross-asset basis (e.g. heavily overweight equity), or cross-sector momentum themes (such as long mag 7 and short Russell 2000). While momentum strategies most of times make money, reversion points can erase years or performance in short periods of time.



The Nasdaq 100 rallied 3.01% today and closed at a new all-time high. 

The last time the index had a one-day gain of more than 3% to finish at an all-time high was...wait for it...3/22/2000.

March 2000 certainly wasn't a good day to suddenly turn bullish on the Nasdaq, but some context is in order.

While 3/22/2000 was the last time the Nasdaq 100 had a day like today, it actually had 22 similar days during a stretch from June 1998-March 2000, and it happened plenty of times during the index's entire 1990s run starting in 1991.







Bubble Fare:

The current situation with Nvidia and AI isn’t nearly as extreme as the dot-com era, but the prospect of cheaper money on Fed rate cuts could add fuel.




Quotes of the Week:

“As goes Nvidia, so goes the market,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer of Bokeh Capital Partners LLC. “It does confirm the narrative that AI is going to continue to be strong for the foreseeable future. This narrative supported the markets last year, why wouldn’t it do the same this year?”



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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

A ruthless dissector of unwarranted assumptions takes on environmental catastrophists and techno-optimists.

................................. Smil is a ruthless dissector of what he believes to be unwarranted assumptions, and not just those of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish satirical novelists. The first book of his that I read, twenty years ago, was “Energy at the Crossroads,” published by the M.I.T. Press, in which he wrote that the power under the direct control of an affluent American household, including its vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman latifundia owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a nineteenth-century landlord employing 3,000 workers and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern access to energy, most of it produced by burning fossil fuels. No one can doubt that twenty-first-century Americans’ lives are easier, healthier, longer, and more mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s comparison makes it clear that most of us underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the scale of the energy transformations that have made our comforts possible. 

More recently, Smil has written about ongoing efforts to address climate change, and about the feasibility of achieving “net zero” by 2050. In “How the World Really Works,” published in 2022, he writes that, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, “despite extensive and expensive expansion of renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary energy supply fell only marginally”—from eighty-six per cent to eighty-two per cent—and that, during the same period, global consumption of fossil fuels actually increased, by forty-five per cent. Those numbers surprise people whose sense of environmental progress is shaped by car commercials and by news stories about breakthroughs in solar panels, algae-based fuels, and organisms that turn carbon dioxide into stone. ............

Toward the end of “How the World Really Works,” he quotes a line, usually attributed to Descartes, that could serve as his own guiding principle: de omnibus dubitandum. Doubt everything. .............

Smil has written a great deal about renewable-energy technologies, and he has said that their implementation cannot continue to grow quickly enough to fully negate the global increase in over-all energy demand during the next two or three decades. Unrealistic expectations for such technologies, he has written, arise in part from inappropriate extrapolation from the extraordinarily fast and sustained evolution of solid-state electronics ..........

In the book’s preface, Smil writes that most growth processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then levels off. An error that humans make with similarly predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly vertical middle segment of an S-shaped curve can continue at that angle indefinitely (the price of Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, the price of bitcoin in the twenty-first). One of his conclusions is that the steady, unceasing economic expansion that economists and politicians dream of is not sustainable, and that the relentless pursuit of growth is environmentally disastrous. Smil has often said that he doesn’t make forecasts—“a pathetically and inexorably ever-failing endeavor on any level,” he told me—but predictions of a kind are implicit in much of his work. In “Growth” ’s coda, he writes, “Continuous material growth, based on ever greater extraction of the Earth’s inorganic and organic resources and on increased degradation of the biosphere’s finite stocks and services, is impossible”—a principle that, in various forms, animates almost all his work ............

Smil wrote, “The problem is that rather than take a clear-eyed look at the enormous challenges of phasing out the fossil fuels that are the basis of modern industrial economies, we have ricocheted between catastrophism on one hand and the magical thinking of ‘techno-optimism’ on the other.” Smil has described himself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but merely as someone who presents “correct statistics and engineering realities.” Yet he also told me that “upholding rationality in an utterly mad world leads nowhere” and that he sees “no point in throwing more dry peas against the wall of ignorance and self-satisfied but grossly misinformed ‘greenness.’ ” .........


  • ADNOC CEO Al-Jaber: the current trajectory of rapid energy demand growth is unsustainable.
  • According to ADNOC CEO Al-Jaber, it is unlikely that global carbon reduction targets can be met unless the world cuts energy demand.
  • Exxon Mobil sees global oil demand peaking in just a decade, though it has predicted that oil will remain the world’s most dominant form of primary energy by 2050.

worth checking out even if only for the pics:
Scientists who studied the region’s arid past warned this drought was coming. Thirst for growth won out. A Tyee special report.


The true cost of cleaning up mine pollution in B.C. is growing, an investigation by The Globe and Mail and The Narwhal has found. If disaster strikes, taxpayers could be stuck with covering the costs


Public Citizen’s comment on CFTC’s draft guidance on carbon credits is spot on.



Geopolitical Fare:


At this point in history the most effective way for westerners to fight the empire and build support for revolutionary change is to undermine public support for western status quo systems and institutions. One does this by using every means at their disposal to help people see that the power structures which rule over us don’t serve our interests, and that they are in fact profoundly evil and destructive.

It takes a flash of insight for a westerner to be able to really see the perniciousness of the US-centralized empire in all its blood-soaked glory. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in empire propaganda from childhood, which has normalized and manufactured their consent for the murderous, exploitative and oppressive power structure we live under. The current status quo is all they’ve ever known, and the idea that something better might be possible is alien to them.

Teachers of spiritual enlightenment point students to the truth of their being in as many ways as possible in an effort to facilitate a flash of insight into reality. The reason they do that rather than saying the same words over and over again from day to day is because everyone’s mind is unique and ever-changing, and what knocks things home for one student one day will just be useless noise to another student who will later pop open at something completely different. The receptivity to insight varies from person to person.

Similarly, a westerner who’s been swimming in empire propaganda their whole life won’t have their moment of insight into the depraved nature of the empire until something lands for them that they are personally receptive to. ...



The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that if a Republican president were to back a genocide it would be an evil and unforgivable atrocity, whereas when a Democrat president backs a genocide it’s a minor foible that you’d better shut up about unless you want Trump to win. ...

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans argue in support of wars, militarism, capitalism and oppression using right-wing language, whereas Democrats argue in support of wars, militarism, capitalism and oppression using left-wing language. .........


Welsh: The Level Of American Foreign Policy Incompetence

Is breathtaking. Brzezinski was Carter’s National Security Adviser. In 1997 he wrote, not long after the fall of USSR, that:
Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. . . . Averting this contingency . . . will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski
It’s sort of hard to do commentary on this, because of the jaw dropping, head-banging stupidity of it all.

I don’t like US foreign policy after WWII thru the late 60s, but it wasn’t brain-dead. Evil, often, but not stunningly stupid. Nixon was a terrible person, but his “opening of China” was smart and policy after him thru to Bush the Elder was, while not good, or smart, was at least not always stupid.

But since then American policy has been brain-dead. ......

American and Western elites in general aren’t suited to run lemonade stand, let alone countries or an Empire. ...



Sci Fare:

but only in those unfamiliar with math



Pics of the Week:

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

2024-02-20

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


Economic and Market Fare:


The Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) continued its decline in January, dropping 0.4% MoM (notably worse than the -0.1% MoM expectations), and December's 0.1% declin e was revised down to a 0.2% decline.
  • The biggest positive contributor to the leading index was stock prices (again) at +0.10
  • The biggest negative contributor was average workweek at -0.18
This is the 22nd straight MoM decline in the LEI (and 23rd month of 25) -  equaling the longest streak of declines since 'Lehman' (22 straight months of declines from June 2007 to April 2008) .......


but:

........... The largest positive contributor to the turn from a recession forecast came from the recent surge in stock prices to record highs. The benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX), opens new tab has risen by more than 20% since late October after signals from the Federal Reserve that its aggressive interest rate cycle aimed at containing inflation is over and that rate cuts are expected this year.

Persistently low numbers of new filings for unemployment benefits and measures of future credit availability, home building permits and new orders of manufactured goods also contributed to the change in the outlook. ...






Loan loss provisions have thinned even as regulators highlight risks in commercial real estate market

Bad commercial real estate loans have overtaken loss reserves at the biggest US banks after a sharp increase in late payments linked to offices, shopping centres and other properties.

The average reserves at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have fallen from $1.60 to 90 cents for every dollar of commercial real estate debt on which a borrower is at least 30 days late, according to filings to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The sharp deterioration took place in the last year after delinquent commercial property debt for the six big banks nearly tripled to $9.3bn. ......

Across the wider US banking sector the value of delinquent loans tied to offices, malls, apartments and other commercial properties more than doubled last year to $24.3bn, up from $11.2bn the year before.

US banks now hold $1.40 in reserves for every dollar of delinquent commercial real estate loans, down from $2.20 a year ago, according to the FDIC data, and the lowest cover banks have had to absorb potential commercial real estate loan losses in more than seven years.



China Fare:

China’s impressive topline growth figures mask underlying disparities and societal unease.



Vid of the Week:




Quotes of the Week:
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Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Alexander Muller, former FAO assistant director-general talks about how the impacts and cost of natural capital as well as social affairs have been ignored till now



Geopolitical Fare:

You Only Need To Cage A Bird If It Knows That It Can Fly

One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.

In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.

All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly. .....



There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now. ..........

But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.  Much of the rest of the world has seen through the risible MSM headlines used to delude the public that Russia is the great threat to world peace and stability. Like the previous Russia-gate lies, this ongoing one, coinciding with Navalny’s death, is timed to divert the public’s attention from key ongoing matters.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, Julian Assange will have his final appeal in a British court to prevent his extradition to the United States. Biden wants this journalist prosecuted for doing the job that the MSM have failed to do: Exposing the facts about the ruthless U.S. killing machine. ..........



.......... Since a pack of lies about Alexei Navalny won last year’s Oscar for the best documentary film of the year when he was alive,   there’s no doubt he can win another Oscar when he’s dead.  But alive or dead, the prize-winning propaganda of Navalny’s story bears no resemblance to the truth. This is what happens in wartime, especially when the side which is losing the war on the battlefield – that’s the US, NATO and the Ukraine – claims to be winning the war of words against Russia. ........






[not sure whether to place this in Economy or Geopolitics or ESG, so:] 
Other Fare:

Doomberg: Atlas Won’t Shrug
The human endeavor demands ever more energy. So it shall be.

............ What nearly all market observers get wrong is the nature of the relationship between energy and the economy. Most view energy as an input into economic activity, as though its contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) is no different than the other measurable goods and services that go into that important calculation. This is how otherwise intelligent people observe Russia’s comparatively modest GDP and conclude that it is nothing more than “a gas station masquerading as a country.” Such arrogance is the root cause of the West’s catastrophically flawed sanctions policy against the country, and such ignorance explains the dangerously naïve calls to “end fossil fuels,” the equivalent of demanding suicide on a billion-person scale.

This is a concept so vital that it is worth writing with bolded emphasis:

Energy is not an input into the economy, IT IS THE ECONOMY. Humanity organizes its economic activities to ensure a steady growth in the extraction and exploitation of primary energy because energy is life, standards of living are defined by how much energy is available to be exploited, and all humans everywhere are perpetually seeking a higher standard of living.

As far as foundational axioms go, that’s a pretty good one. ........



Pics of the Week:




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