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Sunday, July 14, 2024

2024-07-14

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


Economic and Market Fare:


The evidence supporting multiple Fed rate cuts is now solid. 

As I've been documenting for at least the past year, shelter costs, as calculated according to the BLS's flawed methodology, have been artificially raising reported CPI inflation. Abstracting from shelter costs, the year over year change in the CPI has been less than 2% for 10 of the past 13 months, and in June it was 1.8%. This clearly meets and exceeds the bar that Powell set this week, thus opening the door to multiple Fed rate cuts that could begin as early as the July '24 FOMC meeting, and will almost certainly occur at the September 18th meeting and at subsequent meetings. .................

In sum, the Fed has no reason to not lower rates soon. The market fully expects the first rate cut to come at the September FOMC meeting, and another 1 ½ cuts to come by year end. I don't see why the Fed can't move sooner and more forcefully. Inflation has been licked, and interest rate sensitive sectors of the economy are really hurting. Lower rates would provide welcome relief, and it would take a whole lot of cuts to add up to any meaningful stimulus. 

Cutting rates now would not be playing politics, since it would not boost the economy by any reasonable measure before the November elections; it would instead be a responsible move to avoid further damage to the economy.


we'll see

If you have been waiting for a tell, wait no longer. The great rotation is here. ...........


The tailwind of freakishly loose monetary policy is now over

........... Yet the boom in private markets since the 2007-2009 financial crisis, especially in the big buyout category, was built on ultra-loose monetary policy. Most of the returns came not from enhancing the efficiency of portfolio companies, but from selling assets at ever-increasing market multiples and through leverage, which increases the return on equity relative to the return on assets.

Today multiples are down, financing costs are up and balance sheets are weaker thanks to that leverage. Payouts to investors are low as managers are reluctant to sell assets and crystallise returns while multiples are depressed. As for private debt, its growth has been substantially driven by regulatory arbitrage, with banks facing tougher regulation since the financial crisis .......



Bubble Fare:


...................................................... The end of the cycle will only come if moneymaking applications of AI have not arrived by the time of the next economic slowdown. In an environment of falling profits, investor tolerance for expensive, low-return experiments will disappear and the AI boom will end. Many people describe Nvidia as selling picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It’s a good metaphor. But if no one discovers gold before the next recession, the rush will end abruptly.



Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:





Outages from Albania to Texas show how electricity networks aren’t ready for climate change.




At the NATO summit in Washington on Thursday the US president referred to Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “President Putin”, referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”, and said he is “following the advice of my commander-in-chief” on important military decisions. 

This man’s brain clearly does not work. It is done. Finito. No mas. Dementia has sunk in the rear naked choke, and Joe Biden’s neurology is tapping. 

Americans are watching live proof that their country does not require a president with functioning gray matter in order for decisions to get made and policies to be enacted in the Executive Branch of the US government. The wars and militarism have ticked on uninterrupted, the authoritarian agendas keep getting rolled out, and the same political status quo continues to be advanced. You could not ask for more conclusive proof that for all the fuss that gets made about US presidents and presidential elections, it is nothing more than a figurehead position for an empire that is not actually run by its official elected government. ....................

The “moderates” and “centrists” of the western world are in reality violent extremists, and not just violent extremists but the most murderous and destructive extremist group on the face of this planet. Not one group on Washington’s list of designated terrorist organizations has a body count that’s even a tiny fraction of what the US empire has racked up just in the 21st century alone.

This is the political ideology that Biden has aligned with throughout the entirety of his far-too-long career, from when he was just a baby swamp monster elected to the Senate at the age of 30 all the way until now as he watches all the cognitive flotsam and jetsam of his decades of Beltway soul-selling blur together like oil paints on the palette of his ruined cerebral matter.

This is who Joe Biden is. This is who western liberals are. They are the carnage, starvation and disease in Gaza. They are the biosphere strangling to death under the boot of ecocidal capitalism. They are the nuclear missiles being rolled into position around the world. They are a dying brain and a dying heart on a dying world of their own making. 

Hopefully the death of this toxic, omnicidal ideology won’t be too far behind the death of Joe Biden.



People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist. The only difference is that their delusions are much more widely shared, and that the mechanisms used to brainwash them are much more high-budget and sophisticated. The mainstream worldview is really just a mass-produced artificial psychosis.

It’s actually difficult to wrap your mind around the scale and pervasiveness of the mountain of lies upon which this dystopian civilization is built. You think you’re starting to get a read on things, then you gain more knowledge and insight and realize it goes so much further than you thought. You start pulling on one thread, maybe some obvious lie about Iraq or Palestine or whatever, and the whole thing just keeps unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Before you know it you’re staring at a society that is not just riddled with untruth, but actually woven entirely from the fabric of untruth. 

Everything. How your nation really works. How the world really works. How capitalism really works. What politics really are. What the media are really used for. What laws are really used for. What wars and militarism are really used for. What ideology is really used for. What religion is really used for. What culture is really used for. What rules and etiquette are really used for. It’s all made-up narrative all the way down, and all of those narratives are made up by the powerful, in the service of the powerful. ...........................


Democratic Party delegates must choose one come August.

............ Over the past eighty years there has been a lockstep partnership of both mainstream American political parties to use the democratic forms of the American nation state as a vehicle for militarized economic and strategic “full-spectrum dominance.” This political consensus has produced a neoliberal transnational culture of permanent war within which prospects of an authentic international, universal, and democratic peace have been all but destroyed.  ...........


Project 2025 As Warmed-Over Reaganism, Bretton Woods Revisited, Rio de Janiero's "Narco-Pentecostal" Gangs, Srebrenica and "Genocide", A Wife's Revenge

The populist tide that Donald Trump rode into the White House in 2017 was held back by a series of coordinated actions involving mainstream media, Silicon Valley, and what we call the “Deep State”. Whether via media hysteria, the “Trump-Russia” conspiracy theory, or intelligence officials pushing the falsehood that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinfo”, the Trump administration was effectively neutered from its first day up until its last.

This only tells us one part of the story. The other part involves that administration’s unforced failures that came from within. One thing that liberals and NeverTrumpers got right is that Trump was never presidential material, even if he has a wealth of executive experience in the business and entertainment worlds. This is not to say that all US Presidents have been made of that special ‘material’, but they all have had the organs of state at least not openly working to sabotage him.

It’s also no secret that staffing the Trump administration ended up being a complete disaster. Due to inexperience, naivete (or even negligence), “vetted” individuals were placed into positions of power to either try and steer the Presidency along the “accepted” course laid out by previous administrations, or to sabotage any efforts to try and chart a new path. ............



“Dangerous, diabolical, and dastardly” is how Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Leader, just described the so-called “Project 2025” planning document that all liberals have now been commanded to light their hair on fire about and run around in circles screeching how it portends some imminent apocalyptic MAGA takeover. 

........ What would be far more surprising is if the Heritage Foundation, which drafted the document now being wailed about by every Democratic pundit, had not maximally ingratiated itself with Trump — in fact, the Trump Administration’s embrace of the Heritage Foundation was already well underway during his first term. But now liberals, desperate for a campaign pivot amidst Joe Biden’s cognitive implosion, are using their usual overwrought melodrama to hype “Project 2025” as slam-dunk proof that Trump obviously represents an Existential Threat To American Democracy™ or whatever. What they curiously fail to mention is that the document is robustly aligned with many of the liberals’ most sacrosanct priorities. ...............



............ When Washington declares war on something, it invariably produces more of it. This seems perverse until you realize that wars on abstractions are simply how managerial bureaucracies extend their bases of power. A war that can never be won is a war with job security. A war that gets worse the longer and harder you fight it is even better, because this generates growth.

......... Meanwhile, the war on multipolarity seems in general to be doing a fantastic job of generating more multipolarity.

The longer Washington wages its cowardly war against Russia, China, Iran, and I guess now North Korea, the more Washington’s standing in the world is reduced. I say ‘cowardly’ of course because the war is not waged openly: formally, no war has been declared by Washington or any of its core NATO allies against any of the obvious belligerents. It’s all done through proxies which Washington pays to train and arm and die on its behalf, funding it all with a money printer whose brrrring has gotten defeaning. Or it’s done through sabotage; let’s not forget Nordstream, which kicked the legs out from under Germany’s, and therefore Europe’s economy, in perhaps the most breathtakingly cynical act of strategic sabotage against a supposed ally that one might imagine. Washington doomed Europe in order to ensure that Europe would stay attached to Washington. The whole world sees what Washington is doing of course, and is frightened lest it happen to them, but also disgusted that it happens at all; the latter emotion is becoming increasingly dominant, however, because Washington is becoming less frightening every day. ...................

............ While AI clearly works, strictly speaking, and will undoubtedly prove useful in the future, we can all see already that machine governance just isn’t going to work. The most advanced existing model can’t even formulate the tedious elements of a standard preschool literacy program correctly. When the hype bubble bursts – and it will, as all bubbles do – it will probably take the stock market with it, given that NVIDIA is the only thing propping the markets up right now, along with the last desperate hope of the global managerial class to hold on to power.




TDS (Trump Deragnement Syndrome) Fare:


I can hardly look at social media right now. I increasingly loathe the instantaneous hyper-emotional reactions, the fact-free assertions, the self-serving conjectures. Look, people are obviously going to have an emotional reaction to an event as momentous as an attempted assassination of a former and potentially future President. .........

I think the civic health can be damaged by a proliferation of poor public reasoning. .........

By “poor public reasoning” I mean making conclusory statements devoid of established fact, based on what you on some level want to be true, rather than what is true. ...........


Things got very, very close to being very, very bad.


It is dangerous to shoot at the King, and miss



.................................................. The mass psychosis of totalitarianism has been induced many times throughout history, and as Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind explained: “It is simply a question of reorganizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way.” The general method by which the members of a ruling elite can accomplish this end is called menticide, with the etymology of this word being ‘a killing of the mind.’

............ Never before in history have such effective means existed to manipulate a society into the psychosis of totalitarianism. Smartphones and social media, television and the internet, all in conjunction with bots that spread propaganda and algorithms that quickly censor the flow of unwanted information, allow influencers to easily assault the minds of the unwary. The addictive nature of these technologies means that many people voluntarily subject themselves to a non-stop bombardment.



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The western political-media class hasn’t been this sympathetic and supportive toward Trump since he bombed Damascus.

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I can’t wait til Trump is president so Democrats can remember that genocide is an inexcusable evil.

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The imperial narrative managers of the mass media have successfully paced the ongoing Gaza genocide from a front page story at the center of attention to something bad we just hear the occasional story about, like global warming or poverty. It’s still happening as ferociously as ever, but if you’re getting your information about the world from mainstream sources you are now only peripherally aware of this while your attention is directed to far less consequential things.

The picture the mass media paint of the world is night and day different from life as it actually is. It’s as different from reality as any other work of fiction, not so much because it directly denies reality or makes up whole cloth lies about it, but because it so drastically misrepresents what’s going on through the manipulation of public attention.

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Democrats have been babbling about what a decent and honest person Biden is while defending the decision for him to stay in the presidential race. This is ridiculous. Biden is not and has never been a decent person; he’s easily one of the worst human beings on this planet. And what’s funny is that his dementia has probably made him a softer, gentler person than he used to be. The world might be even uglier than it is now if he had his old brain.

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There’s a quote by Noam Chomsky which you absolutely must understand if you want to be able to make sense of political discourse in the west:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Regardless of your feelings about Chomsky, nothing about our information ecosystem will make sense to you without understanding and appreciating this quote. Until you get this and hold it at the forefront of your awareness, you won’t understand western politics, punditry or political debates.



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