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Sunday, August 25, 2024

2024-08-25

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


Economic and Market Fare:


The outlook for a soft landing is still in play, and the Leading Economic Index continues to signal otherwise. The LEI declined 0.6% in July, bringing the streak to 29 consecutive months without a gain. At 100.4, the index has now fallen below the prior cycle's low reached in April 2020. .........


........................ Despite the indicator's trend decline and recession risks that remain elevated, the long downdraft in the LEI overstate recent weakness in the economy.



The latest retail sales report seems to have given Wall Street something to cheer about.

Headlines touting resilience in consumer spending increased hopes of a “soft landing” boosting the stock market. However, as is often the case, the devil is in the details.

We uncover a more troubling picture when we peel back the layers of this seemingly positive data. Seasonal adjustments, downward revisions, and rising delinquency rates on credit cards and auto loans suggest a more cautious view. The consumer—the backbone of the U.S. economy—may be in more trouble than the headline numbers indicate. .....



Rate cuts won't prevent a recession and the economy is deteriorating 'quite rapidly,' investment strategist says



........ Since 1980, only two easing cycles have seen the Fed cut Fed Funds by less than 5%. The most recent, 2020, was limited as the Fed could only bring rates down to 0%. The other was 1995-1998.

Based on history, the market is betting on an anomaly, like 1995-1998, and not normal monetary policy behavior.

Given that the market expects a relatively minimal rate cut, we should suppose it’s expecting a 1995-1998 economic scenario, i.e., no recession.   

John Authers of Bloomberg recently opined what Fed Funds futures may imply regarding inflation. To wit:
So even if markets buy the notion that the Fed will have to cut soon, they also seem convinced by the theory that the very low rates of the last three decades were an aberration, and that the norm for monetary policy will be tighter in future. That presumably goes hand-in-hand with slightly higher inflation rates.
Presuming the collective market thinks this time is different, they must believe that economic growth and inflation trends of the pre-pandemic have been reversed. We have discussed such a forecast many times. To wit, we share a section from Our Elevator Pitch For Bonds, published in July 2023.

Our view of the attractiveness of bonds can be honed into an elevator pitch. It essentially boils down to a straightforward question – Is this time different? Have the forty-year pre-pandemic economic trends reversed, and the economy’s inner workings changed permanently over the last three years? More specifically, are slowing productivity growth, weakening demographics, and rising debt levels about to reverse their prior trends and become a tailwind for economic growth?

If you think, as we do, that the last three years are an economic, fiscal, and monetary anomaly, then the opportunity to earn 4% or more on a longer-term bond is a gift.

We think yields will revert to low levels when the pre-pandemic economic and inflation trends reemerge. Negative interest rates are not out of the question. ...



Nautilus Research: Another Signal for Lower U.S. Yields (via TheBondBeat)
Significant Deceleration in 1-year Net Change in U.S. 10-year Treasury Yield

Over the past few months, we have consistently focused on U.S. yields, building a comprehensive narrative around a significant peak in rates. While much of our analysis has aligned with broader market consensus, our primary objective remains to deliver actionable signals and metrics. By examining historical precedents through various technical lenses, we aim to provide our clients and readers with perspectives that instill greater confidence in their decision-making.

Importantly, we were ahead of the curve in identifying the timing of peak yields—this is well-documented in our previous posts. Today, we bring attention to a new signal that points to lower U.S. yields across the curve. Specifically, when the 1-year net change in the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield drops below -50 basis points after previously exceeding +50 basis points, it historically signals continued declines in yields. The table below illustrates that 10-year, 5-year, and 12-month rates typically decline by approximately 50 basis points over the next 6 months and by 80 basis points over the following year. 




The blows keep coming for manufacturing



Bubble Fare:




Tweets of the Week:
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Tweet Vid of the Week:


Quotes of the Week:



... My favorite quip ever said about the stock market was by Sir John Templeton. ... He perfectly summed up what really drives the stock market—notably not using a single word that isn't directly tied to investors' emotional state:
"Bull markets are born on pessimism, they grow on skepticism, they mature on optimism and they die on euphoria."
Some of the messages imbedded in Templeton's most famous quote—as well as in those below—are even more important to ponder given today's lofty valuations and signs there still exists some investor complacency. There is nothing wrong with rejoicing in bull markets; but as recent volatility reminded investors, markets don't rise in a straight line. As such, we should always heed the messages from some of the greats of finance. ......................



Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:




... “As the Greenland ice sheet melts, it will probably rise sea level +10 feet by 2100"
..........
..........

The last million years have been the coldest period in the last 300my. What we think of as the “warm interglacial” periods between ice ages, are still colder than it has been for about 300my.

.............................
........................
So, what’s your “takeaway” from all of this?
Did you see or hear about it on ANY mainstream news source?
Before reading this, how much did you think the sea level was going to rise by 2100?
How much do you think it’s likely to rise now?
We cannot “stop” sea level rise.
If it’s ten feet by 2100 then we are going to lose almost every port city in the world by then.
The Moderate climate models are still showing less than two feet of sea level rise by 2100. ...



................... How long had this moment been coming?  The unmatched resource for answers is Spenser R. Weart’s superb 2003 book The Discovery of Global Warming, and its greatly expanded, steadily updated, richly linked hypertext version online. ..............


Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model.







Geopolitical Fare:


I keep seeing liberal commentators like George Takei trying to frame Kamala Harris as the best candidate to bring peace to the middle east, despite her coming directly out of the administration which has been lighting the region on fire with its insane warmongering.

So let’s be clear here: Peace is not on the ballot in November. Americans are voting for Red War or Blue War. That’s it. Those are the choices.

I repeat: Peace. Is. Not. On. The. Ballot. Nobody who stands an actual chance at winning is going to bring about peace, because the US president is a manager of the US empire, and the US empire depends on constant warmongering.

Any debates over whether Trump or Harris are the one to bring about peace are nonsensical, because neither of them are. It’s like arguing over which car salesman might start handing out free cars — that’s not the job. It’s not what the people who have that job do. .............



........................ We look like lunatics. We are acting as crazy as someone whistling and dancing in the middle of a roaring house fire. Surely it would be a hell of a lot saner to be screaming all the time than to be going along our merry little way like this horror isn’t happening. 

But that would be socially inappropriate. It would make people uncomfortable. Here, in this dystopian civilization, it’s considered rude to even bring it up.



The main reason I’m not looking forward to another Trump presidency is because of how fake and insipid political discourse gets when he’s around. It’s not because of his policies and actions (the US empire’s depravity continues uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office), it’s because of the widening effect he has on the gap between reality and narrative when he’s president.

Trump’s presidency oversaw huge new cold war escalations against Russia, genocidal atrocities and deliberate starvation in Yemen, brutal new starvation sanctions on nations like Venezuela, Iran and Syria, brinkmanship with Iran, massively expanded bombing campaigns, turning the situation with Israel into an incendiary tinderbox, and the arrest of Julian Assange. But if you ask the average American liberal what was the worst thing Trump did during his time in office, they’ll start babbling about Russian collusion and insurrections and a conspiracy to end American democracy. They spent the entire time ignoring all of Trump’s worst crimes and shrieking hysterically about pretend nonsense and rude tweets.

And it’s just as bad with Trump’s supporters, who generally have no idea that Trump even did those things. They believe he spent four years “fighting the Deep State”, waging a brave populist revolution against the establishment to Make America Great Again. They’re just as clueless as the Democrats as to what Trump actually did, because both sides spent the entire time in a media-generated narrative matrix that kept them blind to the whole thing. The gap between the raw data of what actually happened and the narratives about what happened is immense.

At least with Biden people are actually sometimes talking about the actual evil things his administration is actually doing, like the Ukraine proxy war and the genocide in Gaza. The reality of the situation has much more in common with the topics of political discourse. Under Trump everyone enters into this bizarre, contorted reality tunnel where fake nonsense is all that matters and real problems are invisible to everyone who’s anywhere near the mainstream.

Really not enthusiastic about the idea of experiencing that moronic bullshit again.



.......... Republicans are so fucking stupid that every few years they start shrieking that they’re under attack from “communism”, and by “communism” they mean the opposing US party which supports the exact same capitalist status quo they support but with tampons in the boys’ bathroom.

God I wish Democrats were as cool as right wing idiots make them sound.

❖

Imagine there was a mass shooting in a major US city. Easy, I know.

Now, imagine that instead of stopping the shooter, the US government started sending him boxes of ammunition.

Now imagine instead of going on for a few minutes, the mass shooting rampage went on for ten months.

Now imagine that instead of being treated like an earth-shattering tragedy in mass media headlines, people just kind of got used to it and it sort of faded into the background of mainstream news reporting.

Now imagine the mass media started reporting on the mass shooting as though the mass shooter is only defending himself, and reporting on casualties of the rampage using passive-language headlines which don’t attribute the killings to the shooter.

Now imagine there was a presidential race, and everybody started talking about which candidate is best qualified to keep giving ammunition to the shooter.

It’s like that. 



Celebrity progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza” at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. There is literally no evidentiary basis anywhere for this assertion. She made it up.

Kamala Harris is not “working tirelessly” to do anything at this time besides become the next president. ..............

The Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was one of the only decent foreign policy moves made by the Obama administration, and killing it was one of the nastiest things Trump did as president — along with his other recklessly hawkish actions against Iran like implementing starvation sanctions and assassinating Soleimani. But rather than pledging to re-enter the Obama era of de-escalation and detente with Iran, the Democrats are attacking Trump for not fighting a war with Iran while pledging ironclad support for the nation that’s doing everything it can to get that war started.

So yeah, that’s the Democratic Party for you. Vote for them and you get a nicer-looking mask on the blood-spattered face of the US war machine. It’ll kill just as many middle eastern kids as the Republicans will, but it will kill them under the presidency of a woman of color with “she/her” in her Twitter bio.



.................. So, so many of the world’s problems wouldn’t exist if the Democratic Party simply was what it pretends to be. If it really did stand against the sickest impulses of the Republican Party, if it really did stand for peace and justice and equality and ordinary working people, things would be unrecognizably different — not just for the United States, but for the entire world. Because good people would be doing something instead of nothing, evil would not triumph. 

The Democratic Party exists to prevent this from happening. ..........

That’s the effect of the Democratic Party, and it’s been doing this since long before October 7. Obama made a whole political legacy out of weaving tapestries of flowery prose expressing deep compassion and a love of peace and justice, while spending eight years continuing and expanding all the most depraved and murderous policies of his predecessor. Biden gave liberals throughout the western world a sigh of relief when he took office, because at long last “the adults are back in the room,” and now he’s waging a steadily escalating proxy war against a nuclear superpower while backing an actual genocide. .........

The empire has weaponized the insight that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, so spreading awareness of the reality that the Democrats are not good people and are not doing good things helps take away that weapon.

Evil will continue to triumph as long as good people continue to do nothing, and good people will continue to do nothing as long as they believe their values and desires are represented by a political party whose sole purpose is to ensure the triumph of evil. Shattering that belief is an absolutely essential step toward a healthy world. ...



Before NATO invaded Kursk–and make no mistake, it was a NATO incursion by proxy–the Ukraine was not in any existential danger. Now, however, words this evening from former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, “you’ll know it when you see it and you’ll see it soon,” make it abundantly clear that the peace will be dictated by Russia.

Full stop.

No third party intercessors, except maybe China. Non-zero chance for India.

But for the West and NATO? How you like that crow you pack of corrupt idiots? .......




Murray: We Are The Bad Guys

........... Somehow I mentally compartmentalised this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in western democracy or the notion that the western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers.

It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up – probably particularly hard if like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system.

I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part – call it “the West”, “liberal democracy”, “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-conservatism”, “Imperialism”, “the New World Order” – call it what you will in fact, it is a force for evil.

Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience. 



............... Palestine is the moral litmus test of the day, just as Iraq and South African apartheid were in their day. Eventually everyone will either pretend they were against it, or mea-culpa “how could I have known?”

But just as with Iraq, everyone who wanted to know, knew. ......



Watching the Democratic National Convention is like watching the tackiest version of the Nuremberg Rallies. The Democrats are committing genocide and using actual Nazis in Ukraine as we speak, and people are excited about what color the meaningless candidate is. It's not a convention (nobody voted for this person), it's a gender reveal. Meanwhile, and I repeat, these people are committing genocide right now. These people are committing ecocide against all living beings, drilling more oil than ever in their history. These people are committing national suicide, killing more people than ever with COVID-19. And the Democrats are somehow the lesser evil? Not numerically.

By any of the metrics above, the Democrats are worse than Donald Trump. The Democrats are not fighting for democracy lol. They're just 'Nice' Nazis. I put the 'nice' in scare quotes because they're actually scary. World War III, genocide, ecocide, a police state, crackdowns on free speech. That's all coming under the Democrats. That's all happening right now, it's not some hypothetical fear you need to vote out of being.  ...

They're committing a genocide as we speak. Everything else is just branding, AKA lying through their bloody teeth.

The Democrats keep positioning themselves as the lesser evil than Trump, but that's pure appearances, and appearances are deceiving. On every issue the Democrats claim to care about—war, democracy, environment, immigration—they're actually worse than their enemy. Check the record and see. .........

Does this mean I support Trump? Lol, a pox on both your houses. Jill Stein is on the ballot, a Jewish woman that opposes genocide, it's not like it's impossible to cast an ethical vote. Or to ethically not cast in your lot with this lot at all, and join the Resistance. Many iterations of voting for the lesser evil have evolved the most malignant evil in the heart of Whitistan. America always gets worse, one lesser evil at a time.

To return to Trump, as this house of cards only has two suits, Trump is actually the lesser evil. He is of course a vulgarian, but look at his record dispassionately and the numbers don't lie. Trump killed less people with COVID and gave out more assistance, Trump did not start major wars with Russia and in the Middle East, and he was at least honestly evil. Trump is the last honest American just as Hitler was the last honest European. These men were honestly evil representatives of honestly evil empires. The other 'good' rulers were (and are) just lying. ....................................

I used to wonder what ordinary citizens were thinking during the Nazi era, but I don't wonder anymore, I see it with my own eyes all the time, that's Americans .......





Sci Fare:






Other Fare:

Welsh: Intelligence v.s. Judgment v.s. Creativity

.......... Judgement is the ability to know what ideas and mental operations are useful and appropriate. People without judgment apply the processes and paradigms they have learned and come up with “correct” answers which are wrong in the real world, or which are harmful.

For the paradigm of this think Larry Summers. Brilliant, but no judgment. He’s a reliable indicator of what you shouldn’t do because he applies the economic paradigm without any judgment, and since economics is a crap discipline to start with, being based on faulty axioms, he produces very intelligent garbage results. He’s a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) machine.





RIP Fare:

Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty-much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly, and morally—questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism. ........



Poetic Fare:

 
Orwell knew.
As did Illich, and Gandhi.
And a few other farsighted in the century prior.
But the rest of us?
The hoi polloi.
Do we know?
 
*
 
That the system we live in.
And celebrate.
This veritable ‘best of all possible worlds’.
Progress, Development, and all the rest of the
self-validating cataract of cliches that sensurround
our senses making us near insensible.
Is a Death Machine.
 
*
 
Just 400 years of it.
And everything around us is dying.
Flora, fauna, all of it.
Habitats dissolving, ecologies dissipating.
The Planet itself, or that part which sustains life, in mortal stress.
 
*
 
And we?
How about us?
Exalted King Vampires astride the top of the food chain.
Masters of the Universe.
How are we doing?
 
*
 
What is left of culture, society, civility , in the
heartlands of where the Great Game originated ?
Sociopaths and psychopaths rule the roost, with societal empathy
derided, disdained, and debauched.
War criminals govern us.
Billionaires buy and sell our fragmenting Republics with brazen impunity.
An Amoral Society (mark the oxymoron) is the latest contribution in the long-drawn saga of EuroModernism (European Modernism).
We live in, and by, dread alone.
And all around us Human Devolution spreads its dissolute wings.
 
*
 
The civilisation-mongers that claim(ed) to be paragons of reason and liberty are racing, joyously, even tumultuously, to raze the world (the same way it began?) with a Big Bang.
Cannon and chicanery had them seize the world, once upon a time.
The very same twin tools now stand put to end it.
Bravo!
 
*
 
What price now the hoary liturgy of liberte?
Freedom?
What a concept!
Yes, we are become ‘free’.
From the prospects of even mere continuity.
In a fact-free, conscience-free, value-free, world.
We are free: free-wheeling, free-dealing, Zombies run amok.
 
*
 
Unabashedly, Post-Truth, Post-Morals, and Post-Human.
That is the Collective West today.
The First World, no less.
First in a world they have securely ensured will not last.
 
*
 
Yes, they are inveterate, intrepid, fighters for freedom.
Yours and mine, that is: except we are trying to preserve it – from their very onslaughts.
I refer to the real autonomies of life: far more concrete than the sloganised memes of ‘freedom’.
 
*
 
Of course, they can claim no monopoly of barbarism.
They have (had) plenty of competition.
But no Others, in human history, have brought us, insouciantly, to the very edge of Exterminism, all the while preaching a meretricious Litany of Rights.
 
*

What is it about EM (European Modernism) that has wrought this?
Its ideology and praxis has deracinated the very roots of our humanity, silting the eternal founts of human affections – viz., family, kindred, and community that keep us sane – with the venal sludge of competitive cupidity, avarice, and accumulation, reducing us to atomised, anomie and angst ridden, solitary, adversarial, asocial individuals ever swirling to higher and higher spirals of mortal alienation from our inherent species-being of Conviviality, Cooperation, and Caring.

In so doing, they morphed a band of convivials into a company of strangers.
Forever lost, lonely, lorn, and disconsolate.
Worse, in metaphor, they almost turned us mammals into reptiles.

The perennial Qualities of Life have been buried, entombed, in the varied avalanches of this misanthropic Age of Quantity.
Madness is the inevitable societal condition of humans when stripped of their baseline affective supports.
We are, and have long gone, mad.
 
*
 
Orwell , Illich, and Gandhi.
Time to read them again, as institutions crumble about us?
And as the Dystopian EM Juggernaut slashes and burns its way onwards , hurtling us all toward a mutually-assured extinction.



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