***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
- Elevated uncertainty causing officials to urge caution on cuts
- Policymakers still showing confidence over inflation path
“Importantly, uncertainty about the neutral rate has also risen, perhaps because the structural changes in the economy are relatively recent and will take time to fully assess,” Schmid’s counterpart in Dallas, Lorie Logan, said in separate remarks at the same conference.
The uncertainty is weighing heavily on Fed officials, because overshooting the neutral level would risk reigniting inflation. That will likely make them proceed with greater caution and possibly introduce pauses into their rate-cutting cycle.
Logan said “widely consulted models” put the neutral federal funds rate anywhere from 2.74% to 4.6%.
Expectations for another era of Trumponomics have boosted US yields and the dollar, while downside risks have increased in the Euro area due to the collapse of the German coalition government. Further divergence looks likely.
“Private credit has been a relatively new competitor for more traditional leveraged finance,” Altman said. “Whenever there’s competition, there’s usually an impact on prices or, in this case, spreads.”
The average spread was 2.55 percentage points on Wednesday, but going back to 1986, that level has averaged closer to about 5.2 percentage points, according to Bloomberg index data. Current levels should be closer to historic levels, Altman told Bloomberg.
Investors don’t seem too worried now, but they probably should be, Altman said. Bankruptcy filings and leveraged loan defaults have climbed since 2022, and leverage levels are relatively high, Altman wrote in an analysis in August.
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: The Turtle and the Pendulum
Quotes of the Week:
US October producer price inflation is due. These numbers better reflect corporate pricing power than does the consumer price data. The tone should be consistent with a December rate cut—in this situation, the Federal Reserve does not want rising real rates, and inaction would raise real rates over the course of this year.
Yesterday’s US consumer price inflation data remains in thrall to the fantasy owners’ equivalent rent (at over a quarter of the index and rising over 5% a year, this is a price no one has ever actually paid). Middle-income homeowners’ true cost of living inflation has been below 2% y/y for six months.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Purpose and Profits?
You might know, by now, of my views on ESG, which I have described as an empty acronym, born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy and sold with sophistry. ..........
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to reach records highs this year, with "no clear signs" of a peak despite a growth in clean energy, .......
...... Almost half of humanity lives below $6.85 per day. This population does not consume goods and services at a rate exceeding Earth’s capacity. Yet here we sit, on the wrong side of six of the nine planetary boundaries identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
How did we get here? Via the economic activity of the other half of humanity. The planet, and all its inhabitants, desperately need this population to slow down. ..............
The green investing revolution never stood a chance in the US once ensnared by the culture wars, but that wasn’t the only cause of death
......... Supporters of the concept were already disillusioned that ESG had become little more than a marketing wheeze, and several big fund managers, including WisdomTree and Invesco, have faced fines in the US for “greenwashing” (claiming their products were greener than they really were). In France, BlackRock is under fire over allegations that 18 of its funds sold as sustainable are in fact investing in fossil fuels. ...........
Wargaming the Future of Climate Change
Berman: Naïve Optimism vs Reality: The True State of Our Planet and Energy Future
Berman: Naïve Optimism vs Reality: The True State of Our Planet and Energy Future
Much has been written about the denial, by many if not most of the world’s people, that climate collapse is accelerating, and that it will irrevocably precipitate or intensify and quicken the collapse of our entire global human civilization, with catastrophic consequences possibly including the extinction of most or all life on the planet, including human life.
But the inevitability of climate collapse is just one obvious example of humans refusing to believe what they don’t want to believe.
Here’s a summary of why I think this is so prevalent:
- Our behaviours (what we do) are strictly the product of (i) our biological conditioning (what our ‘instincts’ tell us to do), (ii) our cultural conditioning (others’ behaviours — what they say and do), and (iii) the circumstances of the moment. ‘We’ have no say in any of it.
- Our beliefs (what we think) are the product of the above three conditioning factors, plus (iv) our rationalization (how we ‘make sense’ of things, and what we want to, and refuse to, believe, and (v) our own behaviours, which need to be justified and rationalized.
...............
“What a diff’rence a day made”.
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......................... We are in the ENDGAME now.
I want to be REALLY CLEAR about this. It’s TOO LATE to do anything about the Climate Crisis without attempting GEOENGINEERING the Climate System. Probably using SOx aerosols to increase the planetary ALBEDO to reflect more sunlight away from the planet.
Simplistic but this is the basic idea. Put SOx aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
James Hansen, and the team of climate scientists who work with him, are calling for a HUGE build out of nuclear power plants AND a global program to “turn the sky WHITE” with sulfate particulates. In conjunction with a CRASH effort to slash Global CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.....................
Last weeks election means we are effectively going to do nothing to SLOW the Climate Disaster down. It probably means +4°C by 2050 and a -80% decline in agricultural outputs.
Collapse is going to play out now over the next 25 years. ...............
U.S. B.S.:
Biden’s legacy is genocide, war, and nuclear brinkmanship. That’s all anyone should talk about when this psychopath finally dies. Anything positive he may have accomplished in his political career is a drop in the ocean compared to the significance of these mass-scale abuses.
Biden spent his entire career promoting war and militarism at every opportunity, and then spent the twilight years of his time in Washington choosing to continue supplying an active genocide that is fully dependent on US-supplied arms.
He refused off-ramp after off-ramp to the horrific war in Ukraine that has burned through a generation of men in that country, which he knowingly provoked by amassing a military proxy threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never tolerate being amassed on its own border. In the early weeks of the conflict Biden and his fellow empire managers sabotaged peace talks to keep the war going for as long as possible with the goal of bleeding Moscow, and at one point his own intelligence agencies reportedly assessed that the probability of a nuclear war erupting on this front was as high as 50–50.
Coin toss odds on nuclear war. To call this a crime against humanity would be a massive understatement.
Biden has been facilitating Israeli atrocities in the middle east with US military expansionism in the region and bombing operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. He will spend his lame duck months backing Israel’s scorched earth demolition of southern Lebanon.
This is who Biden is. It is who he has always been. It is true that his brain has begun to rot away like just like his conscience has rotted, but in his lucid moments he adamantly defends his administration’s decisions as the only correct course of action, and it aligns perfectly with his past. To know this, one need only to look at the pivotal role he played in pushing the Iraq invasion, or his extremist rhetoric about how “If there were not an Israel we’d have to invent one.”
This is the legacy that Democrats were forced to spend the last election cycle pretending is great and awesome. It’s no wonder they lost. So now, as a parting gift from Joe Biden, Americans and the world get another four years of Donald Trump.
That’s the story of Joe Biden. That’s the whole entire thing. Anything on top of that is irrelevant narrative fluff.
***** Heying: Reason for Optimism
Donald Trump has named Republican congressman Mike Waltz as his next national security advisor, a position that was held by ultrahawk John Bolton in the last Trump administration.
Like Bolton, Waltz is a warmongering freak. Journalist Michael Tracey has been filling up his Twitter page since the announcement with examples of Waltz’s insane hawkishness, including his support for letting Ukraine use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, criticizing Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine, advocating bombing Iran, opposing the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and naming Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and Venezuela as “on the march” against the United States toward global conflict. The mainstream press are calling Waltz a “China hawk”, but from the look of things he’s a war-horny hawk toward all the official enemies of the United States. .............
Sci Fare:
Even in a Hall of Mirrors
Three presidential elections in a row, with three rounds of outrage and disbelief.
Three presidential elections in a row, and three rounds of excitement and relief.
We are in a hall of mirrors. We can be sitting right next to someone who has been shown entirely differently “facts” about what is true—facts which demonstrate how decrepit Joe Biden is, how sexist Donald Trump is, how incompetent Kamala Harris is.
I don’t believe the middle of those three statements, and I do believe the others. Many people believe the opposite of what I do. None of us are inherently fools or fascists for believing what we do.
Science is about figuring out what is true. We scientists don’t always get there, and we won’t necessarily know when we do. We make mistakes—lots of them—and it is incumbent upon us to correct those mistakes when we discover them. Science is a messy, non-linear process, and scientists are only human. We all have capacity to discern fact from fiction, though, to think scientifically. One easy step to take is to distrust any who tell you that they are the voice of science. Science is not something to be followed, or to be believed in. Science is something that you do.
One thing is certain: (almost) nothing is certain.
Fact-checkers have become popular in recent years as arbiters of truth, as have their mouthpieces, the mainstream media. They are not. They get a lot of things very, very wrong. The problem is not so much that they get things wrong, though, but the certainty and authority with which they do it. We were assured that SARS-CoV2 didn’t come from a lab. (Oh, but it did.) The mRNA Covid shots are safe and effective. (No, they’re not.) Donald Trump said that there were some very fine people among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. (He did not.)
Our sense-making apparatus is upside down and inside out, and even most of the scientists don’t seem to know what is going on. ....
Meanwhile, the warmongering neocons whom Democrats like me used to disdain, are being welcomed in to the Democratic Party.
That sentence may be difficult to parse. To be clear: I still disdain the neocons. And I am no longer a Democrat.
Any party that embraces the neocons is not the party for me. Establishment politicians are running to the Democratic party, because that is their only remaining safe harbor. That should tell us all something about what is happening over in Republican land. It’s chaos. Many of us hope and believe that the chaos will result in far better things in the future. Chaos is inherently unpredictable, though ....................................
or, very predictable:
Clean sweep for Israel: Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz, Brian Hook.
........... As I said the other day, I suspect Pompeo and Haley — who were part of Trump con 1.0 — had their names floated to make the other warmongers Trump was set to name look more palatable.
And, as I’ve argued for years, Trump is the opposable thumb of the establishment. ............
Like Bolton, Waltz is a warmongering freak. Journalist Michael Tracey has been filling up his Twitter page since the announcement with examples of Waltz’s insane hawkishness, including his support for letting Ukraine use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, criticizing Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine, advocating bombing Iran, opposing the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and naming Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and Venezuela as “on the march” against the United States toward global conflict. The mainstream press are calling Waltz a “China hawk”, but from the look of things he’s a war-horny hawk toward all the official enemies of the United States. .............
The way raw video evidence debunked the “Amsterdam pogrom” narrative in real time in full view of the entire world is exactly why Israel hates journalists. It’s why it won’t let the western press visit Gaza, and it’s why it murders Palestinian journalists at every opportunity.
❖
Trump’s “America First” cabinet is being packed full of swamp monsters who want to pour American money into helping Israel destroy the middle east, pour American money into the unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine, and prepare American troops to fight a war with China to defend Taiwan.
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I’m already getting Trump supporters all over my replies telling me that the hawkish inclinations I’m seeing from the incoming administration aren’t what they look like. They did this throughout his entire first term. Four fucking years of morons telling me the insane acts of warmongering I was witnessing were actually fine and good, or even brilliant strategic maneuvers against the deep state warmongers. Really not looking forward to another four years of this shit. ..............
Geopolitical Fare:
The liberal world order was always a myth
Hedges: Genocidal Scorecard
U.N. Special Rapporteur Albanese’s report is an an urgent appeal for a full arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until the genocide of Palestinians is halted.
Israel grants gas exploration license in areas considered to be within Palestine's maritime boundary
Trump Is Not the "End of Liberalism", Ending the War in Ukraine, European Industry Getting Ruined By US Diktaks, Germany's Failing Economic Model , When Airlines Vanish
.................... I take issue with Fukuyama’s contention that American voters rejected liberalism. Donald Trump is nothing if not a 1990s Clinton liberal. Elon Musk, a man who played an outsized role in Trump’s victory, is also your standard-fare liberal who was, until recently, himself a Democrat. Two key players on Trump’s transition team, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, are also both ex-Democrats and both are political liberals.
One of the bigger themes of this Substack is how the term “liberal democracy” is used and abused, and constantly changed and updated. This constant morphing leaves those who fall outside of its present and temporary definition relegated to the status of “illberals”, if not fascists. ...............
President Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire American missiles deep into Russian territory risks plunging the world into crisis in the finals months of his administration.
Europe turns away from America
........................................ Which reminds me: I suppose Foucault would have asked why Europeans were so quick to accept many of these evidently silly ideas and norms, apart from the convenience of doing so, and the work involved in finding alternatives. I think there are a number of different issues here, and a number of different reasons why Europeans, quite voluntarily, adopt US norms and ways of looking at the world, in spite of the obvious irrelevance of many of these norms and the failure, in practice, of attempts to apply them.
One, simply, is power worship. The impression, again heavily fortified by American cultural output, is of a powerful, determined and ruthless nation able to act decisively on the world stage. ...................
In its purest form this attitude did not last very long, given the failure in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq, but it remained, and remains, highly influential. It is at the root of the disastrous underestimation in Europe of Russian military power, and the belief that Russia, like all weak states, can just be kicked around without consequences. It is also at the root of unreasoning hatred of Iran, and fear that a rising China will do to the United States what that country has sought to do to the rest of the world. The realisation that the United States is not, in fact, a “hegemon” or an “Empire,” and has been misguided to behave as if it were, is only slowly dawning now on European elites: I return to this point below. ................
The Myth works backwards, of course. So insistent is the stress on omnipotence, omniscience and omnicompetence, and so complete is the exclusion of the interests and opinions of other nations, that we are inevitably required to conclude that Washington had decided everything in every crisis. So when the war in Ukraine started and it was expected that Russia would be defeated and Putin overthrown within days, that was assumed to be part of the plan all along. When that didn’t happen and sanctions were imposed to strangle the Russian economy, that was assumed to be the plan all along. When the Ukrainian forces were wiped put and had to be rebuilt with NATO stocks, the plan all along was assumed to be more order for defence manufacturers, although in fact much of the equipment sent was obsolescent or surplus and would not be replaced. Then when the war went into its second and third years it was assumed that the plan all along had been for a sustained war exhausting Russia militarily. Now that it is clear that the West, rather than Russia, will be left exhausted and militarily weak, someone is no doubt trying to fit that into the long-term plan, ignoring the fact that “Washington “ and “long-term” don’t really belong in the same sentence together. .........................
They don't make Colour Revolutions like they used to
.......... The Sahel, a vast region spanning parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, is known for its economic hardship and violence, but the new governments in these nations are taking major steps towards breaking free from foreign influence and asserting local sovereignty . There’s a lot of hope. As Stanley Kwabla Arku, a Ghanaian journalist with Pan African Television, writes:
The Sahel’s recent shifts have ignited a movement against foreign military involvement, particularly French influence, which many local voices say has fueled conflict and stymied economic progress. ..........
A big reason why is that the US and France are helping to drive the violence, including using Ukraine, much the same way they do with Israel, to destabilize nations and regions that threaten Western capital. .........
Critics of foreign aid are often quick to point out the faults of recipient countries. This column looks at the motives of the donor countries themselves. Examining the flow of foreign aid following major discoveries of natural resources, the authors find that aid flows tend to increase following a discovery despite the recipient country becoming wealthier. The finding suggests that donor countries are not entirely altruistic, but prioritise access to valuable natural resources and their strategic interests above recipient need.
Sci Fare:
COVID-19 was arguably the worst public health disaster in history, and as more and more are now realizing, most of that could have been prevented if the medical industry had been less greedy throughout the pandemic and not put profits before people. Because of this, the unconditional trust the industry made enormous investments to create and has relied upon for decades has been shattered (e.g., a large JAMA study of 443,445 American adults found that in April 2020, 71.5% of them trusted doctors and hospitals while in January 2024, only 40.1% did)
Over the last month, I have received a large number of requests to highlight some of the egregious conduct by our healthcare authorities throughout the pandemic. At the time, it did not feel like the correct time to publish it, but now it does (e.g., something can be done about it).
In this article, I would like to focus on a few critical areas that need to exposed as we begin exploring the topic of COVID accountability ...................................
Regulatory Corruption
Throughout COVID-19 we’ve seen numerous red flags about the danger and ineffectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. Yet, regardless of the data or how much the vaccines fail to live up to their promises, the FDA and CDC keep on approving and then mandating the vaccines while insisting they are safe and effective. This has made many suspect those agencies are corrupt, particularly since:
•The government accountability office interviewed employees at these agencies who stated that political interference caused their agencies to adopt policies that went against scientific evidence during COVID-19.
•Leading scientists in the FDA’s vaccine approval division resigned as a result of being pressured by the Biden administration to approve an unnecessary COVID-19 booster. ...................
Canary In a (Post) Covid World: Money, Fear and Power
Other Fare:
If, at the moment, you find yourself looking around for guidance about, I don’t know, the nature of reality and how easy it is to manufacture it, you could do a lot worse than turning to Philip K. Dick. .......................
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, published in 1978 but begun around the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation, has achieved cult status for its exploration of manufactured realities and institutional power. In the book, Dick examines how media systems can create “pseudo-worlds” delivered directly into people’s minds. His analysis of how “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups” strikes an eerily familiar chord in our hyper-digital age. .................
Defining and allocating legal rights, and, by implication, assigning legal personhood, is one way to protect nonhuman entities (such as animals, plants, and ecosystems) and the interests of future people. This paper aims to clarify some basic issues underlying legal and legal policy debates about such protections ........
Their body, your choice
Their body, your choice
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