***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
Wall Street’s market forecasts are too tepid. The S&P 500 could rally next year on a combination of AI growth and deregulation. But investors should prepare for a wilder ride.
.............. But history rarely is reasonable. Over the past 100 years, the stock market was more likely to gain 10% to 20% annually than 0% to 10%, according to Deutsche Bank data. Overall, stocks gained 20% or more 39% of the time, while dropping 26% of the time. An average year, which analysts are predicting, doesn’t happen all that often, despite the frequency of such predictions. ....
........ Shelter prices increased 0.3% for the month. *Everything* else all together *declined* -0.2%. On a YoY basis, shelter increased a little under 4.8%, its lowest such reading in almost 3 years. All other prices increased 1.6% YoY, the 19th month in a row they have risen less than 2.5%. In the broadest terms, high inflation remains almost all about shelter. .............
...... Now let’s discuss the other remaining problem child, transportation services. As I wrote yesterday, transportation services (mainly insurance and repair costs) lag vehicle prices. In November, vehicle prices increased a strong 0.9%, while transportation services increased less than 0.1%. On a YoY basis, vehicle prices remain *down* -2.2%, while the increase in transportation services costs slowed to 7.1%, which is bad, but still the lowest in nearly 3 years
Analyzing the two biggest sectors that drive the overall labor market
Freeland released her statement in a post on X, pulling no punches (emphasis ours) .....
Bubble Fare:
It’s time to bet against American exceptionalism
Having tagged America’s inordinately large share of global financial markets as “the mother of all bubbles” in my last column, the main pushback I got, even from the few people who share my view, was that there is no sign this bubble will deflate any time soon.
Almost no one foresees an imminent pop. Virtually every Wall Street analyst predicts US stocks will continue outperforming the rest of the world in 2025. But all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at a very advanced stage. If the consensus on “American exceptionalism” is so overwhelming, who is left to hop on the bandwagon and inflate it further? .....
......... But every hero has a fatal flaw. America’s is its sharply increasing addiction to government debt. My calculations suggest it now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth — a 50 per cent increase on just five years ago. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing, but for now, they think America can get away with anything, as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the reserve currency.
......... The longer a trend lasts, the more confident investors get, and the more indiscriminately they buy into the mania. In the late stages of a bubble, prices typically go parabolic, and over the past six months US stock prices have outgained others by the widest margin for any comparable period in at least a quarter century. When flying in such thin air, it doesn’t take much to stall the engines. All the classic signs of extreme prices, valuations and sentiment suggest the end is near. It’s time to bet against “American exceptionalism”.
Quotes of the Week:
Delwichhe: We are 10 trading days into the “best month of the year for stocks” and every day so far has seen more decliners than advancers on the S&P 500. I’ve been watching the market for a quarter of a century and have never seen more sustained weakness beneath the surface.
Delwichhe: We are 10 trading days into the “best month of the year for stocks” and every day so far has seen more decliners than advancers on the S&P 500. I’ve been watching the market for a quarter of a century and have never seen more sustained weakness beneath the surface.
Charts:
1:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
********** Hansen: Climate Change at the International Court of Justice (pdf)
......... Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to “net zero” at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate. ....................
But where is scientific advice? The UN is served by a huge scientific apparatus, but we hear little scientific objection to the farcical climate “strategy” at COP meetings. Voluminous IPCC3 reports contain good data, but what good are data alone? Scientists are the physicians of the planet. We have a moral obligation for diagnosis and advice. My comments here are based on a paper4 published a year ago in Oxford Open Climate Change and a paper5 accepted for publication in Environment, which my coauthors and I expect to be in the January 2025 issue.
Global temperature (Fig. 1) took an unprecedented leap of half a degree Celsius in the past two years, which confounded the climate research community. The warming coincided with an El Nino, but the El Nino was weak and could cause warming of only a quarter of a degree, half of the observed warming. Another big factor had to be involved, which we suggested in the Oxford Open paper was the “Great Inadvertent Aerosol Experiment” caused by restrictions on the sulfur content of ship fuels (Fig. 2), imposed in coastal regions in 2015 and on the global ocean in 2020. .............
Implications of the aerosol effect are staggering. Warming of the ocean surface will not go away. We are now living with an ocean that provides increased drive for strong storms and extreme flooding. Global temperature will decline a bit as the tropics goes into its La Nina phase, but we are now living in the +1.5°C world, averaged over the Nino cycle, and we are headed higher. An even more important implication is that climate sensitivity is not 3°C for doubled CO2, which has been IPCC’s best estimate. When aerosol effects are accounted for, observed global warming implies a climate sensitivity of 4-5°C for doubled CO2. This high climate sensitivity, combined with steady or declining aerosol cooling implies that global warming will accelerate more – unless the growth of greenhouse gas forcing declines rapidly. Thus, an honest assessment of the growth of greenhouse gas forcing is in order. Is the world making progress toward stabilizing climate? .................
Galbraith: Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust
A large majority of voters gave the Biden administration a failing grade on the economy. For the sake of future policy battles, it is worthwhile to try to understand their reasons.
................ If voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators—unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth—it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being.
Geopolitical Fare:
It’s pretty wild how the west went directly from “We need to occupy Afghanistan for two decades to prevent it from being taken over by the Taliban” to “Yay! Syria’s been taken over by al-Qaeda!”
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The IDF has moved to occupy new stretches of Syrian land in the name of protecting its safety and security in the wake of Assad’s removal, to approximately zero condemnation from the western power alliance.
One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel is that the only thing it can ever do to ensure its safety and security when a danger presents itself is to grab more land. Land grabs are always the answer.
So to recap:
Russia invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = wrong, evil, worst thing ever.
Israel invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = fine, normal, nothing to worry about.
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The US is considering removing Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham from its list of designated terrorist organizations following the al-Qaeda affiliate’s victory in Syria. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. .......
Syria has fallen.
It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can.
Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.
Israel is grabbing another large amount of Syrian land. ..............
With the fall of Syria Iran has lost the major link in its axis of resistance against Israel. Its forward defenses, provided by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are now in ruins.
As the former General Wesley Clark reported about a talk he once had in the Pentagon:
"This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have by now been thrown into chaos. Iran is -so far- the sole survivor of those plans. It will urgently have to further raise its local defenses. It is high time now for it to finally acquire real nuclear weapons.
The incoming Trump administration sees China as its major enemy. By throwing Syria (and Ukraine) into chaos the outgoing Biden administration has guaranteed that Trump will have to stay involved in the Middle East (and eastern Europe).
The massive U.S. 'Pivot to Asia' will again have to wait. This gives China more time to build its sphere of influence. It may well be the only power that has been a winner in this.
Sci Fare:
Other Fare:
Sardonicky: Health Care, Not Wealth Care
The New York City Police Department has just issued an urgent bulletin, warning corporate CEOs that "kill lists" bearing their names and other information have begun appearing online.
This is an outrage, given that everybody should know that only presidents are permitted to possess kill lists for the extrajudicial assassination of alleged terrorists with remote control Predator drones. Mere citizen Luigi Mangione sure had some nerve summoning up his inner Barack Obama and devising his own "disposition matrix" to rationalize the killing United HealthCare executive Brian Thompson last week. ...........
All Stories Are Propaganda
................. Let’s pick an extreme example: The massive, monstrous, sophisticated lies perpetrated by the US state department and military and “intelligence” community about almost everything they are doing across the globe, faithfully repeated by bought-and-paid political lightweights, and transcribed in op-eds and “news from a reliable source” reports by naive and incompetent reporters. We might (except for the odd reality-denier and conspiracy-theorist among us) readily agree that this is mostly propaganda. But if the perpetrators believe what they propagate to be true, is it still propaganda? What if they believe it because they want to believe it, even though the evidence they are ignoring overwhelmingly shows it to be false? What if they know it to be false, but think it’s essential that the public believe it to be true, to make the world a better, safer place?
................. Let’s pick an extreme example: The massive, monstrous, sophisticated lies perpetrated by the US state department and military and “intelligence” community about almost everything they are doing across the globe, faithfully repeated by bought-and-paid political lightweights, and transcribed in op-eds and “news from a reliable source” reports by naive and incompetent reporters. We might (except for the odd reality-denier and conspiracy-theorist among us) readily agree that this is mostly propaganda. But if the perpetrators believe what they propagate to be true, is it still propaganda? What if they believe it because they want to believe it, even though the evidence they are ignoring overwhelmingly shows it to be false? What if they know it to be false, but think it’s essential that the public believe it to be true, to make the world a better, safer place?
We might say it’s propaganda if they ‘know’ it to be false, and otherwise it’s not. But that seems a meaningless distinction if the outcome — a public that is persuaded to believe falsehoods — is the same. And when we get into intent, we are likewise on slippery ground. If they’re ideological morons like Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland or Canada’s deputy PM Chrystia Freeland (author of this preposterous nonsense), they likely believe (like many neocons) that the end justifies the means (the means being what we probably see as bald propaganda), and they are likely incapable of separating truth from fiction ..............
QsOTW:
“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
Whilst @bobscartoons cartoon seemed pretty shocking, it now seems accurate. The same group of devious psychos has been causing mayhem and bloodshed for decades in the name of "democracy". No doubt they will enjoy seeing their jihadist proxies al-Nusrah Front sacrifice the… pic.twitter.com/KfLxSLblEh
— Thinking Slow (@ThinkingSlow1) December 8, 2024
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