***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
Protectionism threatens to fuel inflation, push up interest rates and end the bull run in equity markets
....................... Over the past three years, the US has defied worries that a slump may be imminent – most notably during 2022 and 2023 as the US Federal Reserve aggressively tightened the monetary screws to curb surging inflation.
After consistently surprising to the upside, the risk of a US recession is low on financial markets’ list of concerns.
So maybe now is the time to be worried. When confidence exceeds fundamentals, the risk of downside surprises increases.
Of course, it does not necessarily follow that a period of fast growth needs to give way to a slump. But a close examination of fundamentals suggests some cause for concern. ..................
The rise and fall of construction and manufacturing determine the strength of economic cycles.
Tightening of monetary policy impacts the Leading Economy. Once the Leading Economy turns down with enough magnitude and enough duration, the Cyclical Economy turns down, which means actual production and actual employment in key industries are falling.
Job losses that occur in the Cyclical Economy create downstream effects on services.
People who become unemployed in construction, manufacturing, and the tangential industries immediately stop discretionary spending and eventually may default on credit cards, auto loans, and home mortgages.
Banks then experience rising delinquencies and further contract credit, and only then do the services business experience a fall in revenues. At this point, the Federal Reserve and the broader public notice the trouble, but in reality, the sequence has been playing out for usually a few years. .............
The transformational upward shift in U.S. stock market valuations appears to be broad-based across nearly “all” parts of the stock market.
MMT Fare:
..................... Meanwhile, the so-called national debt remains nothing more than a historical record of US$ that have been spent by government and not taxed away from us over the centuries (i.e. part of our financial savings); the coveted r < g debt sustainability condition continues to hold; issuing Treasuries and paying interest remains a policy choice (not an economic imperative) so r < g can always be achieved by design; and the numbers used to generate CBO’s scary debt graph “are completely bogus.”
Bubble Fare:
China's futures traders drove a remarkable $400 surge in gold prices this past spring, and now they are positioned to propel it to $3,000 and beyond.
Charts:
0:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
***** The Crisis Report - 101
Let me present a “worst case” climate scenario to you.
................ They HOPE that global temperatures will stop going UP and that they even decline a little. Pretty much the way they have behaved over the last 60 odd years that we have been closely monitoring the Climate System.
That HOPE, isn’t based on anything. Planetary conditions have CHANGED. The earth’s ALBEDO has “dimmed” a LOT since 2014. That “dimming” means a LOT more ENERGY from the Sun is going into the Climate System, 90% of it right into the oceans
.......................... The ongoing, long term reduction in albedo has produced more than twice as much warming effect in recent decades as the radiative forcing from CO2.
James Hansen has stated that the change in the earth’s albedo since 2014 is roughly equal to increasing the CO2 level by +100ppm. That’s as if it suddenly JUMPED from 425ppm(CO2) up to 525ppm(CO2) in JUST 10 years.
That’s IN ADDITION to the roughly +100ppm of CO2 equivalent climate forcing that he estimates is happening due to the sharp increase in “the other” GHG’s like methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (NO). Gases which have also increased dramatically in the atmosphere since 2000.
Essentially it’s as if CO2 levels increased by about +250ppm since 2020. ......................
The Trump administration has already rolled back planned limits on PFAS chemicals, which have been linked to cancer and other health problems.
U.S. B.S.:
Hedges: The Empire Self-Destructs
These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
***** Welsh: It’s The End of the American Era. Period.
Commenting on all the stupid (like Musk’s antics) is tiring sometimes.
I was trying to figure out what to write today. There are about a dozen possible posts, all of which amount to “Trump or Musk are flinging poo at the wall.”
So let’s forget all the stupid little details and cut to the chase.
America is in irreversible decline. If you think otherwise, you are living in a fantasy world .........
We need to reimagine what it means to serve the common good.
........................... The message I got from this then-aspirational culture blending hyper-nationalism with cosmopolitanism: To serve the public was to enmesh your existence with the federal bureaucracy in some way.
Not only was that untrue all along—there were many ways to work for your fellows, then and now. The real problem, in hindsight, was that Washington’s political class was able to do horrible things around the world by exploiting our willingness to serve. And we can’t put all the blame on self-interested politicians, unfortunately.
We who served also never questioned whether or how often the state actually worked in the public interest, the common good. “Trust the process” was very much a belief system—one that made Washington uniquely unprepared for Trump. Clinging to process as if it were rosary beads in The Exorcist alleviated the need to think critically about who benefited and who was harmed by the choices we were helping the state make.
The Iraq War? A one-off mistake. The Global War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, black sites, torture programs, and drone strikes? Good intentions. Barreling toward a nuclear war with North Korea? Trump did it.
Insane. Insane. But such is the power of American exceptionalism—an almost impressive inability to see the world in a way that would implicate Washington’s exercise of state power in the global worsening of extreme inequality, racism, and militarism.
.............................................. Gen Z—and all the generations that come after—are facing a radically different, and more daunting, situation than their elders. For the most part, they didn’t grow up on Jack Ryan movies. Professionally, they have no incentive to believe in a theory of saving democracy that relies on deep-state heroes.
At any rate, there’s a certain intellectual and moral poverty in depending on cliques of well-educated, unelected elites to save our way of life, and I say that as someone who both very much thought that way circa 2017 and does not want to demobilize anyone who is doing the resistance thing inside the machine. If you’re a well-educated, unelected elite quietly working to save democracy, by all means you do you.
But the thing is, if you’ve ever worked in government, you know 1) how extraordinarily difficult it is to change anything, and 2) that the intellectual and political pressures to conform to the going concerns of those around you are immense. ...............................
Geopolitical Fare:
***** Maple Maidan
Consolidation of the New Colossus by Canadian colour revolution
................................ If Canada needs regime change, and Canada cannot achieve regime change internally, the obvious answer is to impose regime change. Either circulate the elites, such that a friendly albeit still nominally independent regime comes to power, or simply annex the country outright.
Annexation is far more complex than just bullying Ottawa into becoming a compliant, well-behaved vassal state again. But it is also a unified application of two core American principles: Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe Doctrine. .......................
............... Kicking the Palestinians out of Gaza to neighboring Arab states has always been the plan; it didn’t just emerge out of nowhere when Trump became president.
................... This has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine.
And that’s all it has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not fighting terrorism. Not self-defense. This is about driving Palestinians out of their homeland so that their territory can eventually be fully and officially absorbed by Israel.
❖
Democrats are as happy as a pig in shit right now. Suddenly they get to pretend all the unfathomable evils their president inflicted upon our world never happened, just because there’s a different president doing bad things who people are feeling big feels about. .................
The Truth about Rare Earths in Ukraine
................................ It is a strange case of a non-war for non-resources. But if mythical rare earths are used as a trick to end the war, I have to say that these people are admirable in a certain sense. True masters of deception, they play with the naiveté of the public as if they were violin virtuosos. And the public seems to love being played. From the time when Rumsfeld said that reality can be created, we became real-life Cinderellas, easily convinced that if we keep on believing, the dream that we wish will come true
Maria Zakharova:
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) February 13, 2025
„The Italian Foreign Minister, reacting to the phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, expressed the opinion that Europe should not play a “secondary role” in negotiations on Ukraine.
There is no emoji to convey the… pic.twitter.com/zrxQRbdA23
Sci Fare:
........... What you’re looking at, is damage to the immune system, observed through most of the human population. It seems to be a combination of damage from SARS-COV-2 and damage from the vaccination campaign. ................................
Other Fare:
Rise of the Real Technocracy
Zeitgeist Fare / TL;DR Fare:
Why Conservatives encourage bright young men to waste years flipping burgers — while holding up 'reformed' prostitutes as tradwife icons
......... Billionaire Psycho - the mind behind the transcendent Pygmalion and the Anime Girl, and the author of an excellent ongoing series on the fundamentals of storytelling - has performed a Herculean task with this piece, which doesn’t simply express his own sentiments, but pulls together hundreds - yes, hundreds - of posts from accounts large and small, infamous and obscure, anonymous and onymous, collecting them all in one place. As you read this, the collective howl of fury from our dispossessed generation rolls over you like the shockwave from an Olympian thunderbolt cracking through the firmament of a cultural consensus that you can see shattering in real time.
..........................................................
..................... Conservative think tanks are mirrored reflections of government’s inertia, stagnation, and self-satisfied neglect, overshadowed by the federal Leviathan they pretend to oppose.
Political movements require talent pipelines. And these talent pipelines operate on a generational delay. There’s a significant lag. Investment into the nation’s best minds won’t pay off for a couple decades. If you want a forest, these seeds need to be planted far in advance.
Where is the right-wing Barack Obama?
Where is the right-wing Aaron Sorkin? Where are the right-wing versions of Saul Alinsky, James Carville, Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton, Van Jones, Al Sharpton, Rahm Emanuel, Lena Dunham, Michael Moore? The list goes on. ........................................
In retrospect, it’s almost funny how everything the proponents of NAFTA promoted was revealed to be deceptive, and everything they characterized as a hysterical fear tactic ended up understating the full scale, impact, and intensity of deindustrialization that has occurred since the 1990s. ...........................................................
.................. a couple of quote excerpts:
“We’re not spending another dime to help the destruction of this country…
NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) have been perverted into a shadow government. An NGO is sometimes an operation that does things that the government can’t do, because it’s not legally allowed to do it. So they create an entity to legally use government dollars, taxpayer dollars to do something that the federal government isn’t allowed to do — a shadow government used to undermine our country’s national security.”
—Kristi Noem, January 29th, 2025
"Elders rarely acknowledge their own role in fostering the conditions that led to spiritual and cultural decline... Conservatives should offer the young a future worth embracing instead of ridicule for the world they inherited."
—Auron MacIntyre
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