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Sunday, December 8, 2024

2024-12-08

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


Economic and Market Fare:

One can reasonably debate whether the stock market has risen exponentially but there is no arguing that the surge in the S&P 500 these past two years has been nothing short of extraordinary. And it has clearly gone much further than I thought it would, especially in these past twelve months, and so at this point, it is worth the time and effort to discuss and interpret the message from the market. 

Rethinking the “Bubble” Thesis
It’s high time for me to stop pontificating on all the reasons why the U.S. stock market is crazily overvalued and all the reasons to be bearish based on all the variables I have relied on in the past — from valuation, to sentiment, to overcrowded positioning. So, what I am going to start doing is assessing what it is the market is saying, because the market can certainly move to excesses in both directions and make faulty assumptions, but the market is not stupid.

What is the market telling us, in other words? Especially since this bull phase has now lasted long enough that those of us who have been on the wrong side of the trade need to take a different tack. This is not about throwing in the towel as much as trying to get a grip on what is going on beyond just calling this a “bubble” every single day. ...................




................. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that the AI boom could really just be a bubble – a huge rise in what Marx called fictitious capital, ie investment in the stocks of AI-related companies and the US dollar that is way out of line with the reality of AI-realised profits and productive investment. ...........

And this bubble is very narrowly supported. US stock market drives world markets and just seven stocks drive US stock market: the so-called Magnificent Seven. For the vast majority of US companies, those outside the burgeoning energy sector, social media and tech, things are not so great. S&P 500 free cash flow per share hasn’t grown at all in three years (see the red line below). Forecasts of profit growth are wildly out of line with what is being realised.


Are American pathologies the necessary price of economic dynamism?




.............

“Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.”
S. Klarman

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easier person to fool.”
R. Feynman

..........

In this analysis, we aim to objectively examine the current discrepancy between the intrinsic value and the market price of the S&P 500.

Our conclusion is that the S&P 500 is unlikely to have a positive nominal total return in the next 10 years and a ‘miracle’ would be needed to achieve positive real total returns. ...........................


CONSILIENT OBSERVER
Introduction

The Consilient Research team spends a lot of time on, well, research. The reports we publish reflect this effort. But there are times when we study a topic and either do not write about it, or a subject gets limited attention because it plays a small role in explaining something larger.
 
As a change of pace, we have decided to publish some of our favorite charts that went unused or got lost in the shuffle. Most of these exhibits explain themselves, but we add a little commentary in each section to set the tone. We have placed the pictures in five (loose) categories: overall valuation, empirical regularities, capital intensity of “big energy” versus “big technology,” corporate performance, and investment management. 



Quotes of the Week:

Paul Tudor Jones: I was watching this Vince McMahon [prior owner of the WWE] documentary and in it… there was a term I never heard of called “kayfabe.” And in wrestling in particular parlance that represents the unspoken, unwritten agreement between the wrestlers and the fans about the elusion that’s going on in the ring. The suspension of disbelief that [is] going on in the ring is actually [scripted]. We know it’s scripted and we know it’s a performance but the ask us to think it’s genuine and real… we’re in an economic “kayfabe” right now and it’s not just the US. After this election, the question is, will we have a Minsky Moment… in US debt markets, where there’s a point of recognition that what’s going to happen… is fiscally impossible, financially impossible… I’m clearly not going to own any fixed income.




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(not just) for the ESG crowd:




Yves here. An acceleration of growth of data centers, driven by AI demand, is set to make the already existential climate change threat even worse. Yet there’s collective complacency, as opposed to calls for AI to be severely curbed or heavily taxed due to its energy cost. Perhaps I have missed it, but I have yet to see either AI or data center players targeted in a meaningful way by climate activists.

For those late to this story or who want convincing evidence to present to skeptics, a recent report by the International Energy Agency chronicled the rise in energy demand by data centers and AI players, and how their demand for electricity is set to increase even faster, outpacing the ability of clean energy sources to meet it .............



.... As far as global environmental concerns go, the US has an irretrievably split personality. Far from organising the world, it will be the world that has to adjust to the disorganising impact of America’s polarised and depressingly unintelligent democracy. 

....... The inescapable conclusion of the past 35 years is that it is foolish to treat the US as a reliable partner in global climate policy.



U.S. B.S.

Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.  



That a ruler or priest can be both a hypocrite and moralizer has been true throughout human history.  

Thus has Joe Biden embraced his inner Chaucerian Pardoner in issuing his son Hunter a full pardon for any crime he may or may not have committed in the past decade. No matter that Hunter was never charged in direct co connection with his work for a gas company in Ukraine. where his then-vice president daddy was de facto viceroy ..............

As Chaucer's Pardoner protested back in that 14th century chronicle: "What? Think you that because I'm good at preaching / And win me gold and silver by my teaching / I'll live of my own free will in poverty? / No, no that's never been my policy!"



Geopolitical Fare:


I have learned a few things in my time on this earth. Not many, but a few.

I have learned that western regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and that men like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are always on the wrong side of history when it comes to such matters.

I have learned that organizing human civilization around the pursuit of profit has had devastating consequences for our ecosystem, our health, our hearts, and our happiness.

I have learned that there is an entirely unacceptable amount of human suffering in developing nations, and that it is largely caused by the western power structures we live under and the way our civilization behaves. 

I have learned that rich and powerful people pour tremendous amounts of resources into psychologically manipulating the public using all forms of media, and that their efforts to indoctrinate the masses have proven very successful. ..........



...... This is one of those things that looks more evil the longer you stare at it. They’re pushing for teenagers to be thrown into the fires of an unwinnable war like it’s nothing — like a corporation saying they need to hire more staff to accommodate their growing business. And why? To tie up Russia so that Syria can be turned into a smoking crater and allow the US war machine to focus its crosshairs on Iran and China, with the end goal of total planetary domination. All because some swamp monsters decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must maintain unipolar global hegemony no matter the cost.

Ukraine barely even has anyone in the country from ages 18 to 25 for various reasons (many of which predate this war), but the managers of the US-centralized empire are pushing to scrape out the few they do have and toss them into the landmines and artillery fire just to keep this unwinnable war going for a few more months. Whether they succeed or not, the fact that they even tried is so profoundly psychopathic



If you have not spent the past 14 months watching all the footage of dead and mutilated children coming out of Gaza, then you have no business trying to defend Israel and its actions. If you are avoiding looking at the facts, then you have no business talking about them.

Everyone who has spent these past 14 months bringing their attention to the concrete realities of the nightmare in Gaza has been living in an entirely different world than everyone who has not. A darker world. An uglier world. A world where living monsters prowl the earth.

Their dreams are worse. Their insides feel different. They experience the day to day moments of life in a whole other way.

The opinions of such a person about what is happening in Gaza do not have the same value as the opinions of someone who has avoided looking at these things. ............


Syria is just the latest case of U.S. meddling and the timing could not be more suspicious

The Biden administration has triggered another proxy war for Donald Trump to deal with when he becomes president next month. The U.S. deep state is fighting a proxy war in Syria, which appears to be waged with the intention of further destabilizing the Middle East and stirring up another front in World War III. ..........



Sci Fare:




Other Fare:



A vivid account of the evolution of minds will fill readers with wonder — and challenge how they think about their moral responsibility to protect the planet.



Posted by at No comments:

Monday, December 2, 2024

2024-12-02

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


Economic and Market Fare:




.................... The 2024 economy has proved far more resilient than most expected at the beginning of the year. In fact, stock markets outran the best of them.

The point here isn’t to beat up on the Wall Street strategists.

Quite the contrary, actually.

These men and women are tasked by management and boards to put out forecasts because the bank can then sell it to their institutional clients. These folks produce evidence-based research grounded in historical data and interpreted through robust multi-factor models. Many of these people are off-the-charts intelligent. But, you share a bourbon or three with them, and they’ll share their disdain for these outlooks.

The purpose of this message is to exert caution.

The historical track record of Wall Street strategists correctly forecasting the market 12 months in advance is not great. In fact, they’re more often wrong than right. ...........




not saying I agree, but:

Mark Haefele, Chief Investment Officer at UBS GWM, says:
”The US election result remains a focal point, with the prospect of lower taxes and deregulation adding to a positive ‘Roaring 20s’ market narrative built on solid growth, and continued investment in AI. Still the problems of deglobalization, debt, and demographics—among others—mean the we have to be prepared for a wide range of outcomes in the year ahead.”



again, not what I think, but a good summary of what many think:
Credit Agricole: 2025-26 Outlook: mind consensus via TheBondBeat

…US rates:
  • Despite the Fed cutting rates, the best trade in 2024 was staying in cash (or T-bills), certainly on a risk adjusted basis.
  • The cyclical bull steepening we were expecting came through but a progrowth Republican policy mix points to a very shallow cutting cycle.
  • A clean sweep suggests a high probability of election pledges being enacted boosting nominal growth but destabilising global trade.
  • The UST curve should remain dis-inverted but very flat. With Fed policy rates likely dropping to 4% only, 10Y yields should hover around 4.5%.
  • While QT should end, net UST supply of USD2.1trn should weigh on longend ASW. The debt ceiling debacle should be manageable.
  • Significant, fiscal driven bear steepening is not on our radar. The Fed should remain driven by its existing remit.
  • Large deficits and (financial) deregulation augers for higher growth implying the potential for higher UST real yields.

The US has never been so overhyped, relative to the rest of the world

....... The overwhelming consensus is that the gap between the US and the world is justified by the earnings power of top US companies, their global reach and their leading role in tech innovation. These strengths are all real. But one definition of a bubble is a good idea that has gone too far. Awe of “American exceptionalism” in markets has now gone too far. .........


Realtor.com Reports Active Inventory Up 26.5% YoY

............... However, inventory is still historically low. New listings remain below typical pre-pandemic levels.


Deflation fuels ‘inexorable’ slide in China’s long-term sovereign bond yields below Japan’s for the first time



The reason we’re in crisis is not because policymakers have been ignoring the advice of orthodox economists, but because they have been following it.

In 2016, Paul Romer, who was then Chief Economist at the World Bank wrote “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” in which he eviscerated the current state of macroeconomics in the U.S. and around the world, writing that orthodox macroeconomics had been in “30 years of intellectual regress,” and was so disconnected from reality that it was “post-real”. Romer wrote his paper, inspired by a similar critique of “string theory” in physics.
Lee Smolin begins The Trouble with Physics (Smolin 2007) by noting that his career spanned the only quarter-century in the history of physics when the field made no progress on its core problems. The trouble with macroeconomics is worse. I have observed more than three decades of intellectual regress.
The reason for this, Romer argues, is that orthodox economics - the formulas used by government budget offices, political parties, central banks and business, are based on a series of assumptions that are not backed up by facts.

They are, in fact, filled with assumptions that are a figment of a shared imagination .....................................

The Critics of MMT Aren’t Doing Their Homework
By contrast, proponents of Modern Monetary Theory have predicted many of the crises that neoclassical economists completely whiffed on, because they actually measure and include data in their model that orthodox economics does not.

What is even more egregious, however, are the superficial criticisms of MMT deployed to criticize it, which amount to not understanding it, because they can’t see how it fits in with their own view. That, however, is the point. It doesn’t “fit in” with their view, it replaces it with a different one. ................



One would reasonably think that if someone had been exposed in the past for pumping out a discredited academic paper after being at the forefront of the destructive austerity push during the Global Financial Crisis, then some circumspection might be in order. Apparently not. In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper in one of the leading mainstream academic journals – Growth in a Time of Debt – which became one of the most cited academic papers at the time. At the time, they even registered a WWW domain for themselves (now defunct) to promote the paper and tell us all how many journalists, media programs etc have been citing their work. While one can understand the self-promotion by Rogoff and Reinhart, it seems that none of these media outlets or journalists did much checking. It turned out that they had based their results on research that had grossly mishandled the data – deliberately or inadvertently – and that a correct use of the available data found that that nations who have public debt to GDP ratios that cross the alleged 90 per cent threshold experienced average real GDP growth of 2.2 per cent rather than -0.1 per cent as was published by Rogoff and Reinhart in their original paper. So all their boasting about finding robust “debt intolerance limits” arising from “sharply rising interest rates” – and then “painful fiscal adjustments” and “outright default” were not sustainable. Humility might have been the order of the day. But not for Rogoff. He regularly keeps popping up making predictions of doom based on faulty mainstream logic.

I analysed the spreadsheet scandal in detail in this blog post – Elementary misuse of spreadsheet data leaves millions unemployed (April 17, 2013).

His latest intervention (November 28, 2024) – Europe’s Economy Is Stalling Out – was published by Project Syndicate, which regularly gives space to these nonsensical mainstream articles. ........

............................................ Both situations, however allow us to conclude that from that given position, any discretionary attempt to reduce the deficit will reduce growth, incomes and employment.

I was talking to a podcast yesterday and they asked me what might happen if Elon Musk and his gang close down a lot of government departments.

While the Musk zealots might claim they are freeing the US of wasteful and unnecessary bureaucracy, the spending that runs those departments is necessary to sustain the current GDP growth and employment levels, given non-government spending choices.

So if they scrap those departments and do not increase spending elsewhere to offset the chosen spending cuts then the US will likely fall into recession. ...................



Quotes of the Week:

Donovan: US data on income and spending confirms that the US consumer has money and is prepared to spend it. There was not, perhaps, much doubt of the latter point.


Wang: A new round of tariffs is much more likely to prompt a dovish monetary policy response on concerns of higher unemployment than a hawkish response on concerns of inflation. Higher tariffs could raise prices, but the inflationary impact would in part be tempered by a strengthening dollar and lower business margins. Most importantly, the Fed would likely be looked through any price increases as transitory. Tariffs are more likely to slow economic growth


BSM: At risk of making a statement of the bleeding obvious, it has been an(other) extraordinary year for US equities. November closed at yet another all-time-high for the S&P500 and the fervent post-election embrace of risk left this rodent almost surprised that the monthly candle was only the 7th largest percentage advance for the ‘Spooz’ since the Covid lows. We got our Santa rally. With bells on! But is the old boy now out over his skis?


Elliott: For decades prudence was a virtue in asset management.
These days it is a liability.



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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


There was a tortuous and painful end to COP29, the international climate change conference held in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan. The main issue was how much would the rich countries hand over to the poor countries to pay for the measures to mitigate global warming and handle the damage caused by rising ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The finance target set was for more than $1.3trn a year by 2035. But the final deal was based on just $300bn in actual grants and low-interest loans from the developed world. The rest would have to come from private investors and perhaps levies on fossil fuels and frequent flyers – the details of which remained vague. ..............



.............. “With each new iteration of the texts, oil and gas producers managed to dilute the urgent commitment to phase out fossil fuels,” 


Analysing the way ancient plankton responded to climate change 21,000 years ago, scientists at the University of Bristol have warned that this "lifeblood of the oceans" simply cannot keep up with pace of current temperature rises.



.............. I have posted this article from Derrick Jensen many times, appealing to the reality of what hope really means rather than the general cultural meaning that so many people think it means. He explains it rather well in just three paragraphs, quote:
"Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. ...............

Chronicles of Collapse
Erik Loomis reviews “The Burning Earth: A History” by Sunil Amrith.



So… this is not good at all. Some scientists measured microplastics concentrations in the brain and found that in 2024 the brain was 0.5% microplastics in weight, which was an increase in 50% from eight years previously. ...

This is again, a lagging problem. Plastic production around the world is skyrocketing and it generally takes many years, until those big pieces of plastic become small enough to enter the food chain.

The working thesis of this blog is in a sense the idea that something other than global warming will bring down human civilization, enabling non-human organisms to go on without us. The prime candidates to make that happen are of course H5N1, SARS-COV-2 and monkeypox.

But the microplastics thing is a bit of a wildcard. I’ve had this idea that we’ve been getting dumber for quite some time and some things suggest to me it may have started before SARS-COV-2 started in 2020. Microplastics in our brains could be part of the explanation. ............

They found an increase in microplastics in every organ they looked at over the past 8 years. How much microplastics can you put into the brain, before it starts to make us dumber? We’re at 0.5% now. To me that is a terrifying number. Autism and depression are mostly a product of brain inflammation. If the brain tries to get rid of these particles, inflammation would seem to me like its main available tool .........

In the words of the late great Lynn Margulis, a woman like no other, Gaia is a tough bitch. The speed of our release of carbon into the atmosphere is unprecedented in geological history, but we’re engaged in numerous unprecedented experiments simultaneously. ........



U.S. B.S.


It’s so fun how the Biden administration is using its lame duck months to skyrocket hostilities between nuclear superpowers and we don’t even know who’s really making these decisions because the president’s brain is cottage cheese.


Expectation of peace talks after Donald Trump's inauguration is pushing all sides of the Ukraine war to escalate, with British and American missiles adding fresh risk

In an irony so miserable it must be true, widespread belief that peace talks are coming after Donald Trump’s inauguration is pushing Russia and the U.S. into a game of nuclear chicken, leaving us with “60 days to decide on World War,” as one Russian newspaper put it this week.

While the story may not be getting Cuban Missile Crisis treatment here, Joe Biden’s decision to green-light launches of U.S.-made ATACMS missiles into Russia has that country’s media in freakout mode. ............




Trump's cabinet picks seem more neocon than isolationist


Donald Trump has received praise for being a dove when it comes to international affairs. His record and early cabinet selections tell a different story.


Part 3 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy

Last week we wrote about the central role Obama played in establishing the Russiagate Hoax. This week we’re going to take a closer look at why Obama was so involved. What drove him to push a hoax that had been ostensibly put into place by the Clinton campaign? 

Many are aware of Biden’s entanglements in Ukraine but most are unaware of Obama’s implicit involvement. For some time now it's been our working theory that Russiagate originated, at least in part, as the result of what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine - and as a result of Obama’s knowledge of Biden’s actions.

Recall that Biden’s involvement in Ukraine traces back to at least early 2014 when he was pulled into the U.S. overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-held elections by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama State Department. ..........



Geopolitical Fare:






...... Peace will be made under the terms Russia wants, or the war will continue. Ukraine is still fighting, but everyone with the least lick of sense knows it is going to lose. Ukraine will have to accept the terms imposed on it, because if it doesn’t Russia will just keep going. ...........

.......... As for Ukraine, the best deal they could have gotten was offered by the Russians near the start of the war, but they believed NATO and the US and Boris Johnson and thought they could win. The result is going to be a much weaker and poorer Ukraine, probably with half the pre-war population.

Meanwhile sanctions, instead of harming Russia, boomeranged and hurt Europe far more than Russia, and have contributed to Europe’s ongoing de-industrialization. .......



... If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help. ..............

.............. Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.

The  ICG has a good corrective in their “visual explainer” of the Donbas War.
Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.
Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)

Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.

This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.


A failure of understanding in Ukraine.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly. ................

The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible. .................................





..… We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.

.................... We know now the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation. 




They Lied About Gaza, And They're Lying About Syria

.......... It’s hard to say exactly what’s happening in the moment, but I will say it’s mighty convenient how Russia being tied up in Ukraine and Hezbollah being decapitated by Israel leaves Syria once again exposed to the longstanding regime change agendas of the same western empire who’s been backing both of those proxy conflicts.

❖

Syria is more complicated and harder to understand than Gaza, but if you look into it you’ll find mountains of evidence that for many years the US and its allies and partners have been actively fomenting violence, chaos and destruction in that nation to effect regime change. Anyone who denies this is either ignorant or dishonest, as is anyone who calls you a Russian propagandist or an Assad lover for stating this well-evidenced fact.

There are a lot of people who see through the imperial lies about Gaza but still buy into the imperial lies about Syria, largely because the lies about Gaza are so much easier to see through. Immense amounts of propaganda and information ops have gone into framing the violence we’ve been seeing in Syria since 2011 as a completely organic rebellion against a tyrannical dictator who just wants to murder civilians because he is evil. But if you bring the same sincere curiosity and rigorous investigation to this issue that you brought to the plight of the Palestinians, you will discover the same kinds of lies and distortions which you’ve seen the western political/media class promote about Gaza being spun about Syria as well — frequently by the same people.

This is how unpacking the lies of the empire tends to unfold for folks. Your eyes flicker open because of some really obvious plot hole in the official narrative like Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, or Gaza, and then once you’ve seen through those lies you start getting curious about how else you’ve been deceived. You start pulling on other threads and learning more and more, and then after a while you start seeing the big picture about the US-centralized empire inflicting horrific abuses upon humanity all around the world with the goal of dominating the planet.

If you saw through the lies about Gaza, don’t stop there. Keep going. Keep pulling on threads. Keep learning. Stay curious. They lied about Gaza, they lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Ukraine, and they’re lying about Syria too. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to dull your curiosity. Ignore anyone who tries to shout you down and shut you up for asking inconvenient questions. Keep waking up from the matrix of empire propaganda until your eyes are truly clear.


Only A Truth-Based Relationship With Reality Can Satisfy

................ The overwhelming majority of humanity is lost in delusion. Our minds are full of propaganda-induced hallucinations about a completely fictional world in which capitalism is working just fine and the US and its allies stand on the side of freedom and justice. Our behavior is driven by advertising and cultural indoctrination about what we should buy and how hard we should work to buy it and what kinds of goals we should be striving to achieve. Our psyches are wrapped around a believed sense of self which is completely and utterly illusory. .......................

It’s all lies. It cannot satisfy. 

The only thing that can satisfy is a truth-based relationship with reality. One in which your worldview is in alignment with truth, and your thoughts are in alignment with your worldview, and your words are in alignment with your thoughts, and your deeds are in alignment with your words.  .................



Sci Fare:


............................ I think Democrats in a way feel a sense of relief over having lost the election. If they had won the election, they would have to work out how to try to solve our problems. But since people voted for Trump, now they deserve what they’re going to get. The United States has settled on YOLOing the next pandemic. There is bird flu in the cows, the cats that drink their raw milk die with bleeding brains, but nobody seems to care.

The whole population is starting to show signs of immunodeficiency.  ............

.................... When SARS-COV-2 first emerged, it was incapable of infecting children and it was killing people who had about eight years of life expectancy left. Now we have a virus that regularly infects children, as a result of the global gain of function experiment through mass vaccination. We also see widespread brain damage in the population now. We also see widespread damage to the immune system, mostly concentrated in the lungs, resulting in far more cases of pneumonia.

Just as there is no easy technofix for climate change, there is no easy technofix for SARS-COV-2. The Trump administration thought they could fix the SARS-COV-2 problem by rushing a vaccine, but it left everyone with a broken immune response. The same people peddling social distancing as an easy solution back then, are now peddling blocking the sky as an easy solution to global warming.

Any sort of real solution to the problems we face would just require radical lifestyle interventions.  ...........



Other Fare:


Sardonicky: "The myth of Thanksgiving has deservedly been collapsing in recent decades. Like US Empire itself, the story is a picked-over turkey carcass, with unsightly shreds of dried out flesh and gristle clinging to the wishbone of American exceptionalism."


Posted by at No comments:

Monday, November 18, 2024

2024-11-18

***** 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
...... Many have said they believe the neutral rate — the level where rates neither fuel nor dampen economic growth — has likely risen since the pandemic. But none has expressed confidence over where it lies.

“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%.




We shift our overall market view in favor of raising cash and taking down risk across the portfolio given policy impacts and uncertainties. This policy bog, combined with an equity market that increasingly looks to be in a price bubble, makes 4.5% T-bill yields an attractive alternative.

................... It should really not be lost on anyone that this has not been an “earnings-driven” rally but rather a “sentiment-driven” rally because if it were earnings doing the heavy lifting, the S&P 500 right now would be trading at 4,860. Not only that, but the analyst earnings upgrade-downgrade revision ratio has just turned negative and is at the second-lowest level of the past year. Not a good look, as we have been saying for a while now — we do not typically make a habit of chasing price bubbles. ...............

................ Of course, there is all the “dereg!” coming, and that is business-friendly for equities and disinflationary for bonds — in addition to any success Elon Musk has in his drive to cut the fat out of federal government spending (there is actually less here that spins the dial on deficit reduction than is advertised). But the overall economic impacts here are glacial in nature and exert a less direct effect on growth and inflation than the magnitude and breadth of the tariff increases that Trump is proposing. The bottom line is that nobody really knows what he is going to do or not do, or what he will be able to do. ......................

...................... The challenge for any investor is that there is simply too much uncertainty, and this is no time to be playing a guessing game. We just do not have enough conviction to know what will happen and the stakes are extremely high. In my view, it is better to wait it out and make a more informed decision when the dust settles.

Nothing right now is as important as this tariff issue and the other policy planks, which may or may not live to see the light of day. Not even the high-frequency economic data, including the U.S. retail sales data, which you can see was widely ignored by investors across all asset classes on Friday. We will obviously still be reporting on and analyzing the incoming data, but a financial market confronting an abnormally uncertain macro policy backdrop is going to care far less about numbers that are inherently lagging and contemporaneous in nature. This is not a normal environment, and the asset mix should reflect this classic Donald Rumsfeld “unknown unknowns” condition. All the economic data are going to be taking a back seat to the fiscal and trade policy background for many months to come ....................


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:




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. ...........

 



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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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”.

.................................................................... 
......................... 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
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. ............



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. .............



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. 
❖
 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


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.






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
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