Jeremiah Babe,
“California Economy Smashed; Hotel Industry Decimated;
Leisure/Hospitality Vaporized - Unemployed”
Full screen mode suggested.
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
"The Feds’ Next Scam: Digital Money"
"The Feds’ Next Scam: Digital Money"
By Bill Bonner
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "For half a century, America’s greatest export has been the dollar. So much so that there are now more physical dollars outside the U.S. than in it. Overseas, people use dollars as an alternative to their own money. Foreigners are more familiar with Ben Franklin than Americans. In many places, people cling to U.S. dollars like a drowning man to driftwood. Here in Argentina, for example, inflation is already running at about 50% per year. People think it will get a lot worse. So they prepare by trading their pesos for dollars – now at a rate of 150-to-1.
Sinking Dollar: But what happens when the dollar sinks? The question is premature. Almost naïve. For the present, the dollar is as buoyant as an empty plastic bottle. The velocity of money – a key component of consumer price inflation – is actually going down.
Americans are happy to get dollars from the government. And foreigners are happy to get them any way they can. But soon, everyone will see that the U.S. feds are acting like the people who run sh*thole countries. They stifle the economy with laws and regulations – shutdowns, moratoria on evictions, $1,200 checks for everyone – and try to finance it with printing-press money.
We have no superpowers here at the Diary. We cannot climb walls, fly through the air, or see through concrete walls. So we cannot tell you when or how the dollar fails. But today, we will explore the question of what you should do about it.
Good Money: Money is only “good” if it can be used to claim goods and services from others. So, when the inflation rate increases, typically, people rush to claim whatever goods and services they can before their currency loses more value. The poor buy food… tools… household supplies… and televisions. The middle classes buy houses and cars. The rich buy land, commercial property, art, collectibles, and jewels. Rich or poor, the goal is the same – not to end up holding the Old Maid money.
Here in Argentina, it is almost impossible to get a mortgage. The economy is shrinking. The money is being inflated away. The economy is shut down. And yet, people are buying apartments and houses – and paying in cash – as a way to protect themselves from the government’s money. (Apartments in Buenos Aires are being advertised for just $37,000.)
Best Defense: Traditionally, gold is the best defense. It has been a “last resort” money for at least 3,000 years. For example, a cache of gold coins and objects, buried in England in the 8th century, was discovered a few years ago. In the time between its burial and its discovery, England suffered civil wars, religious wars, Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, plagues (in which a third of the population died), bankruptcy, bombing, external wars, and the decline of the empire. But not only were the coins still valuable – they were much more valuable when they came up out of the dirt than when they went in.
Our guess is that gold will continue to do its work – especially in the first phase of the coming crisis. People will become more and more concerned about the dollar, the economy, and the stability of the country. They will buy gold as protection, even as they are unsure what they are protecting themselves against. And if the election results are contested, for example, the price of gold will probably spike as soon as six weeks from today.
Much Tougher: Classic consumer price inflation may not come quickly. Instead, we could be in for a longish period of depression first. Even so, gold – like a refuge against heat as well as cold – will probably rise. But a depression would just encourage the feds to step up their money-printing. So, one way or another, sooner or later, we should expect consumer prices to rise – perhaps at 5% per year… maybe 50%. Then, things will become much tougher. And gold is no panacea. Desperate governments will call people who try to escape the currency crisis “parasites,” “profiteers,” or “class enemies.” Gold may be banned… taxed… or even confiscated.
In 1933, by Executive Order 6102, President Roosevelt made private ownership of gold illegal – subject to a $10,000 fine (which was a lot of money back then…) and 10 years in jail. Contracts stipulating payment in gold were nullified. This ban was enforced for the next 40 years. Just last week, the Argentines put a tax of 35% on exchanging pesos for dollars… that was on top of the 30% tax already in place. And you are limited to just $200 a month in exchanges. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine similar taxes restricting Americans’ use of gold.
Alternatives: In the long run, productive farmland may be a surer form of wealth than gold. It is less likely to be confiscated or heavily taxed. On the other hand, it is very illiquid. Here in the Calchaquí Valley, for example, there are now no buyers for farmland… or anything else. When Argentina emerges from its current crisis, landowners will probably still have their land. And they probably won’t starve. But in the meantime, they may have no “money” at all.
Today, people have another alternative – cryptocurrencies. Theoretically, bitcoin is superior to gold… in that it is easier to exchange it and hide it. No need to lug bags of gold coins around… or to pay someone to store them for you. And unlike farmland, it doesn’t need to be managed… and may not sit, inert and useless, for years while you wait for the crisis to end. With a few clicks on a keyboard, you can use your bitcoin to buy a pair of blue jeans… a pizza… or a new house. In theory, bitcoin may be harder to tax, too, as long as it remains in the ether crypto world. But try to use it to buy something… and it becomes vulnerable.
Will bitcoin prove to be a good alternative to land, the peso, the dollar, and gold? We wish we had the superpower to tell you. But gold is a work of nature. Bitcoin is a work of man. And so far, man’s works have proven transitory. Bitcoin was surely a clever innovation. But there are millions of clever people… Who knows which of them will find a better bitcoin?
Making Plans: Crypto/digital money might turn out to be the money of choice for governments more so than for their citizens. It is no secret to us that current levels of debt growth and money-printing are leading to trouble. By 2030, the feds will probably owe about $40 trillion, not counting their unfunded obligations under Social Security, Medicare, etc. That debt is only sustainable as long as the dollar floats. When it sinks, the whole ship goes down with it. The feds know this as well as we do. And they, like we, are already making plans. No, they are not making plans to right the ship by balancing the budget, cutting the deficit, or reducing the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. They know that is politically impossible.
New Dollar: More likely, they’re planning to abandon ship. Who would benefit most from the collapse of the dollar? The world’s biggest debtor, of course – the U.S. government. At 50% inflation (the current rate in Argentina), half of the feds’ debt disappears in a single year. In three years, it is almost all gone. Then, they can introduce a new dollar. Our colleagues at Tradesmith report: "The Bank of International Settlements, or BIS for short, is known as the central bank for other central banks. In January 2020, the BIS published a new research paper – not its first one – on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
Eight months ago, the BIS found that 80% of all the central banks they surveyed were investigating CBDCs, and 40% had moved from the research stage to the concept and design stage. Meanwhile the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank (ECB) have expressed interest in digital currency and research, and the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is potentially years ahead of the competition in rolling out an e-yuan, with mass trials underway involving real-world commercial use."
So you see, Dear Reader, there is no reason for despair. The feds will get to start the scam all over again!"
"Why Is The Mainstream Media Signaling That A Much Larger Stock Market Crash Is Coming?"
"Why Is The Mainstream Media Signaling That
A Much Larger Stock Market Crash Is Coming?"
by Epic Economist
"In recent weeks, the mainstream media has been overly indicating that a stock market crash is about to happen. There are many ongoing discussions about a potential dramatic fall in stock prices that will likely come by the end of the month. And even though a market crash can happen at any time, especially with such a massive overvaluation in prices, it is uncommon to see corporate-led media telling us what to expect about the next developments in the stock market, hinting to where it is headed next. For that reason, today, we rounded up some of the mainstream media statements that point to the imminent financial market downfall to investigate what is laying behind the curtains. Is this a new smokescreen? Or a widespread meltdown is much closer than we thought? That's what we are going to find out, so keep with us, and don't forget to give this video a thumbs up, share it with your friends, and subscribe to our channel not to miss out on the unfoldings of the economic collapse.
Earlier this year, when the health crisis started to spread on American grounds, corporate media started to release one report after the other about an incoming crash in stock prices. Now, they're doing it again. This time around, the difference is that many media outlets are reasoning the same mantra: the downfall is near. They seem to have a virtual certainty that price evaluations won't be sustained for any longer and by the end of next week, the financial scenery can turn upside down. Not long ago, the news was focusing on praising the market rebound after the huge tech stock sell-off, and then suddenly, it decided to shift its focus, leaving us wondering why would the mainstream media want all of us to believe that a financial crash is at the door? It goes without saying that prices are dramatically overvalued. For the past three weeks stock prices either flatlined or taken the downward direction, and all of the major stock indexes have recorded sharp declines for three weeks in a row, and it seems this week will make it four. Up-to-date, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went down 4.5 percent this month, the S&P 500 went down over 6 percent, and the Nasdaq declined about 8.5 percent. Essentially, the market is experiencing the worst September in 18 years, but the corporate-led media is signaling that things are going to get even worse.
Additionally, it reported that Deutsche Bank economists consider that a policy shift may arrive sooner than we thought, explaining that "financial crises have often been touched off in the past under such conditions by the inevitable shift from policy ease to policy tightening, which is likely still at least several years away, but could surprise sooner". Once again, we definitely agree that a global financial crisis could emerge at any time, but we don't typically see a corporate-controlled news outlet alerting for a "looming" stock market collapse.
All things considered, and with signals coming from many different sources, the financial abyss seems to be at the corner. As the remaining 90% are struggling to stay afloat and barely having conditions to properly evaluate the situation, they're probably going to be pushed to the edge without even noticing. In the meantime, the wealthy 1% has already managed to secure themselves and dump whatever stocks they don't feel confident about, leaving the consequences of the volatility of such stocks to be taken care of by the unsuspecting others.
The next stock price drop will be followed by a quick rebound to add some heat in the political narrative and then a sharp drop once again. So, during this whole process, the beaten economy will face yet another downturn. It's a never-ending cycle of inflating and bursting the debt bubble. How long will the system be able to sustain it? It's anyone's guess. But we can't say we haven't been warned."
Musical Interlude: Prelude, "After the Goldrush"
Prelude, "After the Goldrush", A Cappella
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Live: Prelude, "After the Goldrush"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit. Spiral galaxies form disks because the original gas collided with itself and cooled as it fell inward. Planets may orbit in disks for similar reasons.
Click image for larger size.
The featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a light-colored central bulge composed of older stars beyond filaments of orbiting dark brown dust. NGC 3717 spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 60 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra)."
"Sometimes..."
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.
You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”
- Richelle E. Goodrich
Chet Raymo, “Strange”
“Strange”
by Chet Raymo
“In a review in the “New York Times” Book Review, Daniel Handler writes: “And strange? Well, let’s get this straight: All great books are strange. Every lasting work of literature since the very weird “Beowulf” has been strange, not only because it grapples with the strangeness around us, but also because the effect of originality is startling, making even the oldest books feel like brand new stories.”
Strange: Out-of-the-ordinary, unusual, curious. “The strangeness around us,” says Handler. There is a paradox here. What could be less strange than the world around us? It is the same world that was here yesterday, and the day before that. More to the point: It is a world ruled by law. Inviolable causal bonds. That’s what makes science possible.
And yet, and yet. I walk wary. Strangeness lurks on ever side. Strangeness leaps out of every pebble in the path, every wildflower, every spider web flung between weedy stalks. In the midst of the utterly ordinary the extraordinary abounds. Nothing is so commonplace as to be common. The strangeness of the world, as in literature, has its source in the head, in the convoluted interaction of mind with world. Strange, that we should be here, strangers in a strange land, pilgrims on our own yellow brick roads where nothing is ordinary because everything is perceived through the filter of a unique consciousness.
And strange? Well, let’s get this straight. I hope never to lose the capacity to see the strangeness in the familiar, the curious in the everyday, the exception in the unexceptional.
“I do not expect a miracle,
or an accident,
to set the sight on fire...”
wrote Silvia Plath. Just being here is enough. Just being here is surpassing strange.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
The Poet: Charles Bukowski, “Mind and Heart”
“Mind and Heart”
“Unaccountably we are alone,
forever alone,
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant
to be any other way -
and when the death struggle begins
the last thing I wish to see is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me -
better just my old friends,
the walls of my self,
let only them be there.
I have been alone but seldom lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight, sitting,
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.
Peace of mind and heart arrives
when we accept what is:
having been born into this strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our days,
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of leaving it all behind.
Cry not for me.
Grieve not for me.
Read
what I’ve written
then forget it all.
Drink from the well
of your self and begin again.”
- Charles Bukowski
"In A Nation Ruled By Swine..."
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile - and the rest of us are f****d until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, “The Great Shark Hunt”
"Inflation and "Socialism-Lite" Are Just What the Billionaires Want"
"Inflation and "Socialism-Lite" Are Just What the Billionaires Want"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Imagine owning a Buffett-Bezos fortune of bilious billions, or even 10% of these mega-fortunes, i.e. between $5 billion and $20 billion. Heck, imagine owning 1% of these mega-fortunes, i.e. $500 million to $2 billion.
You're extremely rich so you can buy the best advice. Your capital is mobile, and so are you. You can live anywhere and shift your capital anywhere. Your advisors have noted an increase in media chatter on inequality, for example: "The Bill for America's $50 Trillion Gluttony of Inequality Is Overdue", and they're busy preparing plans to weather the storm and preserve your fortune come what may.
It's all too obvious that a claw-back of the trillions plundered by America's 0.1% is now inevitable as the pendulum has swung to extremes of looting and parasitic predation that have destabilized the social and economic orders. So Job One is managing this claw-back politically and financially to leave the fortunes of the super-wealthy either unscathed or even more magnificent after the dust settles.
The super-wealthy have two key weapons at their disposal: inflation and "socialism-light." Once the world's governments borrow and spend enough money supporting all the insiders, bread and circuses for the masses (Universal Basic Income) and giveaways to industry and construction (under the happy rubric The New Green Deal), inflation will be roaring higher in no time.
What happens in runaway inflation? Tangible assets soar: land, timber, railroads, gold, mining companies and stocks of truly profitable enterprises (not zombies propped up with debt and bogus "profits" ginned up by accounting tricks).
What do the super-wealthy own? Land, timber, railroads, gold, mining companies and stocks-- all the tangible assets that will maintain or increase their value in runaway inflation. (Recall that "inflation" is not one dynamic; many are protected and others actually gain while the masses are impoverished: "Inflation and America's Accelerating Class War" 9/18/20.)
"Socialism-light" is equally beneficial to the super-wealthy. "Socialism-light" is my term for the Aristocracy's management of the extreme inequalities of wealth, income, power and privilege. The basic idea of "socialism-light" is to spread a thick layer of gooey PR over the same old system of legalized looting, parasitic exploitation and neofeudal predation and then have the government borrow endless trillions to fund bread and circuses for the masses (Universal Basic Income).
The irony will not be lost on the super-wealthy. As the state borrows endless trillions to send every household $1,000 a month, this borrow-and-spend orgy will push inflation higher, stripping away the purchasing power of the household's income. In no time at all the $1,000 in "free money" will only buy $500 of goods and services. The cries for "more stimulus" will reach a crescendo and the bread and circuses will double to $2,000 a month.
But this money-printing-to-the-moon will only increase real-world inflation (as I explained in "This Is Why Inflation Will Rip Everyone's Face Off" 9/17/20), so the end result will be the $2,000 only buys $200 of goods and services.
Meanwhile, the super-wealthy are minting fortunes as everyone desperately seeks a hedge against inflation, which is wiping out cash, low-interest bonds, etc.
Banks - a core source of wealth and power for the super-wealthy - also anticipate this, which is why they immediately sell all the loans they originate to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other bagholders whose losses will be stupendous once inflation shreds the value of low-interest rate debt.
Banks won't be able to survive unless they 1) grab the most valuable collateral underlying their loan portfolios and 2) move their lending into short-term debt so they can jack up interest rates to match inflation.
Meanwhile the gooey, easily digestible PR will include a "wealth tax" that ends up being a pinprick on the total wealth of the super-wealthy who have sequestered their wealth in philanthro-capitalist foundations that are nothing but power grabs by other means, and various other forms of legalized looting.
The "wealth tax" will end up stripmining professionals and entrepreneurs, not the super-wealthy. Those earning $1 million with a net worth of $20 million will be gutted, while those worth $5 billion will pay a pittance. This is the inevitable result of the best government money can buy.
Eventually the entire house of cards collapses and if there is no replacement of the current political power structure that actually changes the way currency is created and distributed, the pathways to ownership of capital and labor's share of the economy, then the system will simply return to the existing inequality with a new currency.
As I often say: if you don't change the way money is created and distributed, you've changed nothing. If you don't change the means of acquiring capital and political power, you've changed nothing. If you don't change labor's share of the economy, you've changed nothing.
Money-printing, inflation and "socialism-light" are just what the super-wealthy ordered: so by all means spark runaway inflation with "free" (heh) bread and circuses, provide trillions in "stimulus"to corrupt insiders, industry giveaways (New Green Deal, carbon credits, etc.), and slap a feel-good "wealth tax" that mysteriously misses the super-wealthy but guts the tattered remains of the productive class.
After a bout of inflation and "socialism-light", we could end up with even more extreme inequality when the whole rotten structure collapses. Be careful what you wish for and cui bono - to whose benefit? To answer that, look beneath the gooey layer of PR.
It doesn't have to be this way. My new book outlines a much different way of organizing capital, labor and the creation of money: check out the free bits: Excerpts of the book (PDF) "The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.""You Know..."
"You know, we never see the world exactly as it is. We see it as we hope it will be or we fear it might be. And we spend our lives going through a sort of modified stages of grief about that realization. And we deny it, and then we argue with it, and we despair over it. But eventually, and this is my belief, we come to see it, not as despairing, but as vitalizing. We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is. "
- Maria Popova
"Super Intelligence: Binaural Beats Music for Better Focus, Concentration and Memory. "
Greenred Productions,
"Super Intelligence: Binaural Beats Music
for Better Focus, Concentration and Memory."
Use this study music to boost your learning abilities.
"Out of Control"
"Out of Control"
by DeRisk
"I think it is a fallacy to believe central banks are in control of financial markets, or that there can be any outcome to the current situation other than hyperinflation. If we set aside for a moment the psychological need to believe someone is in control lets us take a look what is in fact some very simple logic. If the logic stands up it relieves the need to analyze much of the current information overload and helps us make better current and future financial decisions.
The logic: Central banks have two monetary instruments: interest rates and money supply. This gives them 4 options:
• Increase interest rates.
• Decrease interest rates.
• Increase money supply.
• Decrease money supply.
The situation they face is unsustainable levels of debt – government, corporate and personal.
Click image for larger size.
How do their four options play out in this context?
• Increase interest rates: Increasing interest rates increases the debt burden as more now has to be repaid. The runaway train gathers pace.
• Decrease interest rates: Decreasing bank lending rates is arguably not possible with most rates around zero or negative. But assuming rates become more negative, in effect paying for people to take on more debt, this still increases the overall debt burden. The train speed increases.
• Increase money supply: Because debt levels cannot be serviced by the real economy, since 2008 central banks have stepped in with ever increasing amounts of new money (quantitative easing) to service existing debt obligations. The money enters the system as new debt. Alternatively assets in danger of default are simply purchased. Default must be avoided at all costs. The reason for this is the systemic interdependence of the system – if one major component defaults, the consequences can bring down the entire system in a domino effect. Increasing money supply increases debt burden. The train accelerates.
• Decreasing money supply: In 2019 the Federal Reserve took tentative steps towards reducing its assets (taking money out of the system by selling assets and retiring the money). It didn’t work. In fact since inception in 1913 the Federal Reserve has never been able to reduce its balance sheet for more than a few months. To do so now would trigger debt default on a massive scale. The train has no brakes.
Click image for larger size.
Out of Control: I trust this simple analysis makes it obvious that central banks are not in control. They cannot decrease money supply without provoking the collapse of the fiat system. Keeping interest rates low increases debt. Raising interest rates and increasing money supply both increase indebtedness. Central banks are in a Catch-22 situation. Any action they take leads to the collapse of the financial system or compounds the original problem.
Destination Hyperinflation: Eventually the new money finds its way into the real economy. People cash out their shares or receive their stimulus checks. Price inflation is the result. There is nothing central banks can do. This is already happening. Inflation is higher than official figures. For example: In the United Kingdom food prices have risen 0.8 per cent according to the ONS (an annualized rate of 54 per cent). Pet food prices have risen a truly hyperinflationary 6.2 per cent (annualized: 2,575 per cent).
See also the Chapwood Index. In an effort to continue the pretense of being in control central banks “relax” their inflation targets.
Inflation rapidly becomes hyper-inflation. In extreme cases this can happen in a matter of months. Again there is nothing the two monetary tools of central banks can do. They are caught in a positive feedback loop of their own making:
Positive feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That's why there are so few of them. Germany during the Weimar Republic had a similar positive feedback loop. The central bank felt compelled to print ever increasing amounts of money in order to feed people who would otherwise starve as their money became progressively worthless.
There was a point during the Weimar Republic when the central bank still held sufficient gold reserves to replace the depreciating mark with a gold-pegged currency that would have restored financial stability. But there was never the political or commercial will to do more than take the soft option and print more money. Today we too are well beyond any political or commercial support for anything but the same soft option.
In Weimar Germany, stability only came when the train reached its final destination. However I doubt few people have any real conception of how dark the end actually is: Financially, for nearly four years, the ultimate cataclysm was always just round the corner. It always arrived, and there was always an even worse one on its way - again, and again, and again. The speeches, the newspaper articles, the official records, the diplomatic telegrams, the letters and diaries of the period, all report month by month, year by year, that things could not go on like that any longer: and yet things always did, from bad to worse, to worse, to worse. It was unimaginable in 1921 that 1922 could hold any more terrors. They came, sure enough, and were in due course eclipsed, and more than eclipsed, with the turn of the following year. (Adam Fergusson's 1975 classic "When Money Dies - The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse". page 1.)
Sound familiar? How could anything be worse than the instabilities of 2019? How can there be anything worse than the global economic shutdown of 2020? The train speeds on. But at least by now we should be in no doubt of where it is headed."
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Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"
Gregory Mannarino, "Is The Stock Market Really About To CRASH? The Bears Think So"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Is The Stock Market Really About To CRASH? The Bears Think So"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/22/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/22/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (September 22nd to 24th)
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 9/22/20"
By David Leonhardt
"The fall surge is here: Public health experts have long been worried that the end of the summer - as some students returned to school and the weather cooled - would bring a surge in coronavirus cases. That surge appears to have begun. The number of new daily confirmed cases in the U.S. has jumped more than 15 percent in the past 10 days. It is the sharpest increase since the late spring, and it has arrived just before the official start of autumn, which is today.
Unlike the earlier summer surge in the U.S., this spike also coincides with a rising number of cases in other affluent countries, like Canada and much of Europe. The increases appeared to play a role in yesterday’s stock-market decline, as investors feared the need for new lockdowns.
In Britain today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to to announce new restrictions on nightlife. In the Czech Republic yesterday, the health minister resigned. In Madrid, the authorities imposed new restrictions on almost one million residents. Across Europe, officials are hoping that these targeted restrictions will reduce new cases - and allow them to avoid imposing full lockdowns again.
The U.S. continues to be among the most vulnerable countries, because it never crushed the spread of the virus after the original outbreak. (In the chart above, you can see how much higher the red line, for the U.S., has been than the other lines since April.)
Coming weeks may bring new problems, too: The cooler fall weather will start to complicate outdoor socializing. “And if pandemic-fatigued families travel to spend the holidays together, it will get worse in late fall and winter,” The Times’s Jeneen Interlandi wrote in an article previewing the rest of the year.
There has been one big piece of good news. People infected today are roughly 30 percent to 50 percent less likely to die than those in the early spring, Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates. Still, the death toll is horrific. Today, the number of confirmed U.S. deaths will most likely surpass 200,000.
In other virus developments:
• An officer at the National Institutes of Health will leave the job after a report in The Daily Beast revealed that he had been attacking the agency and one of its leaders, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in pseudonymous posts on a right-wing website.
• Almost 90,0000 pre-K students and children with disabilities in New York City returned to classrooms yesterday.
• The organization that runs a major college-admission test - the ACT - closed more than 500 testing centers this past weekend because of the virus or the recent wildfires. The closures left many students unable to take the test."
SEP 22, 2020 12:31 AM ET:
Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 31,290,000
people, according to official counts, including 6,880,636 Americans.
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09/22/2020 - 07:20: "US Suffers Most New COVID-19 Cases In 5 Weeks As Doctors Warn Of 'Apocalyptic' Fall: Live Updates"
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Updated 9/22/20, 3:23 AM ET
Click image for larger size.
Monday, September 21, 2020
Must Watch! “FED Saves Wall St Again; Debt Clock Overheating; $Trillions Not Going to Save Markets; Cash”
Jeremiah Babe,
“FED Saves Wall St Again; Debt Clock Overheating;
$Trillions Not Going to Save Markets; Cash”
"Swamp Thang"
"Swamp Thang"
by Jim Kunstler
"There’s the Swamp teeming with scaley, slithery, sharp-toothed, many-footed predators, but then there’s the miasma hanging over the Swamp, a toxic mist of lies, misdirection, dis-info, propaganda, bad faith, and sedition, illuminated by pulsing blue gaslight that affords a toxic blanket of protection to the denizens of the Swamp. Now a storm is brewing. The critters are evacuating their mud-holes and moiling about desperately among the cypress knobs as a mighty wind rises - the election hurricane - threatening to sweep it (and them) all away!
The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. Weeks from now, as the fetid water subsides, the protective miasma above will dissipate and the people from sea to shining sea will finally get a good look at the landscape revealed and the pitiful, wriggling, dying life-forms of the order Democratica stranded on it.
Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution - his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem - as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.
The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.
The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution - all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries. This week two Senate committees (Finance and Homeland) are expected to release a joint report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It is expected to not look good. Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 - a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme. Will the committees be so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department? If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject? Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in US political history?
All of which is to say that the Democratic Party has other things to worry about besides who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. That may be hard to believe but it’s how things are now after four years of implacable, seditious perfidy from the party. A week ago, all the talk was of the Democrat’s election coup plan, as publicized stupidly by the so-called Transition Integrity Project. Nice try. What if all those mail-in ballots sent out recently have Joe Biden’s name on them and it turns out that he is no longer a candidate? Hmmmm… No doubt the recipients were so eager to fill them in and send them out that there’s no going back on that scam. Apparently, a Biden withdrawal was not one of the scenarios scrimmaged out in the Transition Integrity Project’s “war game.” What? then A do-over?
Hence, panic in the swamp. Joe Biden’s misadventures, and his pitiful fate, are but the outer rainbands of the brewing storm. There’s the threat of further and widespread riots, of course, but since when has insurrection proved to be a winning campaign strategy in a country not entirely gone to the dogs? People who are not insane usually object to their businesses being torched and their homes invaded. At this point, after months of violent antics by criminal nihilists, one can even imagine Multnomah County, Oregon, turning Trumpwise. Closer to the eye-wall of the hurricane looms the stern visage of John Durham. That’s where the most damaging winds whirl and there is reason to suppose they are heading for landfall. Whatever he’s been up to lo these many months has had a tighter lid on it than the tomb of Tutankhamen. It must be making a whole lot of political gators, centipedes, and pygmy rattlesnakes nervous. Perhaps New York Times editor and miasma generator-in-chief Dean Baquet is up at three a.m. thinking about it, puking into his wastebasket."
"2020 Has Been A "Nightmare Year" For America, And The Economic Fallout Is Just Getting Started"
"2020 Has Been A "Nightmare Year" For America,
And The Economic Fallout Is Just Getting Started"
by Michael Snyder
"Most of us have never experienced a year that has been as tough as 2020 has been for our nation. It has just been one major crisis after another, and the month of September has brought us even more trouble. The worst wildfire season in the history of the state of California has been making headlines day after day, and now the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg threatens to escalate the political turmoil in this nation to an entirely new level.
Many had such high hopes for 2020, but at this point this year has been such a disaster that USA Today is calling it “an American nightmare”, and it is difficult to argue with their reasoning: "First the pandemic, which divided us, economically devastated us, and has killed nearly 200,000 of us. Then the racial unrest, erupting at the deaths of more Black Americans at the hands of police: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude.
Now the extreme weather. For only the second time in history, the National Hurricane Center has moved into the Greek alphabet for storm names. This season’s wildfires are bigger, deadlier and more frequent than in years past. In the West, people can’t breathe.
And now a member of the U.S. Supreme Court has died with about a month and a half to go until we get to election day. The shocking death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has stunned the entire country, and I will share my analysis on where things could go from here on The Most Important News later tonight.
In this article, I want to focus on the economic impact that all of this chaos is having. Since the pandemic first started, more than 60 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and that is a threshold that has never been crossed before in all of our history. And we have also seen businesses shut down at a pace that is hard to fully grasp. If you can believe it, more than 160,000 businesses listed on Yelp say “that they have closed”: "Yelp on Wednesday released its latest Economic Impact Report, revealing business closures across the U.S. are increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic’s economic toll. As of Aug, 31, 163,735 businesses have indicated on Yelp that they have closed. That’s down from the 180,000 that closed at the very beginning of the pandemic. However, it actually shows a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July."
I was most alarmed by that last sentence. Things were supposed to be getting a lot better by now, but instead we have seen “a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July”. That is not good. And the percentage of businesses on Yelp that are indicating that their closures are “permanent” just keeps rising: "In addition to monitoring closed businesses, Yelp also takes into account the businesses whose closures have become permanent. That number has steadily increased throughout the past six months, now reaching 97,966, representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening."
So what this means is that none of us should be expecting a return to what we considered to be “normal” prior to 2020. In fact, it is likely that we will see large numbers of businesses continue to fail in the months ahead. According to Fox Business, a whopping 40 percent of all U.S. restaurants “could go under within the next six months”: At least 40% of restaurant operators struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic believe their businesses could go under within the next six months if there is no additional stimulus package from the federal government, according to a new survey by the National Restaurant Association. With one in every six restaurants closed permanently or for the “long term,” the industry is on track to lose $240 billion in sales by the end of the year, according to the National Restaurant Association’s findings on the impact COVID-19 has on the restaurant business."
So what do you think? Should we bail out the restaurant industry? By the way, the airline industry really wants a bailout too. And just about every other industry is looking for government help as well. The reason why almost everyone has their hands out is because we have plunged into a crippling economic depression, and everyone is starting to realize that there is no end in sight to this downturn.
Of course most average citizens also want another round of “stimulus checks” from the federal government, and we are being told that there is a really good chance that “the economy backslides” if that does not happen: "Lawmakers remain deadlocked over a measure to provide another round of $1,200 checks to most households and more aid to struggling small businesses and unemployed Americans. Most saw the money they received from Congress’s $2.2 trillion CARES Act run dry over the summer. “If they don’t” approve another stimulus, “they’re taking a huge risk, says Mark Zandi chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The odds are better than even the economy backslides.”
We have already stolen several trillion dollars from future generations of Americans so far this year to fund “stimulus packages”, and so a lot of people figure that it probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference if we stole several trillion more to fund another one. And the Federal Reserve has been flooding the financial system with so much new money that it makes everything that they have ever done in the past look completely insignificant.
In the process, our authorities are systematically destroying the reserve currency that the entire globe depends upon, but at this point very few people seem to care. So we continue to steamroll toward economic oblivion, and nobody is even thinking about hitting the brakes.
In the USA Today article that I quoted at the start of this piece, the author stated that it is “impossible to know if the worst is behind us or still lies ahead”: "Many of us are vacillating between horror and disbelief at what can only be described as an American nightmare. Devastation doesn’t cover it. It’s impossible to know if the worst is behind us or still lies ahead. Of course that is not true at all. In fact, it is exceeding clear that what is ahead of us is going to be much, much worse than what we have already experienced. But most Americans don’t want to hear that.
Most of us just want to cling to the belief that someday we will wake up and everything will have returned to normal. That may happen in fairy tales, but this is real life, and real life simply does not work that way."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed, including its nearly perfectly round ring of stars and gas, remains unknown. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished.
Click image for larger size.
The featured photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and recently reprocessed using an artificially intelligent de-noising algorithm. Observations in radio waves indicate that Hoag's Object has not accreted a smaller galaxy in the past billion years. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake (Serpens). Many galaxies far in the distance are visible toward the right, while coincidentally, visible in the gap at about seven o'clock, is another but more distant ring galaxy."
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