Gregory Mannarino,
“Alert! Bank Of America ‘Call” Sparks Stock Market Rally”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, March 5, 2021
Musical Interlude: Gnomusy (David Caballero), "Footprints On The Sea"
Gnomusy (David Caballero), "Footprints On The Sea"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“NGC 253 is not only one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, it is also one of the dustiest. Discovered in 1783 by Caroline Herschel in the constellation of Sculptor, NGC 253 lies only about ten million light-years distant.
NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest group to our own Local Group of Galaxies. The dense dark dust accompanies a high star formation rate, giving NGC 253 the designation of starburst galaxy. Visible in the above photograph is the active central nucleus, also known to be a bright source of X-rays and gamma rays.”
"How the Brain Stops Time"
"How the Brain Stops Time"
by Jeff Wise
"One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from "The Matrix" in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.
Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?
Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way. He reasoned that when time seems to slow down in real life, our senses and cognition must somehow speed up-either that, or time dilation is merely an illusion. This is the riddle he set out to solve. "Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?" To find out, he first needed a way to generate fear of sufficient intensity in his experimental subjects. Instead of skydiving, he found a thrill ride near the university campus called Suspended Catch Air Device, an open-air tower from which participants are dropped, upside down, into a net 150 feet below. There are no harnesses, no safety lines. Subject plummet in free fall for three seconds, then hit the net at 70 miles per hour.
Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation? To see, Eagleman asked subjects who'd already taken the plunge to estimate how long it took them to fall, using a stopwatch to tick off what they felt to be an equivalent amount of time. Then he asked them to watch someone else fall and then estimate the elapsed time for their plunge in the same way. On average, participants felt that their own experience had taken 36 percent longer. Time dilation was in effect.
Next, Eagleman outfitted his test subjects with a special device that he and his students had constructed. They called it the perceptual chronometer. It's a simple numeric display that straps to a user's wrist, with a knob on the side let the researchers adjust the rate at which the numbers flash. The idea was to dial up the speed of the flashing until it was just a bit too quick for the subject to read while looking at it in a non-stressed mental state. Eagleman reasoned that, if fear really does speed up our rate of perception, then once his subjects were in the terror of freefall, they should be able to make out the numbers on the display. As it turned out, they couldn't. That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.
Eagleman's findings are important not just for understanding the experience of fear, but for the very nature of consciousness. After all, the test subjects who fell from the SCAD tower certainly believed, as they accelerated through freefall, that they knew what the experience was like at that very moment. They thought that it seemed to be moving slowly. Yet Eaglemen's findings suggest that that sensation could only have been superimposed after the fact. The implication is that we don't really have a direct experience of what we're feeling ‘right now,' but only a memory - an unreliable memory - of what we thought it felt like some seconds or milliseconds ago. The vivid present tense we all think we inhabit might itself be a retroactive illusion."
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For more on how intense fear affects memory, see my post,
The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
“The Waking”
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
- Theodore Roethke
"Vitae Summa Brevis"
"Vitae Summa Brevis"
"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream."
- Ernest Dowson
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“Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam”
is a quotation from Horace’s “First Book of Odes”:
“The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes.”
"There’s More to the Inflation Story Than Numbers"
"There’s More to the Inflation Story Than Numbers"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "Yesterday, Jerome Powell, jefe of the Federal Reserve, speaking at a Wall Street Journal virtual conference, let the cat out of the bag. CNN reports: "US stocks tumbled Thursday after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell predicted an increase in consumer prices this summer – something investors fear will force interest rates up sooner than expected.
The market reacted strongly to his interview. The 10-year US government bond yield jumped and was up 0.07% at 1.54% around the time of the closing bell. Meanwhile, stocks sold off. The Dow finished down 1.1%, or 346 points, and the S&P 500 closed 1.3% lower. The Nasdaq Composite fell even more sharply, tumbling 2.1%. The index managed to just avoid dipping into correction territory – defined as a 10% drop from its most recent high – as it was down 9.7% from its February 12 record high. The Nasdaq has erased its gains for the year.
“We do expect that as the economy reopens and hopefully picks up, we’ll see inflation move up," Powell said…"
More to the Story" We’ve spent the entire week poking around in the marshes… the tidal flats where inflation flourishes… between the water world and solid ground. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Alas, about that he was wrong. He was too literal. Too numerical. Too confident of his own power of intellectual reductionism.
Funny that Friedman would illustrate such a mistake. Like choosing Mao Tse-tung to make a point about dental hygiene, Friedman was supposedly a conservative. That is to say, he recognized that we should be chary of making impulsive changes. For however much we think we have something figured out, there’s always more to the story.
Shortcomings: We are grateful to our colleague, George Gilder, for triggering this thought. In his recent writings, he has focused on the shortcomings of scientific models. The world, of course, is an infinitely complex place. But we can’t produce infinitely complex models. So our models are always simplified… like a school book for sex education leaving out the racy parts. That’s why the modelers are almost always wrong. The climate modelers tell us that because of our cows and cars, the world is heating up. And maybe it is… or isn’t. The epidemiologists tell us that COVID-19 will kill millions… unless we wear our masks. And maybe they’re right, too… or not.
Amusing Story: On this subject, an amusing story developed yesterday, when Joe Biden referred to Republican governors’ reluctance to continue with the lockdowns and cover-ups as “neanderthal.” How he knew what Neanderthals would think of his opinions on infectious diseases, we can’t imagine. And why the “unity president” would feel free to stereotype and calumny a whole race of humans – talk about victims of the patriarchy! – we don’t know that, either.
But at least one member of Congress stood up for the neanderthal-ish governors. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) one-upped the president, constructing an amazing, almost first-hand, life-like model of the vanished people: “Neanderthals […] are resilient, they’re resourceful, they tend to their own,” Blackburn said." Well, they must not have been that resilient; they disappeared 30,000 years ago.
Just Numbers: Models are always fanciful. The Fed’s 2,000 economists prepare models to predict GDP growth, for example. Inevitably, the models need to be constantly revised… so that the final line on the chart bends to meet reality. And when Milton Friedman modeled inflation, in order to reduce it to a “monetary phenomenon,” he had to ignore the mystery and poetry… the moral side of things… the surprises… the politics, panics, and madness… and all the other things that go into making a genuine inflationary episode. That is, he had to drain the marshes of all that didn’t fit his model – the tides of greed and fear… the wild animals… the slosh and suck of untamed mud. And what was he left with? Numbers. Numbers that did his bidding. Numbers that didn’t whine or complain when he crunched them together. Numbers that didn’t ask questions.
More than Numbers: In the stripped-down, simplified version, Germany’s hyperinflation was caused by numbers. In 1918, Germany had about 32 billion marks in circulation. By 1923, when the architect of Germany’s monetary policy, Rudolf von Havenstein, died of a heart attack, it had 500 quintillion of them. But Germany had also just lost a devastating war. It had lost its industrial heartland – the Ruhr Valley. Its unemployed war veterans were battling it out in the streets – the brown-shirts against the black shirts… the communists against the national socialists.And it had been forced to deliver almost all its real money – gold – in reparations to Britain and France.
Those things were not numbers. And not strictly monetary. But they mattered, too. And in America, had they been less pliant, the numbers might have stood up in 1971, when Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold, and asked: “Now that the feds can print money at will, won’t they inevitably print too much? Isn’t that the lesson of 2,000 years of monetary history?”
Eight years later, they would have had more questions: “What is the effect of China joining the world economy? They have about 500 million people ready to be put to work. What will that do to inflation?”
"We Have Met The Enemy..."
Full screen recommended, if you dare.
3/4/21: Skid Row homeless encampment
in downtown Los Angeles in the rain.
Full screen recommended.
March 2, 2021: Las Vegas Homeless
It's everywhere...And 22 million evictions pending
once the moratoria and forbearances end... Then, what?
"Dispatches from the New Cold War"
"Dispatches from the New Cold War"
by Fred Reed
"Today’s characteristically luminous insights will be disordered and structurally horrifying, the sort of essay that would have sent my high-school English teacher into anaphylactic shock. In exculpation I plead laziness.
Recently I wrote a column on China’s digital yuan, now in late-stage testing. Bare-bones explanation: You download a digital-wallet app with which you can then send payments to anybody in the world who also has the app, no forms, bureaucracy, or bank account needed. OK, that’s cute, you say. Then, with my phenomenally perceptive, pincer-like grasp of the inescapable, I thought, it sounds scalable. If you can do it with thirty bucks (in yuan) for a hat from some store, why not with fifty million dollars (in yuan) for a shipment of oil from Iran? Sure, with more security and so on, but same mechanism. Interestingly, such payments would be completely independent of, and opaque to, Washington. And independent of…SWIFT, eeeeeeek! Do you suppose China has thought of this?
Well, I thought, this is mere speculative maundering by some guy in Mexico who is admittedly pig ignorant of international finance. And of course China itself was saying that the dijjywan had nothing to do with the dollar, oh no, was solely for domestic use, and for retail sales. Not important. Move on. Nothing to see here.
But then, this: China is consulting, whatever that means, with Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE over using the dijjywan for international payments. Uh…say what? Thailand and the UAE are not particularly domestic to China. And I doubt that Beijing is intensely interested in the retail market of the UAE, which has the aggregate population of a large city bus. Methinks China has Something In mind. And it don’t bode good for sanctions, the petrodollar, and the like.
Nuther subject: Being fascinated by what looks like a shift of the world’s technological and economic center of gravity from the West to Asia, I poke about the web in the manner of an Ernest truffle hound, to see what the wily Orientals are doing. My results are not too systematic. My distinct impression is that things are happening over there, ideas popping up on Wednesday and in volume production by Friday afternoon, of energy and movement. By contrast, America looks asleep at the wheel. Except that it doesn’t have a wheel. A few almost random examples:
Business Insider:“ “China is moving ahead with a huge robot farming project…powered by 5G cellular technology, the agricultural tractor with self-driving mode can also be remotely controlled to carry out multiple intelligent functions” says Chinese governmental site Global Times
Beijing has successfully powered up its “artificial sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, China’s People’s Daily reported on Friday. It’s designed to be a clean energy source, similar to the real Sun.” The foregoing is overexcited as neither China nor anyone else has demonstrated controlled fusion, but it shows that the country is in the race.
Global Times (Again, mouthpiece of Beijing): China needs to increase its nuclear warheads to 1,000.” Because of American hostility.
Education. China finds its brightest students with a grueling entrance exam. America dumbs down elite high schools because they don’t have enough unqualified minorities. Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia has already been enstupidated, and the NYC schools are on the block. The purpose of schools is to admit students who can’t do the work. New York Post: “With this year’s state math and English exams canceled, a watered-down grading policy enacted, and the tossing of attendance, the key factors for admission to selective schools have been dropped or diminished…. “
America Ties with China in 2019 Math Olympiad: Well, not exactly. The 2019 U.S. team is: Vincent Huang, Luke Robitaille, Colin Tang, Edward Wan, Brandon Wang, and Daniel Zhu. China, it seems, tied with itself.
BBC: China’s Chang-e Five lunar-sample return mission safely parachutes into Mongolia. Very sophisticated engineering, and it worked. The US is ahead in space exploration, its Perseverance mission now on Mars being a marvel, but the gap ain’t what it used to be.
If a car looks like this, I want one. Nio is working on a system in which “gas” stations remove a depleted battery and replace it with a charged one, thus eliminating the problem of long charging time. Will it fly? I don’t know, but those folks over there are scurrying. China, Japan, and South Korea, for example, are rapidly advancing hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars.
China’s Quantum Computer Beats Google’s Sycamore in ‘Computational Supremacy’, Claims New Study. Also a bit overdone. My grasp of quantum computing equals that of a hardboiled egg, but this seems to indicate that China is holding its own in a field that is a Very Big Deal.
China has finished building the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. This photo was taken on July 3, 2016, the day the huge dish’s last panel was installed” Great big sucker. Four years ago. China has the money to spend on pure science. Wow.
“The next-generation Chinese medium-low speed maglev doubles the top speed of the first generation and it becomes driverless…Most of the R&D work is done in Hunan Province…” Miles of high-speed rail in the US: 0. Miles of maglev rail in US: 0. Likelihood of either any time soon: 0. Cost of new B21 intercontinental nuclear bomber: $550 million. Each.
China to build 30 ‘fully connected’ 5G factories by 2023. Many think of Five G as being able to download movies in three seconds. Actually, with high throughput and low latency, combined with artificial intelligence and edge computing, it will be hugely important in managing smart factories, transportation networks, smart cities, and so on. This is why Washington wants to block it. Meanwhile China is catching up in AI, it seems.
“Huawei’s Harmony OS Extends to All Devices in 2021 in Bid for Tech Self-Sufficiency Amid US Trade War.” This is interesting. Tech commentators have pointed out, correctly but without too much insight, that Huawei will have a hard time selling phones with Harmony outside of China because Trump cut the company off from using the Android operating system’s app store. Google.” Huawei is now preloading Harmony on all of its product, making it independent of Google.
Now we have Huawei May Allow Chinese Smartphone Firms to Use Harmony OS to Counter Trump Trade Bans, This means that all of China’s phone companies are independent of Android, at least in China, as, if threatened by the US, they just switch to Harmony. It also means that China, should it choose, could ban Android in Chinas as Trump banned Huawei in the US, and perhaps ban iOS also, thus losing the entire Chinese market for Google and Apple. Forcing a large, resourceful country to build competing products might charitably be called preternaturally stupid.
Which brings us to the new Cold War, which is exactly what Trump II is engaged in. The Beltway China hawks want to cripple China’s tech industry by denying it advanced semiconductor technology, chiefly from America’s vassal states of Holland, Taiwan, and South Korea. Will this work? I dunno. But there is a clear pattern in China’s response. A sort of techy example, that sensible readers can skip.
There is a company in Wuhan, YMTC, Yangtze Memory Technology Company, that has developed an advanced 192-layer dual-wafer NAND (“flash”) chip using Chinese technology. Flash memory is used in huge quantities in everything from smartphones to French fries (well, maybe not French fries.) There is some doubt as to whether the company will be able to produce in volume, but it is building a second fab line, so it must think it can. If it does, American companies, notably Micron, will lose the (very large) Chinese market for flash. Then the Chinese, nothing if not commercial, will probably flood the world market with discount flash.
This tech-wide lunge for self-sufficiency, if Washington does not succeed in crushing it, will close the Chinese market progressively for American firms. Well, who needs 1.4 billion customers? The China hawks may be poking the wrong bear.
RCRWireless News: “Chinese operators to build over 1 million 5G base stations in 2021: “According to estimates from Wu Hequan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the total number of 5G base stations in China could reach more than 1.7 million by the end of next year.”
US fumbles, fiddles, sucks thumb. Years behind. It is now forcing UK to uninstall Huawei gear. Great diplomatic triumph. Brilliant future. Nuff said.
A total of 40% of the world’s new solar power generation capacity is constructed there. And the country’s share of global electricity generated by the sun has jumped from 2% in 2010 to 32% in 2018. Nuff said."
"The Duty..."
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you
damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty,
the duty to take the consequences."
- P. J. O'Rourke
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/5/21"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 3/5/21"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Another week and more election fraud is uncovered. Now, 400,000 absentee ballots are “missing” in Georgia. Joe Biden won the state by a little less than 12,000 votes. The ballots are required by law to be kept, but now they are gone and no way to check them. There was more election fraud discovered in New Jersey and Mississippi as well, but the public is being told election fraud in the 2020 Election is a “myth.” That’s a huge lie, and everybody knows it, including the Republicans that worked so hard to put Joe Biden in office. Now, the Republican leaders are talking about “voter integrity.” Hey, I thought voter fraud was a “myth”????
Dr. Simone Gold was arrested by nearly two dozen heavily armed FBI agents. Dr. Gold was at the U.S. Capital January 6th with a bullhorn warning anybody that would listen about the dangers of taking “experimental” Covid 19 (CV19) vaccines. Yes, you heard correctly, the vaccines are only approved for “emergency use.” This means the CV19 vaccines are experimental. Vaccine companies have no idea what will happen long term, but short term, Dr. Gold says they can cause miscarriages and also cause young women to be sterile. Dr. Gold did walk through the Capitol building on Jan 6th but caused zero damage and did nothing violent. Dr. Gold thinks the FBI raided her home and broke down her front door to intimidate her and anyone else that would tell the truth about CV19 vaccines and non-vaccine treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Ivermectin that have proven very good results for fighting CV19. Medical tyranny is here and alive and well in America.
This week, it was reported that another nearly 750,000 people filed for first time unemployment benefits. How can the economy be getting better? It’s not. Yet, the Senate is debating a $1.9 trillion so-called stimulus package. Will it help the economy? It might if 91% of the $1.9 trillion was not going to political payoffs and non-CV19 related spending. All of the money printing out of thin air might be the reason Fed Head Jay Powell is warning about inflation. Don’t worry, he says, it will be “temporary.” Hope so because things like grain, lumber, oil and many other commodities are spiking in price."
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com on Rumble as
he talks about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up.
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/5/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/5/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
March 4th to March 5th, Updated Daily
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Daily Job Cuts
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FRI MAR 5, AT 6:06 AM: "Central Banks & The Chernobyl Quandary" "Central Banks face an critical ask: how to raise rates to avert fuelling the financial asset bubble without triggering market meltdown."
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And now, the End Game...
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Oh yeah...
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Must Watch! "The FED Cannot Stop The Coming Crash; Cities Get Billions, You Get Crumbs; US Debt $28 Trillion"
Jeremiah Babe,
"The FED Cannot Stop The Coming Crash;
Cities Get Billions, You Get Crumbs; US Debt $28 Trillion"
"Does Anyone Even Care That The U.S. Government Debt Will Soon Cross The 30 Trillion Dollar Mark?"
Full screen recommended.
"Does Anyone Even Care That The U.S. Government
Debt Will Soon Cross The 30 Trillion Dollar Mark?"
by Epic Economist
"America is now officially on the path of financial ruin. We are nearing $28 trillion in national debt, and by the end of 2021, we will likely have exceeded the $30 trillion mark. Congress is about to finally pass a 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package. In the short-term, that will help to ease the pain of millions of American households, and also provide assistance to some businesses across the country. However, a significant part of that spending isn't tied to priorities that are directly related to the current crisis, and considering we will have to borrow every single dollar spent in this bill - on top of all of the "standard" borrowing that we are already doing - it seems that we're doomed to fall into a tragic debt spiral - one that it will take decades to recover from. In other words, with almost $30 trillion in national debt, there's no question we are headed to The Next Great Depression. That's what we're going to expose in this video.
We're right on the verge of a major financial disaster, but as numerous devastating events are unfolding at the same time all around us, many can't afford to take a break and try to look at the bigger picture. Can we even blame them? For a year now, most Americans have been in a living nightmare. People's lives are still being turned upside down and dramatically falling apart. But, of course, the mainstream media is still doing a great job in distracting us from the real roots of our real problems. In that way, it has been quite easy to shift our focus away from national budget issues in a time millions are wondering if they will have enough to eat. However, this is a matter of importance to all of us, because, in the long-run, there will be serious consequences that could collectively impact our living standards. So we're about to report some concerning numbers that are failing to be delivered by mass media outlets.
Let's start with GDP. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, current-dollar GDP declined 2.3 percent, or $500.6 billion, in 2020 to a level of $20.93 trillion, compared with an increase of 4.0 percent, or $821.3 billion, in 2019. What does that mean? It means that once our national debt crosses the 30 trillion dollar mark, our debt to GDP ratio will be soaring toward 150 percent. That is completely absurd. Some may argue that the coming stimulus package is crucial to assist households, workers, and businesses, and no one can really argue with that.
However, according to a recent analysis, only about 35 percent of all money allocated by the next spending bill is going to be redirected to the American people. From those 35 percent, just 22 percent will be set aside for $1,400-per-person stimulus checks, while 13 percent will go for extending additional unemployment funding of $400 a week. Additionally, the coming fiscal package won't compass the same number of Americans as the previous ones. After a prolonged dispute, the Senate agreed to dramatically reduce the number of Americans that will qualify for the new payments.
A sizable chunk of that spending is going to projects completely unrelated to our current recession, including "a $1.5 million bridge connecting New York and Canada; a $100 million underground rail project in Silicon Valley; $480 million for Native American language preservation and maintenance; and $50 million in environmental justice grants," as reported by PolitiFact. In a time when over half of our population is financially suffering, we simply cannot afford to let millions upon millions of dollars go to wasteful spending.
It's important to keep in mind that the 1.9 trillion bill will come from borrowed money. “The United States government borrows money by selling what we call treasury bonds or treasury bills to private investors or to foreign governments or to banks or to state pension plans,” Bolen explains. That is to say, the money that is going to be distributed doesn't come from the economy itself, but through selling the idea that the economy will recover and generate gains for investors, which is why this spending is seen as unsustainable.
What all of this tells us is that we're trapped in a never-ending debt spiral that is about to spin out of control. As we have already fallen into this trap, the only way to survive is to keep creating, borrowing and spending more money. As economic collapse writer, Michael Snyder has recently stressed: "in our insatiable greed, we are systematically destroying the United States of America, and we should be utterly ashamed of ourselves."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.
Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121211.html
"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 - that 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
"Why?"
"Why does truth carry such a dreadful face? Why does subjugation carry
such a happy mask? It becomes sad when people understand that they
can lead a better life as long as they bow their heads, ignoring the truth."
- Lionel Suggs
Must Watch! Gerald Celente, “Trends in The News”, 3/4/21
Gerald Celente, “Trends in The News”, 3/4/21
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."
Gregory Mannarino, “Must Watch/Must Know! FED. Chairman Powell Rocks The Debt Market”
Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/4/21:
“Must Watch/Must Know!
FED. Chairman Powell Rocks The Debt Market”
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Related:
"The Delightful Poetry of Inflation"
"The Delightful Poetry of Inflation"
by Bill Bonner
And now I’m lost, too late to pray,
Lord I take a cost, oh the lost highway..."
– "Lost Highway" by Hank Williams
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "The subject this week is inflation. And what a marvelous subject it is. One day, a share in Tesla costs $50. Flash forward to today, and it has risen to $653. Or take bitcoin… Five years ago, you could buy it for $500. Now, it’s nearly $50,000. Or a daily newspaper. In 1918, you could buy a daily newspaper in Berlin for less than 1 deutsche mark. Five years later, you’d have needed 42 billion of them. We’re a long way from 100,000% consumer price inflation. But even the longest journey, down that lost highway, begins by stepping on the gas.
Hit the Gas: And look at this: We’re rollin’ now… Oil is now at $60 a barrel, up from near zero in April 2020. The U.S. gasoline index increased 7.4% in January. The United Nations says food prices are at a six-year high. And consumable goods are getting smaller, as manufacturers squeeze output to avoid raising prices. Nutella reduced its 400-gram jar of chocolate spread to 350 grams. A package of Nathan’s Pretzel Dogs was cut from five to four. And Charmin’s Mega Roll toilet paper was reduced by 200 sheets.
And here’s one of the heroes of "The Big Short", warning us to prepare for higher prices. From Business Insider: “Prepare for #inflation,” the investor [Michael Burry] said in a now-deleted tweet. “Re-opening & stimulus on the way. Pre-COVID it took $3 debt to create $1 GDP, and it is worse now. In an inflationary crisis, governments will move to squash competitors in the currency arena. $BTC #gold.”
[…]
The investor compared Germany’s path to hyperinflation in the 1920s to America’s current trajectory. “Germany [the US] started by not paying adequately for its war [on COVID and the GFC fallout] out of the sacrifices of its people – taxes – but covered its deficits with war loans [Treasuries] and issues of new paper Reichsmarks [dollars]. #doomedtorepeat,” Burry tweeted."
Speculative Frenzy: In the early stages, inflation seems benign… even agreeable. An investor, with no particular effort or insight on his part, suddenly becomes rich. What is going on? Is it a real miracle? Or just tomfoolery? You can make people rich in material treasure by adding no treasure at all… You can make one master of the other – for now, he can pay the other to do his bidding with nothing more than, well, nothing at all… pieces of paper… or mere electronic notations, so light, so fleeting, you can’t see them… touch them… or even ask them to dinner.
And yet, these notations change everything. One man retires in comfort. Most are impoverished. And the economy, once so fulsome with progress and industry, turns to rank speculation… gambling…every man hoping that he will be the one with the winning hand… the first in line to get the new money.
It’s a “speculative frenzy,” says Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger, who was born at the peak of Germany’s hyperinflation. “Wretched excess,” is how he describes trading in the likes of Tesla and bitcoin. Adds his business partner, Warren Buffett, born during the Great Depression, “Fixed-income investors [who suffer when the dollar is inflated] face a bleak future.”
Replay: There are few advantages to getting old. But one of them, if you can keep your wits about you, is that you’ve seen a lot of wretched excesses; you know what they look like. The whole phenomenon of inflation is deeply entertaining and wonderfully instructive. But it doesn’t come along every day… So we must savor it… like an antique whiskey. Rolling it over his tongue, the old man says to himself (no one else will listen), “Oh yeah… I’ve tasted this before.”
But today’s crazes… the SPACs… cryptos… space stocks – perhaps they are different? Who knows? Youthful optimism tells us that this is a New Era. Old age and grumpiness tell us that it’s a replay of the Old Era, starring that long-time favorite – inflation. The trouble with inflation is that the useful learning comes not at the beginning, but at the end.
For, by then, the nation’s fields and factories have fallen fallow… the economy is in desuetude… and fortunes have declined, too, if not disappeared altogether. By then, the common man would kick his own derrière if he could reach it. How could he have failed to appreciate the delightful poetry of inflation… and how it made something out of nothing and then nothing out of something…leaving almost everyone – save those few who really understood what was happening – destitute?
Too Late: Yes, that is the problem. It is a story whose moral only becomes clear at the end… like a Marcel Pagnol novel… where (spoiler alert!) the mean old man finally learns that the young man… a humpback he has helped to kill… was actually his own son. By then, it is too late to make amends. Too late to say “I’m sorry.” Too late to change course. Too late to avoid the awful catastrophe.
Yes, that is the problem with inflation. Like life itself, it waits too long to speak. It’s only when you approach the end that you hear it whisper: “You damned fool… How could you believe that printing-press money would make you rich?” And then, in your moment of reckoning… racked by doubt and pain… a light turns on and you finally see the scene… your whole life laid out before you – your mistakes… your sins… your lost opportunities and wrong turns… And you finally see what it all meant…and nobody cares. It’s too late.
Tomorrow… why inflation is probably coming, no matter what the Federal Reserve does."
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