"Flashpoint Ukraine: Don't Poke the Bear"

"Flashpoint Ukraine: Don't Poke the Bear"

by Mike Whitney And Israel Shamir

"Question 1: For the last 4 years, Democrat leaders have blamed Russia for allegedly meddling in the 2016 elections. Now the Democrats - who control all three branches of government - have the power to reset US foreign policy and take a more hostile approach to Moscow. But will they?

At present, there are roughly 40,000 US-NATO troops massed along the Russian border conducting military exercises while scores of Russian tanks, artillery and an estimated 85,000 Russian troops are now located about 25 miles from Ukraine’s eastern border. Both armies are on hair-trigger alert and prepared for any sudden provocation. If the Ukrainian Army invades the Russian-speaking region of Ukraine (Donbas), Moscow will likely respond. So, will there be a conflagration in the Ukraine this spring and, if so, how will Putin respond? Will he limit the scope of his campaign to the Donbas or push onward to Kiev?

Israel Shamir: If the Russian army crosses the Ukrainian border, it won’t stop in the Donbas. The war will be brief and the Ukraine will be split into pieces. But will it happen? Russia’s totem animal, the Bear, is a strong and peaceful animal that is not easily aroused, but once provoked, it is unstoppable. Russian rulers have typically fit this image. They weren’t adventurous, but level-headed and prudent. Putin, who is the quintessential Russian ruler, is risk-averse. He won’t start a war he never wanted to begin with, but he will act decisively if he needs to do so. Consider 2014, after the Ukrainian coup: the lawful Ukrainian president Mr Yanukovich ran to Russia and asked Putin to help him regain power. At that time, the Ukrainian army was weak and Russia could have easily retaken the country without facing any significant resistance. But, surprisingly, Putin did not give the order to take Kiev.

Putin is unpredictable. He ordered the seizure of Crimea despite the counsel of his advisors. It was an unexpected move, and it worked like a charm. He also pummeled Georgia in 2008 after Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia. This was another surprise move that succeeded better than anyone could have imagined. If the Ukrainians try to retake Donbas, the Russian army will beat them badly and continue on to Kiev. The presence of NATO’s troops will not deter Putin.

As for the Democrats, they can push Kiev to attack, but they will end up losing Ukraine in the process. If the point is to poison relations between Russia and Europe, they can try to do so, but if they think the Russo-Ukrainian war is going to drag on, they’re mistaken. And if they think Putin won’t defend the Donbas, they’ve made a serious miscalculation.

Biden’s recent phone call to Putin suggests that the administration has decided not to launch a war after all. The unconfirmed report of two US ships turning away from the Black Sea fits this assessment. However, we cannot be sure about this since the Kremlin refused to agree to Biden’s offer for a meeting. The Kremlin’s response was a frosty “We shall study the proposal”. Russians feel that the summit proposal might be a trick aimed at buying time to strengthen their position. Bottom line: We cannot know certain how things will play out in the future.

Question 2: I have a hard time understanding what the Biden administration hopes to gain by provoking a war in the Ukraine. Seizing the Donbas will force the government to impose a costly, long-term military occupation that will be ferociously resisted by Russian-speaking people who live in the area. How does that benefit Washington?

I don’t think it does. I think the real objective is to provoke Putin into overreacting, thus, proving that Russia poses a threat to all of Europe. The only way Washington can persuade its EU allies that they should not engage in critical business transactions (like Nordstream) with Moscow, is if they can prove that Russia is an “external threat” to their collective security. Do you agree with this or do you think Washington has something to gain by launching a war in Ukraine?

Israel Shamir: What do you mean by ‘overreacting’? Putin is not threatening to nuke Washington or take over Brussels or storm Warsaw? But to solve the problem of Ukraine on such occasion would be entirely reasonable.

When the regime in Kiev began to prepare for war a few months ago, they thought it would be a repeat of 2015, where they attack Donbas, the Donbas suffers losses, and then the Russian army steps in to prevent their defeat. They saw it as a limited war with a good chance of regaining Donbas. But Moscow has indicated that they will respond to any unprovoked aggression using their full strength, thereby crushing the Ukrainian state. In other words, the Russian army won’t stop at the Donbas but will proceed to the western borders of Ukraine until the entire country is liberated. Is that ‘overreacting’?

Definitely not. The people of Ukraine would be saved from the nationalist, anti-Russian regime, and the people of Russia would be saved from a NATO base on their western flank. Hopefully the EU will understand this. As for the US, the Russians have already made up their minds; the United States is an enemy. There has been a tectonic shift in Russia, and that shift is the result of Russia’s weariness with the United States’ proxy assaults.

The US would like to see the Donbas reintegrated into the Ukrainian state because then they’d be praised as a ‘mighty defender of an East European country against Russia’. But then Russia would have permanent low-level war on its border. Either way, Russia’s relations with Europe would be poisoned and the EU would probably end up buying expensive liquefied gas from the US rather than instead the much cheaper Russian gas. Russia’s decision to launch a full-blown attack on the Ukraine has made the whole plan irrelevant. Putin will not allow it to happen.

The Ukrainians are flexible folks. At present, they submit to anti-Russian nationalist narrative, but if the Russian army were to come, the Ukrainians would quickly remember that they were co-founders of the USSR, brothers to Russians, and they would shake off the nightmarish nationalist rule. The Ukrainians are wonderful people, but they easily adapt to new rulers, be they the German Wehrmacht, the Polish landlords, the Petlyura Nationalists, or the Communists. They would adapt to a partnership with Russia, too. Similarly, the Russians would embrace the Ukrainians as they did in 1920 and in 1945.

Question 3: The Russian army would have little problem capturing the Capitol, but holding on to Kiev might be a different matter altogether. Let’s say, Russian troops are deployed to Kiev to maintain the peace while a provisional government is established in the run-up to free elections. What would the US response be? What would NATO’s response be? How would this maneuver be portrayed in the western media? Would it be portrayed as a “liberation” or an “occupation by a ruthless imperial power”? Would this help or hurt Moscow’s relations with its partners around the world and particularly Germany where Nordstream is still under construction?

And wouldn’t this scenario prompt the US Intel agencies to arm, train and fund disparate groups of far-right extremists who would carry out a protracted insurgency against Russian troops in Kiev? How is that in Russia’s interest? Why would Putin put himself in the same situation the US put itself in Afghanistan, where a poorly-armed, ragtag militia has made governance impossible forcing the US to pack-up and leave 20 years later. Is that what Putin wants?

Israel Shamir: The comparison with Afghanistan is absurd. Ukraine is a part of Russia that became independent the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. Ukrainians are Russians of a sort. They have the same religion, the same language, the same culture, and the same history. Yes, the CIA did try to arm the Ukrainian insurgency after WWII, but with little success. You could compare a takeover of Kiev with a takeover of Atlanta by Sherman.

Ukrainian independence and separation probably cannot be reversed right away, but instead of one big unwieldy state, Ukraine can be transformed into a few coherent independent units. Western Ukraine is likely to join Poland as an independent or semi-independent state. East and South Ukraine could become semi-independent under Russian umbrella, or join Russian Federation. And historical Ukraine around Poltava could try and go its own way. I think the Ukrainians would be happy to reunite with their mother state, or at least to become friendly with Moscow. There will be no need to deploy Russian troops in Kiev or elsewhere. There are enough Ukrainians to govern and control the situation and to deal with remaining extreme nationalists.

What would the US and NATO response be? How would this maneuver be portrayed in the western media? Probably the same as their response to Crimea takeover. They will be angry, unhappy, furious. The problem is they already are. They’ve already imposed sanctions on Russia and reinstalled the Iron Curtain. They’ve already done everything short of a military confrontation. Russia is so annoyed by it all, that she is beyond caring about another bout of sanctions.

I am certain that Russia won’t start a war in the Ukraine, but if Kiev does, the Russian army will topple the regime just like the US toppled regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other states. And, any attempt to establish US or NATO military bases in Ukraine will undoubtedly be seen as casus belli.

Russians think that a big war is unavoidable, so it’s probably better to have Ukraine under Moscow’s control before that war breaks out. The US is an enemy; that is the feeling in Russia. If the US wants to change that perception, it should act fast.

Question 4: Is Washington genuinely interested in Ukraine or is it just a staging-ground for its war on Russia?

Israel Shamir: Washington would like to initiate a low-intensity war between Ukraine and Russia, a long-lasting war that would drain Russian resources and kill Russian troops; a war that would divert Russia’s attention from other hotspots, like in Syria or Libya. This is the way in which the US is laying the groundwork for an even bigger confrontation with Russia in the future.

Putin has accepted the breakup of the USSR. He’s not trying to reconstruct the Soviet empire nor is he particularly interested in Ukraine. Twice he allowed Russia’s enemies to carry Ukraine away: in 2004 and in 2014. He has showed that he’d prefer to have as little to do with Ukraine as possible. Being a lawyer by education, Putin has a legal mind. He thought that Minsk Treaties were good enough a solution for all concerned. (The Minsk Treaty would “federalize” the Ukraine) He didn’t expect that Kiev would just ignore the treaties, but that’s what happened. Now he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s not keen on annexing any part of Ukraine, but he might be forced to do so sooner or later.

In the last few weeks, US-Russian relations have deteriorated significantly. Russia is deeply offended by recent developments and will not go back to “business as usual”. We have entered uncharted waters and there is no way to predict what will happen next.

Question 5: No one in the United States benefits from a conflict with Russia, in fact, a military confrontation with Moscow poses a serious and, perhaps, existential threat to Russians and Americans alike. Still, the rush to war continues apace, mainly because the US military –with all of its millions of troops and high-tech weaponry – is in the hands of a foreign policy establishment that is determined to control the vast resources and growth-potential of Central Asia despite the casualties and destruction that strategy will undoubtedly cause.

The biggest obstacle to this plan is Russia, which is why – since the collapse of the Soviet Union – the US and NATO have made every effort to encircle Russia, deploy missile sites to its borders, conduct hostile military exercises on its perimeter, and arm and train Islamic extremists to fight in its provinces. (Chechnya) Now that Joe Biden has been elected president, I would expect the hostilities towards Russia will rapidly intensify in both Ukraine and Syria. Biden has already shown that he will do whatever he is told to do by the foreign policy “Borg”, which means that war with Russia might be unavoidable. Do you agree or disagree with this analysis?

Israel Shamir: There are forces that want to control and direct mankind. These forces use the US as their enforcer. The Trump-related part of the US elites want the US to be the main beneficiary of the process. The Biden-related part of the US elites is more globally-oriented. Russia is ready to adjust to some of their demands (vaccination, climate) in order to avoid a final showdown. On the other hand, we don’t completely know what these global elites really want. And why the sense of urgency? Why the lack of concern for the American people or the Russians or the Europeans? Perhaps Davos is the new center of power and they are simply upset by Putin’s disobedience?

What we can say for certain is that imperialists always seek world hegemony. Independent Russia presents a challenge to that plan. Perhaps, western elites think they can bring Russia into full compliance by brinkmanship and threatening war? Perhaps, what we’re seeing in the Ukraine is an attempt to browbeat Russia into obedience? The danger is that they will push things too far and start a war they can neither manage or contain. Putin remembers the fate of Saddam and Gadhafi. He’s not going to throw in the towel and back down. He’s not going to give up or give in.

To my American readers I’d say that the US is very strong and the people of the US can have a wonderful life even without world hegemony, in fact, hegemony is not in their interests at all. What they should seek is a strong nationalist policy that cares for the American people and avoids wasteful foreign wars."

- https://www.unz.com/

"A Refining Process..."

“Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we’ll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at “Chopsticks.” The piano is not responsible. It’s how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It’s how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine.”

- Barbara Johnson

"Confessions of a Doomsayer"

"Confessions of a Doomsayer"

by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "A dear reader writes to say we are wrong. “What these doomsday prophets like Bonner fail to explain is the efficiency of today’s supply chain that can quickly produce goods and services to meet demand. The market continues to roar in the face of his daily diatribes. If we were keeping score, we would say Fed: 40; Bonner: 0. I do enjoy reading the columns as I find them highly entertaining.” – Mike C.

And yes, of course, we are wrong about a great number of things. This is partly because the odds are so heavily against us. If we say “The bond market topped out on August 4, 2020” (which we think it did), we are guessing that it won’t go higher and finally top out on any of the 365 days in this year. And now, in our constant rehearsal of the “sky is falling” forecast, we will be wrong again… until it finally hits us in the head. When might that be? Well, we don’t know. It could begin any day now… or not. In the meantime, the Federal Reserve will be right… and we will look like an idiot.

Lesson Learned: Today, we enter the confessional. And let’s begin by warning new readers that they should never pay attention to our stock market suggestions. Publicly traded stocks don’t interest us; we don’t do any serious research on them. And on the rare occasions when we comment on any particular company, we are as likely to be wrong as right. (Full disclosure: We do own stocks! They’re managed for us by our trusted old friend, Chris Mayer.)

Just this week, we were reminded that, some months ago, in this space, we laughed at investors who were buying Hertz (HTZGQ). The company had gone bankrupt. But somehow, it had found favor with the young traders who spend their time chatting about such things. They were so eager to buy the stock that the company – then in bankruptcy – decided to issue new shares. It would have been a first in the history of finance… had not the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) put a stop to it.

“When you’re young… in love… at war… or in a bubble…” we concluded, “there’s no time to think straight, or even think at all.” Well, wouldn’t you know… we’re in a bubble. The used car market turned up… and Hertz – like a sleeping beauty, kissed by its Reddit suitors – came back to life. The company is back in business. The whippersnappers turned out to be right. We turned out to be wrong. We take no lesson from the Hertz story but that there are a lot of things you can be wrong about. We’re working our way through them, slowly.

A Costly Lesson: Take Amazon (AMZN), for example… please. One of the most spectacular things we were wrong about was Jeff Bezos’ creation. When it came out – this was more than 20 years ago – we called it “The River of No Returns.” The title was clever. But the prediction was poor. Amazon’s business strategy was a classic formula for failure. The company cut its margins so thin, it lost money on every sale. Then, it aimed to make up for the losses by increasing volume. That was never going to work, we opined.

And it never really did. Amazon’s retailing business has never made enough money to justify the huge “investment” (losses) necessary to reach its present scale. So its core business is still a river of no returns – not worth a fraction of its current market price. But how were we supposed to know that a virus would come along… so that people would stay home and be almost forced to order from amazon.com? Boom! Amazon’s net sales rose by more than $100 billion last year. And how were we to know that its huge data processing needs would get it into a whole new line of business that would be so profitable? Yes, the cloud computing business. That’s where the money is. Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for a bit more than 10% of the company’s sales… but more than 60% of its profits.

AMZN gave our dear readers their first big opportunity to get rich. Those who were smart enough to ignore our advice could have bought the stock for under $50. Today, split adjusted, it is over $3,000, giving the company a market value of about $1.7 trillion. Jeff Bezos got so rich, he could go through the most expensive divorce in history and still have a net worth estimated at almost $200 billion.

Mechanistic Approach: So let’s turn back to the Federal Reserve, which is clearly ahead of us – as our dear reader tells us – on points. There – on the big picture, the macro view – we do pay attention. And maybe there, we are less of an idiot than we appear. Ours is a “moralistic” view. That is, we assume that if we leave the dishes unwashed, sooner or later, they’ll attract cockroaches. But, of course, that could happen any time.

Almost all other observers today use a more mechanistic approach. They believe you can understand an economy – and are able to predict its next moves – by looking at dials and instruments, as if you were flying an airplane. Losing altitude? Give the machine more throttle! The trouble with the mechanistic approach is that an economy is not a machine. It is more like a living thing… infinitely complex, with purposes and prejudices we can’t possibly know. As for adjusting the throttle, forget about it. You can’t plot a course… or determine the correct speed or altitude… because you never know where you’re going. You won’t know until you get there. And you don’t know how to fly a plane, anyway.

Moralistic Approach: But the “moralist” is always wrong… before he is right. He notices when things seem out-of-whack. But he has no way of knowing when or how they will go back into whack. That is what happened in 2000 and again in 2008. Each time, the stock market was in a boom and the mechanics were proclaiming a New Era. The moralists denied it. “How could investors make money from unprofitable companies?” they wondered in 1999. Eight years later, they wanted to know how people could get rich by “taking out equity” from their own homes.

Both times, the doomsayers (including us) were way too early, anticipating crashes years before they ever happened. Then, when the crises came, the Fed gave the plane full throttle – “printing” record amounts of new money. The mechanics saw a recovery. The moralists saw more trouble ahead. And now, in the greatest bout of money-printing in U.S. history, we doomsayers see another calamity coming – the third major crisis of the 21st century. Will we be right or wrong?

Bad Ending: The Fed has set off a boom. Everything is flying through the air. The mechanic sees sales increasing… unemployment going down… stocks near record highs. Even things with no apparent value – NFTs, money-losing businesses, Dogecoin – can be worth billions. Dogecoin, created as a joke in 2013, is now said to be worth $42 billion… or just slightly less than Hewlett-Packard, for example. We try not to pretend to know things we don’t know. And we have no idea why Dogecoin is worth more than HP. But we believe this boom is going to end badly… like the other two. Only worse. Boom… boom… Ka-boom!"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"How It Really Is"

Well that's not entirely true, there's the $trillion mineral deposits; the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) Gas Pipeline; the trillions spent by the Defense Dept; the hundreds of billions spent on "private contractors"; tremendous oil and natural gas deposits; the hundreds of billions spent on "reconstruction projects" like gas stations in the middle of deserts; and control (and distribution) of 90% of the world's $100 billion yearly opium supply by those great patriots the CIA; and on and on ad absurdio...

Oh, and lest we forget, "freedom and democracy", baby!

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Related:

"Why Can’t We ‘Just March Out’ of Afghanistan?"

"The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing"

"The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing"

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

"The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.

Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.

The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.

Click image for larger size.

Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe.The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true.

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes.

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962).

A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America.

It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse.

The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way. In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies. The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again.

As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology.

When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once.

Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one: "When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group."

That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.

It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming.

Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government."

- https://www.globalresearch.ca

- https://www.aier.org/

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Related:

• "Comply or Die: The Only Truly Compliant Person

 in a Police State Is a Dead One"

• "Lockdowns Are a Step Too Far in Combating Covid-19"

• "Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns 

if They Think They Can Get Away with It"

"Housing Bubble Will Collapse Everything; Retail Sales Go Bananas; Helicopter Money; Stimulus Effect"

Jeremiah Babe,

"Housing Bubble Will Collapse Everything; 

Retail Sales Go Bananas; Helicopter Money; Stimulus Effect"

Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: The Prince is Dead, Long Live the Prince"

Gerald Celente, 

"Trends Journal: The Prince is Dead, Long Live the Prince"

- https://trendsresearch.com/

Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/20/21: "FREEFALL: The US Economy Is MELTING DOWN, And Poverty Is Skyrocketing"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/20/21:

"FREEFALL: The US Economy Is MELTING DOWN, 

And Poverty Is Skyrocketing"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"How It Really Is"

"Ka-Boom Time!"

"Ka-Boom Time!"

by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "What a jolly time. A boo… boo… ka-boom! JPMorgan Chase CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon sees it coming: "I have little doubt that with excess savings, new stimulus savings, huge deficit spending, more QE, a new potential infrastructure bill, a successful vaccine, and euphoria around the end of the pandemic, the U.S. economy will likely boom. This boom could easily run into 2023 because all the spending could extend well into 2023."

Yes… all that stimmy money… all that fake, new cash and credit… so many boondoggles… so many Madoffs… so little time. So many new “investments”… and with no sure money, no way to know what they are worth.

Here’s The Intelligencer with the boomy news: "Last week, fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits than at any time since March 2020. Last month, retail sales in the U.S. rose by 9.8 percent, the largest increase in nearly a year. Factory activity in the state of New York just hit its highest level since 2017; in Philadelphia, manufacturers are now more confident about business conditions than they have been since 1973. As of this writing, U.S. stock values have hit an all-time high. All of this news is better than expected. And yet the yield on U.S. Treasury bonds declined Thursday morning - a sign that global investors believe America can have its post-COVID economic boom and its low inflation, too."

Two Kinds of Boom: Yes, but wait. The trouble with booms is that there is more than one kind. There’s the kind of boom that makes people richer. And there’s the kind of boom that makes them poorer. A further complication is that, in the early stages, it’s hard to tell the two apart. A real boom – based on working, saving, investing, and innovating – makes you richer and better off. The other kind… the fake boom… is another thing altogether. You just print up some money and pass it out all over town.

Pretty soon, things start to happen. Even “better than expected” things. People spend. Cash registers make a joyful sound – ka-ching! – especially the ones in China, Vietnam, and Mexico, where Americans tend to spend most of their stimmy money. The last 12 months were unique in that respect. Shutting down the local service economy – restaurants, bars, hotels, and theaters – left Americans with money on their hands. What did they do with it? They bought new refrigerators. Spending on “consumer durables” rose 17% over the last 12 months, partly explaining last month’s almost 7% rise in import prices.

A fake boom doesn’t add to prosperity; it reduces it, by squandering real wealth – time and resources – on projects that don’t pay off. Giveaways, for example. Political payoffs. And bad investments. More money for the unemployed. More for Amtrak. More for “socially disadvantaged farmers.” And more money for cryptos, SPACs , NFTs, and Elon Musk.

Parade of Lunacy: But at least a fake boom is more entertaining than a real boom. The latter is all sobriety and hard work, while the former sets in motion a glorious parade of lunacy. Here at the Diary, we watch them go by – the madmen… the imposters… the shysters… and the world improvers. We gawk. We salute. We toss confetti. We would shake up a bottle of champagne and spray it over them… if we were that sort of fellow.

If only you could get rich by spending money you don’t have on things you can’t afford and don’t really need anyway! But you can’t. And over time, every detail of the fake boom is destined to be exposed as counterfeit. Especially the “low inflation.”

The feds are now proposing a 50-year Treasury bond to let investors take advantage of the next half-century of stable prices. So you see, even they haven’t completely lost their sense of humor. Or else they are insane, too.

What Inflation Looks Like: When you increase the supply of money – with no offsetting increase in goods and services – you should expect rising prices. But not always where or when you expect them. The monetary foundation of the U.S. used to be in Fort Knox. But now, since there is no longer any connection between U.S. gold and U.S. money, the closest thing to a monetary base is the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. That tells us how much new money the Fed has “printed.”

When the 21st century began, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at about $600 billion. Today, it is almost $8 trillion, with nearly half of that added in the last 12 months alone.

It Also Looks Like This: The Fed’s balance sheet is what enables so much federal borrowing… and U.S. debt.

The U.S. borrows by selling bonds. Grosso modo, the Fed buys them with money it specially creates for the occasion. The total U.S. debt at the beginning of the 21st century stood at $5.7 trillion. Twenty-one years later, the total is over $28 trillion.

That’s inflation too, right there – in the federales’ accounts. It has already disrupted the financial system and corrupted capitalism. Companies no longer invest their capital to earn more capital; now, they buy their own shares… or, like MicroStrategy (MSTR), they buy bitcoin (more below). After all, the central bank has been lending money to its member banks at below zero (below the real rate of inflation) for most of the last 11 years. That alone is bound to cause distortions.

Freak Show: We’ve enjoyed laughing at some of these grotesqueries over the last few days and weeks – Dogecoin, MicroStrategy (a company whose business strategy is simply to turn itself into a bag of bitcoin), a single-pixel NFT, Tesla (TSLA)… the list is long, and includes the nearly 40% of small-cap companies on the Russell 2000 index that are not profitable.

Bitcoin rose eight times in the last 12 months. Dogecoin is up almost 8,000% since the beginning of the year. And household financial assets, which include stocks and bonds as well as savings accounts, have gone up nearly twice as fast as GDP for the last 30 years.

Last week, the press added another freak to the show – reporting that a single deli in New Jersey, serving some $14,000 worth of sandwiches in 2020, sported a market cap of more than $100 million.

Over at Bloomberg, Matt Levine pointed out that after the news came out, the deli became the “laughingstock” of the financial world. There is no way the deli is really worth $100 million. And everybody knows it. But such are the marvels of the late Bubble Epoch that we no longer know what anything is really worth.

Big Joke: After chuckling at the deli story all weekend, Matt Levine checked trading yesterday. Trading volume on the tiny flimflam had soared. But the company was still worth more than $100,000,000. Traders didn’t seem to care that it was an absurd price. It’s all part of the joke. “You bought the deli? Ha… ha… ha…” That’s inflation. Yuck it up while you can."

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/20/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/20/21"

○

"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:

Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/20/21:

"Important FReaKSh0w Updates. 

Inflation, The Central Planners" 

- https://traderschoice.net/

○

"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

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

CNN Market Data:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

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A comprehensive, essential daily read.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

April 19th to 21st, Updated Daily 

○

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

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

April 20, 2021, "Tsunami Warning"

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

○

And now, the End Game...

○

Oh yeah...

"Retail Apocalypse Continues: 1 Of 3 US Stores Are Closed And 80,000 More Bankruptcies Are Expected"

Full screen recommended.

"Retail Apocalypse Continues: 1 Of 3 US Stores 

Are Closed And 80,000 More Bankruptcies Are Expected"

by Epic Economist

"If you're seeing increasingly more darkening storefronts and empty stores at shopping centers and malls, you're not the only one. The retail apocalypse continues to ravage the U.S. economic landscape and the staggering number of closed stores illustrates the severity of the hurricane blowing through the sector over the past few years. However, since the burst of the sanitary outbreak, the industry's downfall seems to have been greatly accelerated, and now major US retail chains and shopping malls are on the edge of extinction as new consumer preferences might have changed the market for good.

In 2020, roughly 200 department store chains have completely disappeared, and rock bottom is not even here yet. Another 800 - which represent nearly half the country’s remaining mall-based locations - are expected to close by the end of 2025. That, in turn, will have a massive impact on malls, since department stores account for approximately one out of every three square feet in such properties. The alarming number of store closures registered so far and the consequent cascading effect caused on shopping malls across the country - which are already suffering from record-high vacancy rates and precipitous declines in foot traffic - are also on weighting upon the commercial real estate market and the broader economy.

In essence, department stores used to be the American middle-class preferred shopping alternative, but the sector had been slowly decaying long before the health crisis turbocharged online shopping and drove multiple iconic US retailers to bankruptcy. Now, their collapse is directly affecting local labor markets and local communities. Unfortunately, those lost jobs are likely to never come back and the vast majority of closed doors will never be reopened.

Last May, Neiman Marcus, Stage Stores, and J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy, followed by Lord & Taylor and, most recently, Belk in February. Even companies in relatively stable conditions have shuttered dozens of physical stores due to significant revenue drops. Big names like Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Kohl’s have reported steep sales declines since the health crisis started and slashed demand for shoes, clothes, and formalwear, which disproportionately fill their stores. According to industry experts, apparel stores are "in the eye of the storm," as they registered the highest rates of default in 2020 and still are facing other long-term pressures, such as lower foot traffic.

A recent Washington Post analysis of corporate earnings releases and annual reports pointed out that the country’s largest department store chains have permanently closed almost 40% of their locations since 2016. And UBS is estimating that about 80,000 more stores will be shut down by 2026. The industry's challenges extend way beyond short-term sales figures. They also must deal with questions about the viability of shopping malls, particularly because vacancy rates reached 11.4% in the first quarter.

“The department store genre has been taking the great American shopping mall down with it, slowly but inevitably,” said Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University who was previously the CEO of multiple department store chains in the US and Canada. In face of that bleak outlook, Coresight Research estimated that 25% of America's nearly 1,000 malls will close by 2025. Oftentimes, department store closures in malls trigger a wave of closures by other businesses within the mall, leaving the owner no other alternative rather than repurposing the property or getting rid of it entirely.

A recent Vox article outlined that the U.S. shrinking middle-class is also contributing to the demise of department stores and shopping centers, and the problems mount back to the aftermath of the Great Recession, when "the vast majority of income growth in the US has gone to high-income households, squeezing middle-class households and altering where they spend money. As a result, chains that sell brands at sharp discounts like TJ Maxx, Ross, and Dollar General have become more popular, siphoning away shoppers from full-price department stores like Macy’s and J.C. Penney that were designed to cater to a stronger middle class."

Today, even if we could snap our fingers and come back to the era of retail glory, it wouldn’t solve the industry's key societal and macroeconomic problems connected to its decline. All determinants were already piling up on the sidelines to drive the sector to a reckoning, and the health crisis triggered an existential crisis that will lead to the extinction of many of our previously beloved brands and shopping locations, further jeopardizing our prospects for a recovery while compromising income growth of several groups for years to come."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

“Bitcoin To Be Outlawed? Currency Crisis; Survival Of Financial Fittest”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Bitcoin To Be Outlawed? Currency Crisis;

 Survival Of Financial Fittest”

Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/19/21: "The Central Planners: Prices Are About To Rise Even Higher, Faster!"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/19/21:

"The Central Planners: 

Prices Are About To Rise Even Higher, Faster!"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Falling Through Time"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Falling Through Time"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years.

Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young. But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way’s interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100211.html

Chet Raymo, “The Ring of Truth”

“The Ring of Truth”

by Chet Raymo

“In Salley Vickers’ novel, “Where Three Roads Meet,” the shade of Tiresias, the blind seer of the Oedipus myth, visits Sigmund Freud in London during the psychoanalyst’s final terrible illness. In a series of conversations, Tiresias retells the story of Oedipus - he who was fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother – a story at the heart of Freud’s own theory of the human psyche. At one point in the conversations, as Tiresias and Freud discuss the extent to which our lives are fated, the question of immortality arises. Freud says of Oedipus that “he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is.” And Tiresias replies, “But, Dr. Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.”

Oedipus lives on, whether he lived or not in actuality. Sophocles lives in our consciousness as vigorously as ever he did in life. They live because their stories touch something resonant and unchanging in human nature. Vickers suggests that what makes the Oedipal story immortal is not any necessary tendency of humans to act out the Oedipal myth, a la Freud, but rather Oedipus’s rage to know the truth - or become conscious of a truth he has known all along and suppressed – even though the truth will be his undoing. 

The poet Muriel Rukesyser got it exactly right when she said: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Even atoms are stories we tell about the world, having first paid close attention to how the world works. The plays of Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists live on not because their authors were immortal, but because nature endures and their stories tell us something that rings true about enduring nature. And, like Oedipus, we have a rage to know, even if knowledge will unseat some of our more comfortable illusions.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"It's Human Nature..."

“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”

- “Meredith Grey”, “Gray’s Anatomy”

Well, it seems we've gotten what we asked for...and then some.

"The Bamboozle..."

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

- Carl Sagan

"How Empires End"

"How Empires End"

by Jeff Thomas

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." – Thomas Jefferson

Histories are generally written by academics. They, quite naturally, tend to focus on the main events: the wars and the struggles between leaders and their opponents (both external and internal). Whilst these are interesting stories to read, academics, by their very nature, often overlook the underlying causes for an empire’s decline.

Today, as in any era, most people are primarily interested in the "news" - the daily information regarding the world’s political leaders and their struggles with one another to obtain, retain, and expand their power. When the history is written about the era we are passing through, it will reflect, in large measure, a rehash of the news. As the media of the day tend to overlook the fact that present events are merely symptoms of an overall decline, so historians tend to focus on major events, rather than the "slow operations" that have been the underlying causes.

The Persian Empire: When, as a boy, I was "educated" about the decline and fall of the Persian Empire, I learned of the final takeover by Alexander the Great but was never told that, in its decline, Persian taxes became heavier and more oppressive, leading to economic depression and revolts, which, in turn led to even heavier taxes and increased repression. Increasingly, kings hoarded gold and silver, keeping it out of circulation from the community. This hamstrung the market, as monetary circulation was insufficient to conduct business. By the time Alexander came along, Persia, weakened by warfare and internal economic strife, was a shell of an empire and was relatively easy to defeat.

The Tang Dynasty: Back then, I also learned that the Tang Dynasty ended as a result of the increased power amongst the eunuchs, battles with fanzhen separatists, and finally, peasants’ revolts. True enough, but I was not taught that the dynasty’s expansion-based warfare demanded increases in taxation, which led to the revolts. Continued warfare necessitated increasing monetary and land extortion by the eunuchs, resulting in an abrupt decrease in food output and further taxes. Finally, as economic deterioration and oppression of the citizenry worsened, citizens left the area entirely for more promise elsewhere.

Is there a pattern here? Let’s have a more detailed look - at another empire.

The Spanish Empire: In 1556, Philip II of Spain inherited what was regarded as Europe’s most wealthy nation, with no apparent economic problems. Yet, by 1598, Spain was bankrupt. How was this possible? Spain was doing well but sought to become a major power. To achieve this, Philip needed more tax dollars. Beginning in 1561, the existing servicio tax was regularized, and the crusada tax, the excusado tax, and the millones tax were all added by 1590.

Over a period of 39 years (between 1559 and 1598) taxes increased by 430%. Although the elite of the day were exempt from taxation (the elite of today are not officially exempt), the average citizen was taxed to the point that both business expansion and public purchasing diminished dramatically. Wages did not keep pace with the resultant inflation. The price of goods rose 400%, causing a price revolution and a tax revolution.

Although Spain enjoyed a flood of gold and silver from the Americas at this time, the increased wealth went straight into Philip’s war efforts. However, the 100,000 troops were soon failing to return sufficient spoils to Philip to pay for their forays abroad. In a final effort to float the doomed empire, Philip issued government bonds, which provided immediate cash but created tremendous debt that, presumably, would need to be repaid one day. (The debt grew to 8.8 times GDP.) Spain declared bankruptcy. Trade slipped to other countries. The military, fighting on three fronts, went unpaid, and military aspirations collapsed.

It is important to note that, even as the empire was collapsing, Philip did not suspend warfare. He did not back off on taxation. Like leaders before and since, he instead stubbornly increased his autocracy as the empire slid into collapse.

Present-Day Empires: Again, the events above are not taught to schoolchildren as being of key importance in the decline of empires, even though they are remarkably consistent with the decline of other empires and what we are seeing today. The very same events occur, falling like dominoes, more or less in order, in any empire, in any age:

• The reach of government leaders habitually exceeds their grasp.

• Dramatic expansion (generally through warfare) is undertaken without a clear plan as to how that expansion is to be financed.

• The population is overtaxed as the bills for expansion become due, without consideration as to whether the population can afford increased taxation.

• Heavy taxation causes investment by the private sector to diminish, and the economy begins to decline.

• Costs of goods rise, without wages keeping pace.

• Tax revenue declines as the economy declines (due to excessive taxation). Taxes are increased again, in order to top up government revenues.

• In spite of all the above, government leaders personally hoard as much as they can, further limiting the circulation of wealth in the business community.

• Governments issue bonds and otherwise borrow to continue expansion, with no plan as to repayment.

• Dramatic authoritarian control is instituted to assure that the public continues to comply with demands, even if those demands cannot be met by the public.

• Economic and social collapse occurs, often marked by unrest and riots, the collapse of the economy, and the exit of those who are productive.

• In this final period, the empire turns on itself, treating its people as the enemy.

The above review suggests that if our schoolbooks stressed the underlying causes of empire collapse, rather than the names of famous generals and the dates of famous battles, we might be better educated and be less likely to repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, this is unlikely. Chances are, future leaders will be just as uninterested in learning from history as past leaders. They will create empires, then destroy them.

Even the most informative histories of empire decline, such as "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," by Edward Gibbon, will not be of interest to the leaders of empires. They will believe that they are above history and that they, uniquely, will succeed. If there is any value in learning from the above, it is the understanding that leaders will not be dissuaded from their aspirations. They will continue to charge ahead, both literally and figuratively, regardless of objections and revolts from the citizenry.

Once an empire has reached stage eight above, it never reverses. It is a "dead empire walking" and only awaits the painful playing-out of the final three stages. At that point, it is foolhardy in the extreme to remain and "wait it out" in the hope that the decline will somehow reverse. At that point, the wiser choice might be to follow the cue of the Chinese, the Romans, and others, who instead chose to quietly exit for greener pastures elsewhere."

- internationalman.com