So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, March 4, 2021
"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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Related:
"Briefly..."
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity.”
- Erich Fromm
"When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally Implode?"
"When Does This Travesty of a
Mockery of a Sham Finally Implode?"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"How many more times do we have to watch Jay Powell claim his speculative bubble isn't a bubble, and that his massive expansion of billionaires' fortunes will magically create jobs for all those living in the real world he's created of stagnation, social depression and inequality? In other words, when will this travesty of a mockery of a sham finally implode? When will the Universe tire of the lies, fraud, embezzlement and corruption and bring the whole rotten charade down? When will we tire of the stale tale of reflation, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
We all know the Status Quo's response to the global financial meltdown of 2008 has been a travesty of a mockery of a sham--smoke and mirrors, phony facades of "recovery", simulacrum "reforms," serial bubble-blowing and politically expedient can-kicking, all based on borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, yen, euros and yuan, quatloos, etc. and funneling them to financiers, corporations, monopolies, cronies and billionaires.
When will the travesty of a mockery of a sham finally come to an end? How many more "saves" does the Ponzi Scheme of central banking possess? Wall Street and its vast army of apologists, lackeys, toadies, schemers, scammers, con-artists and profiteers will have us believe that the Everything Bubble is permanent and its continued expansion will hide all the systemic rot hollowing out America.
On the other hand, maybe manipulation, lies and artifice can no longer keep the Everything Bubble from popping. The chart I prepared back in 2008 (below) give us a flavor of the confluence of crises that are no longer in the future - they're here now.
Cycles are not laws of Nature, of course; they are only records of previous periods of growth/excess/depletion/collapse, not predictions per se. Nonetheless their repetition reflects the systemic dynamic of growth, crisis and collapse, and so the study of cycles is instructive even though we stipulate they are not predictive.
What is predictable is the way systems tend to follow an S-curve of rapid growth with then tops out in excess, stagnates in depletion and then devolves or implodes. We can see all sorts of things topping out and entering depletion/collapse: financialization, the Savior State, Chinese credit expansion, oil production, student loan debt and so on.
Since each mechanism that burns out or implodes tends to be replaced with some other mechanism, this creates the recurring cycle of expansion/excess/depletion/collapse.
Four long-wave cycles are plotted in the chart:
1. The credit expansion/renunciation cycle. a.k.a. the Kondratieff cycle. Credit expands when credit is costly and invested in productive assets. Credit reaches excess when it is cheap and it's malinvested in speculation and stock buybacks, and as collateral vanishes then credit is renunciated/written off. This is inexact, but obviously the organic postwar cycle of expansion has been extended by the central bank money-printing/credit orgy.
2. The generational cycle of four generations/80 years described in the seminal book "The Fourth Turning." American history uncannily tracks an 80-year cycle of crises and profound transformation: 1860 (Civil War), 1940 (world war and global Empire) and next up to bat, 2020, the implosion of the debt-based Savior State and the financialized economy.
3. The 100-year cycle of inflation-deflation described in the masterful book "The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History." The price of bread remained almost constant in Britain throughout the 19th century. In contrast, the 20th century has been characterized by inflation - the U.S. dollar has lost approximately 96% of its value since the early 20th century.
Another characteristic of this cycle is wage stagnation: people earn less even as costs of essentials rise, a dynamic that inevitably leads to political crisis and upheaval. The federal agencies have been tasked with masking the decline of the purchasing power of wages with heavily gamed statistics, but here's how to detect wage stagnation in the real world: calculate how many hours the average wage-earner had to work in 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005 to pay for essentials and common non-essentials.
If you kept records of your expenses, you'd probably find, as I have, that my wages bought far more goods and services in 1975, 1985 and 1995 than they do now, even though the nominal wage was much lower. Ask yourself how it is that jobs that paid $12 in 1985 still pay $12 an hour. How much does that $12 buy now compared to what it could buy in 1985? Precious little.
Jay Powell, you and the rest of your Wall Street lapdogs have failed the American wage earner. You've enriched the top 0.1% and impoverished the bottom 90%. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ("Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018") $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.
4. There's a problem with oil, and it isn't the price or how much is left in the ground. Actually, there's a number of problems with oil: I explain one here: "Oil and Debt: Why Our Financial System Is Unsustainable" (2/25/21). The price isn't the issue, or the supply: it's how much energy wage-earners can buy out of their dwindling discretionary income, i.e. what's left after they pay higher prices for essentials.
If this is new to you, please read Gail Tverberg's work: "Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away." And Tim Watkin's work: "A Failure of Complexity" and "Texas Trip". And Tim Morgan's work on his SEEDS model of how the economy actually works (it's energy that matters, not finance) Mapping the economy, part one and The map unrolled. Or if you prefer video, watch Nate Hagens: "Nate Hagens: The Collision" (1 hour).
The mutually reinforcing crises aren't in the future, they're here now, and Jay Powell's shuck-and-jive has lost its magical powers to cloak the rot with speculative bubbles. The billionaires thank you, Jay, as they've been selling for months, leaving all the fools you conned holding the bag when your con-artist powers fade and your bubble pops."
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
"Chaos Looming In Texas As The Power Crisis Triggered Food And Water Shortages And Business Collapse"
Full screen recommended.
"Chaos Looming In Texas As The Power Crisis Triggered
Food And Water Shortages And Business Collapse"
by Epic Economist
"Texas remains the epicenter of chaos and disaster in America, as a prolonged arctic blast recently caused storms and unusual freezing temperatures that overwhelmed the state's power grid, leaving millions without electricity, heating, and several other essential services for days. The disruption also triggered alarming food and water crises all across the state, and now, the Lone Star is having to confront the harsh reality that the conveniences of modern life are not as guaranteed as we've previously imagined. Texas power crisis was a reminder to the rest of our country that our modern society relies upon systems that are too overly complicated and incredibly easy to disrupt. Even though the outages are over, the damages have only started to arise.
Since residents sought protection from the chillwave, demand for power skyrocketed, and prices soared from 12 cents per kilowatt-hour to $9 per kilowatt-hour. Some Texans reported electricity bills of over $9,000, as energy providers were seemingly taking advantage of "variable-rate power plans" to overcharge consumers that were already deeply distressed. Moreover, economists are arguing that once the situation is finally under control, a massive wave of bankruptcies is likely to be witnessed, as local businesses are still calculating the extent of the damages and losses suffered so far. And that's what we are going to expose in this video.
The ravaging crisis Texas is facing at the moment is evidencing how America's aging infrastructure is crumbling. Temperatures hit record-lows, and without heating, some locals were left with no alternative other than running their cars to try to stay warm. However, more than 500 cases of residents who were fatally poisoned by their car's carbon monoxide release were registered up until this point.
For weeks, stores have been reporting shortages of basic food staples, and several cities are under a boil water advisory, as the local water reservoirs were contaminated. But with no power or gas, many are having to make the hard choice of either going potentially sick or going thirsty. On top of the troubles residents are having to face at home, many of them have reported having problems at work too, and consequently, in their monthly wages. According to a recent report published by the Texas Tribune, "many hourly wage employees across the state lost working hours last week during the storm and power outage disaster. Now, they’re left with a choice between paying for rent or groceries".
Some of the most affected by the crisis have seen their electricity bill hit sky-highs as wholesale prices were set at $9/kWh - almost 300 times higher than the normal wholesale price. The state's utility company Griddy Energy charges $10 a month to allow residents to pay wholesale prices for electricity instead of a fixed rate. The prices surged as temperatures dropped well below freezing, leaving customers with extremely high power bills. Lisa Khoury, a Texas resident, disclosed to have received a $9,300 electricity bill. Khoury alongside multiple other customers, filed a class action lawsuit against the company.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the company of "misleading and deceptive advertising and marketing practices". "Griddy misled Texans and signed them up for services which, in a time of crisis, resulted in individual Texans each losing thousands of dollars," Paxton stated. "As Texans struggled to survive this winter storm, Griddy made the suffering even worse as it debited outrageous amounts each day".
On Sunday, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, the largest and oldest electric power cooperative in Texas, filed for bankruptcy after accumulating an estimated $2.1 billion in charges. The company owes Ercot a disputed $1.8 billion in collateral. Ercot, which is the state's grid operator, said that overall, there is at least $2.46 billion in unpaid bills, exposing the financial setbacks faced by many other utilities, power retailers, and generators. Brazos and several others whose contract agreed to provide power to the grid, but failed to do so, were forced to buy replacement power at high rates and make up for other firms’ unpaid fees.
As the staggering amount of debt is still piling up, many experts have been arguing that more bankruptcies will follow over the coming weeks. However, the main concern surrounds local businesses that have been struggling throughout the recession, many of which have compromised their insurance payments to keep doors open, and now are facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damages. A massive spike in lay-offs is also being predicted to echo in next week's unemployment report. But as the extent of the losses is yet to be assessed, the following weeks will be decisive for the state's economy. There's no doubt we will have enormous challenges ahead"
"Things Are Getting Worse Not Better; Gambling On Wall St"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Things Are Getting Worse Not Better; Gambling On Wall St"
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Related:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“M13 is one of the most prominent and best known globular clusters. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hercules, M13 is frequently one of the first objects found by curious sky gazers seeking celestials wonders beyond normal human vision.
M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old. At the 1974 dedication of Arecibo Observatory, a radio message about Earth was sent in the direction of M13. The featured image in HDR, taken through a small telescope, spans an angular size just larger than a full Moon, whereas the inset image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, zooms in on the central 0.04 degrees.”
"When I Hear..."
"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"
I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Sydney Harris
The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Walk"
"A Walk"
"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"What If..."
"What if when you die they ask, "How was Heaven?"
~ Author Unknown
A truly terrifying thought...
"To Others And To Ourselves: Obligations"
"To Others And To Ourselves: Obligations"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
"When we schedule too much in our lives trying to meet our obligations, we only end up draining our energy. We all encounter obligations in life, from spending time with family and friends to being present at important functions in the lives of the people who form our community. Many times, the obligations are actually fun and fulfilling, and we want to be there. At the same time, we all sometimes experience resistance to meeting these obligations, especially when they pile up all at once and we begin to feel exhausted, longing for nothing so much as a quiet evening at home. At times like these, we may want to say no but feel too guilty at the idea of not being there. Still, our primary obligation is to take care of ourselves, and if saying no to someone else is what we have to do, then we do not need to feel bad about it.
There is a skill to balancing our obligations, and it starts with simply becoming aware of our schedule. We may notice that three invitations have arisen in one weekend, and we know that we will pay energetically if we attempt to fulfill all three. At this point, we can take the time to weigh the repercussions of not going to each event, considering how we will feel if we miss it and how our absence might affect other people. Most of the time, it will be clear which obligation we can most easily let go and which one we simply can’t miss. Sometimes we have to miss something really important to us, and that can be painful for everyone concerned. At times like this, reaching out with a phone call, a thoughtful card, or a gift lets people know that you are there in spirit and that your absence is by no means a result of you not caring.
Meeting our obligations to others is an important part of being human and not one to take lightly. At the same time, we cannot meet every obligation without neglecting our primary duty to take care of ourselves. We can navigate this quandary by being conscious of what we choose to do and not do and by finding concrete ways to extend our caring when we are not able to be there in person."
Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/3/21: "Its A SET UP! The Fed. Is Laying Out The Groundwork For Its Next Moves"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/3/21:
"Its A SET UP! The Fed. Is Laying
Out The Groundwork For Its Next Moves"
"Bingo Game for Dyslexic Lunatics"
"Bingo Game for Dyslexic Lunatics"
By Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "The gambling goes on. The stakes get higher. You’ll recall that “inflation” refers to additions to the money supply. When you have a gold-backed system, you can’t really inflate the money supply, because you can’t easily get your hands on more gold. Typically, the amount of gold above ground increases at about the same rate as the goods and services it is meant to represent. That’s why prices today – in gold terms – are not so different from those 1,000 years ago (with a generous and elastic allowance for technological improvements). Paper money offers more flexibility – which is to say, it makes it easier to get into trouble.
This was the trouble Thomas Jefferson foresaw, warning that a central bank would emit more and more paper money, and thus bend the nation’s economy away from useful industry towards various “species of gambling.” That has now happened. Since the beginning of the last financial crisis, in 2008, the Federal Reserve’s paper money creation has exceeded GDP growth by some 15 times. And today, on the floor of the Nasdaq stock exchange, the jokers have never had it better.
Classic Monetary Inflation: We are still in the early stages of “inflation.” The Fed creates new money by buying Treasury bonds. Most regular Americans do not own bonds. They are owned by Wall Street… and the rich, in general. That is, after all, how the rich got so rich. The feds made them rich by jacking up their asset prices. It has nothing to do with them being especially greedy… or with a failure of capitalism.
Instead, it’s classic monetary inflation… as understood by Richard Cantillon, about a hundred years before Jefferson. Cantillon, an Irishman, was an early investor in Scottish economist John Law’s Mississippi scheme. Law’s Mississippi company was granted a concession to develop France’s colony in North America. This he used as backing for new, paper money emitted by the Banque de France, which he also controlled. Cantillon, and later Jefferson, saw through the fraud. The first in line to get the new money are always the rich and powerful. By the time the common man gets it, it is already losing value – fast.
Ahead of the Crowd: But for the moment, in America, the new money is still mostly in the financial markets, where it is making investors dizzy. Here at the Diary, we tend to be early. We began warning about the dot-com bubble as soon as we began writing our daily blog – in 1998, two years before it burst. As for the blow-up in the mortgage finance industry, we were writing about that as early as 2005 – three years before Lehman Brothers went broke.
Are we now years ahead of ourselves sounding the alarm over the danger of runaway consumer price inflation? “You’re way too early to be worried about [consumer price] inflation,” comments a dear reader. But we’re not worried about it. We’re just anticipating it. And even looking forward to it, in a cynical kinda way. Because when the inflation comes, we’ll rest easy. “The world still works the way it should,” we’ll say to ourselves. “God is in His heaven. The Queen is on her throne. People still get what they deserve. And all is right with the world.”
Huge Gamble: Right now, much of the stimmy-check money is going into the Wall Street economy, not the Main Street economy. Robinhood and other online trading platforms opened new accounts at a feverish pace last year. This is easy-come, easy-go money… Might as well exchange it for gambling chips. More fun than a casino – where gamblers at least understand the odds, more or less – the stock market has turned into a sort of bingo game for dyslexic lunatics. Neither words nor numbers need to make any sense.
Here’s Matt Levine, commenting in Bloomberg on one of the lunatics’ favorite stocks: "Now Nikola has released the results of the internal investigation and they are… oh, you know. Did Nikola’s founder lie about whether Nikola had produced a zero-emissions truck? Yes, say Nikola’s own lawyers in Nikola’s own annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Did he lie about whether the truck worked? Yes. Did he lie when he said that all the major components for the truck were made in-house? Yes. Did he lie when he said that trucks were coming off the assembly line? Of course. Did Nikola produce a video to make it seem like the truck could be driven, when in fact it was only moving because it was rolling down a hill? Yes, that is also a real thing that this company really did."
Used to be, Levine notes, that investors bought companies based on their past performance. Not anymore. The game has changed. Words are dreams… or lies. And the numbers don’t add up. Investors buy stocks in companies that they think might have a product someday that people might buy and that they might make a profit on… if all goes well. It’s all a huge gamble, in other words, betting that no matter how big a fool you are, there is always a bigger fool out there somewhere.
Big Winner:And thanks to the public school system and the Federal Reserve – it’s a good bet! Get this – Even though Nikola, the electric truck company, has no electric trucks… and even though it lied about its ability to produce one…and even though it faces nine lawsuits, six of which have been wrapped into a single class-action suit…it is nevertheless deemed to be worth $7.5 billion.
Bniog! You win. Of course, the big winner of our time is the company run by the world’s second-richest man… which does have a product. And sales. What it doesn’t have, though, is enough profits to plausibly justify its price – presently just under $660 billion… Let’s do the math. At its current profit-per-car, TSLA would have to sell more than 25 million of them to make enough profit to meet a modest 12 times price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. (We’ll ignore the fact that the company lost $775 million in 2019.) If the total world auto market were about 80 million vehicles, that means one out of every 3 or 4 cars sold would have to be a Tesla. Not going to happen. All the majors are getting in on the electric vehicle (EV) game. Some are bound to score successes and eat some of Tesla’s lunch.
Big Gamble: And then, there’s Lucid Motors. It’s the company that made the batteries for all the competitors in the 2014 EV Formula E race in Beijing. Batteries, it believes, are the key to success in the EV world. And it knows batteries. Last week, Lucid filed for a $24 billion public listing – peanuts compared to Tesla. But now, it’s decided to go into making electric cars, not just the batteries for them. So it will be running around the same track as TSLA. Typical of the casino stage, Lucid has no cars to sell. Not yet. It’s all hope and estimations.
In an earlier age, when investors had their feet on the ground, that would have gotten Lucid nowhere. Investors wanted to see actual results – products, sales, profits – before turning over their hard-earned money. Before they reached that stage, the start-ups had to rely on tougher sources of finance – family money, venture capital, and loans. But Lucid couldn’t wait. And the markets welcomed them with a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company… a slick way of going public without an IPO) deal that brought them $4.4 billion to get going. And – unless it is lying – its not-quite-ready-for-prime-time automobile gets more than 500 miles out of a single battery charge, compared to only about 400 for Tesla’s 2020 Long Range model.
New Game: TSLA was a groundbreaker. It realized early on not only that you could make a good electric vehicle – everybody knew that – but that investors are no shrewder now than they were in the Mississippi Bubble 300 years ago. But eventually, they wise up.
When inflation moves from the rich to the common man… from Wall Street to Main Street… and from delightful to obnoxious…it will be a whole new game. Suddenly, investors will learn to spell. And count.
"The COVID Fraud Will Not Stay Hidden Forever"
"The COVID Fraud Will Not Stay Hidden Forever"
by Martin Armstrong
"The medical profession has really bought into COVID because of the simple fact that they got paid bonuses if the person had COVID. They were claiming that COVID was impacting minorities more, but failed to mention that if you did not have insurance and said you had COVID, the government paid 100% of all the medical expenses. They bribed medical professionals to turn COVID into a national crisis, and even with all of the hype the death toll is only 0.028%.
Now families are starting to demand investigations because their loved one was listed as dying of COVID when they were not. I have received emails from numerous people where their mother was in their 90s and dying of old age, went to the hospital for their final days, and suddenly died of COVID.
In Britain, many medical experts are now insisting that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus. One funeral director has spoken out calling this “a national scandal,” according to the Daily Mail. In Britain, there are no reported flu cases, and in Canada reports of the flu are just a fraction of what they were.
The fraud that has been so pervasive has destroyed the world economy, set in motion food shortages, and has been exploited to end our basic human rights. They have wiped out the hospitality industry, ended the arts, and left many students so depressed and unable to learn remotely. There is a rising trend in suicides which are up by 60%. Meanwhile, we are witnessing a sharp drop in new COVID-19 cases, which is taking place in the US, Canada, as well as India. This is implying that much of the COVID issue has been manufactured by the press and corrupt individuals in the medical field.
Then we have the epitome of corruption in Dr. Anthony Fauci who will say anything to keep the COVID crisis going. He now says that because he is vaccinated, he can at last hug his daughter because she too is vaccinated. He has been unable to hug his daughter in a year, he claims. Now if you get the Gates’ vaccine, you will not have to socially distance from others who are vaccinated. This guy belongs in prison. He has lied so much and is in Schwab’s promotional videos touting the need for the Great Reset economically when he has no qualification on the subject.
We have lost so much because of this fraud and they have deeply terrorized people into wearing masks and being afraid to even socialize. The damage to society has been irreparable. People are starting to fight back."
Gregory Mannarino, "Central Banks Are Not Done, Therefore The FREE-FALL Will Continue"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/3/21:
"Central Banks Are Not Done,
Therefore The FREE-FALL Will Continue"
"Are The Recent UFO Disclosures Setting Us Up For A Mass Deception Of Epic Proportions?"
"Are The Recent UFO Disclosures Setting Us Up
For A Mass Deception Of Epic Proportions?"
by Michael Snyder
"Have you noticed that UFO sightings have been in the news a lot lately? Even in the midst of all the other big events that are happening, evidence of mysterious objects flying through our skies continues to make headlines. In particular, what one American Airlines pilot says that he saw is really shaking a lot of people up. According to a radio transmission that was intercepted from American Airlines Flight 2292, a pilot claims that he witnessed “a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing” fly at very high speed right over the top of his aircraft:
"The cockpit audio from American Airlines flight 2292 from New Mexico to Phoenix sounded like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. “Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us,” a pilot can be heard saying. “I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast right over the top of us.”
This got so much attention that officials at American Airlines were forced to address it. They put out a statement in which they confirmed that the radio transmission did actually come from American Airlines Flight 2292… "American Airlines put out a statement, saying, “Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21.” And the FBI has also publicly announced that it is “aware of the reported incident”, but the agency has not provided any additional details.
Of course this sort of thing is happening a lot these days. In fact, the U.S. Sun has just put out an article documenting “a string of strange incidents involving passenger jets” in recent months. In the old days, the U.S. government would go to great lengths to deny that anything unusual was happening in our skies. But over the past couple of years, government officials have started to change their tune.
For example, last year the Pentagon released footage of Navy fighter pilots encountering a UFO: In late April, the Department of Defense released footage of Navy fighter pilots encountering something “unidentifiable.” The black and white videos are grainy and show small objects flying across the in-flight cameras of Navy fighter pilots."
Full screen recommended.
This footage had already been circulating on the internet. By releasing it, the Department of Defense confirmed the videos’ authenticity—and that it didn’t know what they showed. Much more importantly, the Defense Intelligence Agency recently released documents that admit that the U.S. has been testing wreckage from UFO crashes: "The Pentagon has admitted to holding and testing wreckage from UFO crashes in a bombshell Freedom of Information letter, shared with The Sun. Researcher Anthony Bragalia wrote to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) requesting details of all UFO material, which they hold and results of any tests they had been carrying out on it."
After all this time, why would the federal government finally admit this? Are they trying to mentally prepare us for something? According to the 154 pages of test results that were released, some of the materials that have been retrieved from UFOs possess “extraordinary capabilities”… "In the response, shared with The Sun, the DIA released 154 pages of test results that includes reports on a mysterious “memory” metal called Nitinol, which remembers its original shape when folded. Bragalia said it was a “stunning admission” from the US government and the documents reveal that some of the retrieved debris possesses “extraordinary capabilities” including the potential to make things invisible or even slow down the speed of light.
Obviously the entities that are operating these craft are highly advanced, and they appear to have technology that we do not currently have. But are they friend or foe? Statements that were recently made by someone that was a top official in Israel’s space program for 30 years have sparked a lot of speculation: "Haim Eshed, who headed Israel’s space security programs for 30 years, has been in the spotlight in recent days, after claiming that aliens exist, that Israel and the US have long been in contact with them, and that Donald Trump was going to blab but the extraterrestrial beings of the “Galactic Federation” stopped him. Eshed said aliens conduct experiments on Earth, and there is a joint base underground on Mars where they collaborate with American astronauts. “They asked that we don’t publicize they are here because humanity isn’t ready,” he said.
If Haim Eshed is to be believed, the “aliens” are already here and the U.S. is already cooperating with them. That makes it sound like we don’t have anything to be concerned about. But other experts have come to a completely different conclusion. Temple University history professor David Jacobs has been studying the alien abduction phenomenon for decades, and he believes that these “aliens” have a deeply malevolent agenda: "According to Jacobs, his lifelong research into alien abduction has forced him to the conclusion that an alien race has been implementing a clandestine and sinister program to create an alien-human hybrid race. The program has now reached an advanced stage and alien hybrids are now being secretly integrated into human society. The alien hybrids, according to Jacobs, are able to live secretly in human society because they are superficially identical with humans."
There is so much speculation about these beings, and it can be very difficult to separate truth from fiction. But as the number of sightings continues to rise, it is becoming clear that something very strange really is happening in our skies. And after decades of very strict secrecy, the U.S. government is now openly admitting that UFOs exist.
Many people are looking forward to the day when we can openly welcome direct contact with our “space brothers”, but I do not believe that these are “friendly aliens from another planet”. In fact, they are not our friends at all.
Unfortunately, our entertainment industry has spent decades preparing the general public to embrace visitors from “another world”, and I expect that is precisely what would happen. We are moving into such a chaotic chapter in human history, and a time may come when intervention by “aliens” will be greatly welcomed by a human race that is deeply suffering. The truth is out there, but as far as UFOs are concerned, most people are going to continue to believe whatever it is that they want to believe."
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Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: Roaring '21, Bustin' Loose"
Full screen recommended.
Gerald Celente,
"Trends Journal: Roaring '21, Bustin' Loose"
To access our premium content, subscribe to the Trends Journal: - https://trendsresearch.com/subscribe
"Commercial Real Estate Catastrophe: Property Value Dropping By 60% As Businesses Face Foreclosure"
Full screen highly recommended.
"Commercial Real Estate Catastrophe: Property
Value Dropping By 60% As Businesses Face Foreclosure"
by Epic Economist
"The commercial real estate market have been completely devastated. Commercial real estate buildings’ value remains extremely depreciated and with many businesses are right at the brink of bankruptcy, such properties may face foreclosure pretty soon. In fact, a recent Bloomberg analysis has exposed that at least $146 billion in distressed commercial property is in some sort of financial purgatory, as investors decide which ones are worth saving and which ones will die. In the hospitality sector, U.S. malls have accumulated so much debt that they've lost 60% in value up until this point. While hotels have been registering vacancy rates of up to 80%, and restaurants are closing by the thousands every day. However, commercial office is being considered the biggest loser, with more and more companies choosing to cease their entire office operations for good. As many determinants are still unfolding, the worse might be yet to come for the commercial real estate sector. And that's what we're going to investigate in this video.
The widespread distribution of vaccines and rallying financial markets are signaling that the health crisis might soon be gone, however, according to a recent Bloomberg analysis, the worst is yet to come for commercial properties. The fallout of the sanitary outbreak has pushed about $146 billion of commercial real estate into distress, serious risk of bankruptcy or default at the end of 2020, mostly concentrated in hotels and retail.
It's safe to say retail and hospitality were two of the sectors most widely impacted by the outbreak. As a result, hotel vacancy rates soared to 80% all across the country, and for the first time, Americans had to confront the idea that retail and hospitality businesses were inevitably disappearing. As such businesses depend upon foot traffic to exist, the new restrictions severely compromised their revenue and, therefore, impacted their ability to meet their rental payments.
Consequently, landlords started to fall behind on their mortgage loans, and although lenders repeatedly extended credit and the forbearance period, many of them are already losing patience after months of accumulated debt. The special servicing rate is at 9.72% for the overall market, but almost a quarter of all hospitality loans and 17% of retail loans are at risk of becoming delinquent. “We have tons of stuff that’s in purgatory,” said Manus Clancy, a senior managing director at Trepp.
With nearly $430 billion of commercial real estate debt coming due this year, investors who profited from the current market rally are essentially the ones who can either save or let such properties face foreclosure and die. Even Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress that he is worried and is keeping an eye on the sector, as more bankruptcies are being filed with each passing day, which means more real estate is pushed to the brink of foreclosure. However, most properties never make it to Chapter 11. That is to say, commercial real estate prices can face a major crash as owners have to find a way to renegotiate their debt, and to do so, they will be forced to sharply drop property prices to be able to find investors willing to cover their mortgage loan debt.
More than $4 billion in value was lost across 118 retail-anchored properties with commercial mortgage-backed securities debt after a recapitulation was performed. Shopping malls have suffered the acutest decline in value, plunging an average of 60%, and less than half of the 1,100 U.S. indoor malls have a real chance of survival. But the sector raising the most concerns is commercial office. Commercial office buildings in most of America’s business epicenters are now financially collapsing way faster than malls. Landlords are about to face enormous losses as thousands of companies aren’t renewing their leases this year, leaving tens of millions of square feet of office space empty.
With so many sectors of the economy crumbling at the same time, commercial real estate is set for a prolonged collapse, regardless of the reopening and the distribution of a vaccine. The truth is that once economic activity is resumed what we will actually find is an empty scenario, as our businesses' lives were left in the hands of profited-oriented investors, whose worry is to save big businesses and big properties. For months, business owners and landlords have been pledging Congress for help but their pleadings were left unheard. Now, this is what we get. And as you can probably assume, the toll of letting numerous companies be ruthlessly wiped out will be translated into a lot more economic pain in the months ahead."
Gregory Mannarino, "Mannarino Finally Goes Berserk! It's A Total Sh!tshow! Epic!"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Mannarino Finally Goes Berserk! It's A Total Sh!tshow! Epic!"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This wide, sharp telescopic view reveals galaxies scattered beyond the stars and faint dust nebulae of the Milky Way at the northern boundary of the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Prominent at the upper right is NGC 7331.
A mere 50 million light-years away, the large spiral is one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog. The disturbed looking group of galaxies at the lower left is well-known as Stephan's Quintet. About 300 million light-years distant, the quintet dramatically illustrates a multiple galaxy collision, its powerful, ongoing interactions posed for a brief cosmic snapshot. On the sky, the quintet and NGC 7331 are separated by about half a degree.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141023.html
"None So Blind..."
"There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded
people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.”
- John Heywood, 1546
The Poet: David Wagoner, "Getting There"
"Getting There"
"You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want to be?
You'll remember soon.
You feel like tinder under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change.
The sky is pulsing against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were,
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly like a dream,
That lost traveler's dream under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings."
~ David Wagoner
"What A Privilege!"
“Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Free Download: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is, as the title suggests, a simple story of one day in the life of Ivan Shukov Denisovich, a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp. Shukov, a simple Russian peasant fighting for Stalin in WWII, is imprisoned for treason – a crime he did not commit – and has spent the last 8 years in concentration camps. Shukov’s day begins at 5.00 a.m. with the clang of the reveille – he is, along with the other prisoners, marched out into the bitter cold, stripped and searched for forbidden objects, and then sent to work until sundown, without rest, without a full stomach. In this slim 143 page-novella, we follow Shukov’s grueling routine and see how he struggles to maintain his dignity in small, subtle ways. On this day, he has scored some small triumphs for himself – he has swiped an extra bowl of mush at supper, found a piece of metal that can be used as a knife to mend things, replenished his precious tobacco supplies and also has had a share of a small piece of sausage before lights out. Thus, at the end of the day (and the novel), he thinks to himself that it has been “A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.” He must survive only another 3653 days more.”
Freely download “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”,
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, here:
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"The Chain Of Obedience"
“The death squads and concentration camps of history were never staffed
by rebels and dissidents. They were run by those who followed the rules.”
"Where Your Gaze Lingers..."
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.
You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”
- Richelle E. Goodrich
"Las Vegas Without the Free Drinks"
"Las Vegas Without the Free Drinks"
By Bill Bonner
"A system… contrived (in the Treasury Department) for deluging the states with paper-money instead of gold and silver, for withdrawing our citizens from the pursuits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of useful industry to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species of gambling…" – Thomas Jefferson’s letter to George Washington, March 1, 1792, during the Panic of 1792, after the formation of the First Bank of the United States
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – Jefferson was right. But it took more than 200 years for the dagger he saw coming to reach the heart. And now, it is here. Commerce, manufactures, and other useful industries are in decline. The U.S. economy grew more than 5% per year during the Kennedy-Johnson years. In Trump’s term, the growth rate was only 1.25% – the lowest since the Great Depression.
New Era: But gambling is more popular than ever. And now, the stock market – previously a place to discover the real values of America’s useful industries – is now a huge casino, like Las Vegas without the free drinks, where companies that might be worth zero are valued at billions of dollars. How come? Because the country has been deluged with paper money. Easy money. Fast money. Fake money. Stimmy money.
There, too, Donald Trump is a record-setter. While he was president, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet – which rises as the Fed “prints” more “paper” money – rose more than three times as fast as under George W. Bush and more than twice as fast as during the reign of Barack Obama. Not surprisingly, U.S. debt increased faster, too.
During the Clinton years, the national debt rose at an annual average of about $200 billion. It rose three times faster under George W. Bush… five times faster under Obama… and 10 times faster under Trump.
All of which makes us wonder… What kind of hallucinations were the folks at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, suffering when they bowed down before the graven image of Donald Trump? He is the least conservative of any president – Democrat or Republican – in history (setting aside, perhaps, FDR). Oh yes… we forgot… it’s TPAC now. Conservatives are history. It’s a new era. And it doesn’t matter what you think… what you say… or who you vote for – this sucker is going down.
Going Down: But wait… Maybe if we all pull together… From a dear reader comes a practical question. What if we really did try to pay off the federal debt? “As for the debt of our country,” asks Annette A., “what if everyone in this country gave $1 to $5 dollars on the principal of our debt every year? I really don’t know how many people live in the U.S., but it is a lot. How many years would it take? If this is done, I know that many rich people would give more than $5.”
Well, let’s see. If each American adult pitched in $5… every year… how long would it take to pay off $28 trillion in debt? Hmmm…. We have the answer: 21,937 years! Or, approximately, until Hell freezes over. And that’s only if the feds stop adding more debt… which ain’t going to happen. Which is why we need the full George W. Bush insight. “If the money supply doesn’t loosen up,” said he, “this sucker will go down.”
Loosen Up: That’s what happens. At first, as Hemingway noted, inflating the money supply produces a little “temporary prosperity.” But then, if you stop inflating, the pseudo prosperity disappears… and the sucker goes down. This is the same trap that faced Rudolf von Havenstein in Germany… Gideon Gono in Zimbabwe… Celestino Rodrigo in Argentina… Delcy RodrÃguez in Venezuela… and now, Jerome Powell in the U.S. It’s inflate or die.
Each administration, naturally, wants more prosperity… even if it is temporary. So it needs to “loosen up” the money supply a little more. That’s why the Fed’s real interest rate (charged to member banks) was below zero for all but a couple of quarters over the last 10 years. And this leads to an even greater dependence on the deluge of paper money… and sets the nation up for an eventual catastrophe.
Here’s Yahoo! Finance last month: "Nearly 7 in 10 Americans in a Quinnipiac University poll said they support President Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan."
And here’s the Bank of America, warning that unless the Fed loosens up more… now… the sucker is going down again. From Business Insider: "Last week’s spike in interest rates has Bank of America analysts on edge about a potential stock market crash. In a note on Friday, the bank highlighted the historic yield spike in mortgage-backed securities [MBS] and compared the current environment to 1987, when a continued jump in MBS yields preceded a stock market crash of more than 20%." In 1987, an interest rate shock in April was followed by further rate increases that ultimately led to the October stock market crash, BofA said.
[…]
“Unless Fed fights back very soon with more treasury/MBS purchases, a similar fate likely lies ahead,” BofA warned.
Wrong Choices: Once a heavy object begins rolling down a steep hill, it doesn’t stop until it smashes into something. It doesn’t matter what you say or what you think. As it rolls downhill, it gathers momentum, making it more and more dangerous to try to stop it. And then you get dunderheads like George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Jerome Powell shoving it along even faster. We’re used to thinking that things are under our control… that if only “they” would do the right thing… make the right choices… we could avert disaster. Maybe. But once you’ve made the wrong choices for a long time, it’s almost impossible to make the right ones. The momentum is against you."
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