Jeremiah Babe, PM 6/10/21:
“The Greatest Depression Is Accelerating; Wages Collapse;
Inflation Rages; Household Debt Surges”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Gerald Celente, PM 6/10/21: "High Tax Rates For We The People, Billionaires Pay Peanuts"
Gerald Celente, PM 6/10/21:
"High Tax Rates For We The People, Billionaires Pay Peanuts"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."
Free Download: Albert Einstein, "The World As I See It"
"The World As I See It":
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life”
by Paul Ratner
“Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.
The collection of essays and ideas “The World As I See It”* gathers Einstein’s thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says “at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age”.
In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity. “What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life,” wrote Einstein.
Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.
Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.
Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein's pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts.
In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach: “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
This theme of liberating the self is also echoed by Einstein later in life, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”
In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here’s him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the “The World As I See It”: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?”
○
Freely download "The World As I See It", by Albert Einstein, here:
"Hang In There..."
“Using time, pressure and patience, the universe gradually changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds. You’re being worked on too, so hang in there. Just because something isn’t apparent right now, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s not until the end do you realize, sometimes your biggest blessings were disguised by pain and suffering. They were not placed there to break you, but to make you.”
- “The Angel Affect”
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.”
- Richard Bach
"Ranchers Sell Off Cattle And Farmers Idle Hundreds Of Thousands Of Acres As America’s Drought Emergency Escalates"
"Ranchers Sell Off Cattle And Farmers Idle Hundreds
Of Thousands Of Acres As America’s Drought Emergency Escalates"
by Michael Snyder
"In my entire lifetime, this is the worst that drought conditions have ever been in the western half of the country. During the past 20 years, the amount of territory in the West considered to be suffering from exceptional drought has never gone higher than 11 percent until now. Today, that number is sitting at 27 percent. The term “mega-drought” is being thrown around a lot these days to describe what is happening, but this isn’t just a drought. This is a true national emergency, and it is really starting to affect our food supply.
Just look at what is happening up in North Dakota. The vast majority of the state is either in the worst level of drought or the second worst level of drought, and ranchers are auctioning off their cattle by the thousands… “Normally this time of the year, we’re probably looking at 400-600 head and a lot of times would be every other week,” said former auctioneer Ron Torgerson. On Sunday and Monday, more than 4,200 head of cattle were sold at Rugby Livestock and Auction. Needless to say, ranchers in North Dakota don’t want to get rid of their cattle, but the drought has pushed prices for hay and corn so high that many of them simply have no choice.
One of those that has already been forced to sell a large number of cattle is rancher David Bohl… "As the drought continues, the price of hay and corn has gone way up. It’s more expensive for ranchers to try and supplement feed than it is to sell the cattle. Bohl has already sold 200 of his head in the last month. “Everybody is in the same situation, they’re going to have to sell probably 25 to 50% of them because there’s nowhere to go with them we just got no food to feed them,” Bohl said."
As cattle herds shrink all over the western half of the country, this is going to push beef prices significantly higher than they are right now. And in many areas, they are already at ridiculous levels.
Meanwhile, the drought continues to push the water level in Lake Mead into the danger zone. According to CBS News, Lake Mead will soon hit the “lowest level ever recorded”… "For more than eight decades, the iconic Hoover Dam has relied on water from Nevada’s Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at age 85, it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the dam is supposed to be holding back is gone. “This is like a different world,” said Pat Mulroy, the former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She told CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is on track to soon hit its lowest level ever recorded.
Since the year 2000, the water level in Lake Mead has declined by a whopping 30 feet, and it is currently at just 37 percent of capacity. The dam’s hydropower output has already been reduced by about 25 percent, and once the water level gets low enough it will stop producing electricity completely.
In addition, many farmers that rely on water from Lake Mead are facing a very uncertain future at this point… "For the first time ever, the federal government is expected to declare a water shortage on the lower Colorado River later this summer. That will force automatic cuts to the water supply for Nevada and Arizona starting in 2022. Homeowners have higher priority and, at first, won’t feel the pain as badly as farmers.
Dan Thelander is a second-generation family farmer in Arizona’s Pinal County. The water to grow his corn and alfalfa fields comes from Lake Mead. “If we don’t have irrigation water, we can’t farm,” he said. “So, next year we are going to get about 25% less water, means we’re going to have to fallow or not plant 25% of our land.” Unless something changes, Thelander and other farmers in the region could potentially have all water cut off in 2023. That is just two years away.
Of course there are many farmers in California that have already been informed that they will not be getting any water allocated to them at all here in 2021. It is being projected that farmers in the state will not grow anything on 500,000 acres this year, and that is really bad news because California grows more than a third of our vegetables and two-thirds of our fruits and nuts…
Along with wildfire risks, short water supply is putting immense pressure on the state’s agricultural industry, which grows over a third of the country’s vegetables and supplies two-thirds of the fruits and nuts in the US. Already farmers are culling crops and fallowing fields in anticipation of water shortages. Karen Ross, California’s food and agriculture secretary, told the California Chamber of Commerce that she expected 500,000 acres would have to sit idle this year.
So what are we going to do if this mega-drought persists several more years and agricultural production in California is dramatically reduced for an extended period of time? I am sure that some wise guy will post a comment after this article about importing more fruits and vegetables from South America, but South America is experiencing a historic drought too. In fact, at this moment Brazil is experiencing the “worst drought in nearly a century”, and scientists are anticipating that it will not end any time soon.
Needless to say, the droughts that we are witnessing are setting the stage for many of the things that I have been warning about, and the future of agricultural production in the western hemisphere is looking quite bleak for the foreseeable future. In the short-term, this crisis is going to result in substantially higher prices at the grocery store. I know that grocery prices have already risen to painful levels, but the truth is that food prices will never be as low as they are right now. So I am encouraging everyone to stock up while they still can.
As I have said so many times, we really struggle to feed everyone in the world during the best of years, and 2021 is definitely not one of the best of years. Global food supplies are getting tighter and tighter, and this definitely has enormous implications for our future."
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/10/21: "CRASH: Economy In a Tailspin; Wages Falling; Prices Surging At Fastest Pace On Record"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/10/21:
"CRASH: Economy In a Tailspin; Wages Falling;
Prices Surging At Fastest Pace On Record"
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
"Hell to Pay"; "How Fanatics Took Over the World"
"Hell to Pay"
by Jeffrey Tucker
Editor’s note: Dr. Fauci’s private emails were recently leaked to the media. They revealed some interesting information. Today, old Daily Reckoning hand Jeffrey Tucker shows you how Fauci badly botched the lockdowns and why history will not be kind to him.
"I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about Dr. Fauci’s leaked emails. They were highly revealing, and his reputation will likely never recover. Today, I will break it all down. On March 2, 2020, with lockdowns still two weeks away, Dr. Fauci received an email from Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. He asked the following: “Is the overall strategy of social distancing just to keep the percentage of Americans who get the disease low until a vaccine is available? This seems much harder to do in a free society. Does this mean closing schools? Public transport? Do states and localities make such decisions?”
Harder to do in a free society - indeed! It should have been unthinkable. Fauci’s answer is remarkable, and most of his answer ended up in the column Gerson was writing at the time. He confirmed his lockdown plans but also gave a rationale for them. It wasn’t about the need to flatten the curve to preserve hospital capacity. That was propaganda - a lie fed to the American people to convince them to go along. It wasn’t about waiting for a vaccine either. Fauci did not even believe that a vaccine was necessary. He said so.
What Fauci revealed in his response was his actual thinking on why we need lockdowns. He was convinced that if people stopped socializing, the virus would essentially get bored because it could not find a host. How long was this supposed to take? A month? A year? Ten years? He doesn’t say.
He was trying out a nutty idea here and just wanted to see how it worked. Here is what Fauci wrote on this day. “Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine. The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), work places (do teleworking where possible… The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
Is his theory correct: that you can drive down the infection rate to 0 by keeping people apart and thereby cause the virus to “decline and stop?” I’ve spoken to many experts about this idea for the better part of a year, and they all say absolutely not. Attempting to game the rate of infection (which is impossible to measure in real life with any precision) and thereby affect the fate of a virus is a bit like imposing price controls to influence inflation without stopping the printing presses.
Let’s just say that a powerful government can manage to achieve some weird reality in which there are no crowds, no gatherings, no travel, and no one standing closer to anyone else than six feet. Only in the fantasy world of computer gaming does such a thing work. In the real world, viruses will certainly outsmart a central planner.
Even if it did work, which it could not, the transmission would start again once people start gathering. You will have rolling snap lockdowns forever - which is rather like what we see in Australia today. Once a virus is here, it is not going anywhere until population immunity takes hold and protects people from becoming sick. This point exists in first-year medical textbooks (and in 9th-grade biology class), but somehow Fauci managed to replace this time-tested wisdom with a new theory concocted by himself and his friends.
Fauci’s career and reputation will not likely survive this email dump. My friends in the know have been telling me for many months now that Fauci will be sacrificed by the establishment. The lockdowns were so grim, so unAmerican, so contrary to science, and also completely failed - not only in the U.S. but all over the world - that someone’s head needs to be on a platter. It looks like they were right: it will be Fauci.
As a sign of the times, Amazon and Barnes & Noble recently pulled Fauci’s book "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward" from their websites. His full discrediting is happening in real time. The man who all major media and large corporations fawned over for the better part of 15 months seems destined to go down in disgrace.
Nor will this be the end of it. Prepare yourself for many years of this. The lockdowners themselves certainly are, as one can tell by their near silence for the last two months. The winds have changed dramatically. That’s good for the cause of human freedom. Prepare yourself for many years ahead of astonishing revelations and for a full discrediting of everyone and everything that cooperated in this calamity without modern precedent. Below, I name additional names and show you how this handful of fanatics took over the world. Most definitely, read on."
"How Fanatics Took Over the World"
by Jeffrey Tucker
"Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening.
I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book "The Premonition" that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence - serving an apocalyptic president - he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics. He literally unleashed hell.
That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…
The Man Who Lit the Match: Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called brutal. So on it went.
The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be? The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening. There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.
This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning. For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan - make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine - he was furious. “This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”
Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan. “We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues. “We were going to invent pandemic planning.” This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.
Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Cranks, Computers, and Cooties: His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on. She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.
Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?" They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.
Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle. Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”
At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease - and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is - a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement - it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong. Pathogens are part of our world; they are generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.
Fanatics Win the Day: Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way. Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models - developed with Glass and others - kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period - some of them still not public - and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.
Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, he was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way? There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. Essentially, the lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.
Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history. As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot. The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build."
○
Related:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion is much more than three stars in a row. It is a direction in space that is rich with impressive nebulas. To better appreciate this well-known swath of sky, an extremely long exposure was taken over many clear nights in 2013 and 2014. After 212 hours of camera time and an additional year of processing, the featured 1400-exposure collage spanning over 40 times the angular diameter of the Moon emerged.
Of the many interesting details that have become visible, one that particularly draws the eye is Barnard’s Loop, the bright red circular filament arcing down from the middle. The Rosette Nebula is not the giant red nebula near the top of the image- that is a larger but lesser known nebula known as Lambda Orionis. The Rosette Nebula is visible, though: it is the red and white nebula on the upper left. The bright orange star just above the frame center is Betelgeuse, while the bright blue star on the lower right is Rigel. Other famous nebulas visible include the Witch Head Nebula, the Flame Nebula, the Fox Fur Nebula, and, if you know just where to look, the comparatively small Horsehead Nebula. About those famous three stars that cross the belt of Orion the Hunter- in this busy frame they can be hard to locate, but a discerning eye will find them just below and to the right of the image.”
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.”
"In The Long Run..."
“In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea… gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous.”
- Galileo Galilei,
“Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” (1632)
"Deutsche Bank Goes Apocalyptic: Inflation Is Exploding And Lead To An Economic Collapse! Be Ready!"
Full screen recommended.
"Deutsche Bank Goes Apocalyptic:
Inflation Is Exploding And Lead To An Economic Collapse! Be Ready!"
by Epic Economist, PM 6/9/21
"Everyone seems to be extremely worried about the crushing levels of inflation that have exploded around the world over the past year. But in a recent must-read report, written by Deutsche Bank's global head of research David Folkerts-Landau, and co-authored by Peter Hooper and Jim Reid, the experts have shared an apocalyptic forecast and explained why the worst is yet to come. The report titled "Inflation: The defining macro story of this decade" highlights how the US has seen the biggest shift in macro policies in nearly 40 years. The extraordinary spending policies are expanding the cracks of our economic system, which is now at risk to fall apart completely. "The effects of this shift are being compounded by political turmoil in the US and deeply worrying geopolitical risks," they wrote, revealing that “in turn, we are concerned that it will bring about uncomfortable levels of inflation".
In a very short time span, these unconventional policies were put into place to allegedly prevent the economy from sliding into a devastating depression, but these measures had very little success in actually boosting growth. The Deutsche Bank researchers argued that although a tighter social safety net is needed for the economic growth of our population and our country, the administration's efforts to actually achieve a more balanced distribution of economic and political power between the corporate sector, labor, and the consumer seem quite ineffective because even though the government is seemingly moving towards different priorities, central bankers must prioritize inflation.
In a few short months, the U.S. national debt soared to levels unimaginable a decade ago, largely surpassing red-line levels of 100% of GDP. But up until now, it appears that policymakers are not seriously concerned about debt sustainability in the long run, and how it will affect investors, governments, or international institutions. The same goes for inflation, as the majority of central bankers and economists keep insisting that any rise in prices away from the historically low levels of the past decade will be "transitory", relying on the assumption that baseline effects, one-offs, and structural forces will continue to suppress prices.
As the United States moves towards looser positions regarding inflation levels, and the entire world follows the same path, we are about to witness the most significant shift in global macro policy of the past 40 years. And that's incredibly concerning since at this point fiscal injections are already off the charts. "Never before have we seen such coordinated expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. This will continue as output moves above potential. This is why this time is different for inflation. Even if some of the transitory inflation ebbs away, we believe price growth will regain significant momentum as the economy overheats in 2022. Yet we worry that in its new inflation averaging framework, the Fed will be too slow to damp the rising inflation pressures effectively," the experts warned.
As a result of the Fed's delay in assessing the tricky effects of inflation, Deutsche Bank forecasts that there will be huge disruptions of economic and financial activity in the coming months, and this will trigger "a significant recession and set off a chain of financial distress around the world". The bank's apocalyptic projection takes into consideration historical data that proves the Fed was not successful in achieving a 'soft landing' when introducing a monetary tightening when inflation has been above 4%. That's why the researchers emphasized that "policymakers are about to enter a far more difficult world than they have seen for several decades."
In conclusion, Folkerts-Landau, Hooper, and Reid exposed they worry runaway inflation will make a comeback. The last time our economy was threatened by such painful levels of inflation was in the 70s - a period marked by severe shortages, high unemployment levels, and soaring prices. Even though pursuing social goals is a form of strengthening the economic foundations of any economy, but doing so by "neglecting inflation leaves global economies sitting on a time bomb," the experts concluded.
In short, this means that this new shift in macro policy is actually having the opposite effect when it comes to supporting social goals. Unfortunately, when we hit the stage of unsustainable inflation levels, central banks will become so overwhelmed with the imbalances of their policies that policymakers will have to suspend all social programs that actually provide a safety net for those in need. They won't be able to come to bail us out. We will witness a calamitous uptick in poverty and unemployment rates, as well as even more severe shortages, and even higher price increases. Americans are about to face the most challenging years in history. And the collapse has just begun."
"Real Estate is Going to the Dogs - Get Ready Now"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, IAllegedly,
"Real Estate is Going to the Dogs - Get Ready Now"
The Poet: Mark Jarman, "Coyotes"
"Coyotes"
"Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way,
There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth,
And there's the panting rabbit they will eat.
They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,
Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?
And yet we're crying over the stars again,
And over the uncertainty of death,
Which we suspect will divide us all forever.
I'm tired of those who broadcast their certainties,
Constantly on their cell phones to their redeemer.
Is this a fallen world? For them it is.
But there's that starlit burst of animal laughter.
The day has sent its fires scattering.
The night has risen from its burning bed.
Our tears are proof that love is meant for life
And for the living. And this chorus of praise,
Which the pet dogs of the neighborhood are answering
Nostalgically, invites our answer, too.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?"
~ Mark Jarman
"Waiting..."
"We're all sinking in the same boat here. We're all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We're all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."
- Susane Colasanti
"Tell Me..."
“Life passes like a flash of lightning, whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see. While the earth and sky stand still forever, how swiftly changing time flies across man’s face. O you who sit over your full cup and do not drink, tell me – for whom are you still waiting?”
- Hermann Hesse
“Incidit In Scyllam Cupiens Vitare Charybdim”
“Incidit In Scyllam Cupiens Vitare Charybdim”
by Steve Candidus
“One of the great things about ancient Greek Mythology is that the stories all teach a lesson. They don’t end with – and the moral of the story is – though. They leave it to the reader to figure them out. So in addition to being just plain fun to read they are wonderful teachers about life. Perhaps the best thing about this one is that we still use the expression it contains exactly the same way that the ancient Greeks intended it almost 3,000 years ago. That almost never happens. Language is fluid and the meanings of words and expressions changes from one generation to another, but this one is an exception. The everyday expression it contains is one that we often refer to without really knowing where it came from.
This is one of the tales of Odysseus who was the heroic king of Ithaca and of whose ten-year journey back to Greece after the Trojan War was immortalized in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. There was a point in his journey when his ship had to enter a narrow straight. It was a passage so narrow that it could only be made under special conditions. They had to have both the wind at their backs and the current in their direction. However, once committed it was impossible to turn back.
Unknown to the sailors the straight was guarded by two deadly perils. On the one side, it was guarded by Scylla. Scylla was a six-headed monster that disguised itself as a rock. On the other side, it was guarded by Charybdis, a terrible deadly whirlpool born of the sea god Poseidon.
In olden times, it was common to refer to any place that a ship came to rest on land as being in a hard place. It didn’t matter if it was blown on shore by a storm, grounded on a reef or brought up intentionally for repair. If it was on shore, it was on a hard place as opposed to the soft place – water.
It also applied to a ship that had foundered. A ship that sinks will eventually rest on the bottom. The land at the bottom of the ocean is therefore called a hard place. It used to be a common term, but it has since pretty much fallen out of practice in common language today. A deadly whirlpool such as Charybdis could take a ship and send it straight to the bottom – a hard place.
So, now as we return to the story of Odysseus we see that their ship had entered a narrow straight and that straight was guarded by two evil perils with hardly enough room for a ship to pass between them. They were forced to choose between the six headed monster ‘Scylla’ disguised as a rock or the dreaded whirlpool ‘Charybdis’ that would surely send them to a hard place and they could not turn back.
There is a Latin proverb from this story, “Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim” which translates to, “He runs on Scylla, wishing to avoid Charybdis.” In modern day English, we simply say, “They were between a rock and a hard place”. And now you know…”
Greg Hunter, "Climate Engineering Causing Drought & Earthquakes"
"Climate Engineering Causing Drought & Earthquakes"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"About a month ago, climate engineering researcher Dane Wigington said the severe drought unfolding in the Western United States is only going to get worse. It has. Now, large portions of the Western U.S are being hit with earthquakes. Wigington contends that science shows the rash of earthquakes in the West are linked to climate engineering. One example is the earthquake in Fukushima in 2011. The science is backed up by a report from MIT. Wigington explains, “All this data is extremely verifiable. The testimony from MIT is extraordinarily damming. Their words were ‘extremely anomalous heating directly above the epicenter in the days prior to the quake.’ The Fukashima meltdown was not intended, but when you trigger seismic activity on that scale, massive consequences happen. The ability to cause seismic activity with radio frequency microwave transmissions is very well documented scientifically. There is no official source that is willing to discuss this because it is simply too alarming to the population. The liability issues from decimating food supplies and tripping seismic activity is incomprehensible. When people find out what is being done to them, I would argue that’s when they take to the streets with their proverbial pitchforks and torches to look for anyone and everyone involved.”
The so-called “Mega-Drought” in the Western U.S is being caused by climate engineering. Wigington says, “We know conclusively that in the case of cutting off the flow of moisture in the U.S. West is absolutely the result of climate engineering operations—period. They are cutting off the food supply. Food supply is collapsing. We have climate engineering completely derailing crop production, and it’s not just in the U.S. West, but in multiple locations around the world.”
Wigington points out that Europe is in a severe drought “that is worse than anything in the last 2,100 years,” and yet very little is being reported about it. He says this, too, is a product of climate engineering.
Wigington says great public awareness is what is needed to stop what is being done to the planet with climate engineering. Wigington says, “This is a very direct fight for life. Going back to how we started this interview, the decimation of our food supplies is going to be very visible in the coming weeks and months. No matter what other challenges we face, if we don’t deal with this one, the planet’s life support systems right down to our food supply, nothing else will matter. This needs to be seen by our military brothers and sisters. They need to understand that they are waging all-out weather and biological warfare against their own populations. That’s a fact.”
Join Greg Hunter on Rumbles he goes One-on-One
with climate researcher Dane Wigington, founder of GeoEngineeringWatch.org.
"5 Signs That America’s Raging Inflation Crisis Is Accelerating"
"5 Signs That America’s Raging Inflation Crisis Is Accelerating"
by Michael Snyder
"The pace at which conditions are changing is catching a lot of people off guard. Here in the United States, we have been in a low inflation environment for most of the past four decades, and so many Americans don’t even have a frame of reference for what a highly inflationary environment looks like. But now we are facing an inflation crisis that is unlike anything that we have seen since the Jimmy Carter era in the 1970s. In response to the COVID pandemic, governments around the world have been borrowing and spending colossal mountains of money, and global central banks have been absolutely flooding their respective financial systems with new cash. These measures were taken to stimulate the worldwide economy, but in the process a horrific inflation monster has been created, and it will not be tamed easily. In fact, national governments and global central banks continue to do the very same things that created the horrific inflation monster in the first place.
Moving forward, things look very bleak. The following are 5 signs that America’s raging inflation crisis is accelerating…
#1 Inflation tends to hit those at the bottom of the economic food chain the hardest, but at this point even most millionaires say that they are “concerned about inflation”… "This is a major worry for most wealthy investors, according to CNBC’s latest millionaire survey. As many as 65% of millionaires are concerned about inflation caused by recent government spending, according to the report. Of those, 34% said they were very concerned. The survey, conducted online in April and May by Spectrum Group on CNBC’s behalf, had 750 respondents with investable assets of $1 million or more."
#2 The biggest banks in the world are now sounding the alarm about the inflation crisis. This week, a team of analysts from Deutsche Bank warned that “neglecting inflation leaves global economies sitting on a time bomb”…
"We worry that inflation will make a comeback. Few still remember how our societies and economies were threatened by high inflation 50 years ago. The most basic laws of economics, the ones that have stood the test of time over a millennium, have not been suspended. An explosive growth in debt financed largely by central banks is likely to lead to higher inflation. We worry that the painful lessons of an inflationary past are being ignored by central bankers, either because they really believe that this time is different, or they have bought into a new paradigm that low interest rates are here to stay, or they are protecting their institutions by not trying to hold back a political steam roller. Whatever the reason, we expect inflationary pressures to re-emerge as the Fed continues with its policy of patience and its stated belief that current pressures are largely transitory. It may take a year longer until 2023 but inflation will re-emerge. And while it is admirable that this patience is due to the fact that the Fed’s priorities are shifting towards social goals, neglecting inflation leaves global economies sitting on a time bomb."
#3 Housing prices continue to soar into the stratosphere in the United States. These days, investment funds, wealthy individuals and foreigners are all gobbling up homes in anticipation of making huge profits, and this is making things extremely difficult for ordinary home buyers. Earlier, I found the following message from one exasperated home shopper on a popular discussion forum… "It’s crazy. Soon as it hits the market tons of offers."
Mostly Investors and flippers. Real estate Agent’s telling me things like: “We’ve got Rich guys as far out as Hawaii buying houses sight unseen. They’ll even buy them in bulk. Anything from dumps to mansions.’ We’ve got Chinese snatching up properties, Bill Gates, Businesses, and like I said flippers. It’s Impossible! Auction sites along with gov seized properties are flooded with the same types.
"Can not compete you’ll be outbid by thousands upon thousand of dollars way above market value."
"Any tricks or strategies to buy a house? Anything that may not have all the greedy bastards swarming over them?"
"A family seriously needing to actually live in a place seems completely s.o.l"
"It’s not just my area that’s hot right now its everywhere."
"Please if anyone has good advice would be appreciated. Thanks"
#4 Used car prices have now officially entered “absurd” territory. This week, we learned that the Used Vehicle Value Index has shot up by 26 percent so far in 2021… "Prices of used vehicles sold at auctions around the US in May spiked by 4.6% from April, by 26% year-to-date, and by 45% from April 2019, according to the Used Vehicle Value Index released today by Manheim, the largest auto auction operator in the US and a unit of Cox Automotive."
I used to recommend buying used vehicles to people because I thought that most of the time you could get a better value, but at this point I am reversing my recommendation. In this environment, I would strongly encourage everyone to consider buying new vehicles because used vehicles have become so ridiculously expensive.
#5 Food prices continue to surge higher, and I continue to see reports of intermittent shortages around the nation. Down in Florida, Papa Bee’s Owner Lorie Hamm says that only a limited number of cases of chicken wings are being made available to restaurants in her area, and she also says that the price for such cases has nearly doubled since the start of 2021… “There’s 300 cases that are allocated for two counties I believe, they were gone in two minutes,” Hamm said. At the beginning of the year, a case of wings sold for $70-90 a case. Now they are about $150 a case.
When you begin to wildly create new money, this is what happens. Prices go haywire and shortages tend to occur. Unfortunately, our leaders don’t seem to have even a basic understanding of the laws of economics, and the pain that we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg. If they were smart, global authorities would be taking emergency measures to get inflation under control before it is too late. Of course that is not happening. Instead, they just continue to feed the monster. This crisis is going to go from bad to worse, and you should prepare accordingly."
○
Related:
"Inflation Explained"
"Inflation Explained"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – “Pity the American small business owner… ” writes Dear Reader H.R.E.: “I’m dealing with it as a landlord. Can’t get parts and materials and can’t get labor. Both cost more than ever. Plumbers at $300 per hour. AC guys closer to $500 per.”
Breitbart reports: "Small Business Optimism Drops on Labor Shortage and Inflation Worries." "The National Federation of Independent Business Optimism Index dropped two-tenths of a point to a reading of 99.6 in May. This followed three straight monthly increases but was the second straight month in which results undershot expectations."
And more inflation sightings from our dear readers... Stephen G.: "The MSRP of a 1964 Ford Mustang was $2,368 and an ounce of gold was pegged at $35.10, which works out to a little over 66 ounces of gold. Today, 66 ounces of gold will buy you two BMW Z4s, with almost $20K left over. I think this says as much about the destruction of the dollar as it does about gold as a store of value.
I also remember buying gasoline back in the early ’60s for right around 20 cents a gallon. I remember being struck by the fact that a gallon of gas and a pack of smokes were about the same price. So two silver dimes would buy a gallon of gas in 1963. And, guess what, two silver dimes will still buy a gallon of gas – with change – back in some parts of the country. And that’s just going by the spot price of silver, not the huge premiums being charged on eBay and most other sellers."
Fred T.: "At the real day-to-day level, inflation is rampant. We get Chinese on Thursday nights. Last Thursday, when I picked up the order, I got a severe case of sticker shock. They had raised the price of their entrees 40% – from $9.99 to $14. Unbelievable. They said their food costs have skyrocketed. Trust me, it is not transient. The price will never be reduced."
And Goku V.: "Take a butterfinger. In 1978, it was 4 ozs and cost 10 cents in a vending machine in grade school. By 1993, it was down to 3.4 ozs and cost 25 cents. The last time I saw one, it cost $1.69 and was 1.51 ozs. Take the snack pack of butterfingers. When they came out, they were 10 oz bars for 99 cents. At their cheapest, they were 12 x 1 oz bars for 88 cents at Walmart. Today, they are over $3 and are down to 6 x 55 oz bars. Do the math!"
Confusing and Misleading: Here at the Diary, we don’t really care what things cost… how much people earn… or what interest rate they get on their savings. All that matters is that these figures be true. Then, people can take the “information content” of the prices and make their choices. The trouble – speaking as though we were a serious economist – is that today’s prices, wages, and interest rates all lie. The information content – bent and distorted by the Federal Reserve’s fake money – is false. It confuses us. It misleads us. It creates bubbles and BS. Here, we make a small effort to straighten it out.
False Argument: Many times, in these pages, we have pointed out that a new car or a new house is much more expensive today than it used to be. But the price alone – twisted up by the feds – tells us nothing. We have to adjust it for “inflation.” We can do that, as our dear reader did above, quoting the price in real money – gold or silver. Or, we can figure it in time – how many working hours it would take to earn enough to purchase said house or car. Either way, the real price comes out at two to three times more than it was in the 1970s.
Then, the apologists for the fake-money system tell us that we’re wrong. We’ve failed to take product improvements into account, they say. “A car today is a lot better than one in the 1970s.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually adjusts auto prices downward to reflect quality enhancements. But this argument is false. Technological improvements can make a car better (or worse). But they also should reduce the expense of making it. The two costs – producer and consumer – should change at more or less the same rate. So there’s no reason to think a Ford F-150 should cost more in 2021 than one in 1971.
Higher Wages: Another reason you might think today’s car is more expensive than one from 50 years ago is that wages are so much higher. A person working somewhere on the auto supply chain in 1971 would have earned an average of about $3.60 an hour. Today, he’s earning nearly $25 an hour. But wait. We need to adjust for “inflation.”
And when we do that, our colleague David Stockman tells us that the typical employee in the manufacturing sector hit his peak earnings in 1978. Here we are, 43 years later, and his real, inflation-adjusted wages have gone down 6%. No wonder he wanted to Make America Great Again; he remembered when wages actually went up. He must feel he’s been cheated over the last 40 years, even if he has no idea how the flimflam worked. And he’s right. However much auto prices have gone up, none of that money went into his pocket.
Cheated Again: At the top of the money pyramid, the elites have stocks and bonds. An increase in stock prices – even if it is a phony increase, caused by the Fed’s money-printing – can bring them additional wealth. But most people rely on their time to pay the bills. They sell it, hour by hour, week by week, year by year. And while the Fed continues to buy financial assets at a rate of $120 billion per month… it has never paid a penny for a working man’s time.
Stocks and bonds go up. Wages do not. Still, if he works hard and is careful about saving his money, an assembly-line worker may build up some capital of his own. Were he to save, say, $2,000 every year over a 40-year career of putting nuts and bolts together, he would have $80,000! And then, he could earn interest on it.
Alas, the interest rate has been falsified, too. Adjusted for inflation, had he put his money in a savings account in 2008, he’d have less money today than he had then. This year alone, based on the present inflation readings, on $80,000 of savings, he’d lose another $2,000. Cheated again!
Simple Solution: And now… with the official “inflation” rate over 5% (annualized, based on the first quarter), the feds are busily figuring out how to keep the scam going. “It’s complicated,” they say… which is surely true, thanks to the many curve balls they’ve thrown.
But behind the complexity is the simple Quantity Theory of Money (QTM). This tells us that the more money is in circulation, the higher prices will go. When economist Milton Friedman proposed the fake-dollar system (what was he thinking?!), he said the Fed should increase the supply of dollars at a rate roughly equal to the rate of GDP growth. That way, the quantity of money would go up at about the same rate as the supply of goods and services. No surprises. No shortage of liquidity. No fear of inflation or deflation. And no price distortion. Oh happy day!
Simple Explanation: Friedman set 3–5% as the perfect rate. But that was when the economy really was growing at a 3% rate. Over the last 14 years, the real rate of GDP growth – adjusted for inflation – was under 1.3%. So even a 3% increase in the supply of money would be twice as much as it should be. But guess how much the money supply (the Fed’s balance sheet) grew last year. Five percent? Ten percent? More?
Oh Dear Reader, you already know. Seventy eight percent, March 2020 to March 2021. The number is so staggering, we can hardly believe it ourselves. So let us set aside the Plague Year as exceptional in every way, and go back to the turn of the century. Well… since this century began, U.S. GDP has gone up from about $10 trillion to about $22 trillion. A solid double. But the Fed’s balance sheet? Around $700 billion 20 years ago, if it had kept pace with GDP growth, it would be around $1.5 trillion today. Instead, it’s now around $8 trillion – five times where it should be. If we were looking for a simple explanation of inflation, need we look any further?"
○
Related:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/9/21: "Economy Continues To CRATER Faster!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/9/21:
"Economy Continues To CRATER Faster!
And HYPER-DEBT (With More To Come) Is Propping It Up"
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
"A Look to the Heavens"
"A gorgeous spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish clusters of young stars and dust lanes are seen to trace out NGC 1309's spiral arms as they wind around an older yellowish star population at its core.
Not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy, observations of NGC 1309's recent supernova and Cepheid variable stars contribute to the calibration of the expansion of the Universe. Still, after you get over this beautiful galaxy's grand design, check out the array of more distant background galaxies also recorded in this sharp, reprocessed, Hubble Space Telescope view.”
“Crypto’s Crippled; Don’t Pay Your Rent Buy A New Car Instead; Wealthy Own Assets, Poor Own Debt”
Jeremiah Babe, PM 6/8/21:
“Crypto’s Crippled; Don’t Pay Your Rent Buy A New Car Instead;
Wealthy Own Assets, Poor Own Debt”
The Poet: Linda Pastan“What We Want”
“What We Want”
“What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names-
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.”
- Linda Pastan
"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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)