Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/14/22:
"The UN Warns Of Possible Nuclear War;
Gold, Silver, Crude Fall"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, March 14, 2022
Bill Bonner, "The Liberal World Order"
"The Liberal World Order"
Corporate chiefs, Wall Street heavies,
Hollywood celebrities and other empty-headed jackassery...
by Bill Bonner
"Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur."
"The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived."
San Martin, Argentina - "The US media is privately owned. But it acts an arm of the US government… which is itself an arm of the Entire Elite Establishment (EEE, aka the “liberal world order.”) No surprise. Reporters go to the same schools, read the same newspapers, and believe the same things as Washington’s movers and shakers. They are not intentional propagandists; they just see the world in the same way. So, they generally accept the whole agenda – equity, de-carbonization, racism, financial manipulation, military adventurism, neutral pronouns etc. – of the ‘liberal world order.’ In other words, they become cheerleaders for the powerful EEE, not critics of it.
Never has this been clearer than reporting on the war between Russia and the Ukraine. The war in itself is nothing remarkable. Russia insists that Ukraine remain a neutral buffer between itself and NATO. Ukraine – lured and spurred by the US – doesn’t want to do that.
The whole brouhaha should be of little interest to the average American. His problems are here at home – such as $5 a gallon gasoline – and they are being made worse by the US sanctions. But every headline insists that he take an interest. And they tell him which side to support. Ukrainians are noble freedom-lovers (rarely are its neo-Nazis mentioned) and the Russians are brutes. Putin is compared to Hitler. The Russian army is accused of dastardly war crimes, etc. Last week, one ‘news’ item even featured an adorable stray puppy that had attached himself to a Ukrainian military unit. Are there no puppies among the Russians? Apparently not.
Much of the coverage is just puffery and claptrap. Some stories are actual lies – the Russians did not attack a nuclear reactor… Miss Ukraine is not actually fighting for her country. And some delicious details are hardly noticed; Zelensky really is a former clown/comedian who got elected after playing a teacher on TV who got elected president! Life imitates art… especially when the art is (allegedly) funded by George Soros.
But little attempt is made to observe, study or understand. Instead, the ‘liberal world order’ is on the field itself. Zelensky leads the home team. And the American media… along with the public, as gullible as ever… puts on its jerseys and flies its colors.
McUnhappy Deal: You can fool most of the people most of the time. And that’s plenty for government work. People want to be fooled. That’s what politicians, with their empty-headed jackassery, depend on. And corporate chiefs, Wall Street heavies, and Hollywood celebrities join in too… and share the glory of the winning team.
Leonardo de Caprio said he has sent money to Ukraine. McDonald’s shut down its business in Russia. Wall Street is pulling out too. Business Insider: "Goldman Sachs is shutting down its operations in Russia, becoming the first major US bank to do so. The company said the move was "in compliance with regulatory and licensing requirements."
From the UK comes word that fans may not even be able to watch a soccer match. Because the team’s owner is Russian. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine is on the story: "The U.K. froze the assets of Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, as Boris Johnson’s government dramatically stepped up its sanctions against prominent Russians over the invasion of Ukraine.
Abramovich and six others face a full asset freeze and travel ban, and are prohibited from transacting with U.K. citizens or businesses, the Foreign Office said in a statement Thursday. The move effectively derails Abramovich’s plan to sell Chelsea, which plays in England’s highest soccer league, and raises major questions about the future of the club.
Chelsea won’t be able to sell new tickets for matches, including games in the European Champions League, and the club’s merchandise stores will be closed. Player transfers are banned, as are new contracts."
Speaking of Sanctions…: Even Switzerland is giving up a foreign policy that has served it well for centuries – neutrality – in order to pile on. The Swiss had protected American oil and metals trader Marc Rich for almost two decades, after he was accused of dealing with Iran (among other things). Legal scholars at Harvard and Georgetown later concluded that he had committed no crime; they advised Bill Clinton to give him a pardon, which he did. But henceforth, oligarchs, dictators, traders… Christians or Jews – none can depend on Switzerland to shield them from the long arm of the ‘liberal world order.’"
Yes, dear reader, sanctions work! Look at what they are doing to Afghanistan. USA Today: "As a result of all this economic disruption, including the loss of billions of dollars of aid, 22.8 million people – more than half the population – are facing acute food insecurity. They include a million children under 5 "at risk of dying due to severe acute malnutrition," according to UNICEF." It is not clear why the Biden administration has imposed such devastating sanctions on Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Chinese look on. Tom Friedman believes they have a simple choice. They can stick with Putin. Or they can join the ‘western’ coalition against him. Seeing the awesome firepower of our weaponized money system, he thinks they will buckle under: "There are signs that China recognizes some of these new realities - that no country is too big to be canceled in the wired world."
Get it? The end of history. No country can stand against the ‘liberal world order.’ The wired world has been leveled after all. And yet, the media never even asks the basic question: what does the fight between Ukraine and Russia matter to Americans? Why are we so keen to expand the ‘liberal world order’ onto the Eurasian steppes? What’s it really all about? Or, to put it more provocatively, and borrowing from Country Joe and the Fish who asked the same question about the War in Vietnam, “it’s one, two, three…what are we fightin’ for?”
Might food shortages be another “unintended consequence” of the global upheaval right now? We’ve seen (and continue to see) rising prices at the pump and a squeeze on industrial metals. But while people are generally not too put out having to wait an extra week or two for their iGadgets and expendable luxury trinkets, going without wheat, corn, soy and other essential crops is a whole ‘nutha story. Remember the Arab Spring? Imagine that… but impacting billions of people worldwide.
Tune in tomorrow..."
"What Can We Know?"
“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly
half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the
essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos,
and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos…
A third element of man's nature is this:
that he shall not understand what he is doing."
- John Brunner
Jim Kunstler, "Playing Dumb"
"Playing Dumb"
by Jim Kunstler
"It must be obvious by now that the biggest complainers about “misinformation” in the USA are biggest spreaders of it. When you hear “baseless” and “conspiracy theory” do you not automatically now scent the rot of propaganda working through the delicate tissues of reality? Eventually the stench of psyop is so sharp that it even wakes up the walking dead.
Would our country be disappointed if Russia actually solves the problem of Ukraine? You have every reason to think so. For one thing, we would be stuck having to face our own problems, especially the ones caused by lying to ourselves, such as the nearly unthinkable obscenity of having possibly poisoned a majority of the US population with mRNA “vaccines” and killed hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 patients by withholding known effective treatments? What would you suppose we might do about that?
Hold people accountable? The scale of this disaster is so enormous that the country can’t begin to process it. And it’s not just us, it’s all of Western Civ, which is more or less interchangeable with NATO, now the chosen instrument of distraction. Do any of these member nations have the stomach to face their own gross institutional failures? Apparently not yet.
Even in the face of massive emerging data that the “vaccines” are a bust and have additionally injured and killed many people, the CDC still urges Americans to vaxx up and boost up. So, by the way, does allegedly “former president” Barack Obama, who tested positive for the virus over the weekend, despite being vaxxed to the max. Who will tell them to stop digging that hole they’re in before they dig all the way to China?
It’s only a matter of time before the swindled public flips and realizes it has been subject to mass murder by bureaucrats, politicians, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and purveyors of the news. They’re all in this up to their necks, as are their corresponding officials in France, Germany, the UK, et cetera. They are trying to sweep this enormous lump of depravity under the rug, hoping that the masses of citizens will just leave the room.
They used the same playbook for SpyGate and 2020 election fraud, but the odor of those two exploits lingers, too. CBS’s 60-Minutes (“brought to you by Pfizer!”) was still working the latest narrative failure Sunday night, attempting to defame special prosecutor and former state supreme court justice Michael Gableman’s 2020 Wisconsin election report, which accused Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of feloniously queering the vote by paying millions of dollars through a cut-out charity organization to replace actual local officials with Democratic Party activists to run the machinery of the election. Nothing to see there, declared CBS front-man Bill Whitaker. Judge Gableman’s report is just another conspiracy theory.
Threatened by losing the war against its own citizens, the US government now seeks a wider kinetic war over its would-be client state, Ukraine. The stakes must be pretty high for “Joe Biden” and Company to risk starting World War Three. Why else inflame a dangerous situation by sending more weapons there? I’ll tell you why: to prolong Russia’s operations to neutralize Ukraine so it won’t cause further trouble to them or anybody else in the world. The longer the US can keep that going, the longer we can put off the various reckonings at home.
America has no intention of actually defending Ukraine. It’s really just a global version of the interpersonal game “Let’s You and Him Fight,” as described by pioneering psychologist Eric Berne (1910 -1970), father of transactional analysis. The member nations of NATO have even less desire to join the battle, and are doing a poor job of pretending they oppose Russia’s disagreeable but necessary work there. So far, they have had to sacrifice desperately needed natural gas supplies from Russia. You can be sure they will find a way to sneak around US sanctions and reverse the blunder. They have no choice really, unless they want to go forward without any industries. Google-up the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and you’ll catch a glimpse of that possible European future. Of course, they’ll also have to answer to their own citizens for the awful mistakes of Covid-19.
The best outcome, as others have pointed out, will be the disassembly of Ukraine into an eastern Russian zone - perhaps annexed into Russia - and a rump western Ukraine state that will be as quiet and inoffensive as Moldova and Slovakia next door (When was the last time they caused any trouble in the world?) It would be best for everyone, and especially the Third World, if the Russian operation is concluded as quickly as possible with a structured peace settlement, leaving a chance to get a Ukrainian grain crop planted, because otherwise a lot of innocent people will go hungry. Is the USA interested in a peace settlement? Or do we want to drive events further toward tragedy and our own national suicide?"
"The U.S. of A-Bomb: How American Nuclear Weapons Changed the Course of Human History" (Excerpt)
"The U.S. of A-Bomb: How American Nuclear
Weapons Changed the Course of Human History" (Excerpt)
by AMMODOTCOM
"The United States of America can take pride in a number of things, among them arguably the two greatest cultural and scientific achievements of human history: The moon landing and atomic power. It is the latter that we will focus on in the article, the unleashing of the power of the atom, for good and for ill.
America was the first nation to split the atom and applied it immediately to the war effort. It was not for a lack of trying on the part of America’s rivals: Germany famously had their own nuclear program. Less well known is that the Empire of Japan was also looking for a way to weaponize the primal forces of nature.
But America got there first. And their ability to do so not only changed the course of the Second World War, it also changed the course of human history. For the first time ever, mankind has the ability to wipe away human life as we know it at the push of a button. On the other hand, we also have a clean, reliable fuel source that could outstrip all existing sources, if the political will were there.
This is the story of how America unleashed and harnessed the power of nuclear fission, for better or for worse."
Please view this complete article here:
"The Beginning Of The End Of The Road To Serfdom"
"The Beginning Of The End Of The Road To Serfdom"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"You may have noticed the news flow beyond the hot war in Ukraine is largely focused on capital: financial capital (markets, liquidity, interest rates, commodities, central bank tightening, etc.) and political capital (geopolitical maneuvering, sanctions, revising energy and defense policies, etc.) Notice who's left out, unnoticed and invisible? The serfs, the bottom 90% who have been decapitalized in the developed world and exploited in the developing world for the past 45 years.
With capital ascendant, the vast majority of financial and political gains flowed to the top tier of speculative capital (banks and billionaires) while the purchasing power of labor (i.e. wages) has been in a 45-year descent. (See chart below)
This disemboweling of labor transferred $50 trillion from labor to capital in the U.S. alone. Financialization and globalization devalued labor and working-class assets such as savings and boosted leveraged speculative bets only available to financiers and corporations, for example, stock buybacks funded by the tsunami of free money for financiers unleashed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. (See chart below)
Even though the corporate media gives it no notice, serf-expression will become increasingly consequential. No, serf-expression is not a typo for self-expression, the core doctrine of modernism. By serf-expression I mean the serf's expression of what is no longer acceptable. Another term for this is cultural revolution. I address social and cultural revolutions in my new book, "Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States."
"Is a Cultural Revolution Brewing in America?" (April 9, 2021)
When the serfs no longer believe in the divine right of banks and billionaires, then the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few will no longer be acceptable, regardless of the fawning rationalizations being offered by the toadies, sycophants, enforcers, apparatchiks, minions, lackeys and other apologists for a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Serf expressions are not organized by centralized political parties; they are self-organizing revolts against a failed religion worshiping capital and a failed system of centralized authoritarianism and exploitation. Serf expressions arise without warning and cannot be controlled by centralized authoritarianism, as the revolution is in the sphere of values and what's no longer acceptable, rather than in the sphere of politics.
Serf expressions will surprise a ruling order that reckoned the serfs would docilely accept any level of exploitation. Alexis De Tocqueville's trenchant description from his classic book, "Democracy in America" (1840), comes to mind: "The will is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy... it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till the nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals."
Eventually the "flock of timid and industrious animals" changes their minds about how much exploitation by the few is acceptable. Every repressive move by centralized authorities will only harden the resolve of the serfs that the divine right of banks and billionaires is false and the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few is no longer acceptable.
The ruling elites' vast army of well-paid toadies, sycophants, enforcers, apparatchiks, minions and lackeys are all quick to declare this is impossible. Let's check back in ten years, in 2032, and see who's right."
○
Related:
"Massive Shortages At Walmart! - What's Next? - Sevierville Tennessee!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 3/14/22:
"Massive Shortages At Walmart! - What's Next? - Sevierville Tennessee!"
"In today's vlog we are at Walmart with empty shelves everywhere! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a massive food shortage! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Gregory Mannarino, "Important Updates! Chemical Attacks, Energy Shortages, And A Veterinarian"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/14/22:
"Important Updates!
Chemical Attacks, Energy Shortages, And A Veterinarian"
"Economic Market Snapshot 3/14/22"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
○
"Economic Market Snapshot 3/14/22"
Updated as available.
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
○
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
○
Latest Market Analysis, Updated 3/14/22
○
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
March 13th to 15th, 2022
○
Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
○
Daily Job Cuts
○
○
○
○
○
○
Commentary, highly recommended:
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
○
Oh yeah...
○
And now... The End Game...
Sunday, March 13, 2022
"3 Ways The Ukraine Crisis Could Destroy The Economy"
Full screen recommended.
"3 Ways The Ukraine Crisis Could Destroy The Economy"
by Epic Economist, 3/13/22:
"The ongoing crisis in Ukraine continues to wreak havoc on global financial markets, including the U.S. stock market, and it is threatening to spark a financial meltdown of catastrophic proportions. Even before the conflict started, a massive sell-off of tech and other risky assets was already driving stock markets significantly lower amid an imminent Fed interest rate hike. Now, the second wave of the sell-off is coming from the “destabilization of Eastern Europe by Putin’s advance into Ukraine," explained Mark Grywacheski, a financial advisor with the Quad Cities Investment Group, "This crisis will impact the US economy, but to what extent is highly dependent on Putin. Is Ukraine the final objective?” the expert asks.
The current outlook indicates that a lot more volatility is ahead. With commodity and oil prices rising to stratospheric levels, the stage is set for a financial disaster. Manufacturing costs are also going through the roof, as well as shipping and transportation costs, which, ultimately, will be passed along to the U.S. consumer in the form of higher retail prices. At this point, most investors can see that things will get much worse than they already are. In essence, there are still many other ways this confrontation could get worse than it already is. And every single one of them seems absolutely terrifying.
One thing is certain, this is just the beginning of the financial turbulence, as warned the financial and geopolitical analyst and writer Mikhail Klimentyev. From now on, things are going to get much more chaotic. Today, one of the biggest economies on the entire planet, and one of the largest exporters of energy supplies, and commodities, is being completely isolated from the global economy, sending prices to all-time highs and worsening shortages of a wide range of commodities. That means that the rest of the world will have to figure out ways to keep on running without Russian energy, grain, and raw materials. The same goes for Russia. The Kremlin will have to find alternatives to survive without western capital, technology, and expertise.
In a recent article for the Telegraph, the expert exposed three ways the Ukraine crisis could crash the financial system. While domestic stock markets will continue to plunge week after week, a global stock sell-off is still gaining force as the worsening confrontation and rising crude oil prices shift investors’ sentiment.
Investors have been cutting their positions as they worry about the possibility of a prolonged crisis in Ukraine and its impact on the U.S. economy. “The growing concern surrounding the deteriorating Ukraine crisis has pushed the stock markets into correction mode. The near 20 percent decline from the peak in NASDAQ is a clear indication of the correction that has set in,” said V K Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist at Geojit Financial Services.To make things worse, in a recent note to clients, the head of Matterhorn Asset Management and precious metal specialist at Gold Switzerland, Egon von Greyerz, has warned that the crisis between Russia and Ukraine could lead the world to an apocalyptic turning point.
“The dynamite of a global commodity crisis and shortages thrown into the already catastrophic debt and global monetary fire will create an inferno of nuclear proportions,” von Greyerz emphasized. “If a miracle doesn’t stop this [conflict] very quickly, the world will soon be entering a hyperinflationary commodity explosion combined with a cataclysmic deflationary asset implosion,” he cautioned.
Right now, the impacts of this crisis are still rippling through the global economy, and even though we haven’t seen a crash yet, it is already looming on the horizon - the only question left is how bad the downfall will be. "
"Bank Closures Will Have Us Take Our Money Elsewhere"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 3/13/22:
"Bank Closures Will Have Us Take Our Money Elsewhere"
"The Banking Crisis is happening internationally. 2021 start a record number of bank closures around the world. 2022 looks like it will be no different. We need to be protected from bank balance, banks shutting down and bank robbery."
Musical Interlude: Foy Vance, Ed Sheeran, "Make it Rain"
Foy Vance, "Make it Rain"
The original, Ed Sheeran's version is the cover.
○
Ed Sheeran, "Make it Rain"
○
"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist
as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin."
- Leonard Cohen
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries, some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy. Also known as NGC 772, the island universe is over 100,000 light-years across and sports a single prominent outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait. Its brightest companion galaxy, compact NGC 770, is toward the upper right of the larger spiral.
NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with a spiky foreground Milky Way star in matching yellowish hues. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's large spiral arm is likely due to gravitational tidal interactions. Faint streams of material seem to connect Arp 78 with its nearby companion galaxies."
"A Lemon..."
"When life hands you a lemon, say
"Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?"
- Henry Rollins
Chet Raymo, “Seeing”
“Seeing”
by Chet Raymo
“There was a moment yesterday evening when the
elements conspired to evoke these few lines, spoken by Macbeth:
“Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky woods,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.
The fading light. The crows gliding down the fields to the trees in Ballybeg:
Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky woods,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.”
It’s all there, in those few lines – the mysterious power of poetry to infuse the world with meaning, to anoint the world with a transforming grace. One could spend an hour picking those lines apart, syntax and sound, sense and alliteration. The t’s of light thickening, tongue against the teeth. The alar w’s making wing. The owl eyes of the double o’s. The d’s nodding into slumber - day, droop, drowse.
The poet Howard Nemerov says of poetry that it “works on the very surface of the eye, that thin, unyielding wall of liquid between mind and world, where somehow, mysteriously, the patterns formed by electrical storms assaulting the retina become things and the thought of things and the names of things and the relations supposed between thing.” It works too in the mouth, in the physical act of speech - tongue, teeth, those d’s gliding deeper into the darkness of the throat.
I stand in the gloaming garden and the black birds glide, down, down to Ballybeg, and I marvel that with so few syllables Shakespeare can - across the centuries - teach me how to see.”
"Alas..."
“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.”
- Thomas Gray,
“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than
sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The Trick..."
“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable,
or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”
- Carlos Castaneda
"Economic Recovery Died, You Are On Your Own; Real Inflation Trauma; System Meltdown; Money Printing"
Jeremiah Babe, 3/13/22:
"Economic Recovery Died, You Are On Your Own;
Real Inflation Trauma; System Meltdown; Money Printing"
"Gas Prices In Beverly Hills Are Skyrocketing"
"Gas Prices In Beverly Hills Are Skyrocketing"
By Emily Van de Riet
"With gas prices hitting new records, one area of California is seeing some eye-bugging numbers. Gas prices in Beverly Hills are above $7 per gallon. One Mobil gas station showed prices of $7.35 for regular unleaded, $7.65 for special, and $7.95 for super. The national average for a gallon of gas set a record for a third straight day Thursday, hitting $4.32 a gallon. A survey by AAA revealed that with the cost of gas at least $4 a gallon nationwide, 60% of people say they will change their driving and lifestyle habits."
○
Watch and see...oh, you'll see... soon.
BTO, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"
"Let Them Drive Teslas!"
"Let Them Drive Teslas!"
by Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Attention, Dear Reader, your country wants YOU...
to pay higher prices for gasoline.
As you no doubt noticed, the learned elites were out in force this past week, embarking on a special kind of media blitzkrieg, conscripting all deplorable ordinary systematically racist patriotic Americans to do their part in defeating the great evil of our time: Saddam Hussein... Toxic Masculinity... White Lives... The Covid... (Wait, wait... it’s in here somewhere...) Putin’s Price Hikes (PPH)!
The nation’s Commander-in-Chief appeared earlier in the week, graciously sharing the credit for a job poorly done. His words, quoted here in the New York Post: “Today’s inflation report is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike [...] “A large contributor to inflation this month was an increase in gas and energy prices as markets reacted to Putin’s aggressive actions,” Biden’s statement went on.
“As I have said from the start, there will be costs at home as we impose crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s unprovoked war, but Americans can know this: the costs we are imposing on Putin and his cronies are far more devastating than the costs we are facing.”
Seems a curious pivot from a man who ran on “taking responsibility,” no? Remember this one?
Joe Biden @JoeBiden"Here’s my promise to you: If I’m elected president, I will always choose to unite rather than divide. I’ll take responsibility instead of blaming others. I’ll never forget that the job isn’t about me it’s about you." August 16th 2020, 31,906 Retweets, 235,422 Likes
Never mind that, under Biden’s deft stewardship, inflation in the US was already at a 40-year high before Mr. Putin ordered a single shot fired... What could have fueled this once-in-a-generation uptick in prices, you ask? We found a nifty little cartoon on the web to help explain. It’s so simple, in fact, we’d bet even a Nobel Prize winning economist/Enron consultant like Paul Krugman could understand it. Behold, the picture worth a few trillion dollars...
Nota Bene: If you dial the year in that first frame back to 2019, you get closer to “90% of all dollars in existence.” Might that have something to do with prices rising at their fastest pace, 7.9 percent, since January of 1982? Hmm...
This is a strange form of Pyrrhic victory, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, where one side shoots itself in the foot repeatedly, hoping the enemy will eventually give in. “Putin may be disrupting world markets and driving up energy prices,” Mr. Biden might have declared, “but there’s no harm he can inflict upon us that we can’t better inflict upon ourselves!”
Indeed, as our colleague Dan Denning reminds us, the national average for gasoline prices was up more than 50% before Mr. Putin even got out of bed on the morning he had circled as Ukraine Invasion Day. Yes, it’s up another 18% since. “That's what happens when you take 4-5 million barrels per day off the markets,” writes Dan. All in, “crude is up 124% since Uncle Joe was sworn in.”
What gives? Let’s see, trillions more dollars chasing the same or fewer goods... Hmm... Misty-eyed readers will recall the Keystone pipeline, for example, the one that brought a not unhelpful 900,000 barrels per day down from America’s friendly, NATO neighbor to the north. Well, Team Biden didn’t sit around like lame ducks, waiting for Putin’s missiles to take out that critical piece of strategic infrastructure. No siree-Bob! Uncle Joe’s cabinet got to work immediately, canceling the cross-border permit for Keystone XL on their very first day in office. “Now that’s how you take out a pipeline, Mr. Putin!”
And the Build Back Better squad didn’t stop unbuilding there, either. Summoning the spirit of St. Greta Thunberg, the mentally unstable teenage girl from whom enlightened western nations derive their all-important energy policies, the administration promptly banned all new leases on federal land, too.
Bam! Take that, Mr. Putin! (And by “that” we mean much higher prices for Russia’s key export, the one Mr. Putin sells to the West in order to buy all those “peacekeeping” tanks currently peacekeeping the sh*t out of cities across Ukraine. History students will here note that it was during past crude rallies when Mr. Putin felt emboldened to march into Georgia - 2008, oil: $180/bbl - and the Crimea - 2014, oil: $125/bbl. A pattern, maybe?)
Facing (totally unpredictable... but nonetheless mounting) shortages, Team Biden wasted no time before raiding the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR); once for 40 million barrels worth last fall and now again, according to Press Secretary Jen Psaki, for a “coordinated release of what will be 90 million barrels [...] this fiscal year.”
Gee, that sure sounds like a lot... at least, it probably does if you’re United States Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, who was unable to answer a direct question regarding how many barrels of oil per day the US actually uses. (Seems like a fairly important number, eh? For the record, the average daily use for 2021 was 19.78 million... but Madam Energy Secretary could have received partial credit for anything close to 20 million.) Here she was, back in November...
Reporter: "How many barrels of oil does the U.S. consume per day?"
Biden's energy secretary: "I don't have that number in front of me."
For the mathematically-inclined reader, that means the entire 130 million barrels released from the SPR would last for, oh... (carry the six, divide by pie, find the hypotenuse, sin cos tan...) less than a week, or roughly the time between these Sunday Seshes. Then we’re back, hat in hand as Biden is presently, asking Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro (who also happens to be BFFs with Mr. Putin), to plug the hole left by the dormant Keystone plumbing. That, and making trips to butter up past and future enemies in the Middle East...
But never mind all that jazz. America’s favorite Jens (Psaki and Granholm), along with Transport Secretary, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, just back from maternity leave, have a better plan for proles peasants useful idiots workers who might be feeling the pain of rising prices at the pump.
Yes, Dear Reader, if you’re feeling the pinch of $5... $6... even $7+ per gallon gasoline (as is the case for these Beverly Hillbillies), the solution is a cinch: Just head on down to your local electric car dealership, whip out your credit card, and begin your journey toward smug, carbon-neutral* self righteousness today! And it’s a bargain, too. According to the Kelley Blue Book, the average transaction price for an electric vehicle is a mere $56,437, or just over $21,000 more than the average cost of a gasoline-powered four-door sedan, at $35,000.
Here’s Granholm again, flashing the kind of condescending smirk working class Americans just love seeing wrapped around their multi-millionaire, Dear Leaders’ faces...
Biden’s Energy Secretary in May: “If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you.”
The rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, but higher prices disproportionately impact those clinging to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Pete and the Jens won’t be walking to work or riding the bus anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean you have to either, if you simply heed their sensible, totally-in-touch-with-reality advice: Let Them Drive Teslas!
That Vlad’s Russia is a key supplier of the world’s nickel - a critical component used in the lithium-ion batteries powering those electric vehicles - and that the metal went limit-up in trading in London earlier this week after crossing the $100,000 per ton mark for the first time ever... well, they’re just problems for some other Jens...
And that’s all from us for another week. As always, likes, shares and comments below are always welcome. In the meantime, tune in again tomorrow, when Bill returns with his regular missives. And enjoy your weekend!"
Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Expanding War; Surging Commodity Prices; Shortages"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/13/22:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Expanding War;
Surging Commodity Prices; Shortages"
Greg Hunter, "Going to Get Bad, Really Bad"
"Going to Get Bad, Really Bad"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Last year about this time, precious metals expert and financial writer David Morgan was warning about massive money printing and the so-called “everything bubble” popping. Inflation is the pin, and it found the bloated debt bubble. Now get ready for some pain as Morgan explains, “It’s going to get bad, and I mean really bad. There is already mass starvation at the lower end of the economic scale in third world countries. Prices are going to be untenable for many people, especially those in the middle class. When you get gasoline going up to the $5, $6, $7 range and you’ve got food going up to the level it’s gone up to and continues to go up to, it’s going to be bad. I am focusing on real stuff, not the bond market or what the price of gold is going to do. I am talking about day-to-day living. When gasoline goes from $3.50 per gallon to $5.50 per gallon and you start doing the math on how much it takes to fill up your car and drive it back and forth to work every day, all of a sudden you’ve got diminishing returns. Then factor in what your heating bills and what your grocery bill is going to be. So, there is going to be a lot of people at the margin, and the margin keeps moving up. It’s a few percent of the population. Then it’s 10% and then 20% and so on. When food gets to be 50% of your budget, then there are food riots. That’s the trend, and I think we will get there. We know the ‘Arab Spring’ was not about politics. It was about food. We are going to see ‘Arab Springs’ spring up all over the place because of food costs and availability. You can have a lot of money and not be able to get food too.”
It’s not just physical assets that are going to be affected, but the financial system too. Morgan says, “What is all this going to do to the financial system? It’s breaking, but it’s been broken for a long time. We just have not seen the end result - yet. I don’t think the bankers really thought this through all the way. If you look at the way Russia is, they are a hardened people. They are used to suffering. They are used to standing in line for bread and potatoes. They are not like other nations. This is going to get uglier and uglier and harder and harder. I do not think this is going to get resolved anytime soon.”
What does Morgan see coming? Morgan says, “There are going to be cyber-attacks, and they are going on right now. There is going to be communication breakdown. Number three, there are going to be consequences that nobody can see at this point. And to reiterate, it’s a mess, and it’s going to get messier, and it’s not going to be resolved quickly.”
Morgan sees gold at $2,300 by the end of this year and silver near $40 per ounce. In 2023, all bets are off, and Morgan contends you could see both metals way higher than they are now. Morgan says, “Silver will outperform gold in the long run on a percentage basis. Silver will outperform gold four to one.” Morgan also says, “Demand for the metals from pensions funds and other big money managers is a “trend that is just getting started.” Morgan also talks about the importance of cash and what the signal will be to get out of the U.S. dollar."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
with David Morgan, publisher of “The Morgan Report”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)