"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."
"Everyone I know is walking around in a baseline state of nervous agitation. Are they beset by “disinformation” or is it rather the reality of a cratering nation run by idiots and maniacs? Everywhere you look, calamities gather speed while the klaxons of alarm blare from all compass points. Got money? Looks like soon it will be worthless. Wondering if Mr. Putin has had enough of “Joe Biden’s” brainless effrontery to lob some hypersonic Big Ones in our collective face? Relying on that retirement account you have no direct control over while the financial markets wobble? Need to fill up the gas tank of your pickup truck twice a week? Can’t find a new condenser to fix the failing fridge? Entertaining rumors of looming famine. Credit cards maxed out? Sheriff stapling an eviction notice on your door? Beloved younger brother declaring that henceforward they are your sister? Hearing that all those vaxxes and boosters you obediently submitted to might rearrange your DNA?
These are just a few of the concerns zinging through the zeitgeist these late days of the republic. You are correct to be anxious about them, so at least don’t worry about worrying. Just understand that the more events spool out in the direction of danger, the more you will be warned against “disinformation.” The good part is that now we know the identity of at least one person who is officially in charge of that: “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz (NiJank), new chief of Washington’s Disinformation Governance Board. Whose idea was that, by the way?
Homeland Security Sec’y Alejandro Mayorkis (AlMay) didn’t seem to know anything pertaining to disinformation last week when grilled in committee by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), including two of the most notorious cases in recent memory: Did the Steele Dossier include Russian disinformation? AlMay said he was “not equipped” to answer that question. Ditto the question - now definitively settled - as to whether Hunter Biden’s laptop stuffed with grifting memoranda was for-real. Of course, both of those matters were labeled previously as disinformation by his new expert hire, NiJank, who, it appears, is similarly unequipped to discuss the particulars at issue. But all this does raise the parallel issue: how much depraved insolence is the public supposed to tolerate from its public servants?
My guess: we’re nearing the end of America’s Christian patience for being snookered, gaslit, lied-to, bamboozled, and mind-fucked, especially as our nation gets gang-raped by the Party of Chaos. Perhaps the solution is to go a little further down the Roe v Wade path and make abortion fully retroactive, a new and innovative way to “cancel” lives whose obnoxious presence in the world is a menace to the human project. Declare the likes of AlMay and NiJank retroactively “unborn,” erasing their privilege to appointed office. The wire coat-hanger will not avail in this procedure, but lampposts would do nicely. Of course, it’s all just a hypothetical at this point.
Meanwhile, several Supreme Court justices are under siege in direct contravention of 18 U.S. Code § 115 - influencing, impeding, or retaliating against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member. The authorities are permitting angry mobs to moil freely outside the Justices’ houses, while many January Sixth “insurrectionists” rot in the DC jail into a second-year on misdemeanor charges that the authorities refuse to adjudicate - meaning that there is no authority in Washington, DC, only a nameless, lawless simulacrum of it as conceived, say, in the spirit of Franz Kafka.
Hope abides that the November elections might set up a correction to much of this madness. The release on Saturday of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary "2000 Mules" does not provide a whole lot of encouragement about that. The Party of Chaos still has its apparatus of ballot fraud in place all over the country and nobody seems to know what to do about it (though the remedy is pretty simple and straightforward: in-person voting with voter ID). The evidence of drop-box video and smart-phone tracking of the 2020 ballot-stuffers in several states is right there and nobody in American life appears to be equipped to do something about it. The necessary equipment consists of two plum-sized glands generally assigned at birth to persons of the male persuasion. Perhaps, along with refrigerator condensers, the supply line for that is broken.
But first, of course, before the scheduled midterm elections there are roughly six months of nice weather to get through, meaning conditions that are favorable for action in the street, starring the shock troops of Progressive Wokery. Depending on where you live, maybe that’s another reason to feel those old heebie-jeebies creeping in on little spiders’ feet."
“You wanna borrow, you gotta pay the man.” Rocky Balboa was right, even way back in Rocky I. Rocky didn’t break Bob’s thumb like Mr. Gazzo told him. Bob was late on his payments and Gazzo didn’t like it. “How come you didn’t break this guy’s thumb like I told you?” “I figure if I break the guy’s thumb he gets laid off and he can’t make the payments…” “Let me do the figurin’ Rock! Just let me do the figurin’! These guys think we’re running some kind of charity or something.”
Rocky, Philly palooka though he was, had a tender heart. Still, he collected the debt because he understood the deal. Whether you’re borrowing from a loan shark on the docks or from a major lending institution – and the difference is sometimes negligible – a loan is an agreement, a contract. “You wanna dance, you gotta pay the band,” Rocky reminded the terrified Bob.
President Biden, however, is working his way toward turning the basic principles of borrowing, understood by everyone from the ancient Mesopotamians to South Philly leg breakers, upside down. He wants to cancel student loans on a mass scale. A terrible idea in the presidential pantheon of terrible ideas. He’s already canceled some $17 billion in student loans for 725,000 borrowers through what the White House calls “targeted relief.” But that was clearly just an hors d'oeuvre.
Biden appears to be considering forgiving $10,000 of student debt per borrower. Who will pay for this? We will. And by “we” I mean those of us who paid cash the old fashioned way, or took out loans and paid them back, or who never even attended college. It’s such a bad idea than even Biden himself poo pooed it which, like many other things, he’s apparently forgotten.
"The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,” Biden told New York Times columnist David Brooks in an interview last year. Right, Mr. President. So, what changed?
For starters, Biden’s popularity is plummeting like Wile E. Coyote from a cliff and that little dust cloud you see when he hits the dirt is the Democrats’ fate in the looming midterms unless something changes. In short, Biden needs a win and he appears willing to pursue it through executive action despite rising inflation and a shrinking economy. The timing for this will never be good but it’s difficult to imagine it being much worse.
If there’s any good news, it’s that Biden doesn’t appear prepared – at least not yet – to go as far as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who wants to forgive all, yes all, $1.7 trillion of student loan debt. The whole scheme seems grossly unconstitutional and illegal.
My family wasn’t wealthy by any stretch but my mother, who never attended college, managed our finances with ruthless efficiency. She operated by one simple axiom – don’t buy anything you can’t afford. She was also loath to take out any loans unless she knew she could pay them back in short order. My parents put my sister and me through college, debt free. There was no magic involved. They sacrificed. There were no expensive vacations or cars. They lived comfortably but simply, always within their means.
So, the Biden administration is effectively saying to people like my mother and millions of others who paid, or are in the process of paying back students loans, “You’ve done pretty well for yourself so we want you to pay back the loans of some strangers, like the kid who borrowed 70,000 bucks a year to go to Penn.” This is, above everything else, a wealth redistribution scheme straight from the Sherwood Forest School of Economics. And really, Robin Hood and his Merry Men were just a bunch of thieves in silly underwear anyway.
College tuition is too high and has risen at rates that far surpass inflation. Of course, one of the reasons tuition is so high is because virtually anyone can get a loan, regardless of their ability or intention to pay it back. If this sounds familiar it’s because similar loan practices led to the catastrophic burst of the housing bubble in 2008. We tend to learn little from history.
Still, if you’re going to borrow, you gotta pay the man. Rocky understood. So did Bob. I wish the politicians advocating for loan forgiveness in the name of “fairness” understood how unfair it is."
"The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
- Thomas Sowell
Uhhh, no...
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“A Millenial Job Interview”
"What It’s Like Being a Millennial (Give Me the Respect I Didn’t Earn)"
"Millennials are the most advanced crop of humans that our species has
ever seen. Here's everything you'll ever need to know about being a Millennial."
"In today's vlog we are at Sam's Club, and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
"If you think that things are bad now, just wait until we get into the second half of this year. Global food supplies have already gotten very tight, but it is the food that won’t be produced during this current growing season in the northern hemisphere that will be the real problem. Worldwide fertilizer prices have doubled or tripled, the war in Ukraine has greatly reduced exports from one of the key breadbaskets of the world, a nightmarish bird flu pandemic is wiping out millions of chickens and turkeys, and bizarre weather patterns are absolutely hammering agricultural production all over the planet. I have often used the phrase “a perfect storm” to describe what we are facing, but even that phrase really doesn’t seem to do justice to the crisis that we will be dealing with in the months ahead. The following are 18 signs that food shortages will get a lot worse as we head into the second half of 2022…
#1 The largest fertilizer company on the entire planet is publicly warning that severe supply disruptions “could last well beyond 2022”… "The world’s largest fertilizer company warned supply disruptions could extend into 2023. A bulk of the world’s supply has been taken offline due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This has sparked soaring prices and shortages of crop nutrients in top growing areas worldwide; an early indication of a global food crisis could be in the beginning innings.
Bloomberg reports Canada-based Nutrien Ltd.’s CEO Ken Seitz told investors on Tuesday during a conference call that he expects to increase potash production following supply disruptions in Russia and Ukraine (both major fertilizer suppliers). Seitz expects disruptions “could last well beyond 2022.”
#3 It is being reported that global grain reserves have dropped to “extremely low” levels… “Global grains stocks remain extremely low, an issue that has become amplified because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We think it will take at least 2-3 years to replenish global grains stocks,” Illinois-based CF Industries Holdings Inc.’s president and chief executive officer Tony Will said in a statement in Wednesday’s earnings report."
#4 Due to the war, agricultural exports from Ukraine have been completely paralyzed…"Nearly 25 million tons of grains are stuck in Ukraine and unable to leave the country due to infrastructure challenges and blocked Black Sea ports including Mariupol, a U.N. food agency official said on Friday. The blockages are seen as a factor behind high food prices which hit a record high in March in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before easing slightly in April, the FAO said on Friday.
#5 The out-of-stock rate for baby formula in the United States has now reached 40 percent…"The out-of-stock rate for baby formula hovered between 2% and 8% in the first half of 2021, but began rising sharply last July. Between November 2021 and early April 2022, the out-of-stock rate jumped to 31%, data from Datasembly showed.
That rate increased another 9 percentage points in just three weeks in April, and now stands at 40%, the statistics show. In six states - Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Texas and Tennessee - more than half of baby formula was completely sold out during the week starting April 24, Datasembly said.
#11 The two largest reservoirs in California, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, have both fallen to “critically low levels”.
#12 Some communities in southern California won’t be able to make it through the coming summer months without “significantly cutting back” on their water usage.
#13 Many of the largest lakes around the world are currently in the process of disappearing because they are rapidly drying up.
#14 Wildfires continue to absolutely devastate agricultural land all across the western half of the United States. This weekend, it was New Mexico’s turn to be hit the hardest…"After a few days of calm that allowed some families who had fled wildfires raging in northeast New Mexico to return to their homes, dangerous winds picked up again Sunday, threatening to spread spot fires and complicate work for firefighters. More than 1,500 firefighters were on the fire lines at the biggest blaze east and northeast of Santa Fe, which grew another 8 square miles (20 square kilometers) overnight to an area more than twice as large as the city of Philadelphia."
#15 We are being told that steak prices in the United States will “keep rising” in the days ahead.
#16 Due to hail and frost, the Spanish apricot crop is going to be way below expectations…"In Spain, the latest forecasts suggest production will not reach 60,000 tons, compared with 110,000 tons in 2019 and 100,000 tons in 2020 and 90,000 tons in 2021. In Murcia, where around two-thirds of Spain’s apricot production is located, farmers in the Mula River and northwest regions have been forced to write off the entire season following a severe hailstorm on Monday which not only resulted in the loss of the fruit, but also caused widespread damage to trees.
#18 Kansas Senator Roger Marshall is openly warning that a horrifying worldwide famine is coming…"The war in Ukraine will lead to a worldwide famine in the next two years, warned Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Ky.), who serves on the Senate Agriculture Committee, warned on Tuesday. “You know I’m a big agriculture guy. Twelve, 15 percent of the agriculture products – corn and wheat, sunflower oil - come through that Black Sea, so - and fertilizers come from that area as well, so there actually is going to be a famine one to two years from now. I think two years from now will be even worse,” he told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo” on Tuesday."
The alarm bells are ringing. Are you listening? In all of the years that I have been writing, I have never seen anything even close to this, and this crisis is only going to intensify as the months roll along."
"The Stock Market Is Crashing: 1,000 Point Wipeout
Marks The Beginning Of A Major Financial Nightmare"
by Epic Economist
"The U.S. Stock Market Crash is accelerating at a breathtaking speed – and a 1,000-point flash wipeout indicates that the beginning of a historic financial nightmare is already here. Is this “the Big One”? Wall Street is asking. Last week, the stock market has faced extensive losses, and investors are worried about what will happen when markets open this week, as fears of a massive drag down in the S&P 500 continue to rise.
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve might have started to realize that it made a colossal policy mistake over the past decade. As its benchmark interest rate rose by 50 basis points to help fight soaring inflation, Wall Street investors went into full panic mode. The largest single-day stock market crash ever recorded occurred on Thursday, at a time when stock prices had already fallen quite dramatically. On Thursday, all the major indexes faced a brutal shock.
Days before the flash crash, stocks were melting up – an expression used to describe the moment when indexes are trending lower but some bubble stocks are still being propped higher as speculators anticipate further losses. On Wednesday, all the indexes recorded strong gains - only to lose all of them and some more over the next trading session. “If you go up 3% and then you give up half a percent the next day, that’s pretty normal stuff. But having the kind of day we had [on Wednesday], and then seeing it 100% reversed within half a day is just truly extraordinary,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.
The trigger that prompted investors to rush for the exits was the simple realization that the Fed will not back down from its tightening plan. Worse, they're noticing that corporate CEOs don’t know what to do to hide the slower pace of growth and flatlining earnings. Given the extraordinary amount of leverage in the market right now, rapid declines can set off wave after wave of forced selling. In fact, if we take a look at the latest trends, this appears to be already taking place to a certain degree. And when stocks reach this point, there’s no turning back. It will certainly not take a lot of effort for this “market slide” to evolve into a “market avalanche”.
According to Bank of America’s chief investment strategist, Michael Hartnett, we’re at the beginning of a bear market that will extend well into October, with the S&P at 3,000. The expert compiled some useful information. Over the past 140 years, we witnessed 9 bear markets, with average price declines of 37.3%. The average duration of those declines was of 289 days. Even though past performance is not always a guide to future performance, “if it were, today's bear market would extend until October 19th, with the S&P 500 at 3,000, Nasdaq at 10,000,” he wrote.
His gloomy predictions don’t stop right there. The strategist argues that the carnage is going to pick up speed as inflation hits 10% and growth nears zero. For a long time, stock prices were able to defy economic reality. Many of these bubbles certainly defied gravity. But now they’re deflating, and as economic conditions rapidly deteriorate all around us, the party seems to be almost over. Trillions of dollars are gone, but Wall Street is still failing to realize that what we have been through so far is just a warm-up act. The clock is ticking, and what happened on Thursday should be a major wake-up call for all of us to prepare for what’s coming next."
"The word "mother" is being erased by the federal government, in accordance with the executive order that President Biden signed on his first day in office on January 20, 2021. Along with other sexed words (father, brother, husband, wife, daughter, son), the edict "Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation" is leading to the elimination of traditional terminology.
The proliferating bastardization of the language would be laughable if it weren't so insulting:
• Birthing parents
• Childbearing people
• Gestational carriers
• Bodies with vaginas
• Menstruators
• Postnatal people
• People with a uterus
The Ministry of Truth (AKA the new Disinformation Governance Board that has been created under the Department of Homeland Security) no doubt will be helping us all get used to the new usage. As George Orwell observed, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
At Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, the Wokerati have started instructing students on the care and treatment of pregnant males, and future midwives are being trained to be able to catheterize a penis during "labor."
I'm not a biologist, but I did pay sufficient attention in high school to know that a uterus and cervix are required equipment for giving birth. I also understand biology sufficiently to know that it is not possible for any mammal to change sex. Sex is not just the obvious features such as genitalia; sex is embodied in every cell of the body and plays a part in every aspect of health and wellness. Sex is determined at conception and remains static until death.
The advocates of so-called "inclusive" language claim that their goal is to be kind to everyone. The object of avoiding the word "mother" is to be sensitive to those who are biologically female but do not wish to be referred to with sex-specific terminology. One on one, this can be accommodated. But when messages intended for everyone are modified to avoid basic words like mother, what happens to everyone else?
The goal of communication cannot be to eliminate all possibility of offense. Trying to include everyone with overly broad terms can lead to ambiguity and even alienation. Phraseology such as "bodies with vaginas" and "people with a uterus" offensively reduce mothers to a series of body parts. Consider the woman who adopts a baby and struggles heroically to breastfeed; she is not a "birthing parent," yet she deserves to be respected as a "mother" in all other ways.
If the goal is to be kind to everyone, then it is essential to use language that anyone can readily understand."
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe.”
“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them. “This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.” “This desert, all deserts, any deserts.” “On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.” “Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.” “All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”
“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.” “Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”
“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.” “The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.” “In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…” “The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.” “…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.” “Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.” “Californicating.” “To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.” “Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?” “I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.” “Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.” “Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.” “In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.” “There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.” “A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.” “Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.” “In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…” “New life will be built upon these things.” “…an unrequited and excessive love.” “It is this.” “That’s why.”
"We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy. It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong."
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Oh Lordy! What a week! Captain Powell’s big crash landing... hemorrhaging stock markets... plummeting worker productivity... falling real wages... soaring inflation... and the highest court in the land, leaking like a barbed-wire canoe...Never mind all that, dear reader...
Remember, that time when a distant war, between two foreign adversaries, led to a major oil embargo... when the US economy was “shocked” by a series of bone-headed governmental policies... when America bucked the international monetary system... when inflation was biting hard at home... and when abortion was the kitchen table discussion dividing families across the land?
Younger readers, for whom “way back when” refers to the rollicking, pre-pandemic glory days of the 2010s, may be surprised to learn that there was in fact a precursor to our present day dilemmas. Older Wiser readers will recall, perhaps with a wince, a remarkable decade known as “The Seventies,” in which all of the above events unfolded, almost as a blueprint/harbinger for today.
Half a century has swept under the bridge since Richard Milhous Nixon severed the dollar’s last connective tissue with gold. Said the president to a nation in strife during a special televised address, “We must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world.” And that, with a straight face! Misty-eyed nostalgics can relive the historical moment through the magic of the Interwebs, right here...
Ostensibly scrapped so as to liberate the greenback from the greedy claws of “international currency speculators,” the end of the Bretton Woods system, in effect, untethered the US dollar from “hard asset” reality, turning it instead into a kind of floating abstraction, a plaything for politicians. Over the course of the ensuing decade, the once-mighty greenback declined by a third. Depending on which figures you use (official, unofficial, anecdotal) the dollar has lost something in the order of 90% of its purchasing power since that fateful T.V. address. (The Visual Capitalist has some nifty charts depicting the ravages of inflation over the past half-century.)
Measured against gold, the dollar has likewise wilted like a windsock on a breathless night. The Midas Metal notched an average close of $40.80 for the year of Our Lord 1971. Even after this past month’s healthy decline (roughly -3%), gold has multiplied 47 times in dollar terms since Nixon slammed the exchange window shut. “Pillar of monetary stability” indeed!
But the decade that American novelist Tom Wolfe referred to as the “Me Decade” (what would he say about today’s iGeneration?!) was only just getting going. So, too, were the prefigurations to our present day maladies...
The Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights saw most of the action in what became known as the Yom Kippur War (also the Ramadan War, the October War, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, etcetera). What was at once a local, territorial conflict in a place most Americans could not locate on a map soon ballooned (one is thankful not to use the word “mushroomed”) into a kind of post-Vietnam proxy war for the world’s two nuclear-armed superpowers.
Unfriendly Blowback: One consequence of the war, which brought the conflict home to roost for an otherwise distracted public, was the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Domestic (American) production had been in steady decline since 1969, with supply unable to keep pace with growing demand from new vehicles. The U.S was already importing almost a million barrels per day when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, announced it would no longer supply “unfriendly nations.”
Prices rose 300% (from US$3 per barrel to $US12 per barrel) between October 1973 and March 1974, when the embargo ended. The subsequent recession, which lasted 16 months, ushered in an era of double-digit inflation such as America had not seen in a generation (going all the way back to WWII). High prices stuck to the economy like beetroot on a bedsheet and would smother any hope of a recovery for the rest of the dismal decade.
Perhaps all this is beginning to sound eerily familiar? A foreign war drawing in nuclear powers... retaliation in the form of energy embargos for “unfriendly nations”... a bifurcation of the global monetary system (see A Golden Ruble) persistently high inflation (CPI currently boiling over at 8.5%)... a contracting economy (GDP was MINUS 1.4% for Q1, 2022) politicians speaking out the side of their mouths... if they can string a coherent sentence together at all...and now this week’s revelation that confidence in America’s bedrock institutions is eroding faster than you can say “Watergate” three times fast...
Long has the executive branch of the US government been populated by clowns and knaves. One might argue over the name of the last true statesman to occupy the Oval Office, but he is almost certainly not to be found among the quick. (Which only barely discounts the current resident.)
Similarly has the legislative branch been recognized as the rat’s nest of duplicity, corruption, empty posturing and, failing all else, incompetence that it is. A far cry from what Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson et al. envisioned, Congress has degenerated into the kind of institution that gives the term “ineptocracy” its very meaning.
Blind Justice: But now, further testing Shakespeare’s famous words, that “past is prologue,” we witness a crack in the edifice of what may well be the final vestige of American institutional exceptionalism: A leak from the Supreme Court. (There have been whispers before, yes... but as Politico, the outlet that broke the story, observed: “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”)
Whatever one’s political persuasion, however grave the matter under consideration, time-honored understanding was that one did not talk out of school when it came to the proceedings of the duly venerated SCOTUS. As Lady Justitia be blind, so shall her clerks be mute while she deliberates on the laws of the land. Characterized by a collegiate respect for differing opinions, and robust debate between them, the judicial branch was always the place where respect for the institution itself was held above partisan differences, lest trust in the foundation upon which the republic itself rests be shaken.
So as that most weighty of subjects, the balance between life and liberty, once again descends upon the nation’s shoulders, as it did a half a century ago, one is left to wonder: Without trust in its great institutions to guide it through tumultuous times, on what will the Founder’s bold experiment rely to carry the day?
Ah, but all is not lost, dear reader. After enduring all manner of nonsensical, nutcase nomenclature over the past few years – see “birthing people,”“chestfeeders,”“gestational parents” and even “cervix owners” – at least the subject of pregnancy has finally been returned to the highly-cancelable, long-forgotten, near-anachronistic domain of (millennial trigger warning here)...women!
Whatever you do, just don’t tell this poor bloke...
And that’ll do for this week’s Sunday Sesh, dear reader. As always, drop any comments in the section below and please feel free to share this post with your mates. Other than that, keep an eye out for your Fatal Conceits podcast, which we’ll be mailing (with a full transcript) separately.
Bill will be back with his regular missives from tomorrow. In the meantime, we’re off to treat wifey to a Mother’s Day lunch at La Ferneteria with dear daughter and afterwards to the Museo Nacional Belles Artes for a spot of culture. Until next time...Cheers."
Over the years you get to see what a struggle life is for most people, how tough it is, how easy it is to be judgmental and criticize and stand outside of situations and impart your wisdom and judgment. But over the decades I've got more tolerant of people's flaws and mistakes. Everybody makes a lot of them. When you're younger you feel: "Hey, this person is evil" or "This person is a jerk" or stupid or "What's wrong with them?" Then you go through life and you think: "Well, it's not so easy." There's a lot of mystery and suffering and complication. Everybody's out there trying to do the best they can. And it's not such an easy business.
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