"Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell Admits The Truth: 'We’re Not Going Back To The Same Economy'”

"Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell Admits The Truth: 

'We’re Not Going Back To The Same Economy'”

by Michael Snyder

"Even Jerome Powell is admitting that the boom years are over. For months, I have been trying to explain to my readers that the debt-fueled “prosperity” that we were enjoying prior to the COVID pandemic won’t be coming back, and initially I received quite a bit of criticism for saying that. But that criticism has subsided, because at this point pretty much everyone can see the truth. Despite stimulus package after stimulus package, and despite unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve, we continue to be mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Fear of the virus continues to drag down the overall level of economic activity, more businesses are going under with each passing day, and the layoff announcements never seem to end.

Normally, Federal Reserve officials try very hard to be relentlessly optimistic. But during a European Central Bank panel discussion on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell openly admitted that “we’re not going back to the same economy”: “We’re not going back to the same economy,” Powell said. “We’re recovering, but to a different economy and it will be one that is more leveraged to technology, and I worry that it’s going to make it even more difficult than it was for many workers.” The central bank leader said he was referring specifically to “relatively low-paid public-facing workers who are bearing this brunt,” many of whom are women and minorities.

His use of the phrase “a different economy” really got my attention. When I am trying to break some really bad news to someone in a gentle way, I will often use the word “different” to describe what things will be like moving forward, and I think that Powell is doing the same thing here. He knows that there is no way that things will “return to normal” any time soon, and he is quite correct to be particularly concerned about how this will affect low paid workers.

Low paid workers have been losing their jobs at a much higher rate than anyone else, and the job losses just keep rolling in. On Thursday, we learned that another 709,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, and that number is more than three times higher than what we witnessed during a typical week in 2019: "The Labor Department report showed an eleventh straight week that new jobless claims totaled below 1 million. But new claims have not yet broken back below 700,000 since the start of the pandemic and have held sharply above levels from before the outbreak. Throughout 2019, new initial unemployment claims were coming in at an average of just over 200,000 per week."

As of October 24th, a total of 21.16 million Americans were bringing home some type of unemployment assistance. One year ago, that number was just 1.45 million. In other words, we are in the midst of a national unemployment nightmare. And many analysts are deeply concerned that the new wave of lockdowns that is now starting to happen around the nation will cause a renewed surge in layoffs:

"As colder weather sets in and fear of the virus escalates, consumers may turn more cautious about traveling, shopping, dining out and visiting gyms, barber shops and retailers. Companies in many sectors could cut jobs or workers’ hours. In recent days, the virus’ resurgence has triggered tighter restrictions on businesses, mostly restaurants and bars, in a range of states, including Texas, New York, Maryland, and Oregon. “The risk may be for more layoffs as coronavirus cases surge and some states impose restrictions on activity,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, an economist at the forecasting firm Oxford Economics.

Yesterday, I discussed the fact that one of the experts on Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 advisory board wants a full national lockdown for at least a month once Biden is in the White House. Needless to say, that would make the economic depression that we are currently suffering through a whole lot worse. But of course there are a lot of Americans out there that simply are not going to put up with any more lockdowns. In fact, one new survey has found that only 49 percent of all Americans “would be very likely to stay home for a month if health officials recommend it”:

"Fewer than half of Americans say are very likely to comply with another lockdown, despite growing concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, the latest Gallup polling shows. About 49% of Americans polled between October 19 and November 1 said they would be very likely to stay home for a month if health officials recommend it following a coronavirus outbreak in their community, down from 67% in the spring."

Millions upon millions of lives were turned upside down by the lockdowns that were previously instituted, and the economic damage caused by another round of lockdowns would be incalculable. But it appears that more lockdowns are coming anyway, and that means a lot more economic suffering is ahead.

Prior to the pandemic, 38-year-old Victoria Perez was working two jobs, but she quickly lost both of them once COVID came along. Now she and her children are living in city housing in Oakland, California, and they are just one step away from being homeless: "Among them is Victoria Perez, who was working two delivery jobs before the pandemic struck. Having lost both jobs in the spring, she is now living with her children in city-subsidized housing near Oakland, California, and hoping to avoid homelessness. The city housing, provided to people at heightened risk of the coronavirus, lasts only through December. Perez, 38, is a cancer survivor."

After the holiday season, what is she supposed to do if she can’t find a new job? Being homeless is bad enough. When you add children to the equation, we are talking about the sort of nightmare scenario that nobody should ever have to go through. Unfortunately, the ranks of the homeless are absolutely exploding all over the country as the U.S. economy crumbles right in front of our eyes.

In 2021, I am anticipating the biggest wave of traffic in the history of The Economic Collapse Blog as our ongoing economic implosion accelerates even more. I have been hearing from so many people out there that are deeply hurting right now, and I wish that I had better news for everyone. Sadly, the consequences for decades of exceedingly foolish decisions are catching up with us, and saying that we are heading into a “different economy” is definitely a major understatement."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"The Great Reset" Already Happened

"'The Great Reset' Already Happened"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"The global elites' techno-fantasy of a completely centralized future, The Great Reset, is addressed as a future project. Too bad it already happened in 2008-09. The lackeys and toadies tasked with spewing the PR are 12 years too late, and so are the critics listening to the PR with foreboding. Simply put, events outran our understanding of them. The future already manifested while we were trying to cram the present arrangement into an obsolete conceptual framework.

In broad-brush, the post-World War II era ended around 1970. The legitimate prosperity of 1946-1970 was based on cheap oil controlled by the U.S. and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Everything else was merely decoration.

The Original Sin to hard-money advocates was America's abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, but this was the only way to maintain hegemony. Maintaining the reserve currency is tricky, as the nation issuing the reserve currency has to supply the global economy with enough of the currency to grease commerce and stock central bank reserves around the world.

As the global economy expanded, the only way the U.S. could send enough dollars overseas was to run trade deficits, which in a gold standard meant the gold reserves would go to zero as trading partners holding dollars would exchange the currency for gold. So the choice was: give up the reserve currency and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by jacking up the dollar's value so high that imports would collapse, or accept that hegemony was no longer compatible with the gold standard. It wasn't a difficult decision: who would give up global hegemony, and for what?

Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political. These charts reflect the end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.

Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor's share of the economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power, while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell the story: labor's share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970) while the super-wealthy's share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold. The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial assets are now 6 times the nation's GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.

This capital-friendly era was rocket-boosted by financialization in the 1980s, technology in the 1990s and globalization in the early 21st century. You can see each advance of capital's top tier--the top 0.1% - in the chart below: the top 0.1% first pulled away in the 1980s financialization, stutter-stepped in the early 1990s and then exploded higher as technology fueled capital's leverage and exposure to the gains reaped by computers and the Internet.

Alas, these extremes are not stable or sustainable, and so each wave ends in a devastating crash. The income of the top 0.1% took a hit as the dotcom bubble burst, but then China's entry into the WTO saved the day as rampant globalization and additional extremes of financial leverage and fraud boosted their fortunes in the 2000s.

The dual extremes of financialization and globalization created the 2008 bubble, and its collapse almost took down the entire global capital house of cards. Central banks, ultimately financed by the Fed to the tune of $29 trillion, twice the size of America's entire GDP, instituted The Great Reset under the usual guise of "emergency measures" which then became permanent policies.

The Great Reset led to the hyper-centralization of control over the global economy's money as central banks coordinated unprecedented money-printing and financial repression, which includes zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP), as the debt-bubble would pop if rates aren't nailed down to zero.

All the PR being spewed about The Great Reset is the final frantic flailing of a system that's drowning in its own excesses. The 50-year long era of the few enriching themselves as the expense of the many has ended, for the same reason eras of extreme exploitation always end - the elites got too greedy and overshot the economy's ability to sustain their rapidly expanding share of the income and wealth.

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize. The hyper-centralized global money control has run out of rope as the cheap oil is gone, debts have ballooned to the point there is no way they'll ever be paid down, and the only thing staving off collapse is money-printing, which holds the seeds of its own demise.

Allow me to summarize the only way The Great Reset envisioned by global elites can actually manifest: The Martians arrive towing huge meteorites of pure lithium and gold, and rather than incinerating the global elites, they hand the global elites the meteorites to further their concentration of wealth and power.

Short of that science fiction, this sucker's going down. The Great Reset has already run its course after 12 long years of artifice, fraud and trickery. So global elite shills, lackeys, factotums, toadies and apparatchiks - prepare for your Wil-E-Coyote moment of truth."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)

Moby, 

"Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)

Full screen mode recommended.

Musical Interlude: Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

"Watch This!"

"Watch This!"

by Dmitry Orlov

"There are times in my career as a collapse observer and systematizer when my running commentary can quite reasonably be pared down to just two words: “Watch this!” The current severe stage of the financial and economic collapse sequence that was initiated in 2008, which is being artificially masked (no pun intended) by the Covid “pandemic,” and now a hung and fraudulent US election on top of it is just such an occasion: why not just sit back and watch the world burn? But I happen to be in a particularly good and sprightly mood today, and when I get that way few things can hold me back from holding forth and bloviating prophetically.

Let’s start with a quick jaunt down memory lane. I first realized that the USA was going to follow the general trajectory of the USSR back in 1995. I also immediately realized that the USSR was rather well prepared for collapse whereas the USA was about to be blindsided by it, and so, as a public service, I thought I should warn people. “And a fat lot of good that did!” some of you might immediately exclaim. But you would be wrong: lots of people have written to me to say how much better adjusted they are psychologically now that they have heard and accepted my message, for now they are ready to accept collapse with equanimity and poise. This is sure to make their company less tedious moving forward.

And so I had my “Eureka!” moment in 1995, and a decade later, in 2005, I went public with my observations. I got a surprisingly sympathetic response from some particularly enlightened people (even if they said so themselves). And now, a quarter of a century after my initial insight, as the US enters national bankruptcy and institutional collapse, the whole world is being treated to an end-of-empire spectacular election extravaganza starring none other than the consummate showman and impresario extraordinaire Donald Trump. He used to run beauty pageants, while this one is more of an ugliness pageant, but then beauty is rare and always fades while ugliness is commonplace and usually just gets uglier, making it a much safer bet. And so let’s accept it as a parting present to the world from a vanishing nation that gave us horror flicks, reality television and three-ring circuses with sideshow freaks.

Within the sweeping panoramic tableau of the 2020 election, Trump (our hero) appears bathed in a golden sunset glow of nostalgia for lost American greatness which he forever promises to rekindle. Rest assured, Trump or no Trump, America will never be great again. But Trump’s magic halo extends out from his resplendent orange cranial plumage and enfolds all those who pine for the lost Pax Americana and fear and loathe what America is fast becoming—which is, to put it bluntly, a holding tank for degenerates of every stripe presided over by a freak show. They pine for a time when men were manly and women womanly, when secretaries were flattered when their bosses took time away from their busy schedules to rub up against them, and when everyone was either a WASP, or worked hard on trying to look and act like one, or kept to their assigned station in life and knew better than to get too uppity. They want to believe that the ethnic melting pot can still produce noble alloys, preferably Corinthian bronze, and certainly not clinker or slag.

Arrayed against our fearless orange-hued leader, who at 74 is no spring chicken himself, is a ghoulish gaggle of geriatric gerontocrats.

There is Joe Biden, 77, whose brain ran away and joined a circus some years ago but who imagines himself to be president-elect, or senator, or vice-president, or something. Having spent eight years lurking in the shadows as Obama’s VP, Biden is as fit to lead as a pig is kosher after rubbing its side against a corner of a synagogue. To assist Biden in his dodderings there is his party-appointed nanny, Kamala Harris, a mere slip of a girl at 56.

Also haunting the balcony of the American mausoleum is Nancy Pelosi, 80, who still runs the House of Representatives even though proper employment for her at this point would be up on a pole keeping the birds off the corn. There is also Bernie Sanders, 79, a sad pagliaccio whose permanent role in the political Commedia dell’Arte that the Democratic Party stages every four years is to simulate democracy by cheerleading crowds of young imbeciles in Act I, to feign death after falling off his pogo stick in Act II, and to stagger to his feet, wave and smile for the curtain call.

Last but not least, there is the horrid harpy Hillary Clinton, who is relatively young at 73 but whose putrid smell and cadaverous, ghastly visage are not longer fit for public display except in most delicately contrived circumstances. Hidden even further backstage is the suppurating cadaver of George Soros who, at 90, is still pulling the strings and wreaking havoc in the US and around the world. (His minions had recently spread color revolution to Armenia, in turn causing it to “elect” Pashinyan, a choice imbecile and a traitor, who then lost a big chunk of Armenian territory to Azerbaijan.) I could mention quite a few other financial corpses and oligarchic cadavers, but will refrain, to avoid giving you nightmares. Nobody lives forever, not even Henry Kissinger, 97, and so all we have to do is wait.

In healthy societies, older leaders age out and make room for younger leaders who take over for them after a lengthy period of study and apprenticeship. In sick societies, older leaders cling to power with no one competent there to replace them and once they die are replaced by traitors and criminals. The USSR and the USA are two such examples. The late Soviet serial gerontocracy of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who for a time haunted the balcony of the Lenin mausoleum and, once dispatched to the netherworld, were swiftly replaced by the traitorous duo of blabbermouth Mikhail Gorbachëv and Drunk President Boris Yeltsin, was a tragedy for Russia. The resulting die-off was of the same order of magnitude as the losses incurred during World War II. In accordance with the worn-out cliché about history repeating, the current American gerontocracy is more of a farce than a tragedy, but its results are likely to be no less lethal for the population.

To complete this ghastly tableau, in the ongoing US presidential election, an almost-dead candidate and his charming assistant have been voted for by an army of the undead: voters that have mailed in their ballots in spite of being deceased. I have spot-checked a bit of the incriminating evidence myself, and I am pretty sure that there were over 11,000 such voters in a single Michigan county alone. But this is by no means a local scam: among many other vote-counting shenanigans, it appears that there was a nationwide effort to order mail-in ballots for dead people, fill them out for Biden, and mail them in. You might say that this is a human rights issue: why deprive dead people of their right to vote? Isn’t it about time to stop discriminating against the dead? Perhaps LGBTQ should be amended to LGBTQD for “Dead.” But why stop there? Why not also add a “U” for the unborn and stop this unpardonable discrimination against abortions?

In any case, dead voters for Biden turn out to be just the tip of an entire iceberg of election fraud. There are also the over 1.8 million nonexistent yet registered voters discovered by Judicial Watch back in September. Add to that the faulty voting system, creepily named “Dominion,” which miscounted votes to favor Biden. Add to that the undeservedly kid-gloved and fawning press coverage afforded to Biden and the US mass media’s overwhelmingly hostile attitude toward Trump. Add to that the fraudulent poll data which, just as prior to the 2016 election, was contrived to make a fraudulent Biden victory seem plausible. Add to that the amply funded organizations such as BLM and Antifa (in which the “Anti-” prefix is gratuitous, this organization in fact being very much “Fa…”) which have been ordered to protest, loot and riot in many major US cities, moving their mercenaries from location to location, where they then recruit useful idiots among the locals. What this adds up to is a vast, brazen, carelessly self-incriminating conspiracy to overthrow a sitting president through election fraud.

If you believe even for a moment that I am scandalized, disgusted and outraged by this trampling of the sacred principles of democracy, then pardon me while I shake my head sardonically while quietly chuckling to myself. No, I am not the least bit upset. In fact, this development fills me with optimism for the future. I believe that this ghastly institutional failure is a wonderful development that offers great hope to the rest of the world, and perhaps even to the US itself, although the political environment in the US appears to be rather hopeless irrespective of how horribly or wonderfully its ridiculous electoral system can be made to function.

In any case, it would be futile to try to give the US some semblance of a democratic election system. It would be like trying to clean up a beach by picking up empty beer cans around a beached whale. The presidency, after four years of ham-handed efforts to unseat a president using false evidence, is a failed institution. Congress, which now nonchalantly overspends federal revenue by a factor of three, is a fiscal zombie. The Federal Reserve, which is now a pure pyramid scheme, is a financial zombie. And then there is the rest of the ridiculously bloated US economy, which is waiting for a stiff gust of wind to cause ephemeral wealth to flood out of stocks and bonds and into cash, much of it evaporating in the process and the rest causing a tsunami of consumer price inflation.

In the course of this spectacle, the false image of the US as a shining city on a hill, a beacon for huddled masses yearning to breathe free and a beneficent global policeman safeguarding “universal human rights,” enforcing “universal human values” and spreading “freedom and democracy” around the world is being stomped into the dirt, having excrement poured all over it, and being stomped into the dirt some more. As the curtain descends on this final act of Pax Americana, the image of the orange enfant terrible and the senile puppet with his child-nurse in tow playing on the teeter-totter of electoral dysfunction on the playground of second childhood will forever remain etched into the retinas of the whole world. The whole world will then be able to move on and look for worthier role models and for less corrupt policemen. And that’s progress!

The collapse of the USA will make the collapse of the USSR look like a stroll through a leafy park and a boat ride on a placid pond. I’ve been saying this for 15 years now. My message is still there, for all those who wish to understand what’s been happening and to keep their sanity."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/watch 


“Small Business Gutted; Economy Shutting Down Again; Auto Sales Slow Down; More Job Losses Coming”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Small Business Gutted; Economy Shutting Down Again; 

Auto Sales Slow Down; More Job Losses Coming”

"The Housing Debt Bubble Is Going To Burst: Be Ready For Housing Market Crash!"

"The Housing Debt Bubble Is Going To Burst:

 Be Ready For Housing Market Crash!"

by Epic Economist

"The housing debt bubble is about to explode and bleed over the fragile U.S. economy. With nearly 100 billion dollars in accumulated debt, the housing market will face a lot more torment as another round of lockdowns is looming. Many determinants will play a decisive part in the burst of this massive bubble, and in this video, we're going to analyze each and every one of them. 

In a recent article, the economy expert Patrick Hill has described the events that will inevitably trigger the housing debt bubble burst. Hill argues that the initial push to this domino fall is the uncontrolled growth of the virus. This month, the U.S. had a 44% increase in daily registered cases, and while hospitalizations have been persistently rising in 42 states, new lockdown proposals are considering to shut down the entire economy for weeks. 

When lockdowns close the economy, consequently, economic activity significantly contracts, particularly in sectors that rely on foot traffic. With limited operations or no functioning at all, and left without any revenue for weeks or even months, companies most affected by the lockdown are forced to let their workers go.

The labor market already faced several rounds of massive lay-offs. According to the Department of Labor data, right now there are over 22.6 million workers on continuing unemployment assistance. This level of unemployment is 22 times the 1 million figure from a year ago. However, millions of workers haven't qualified for extended benefits and the total number of unemployed workers is much higher than those recorded by the federal agency, a much more realistic rate of unemployment is around 26%. Yet, a lot more trouble is coming for the labor market. 

Last week, the World Travel & Tourism Council announced that 9.2 million jobs could be lost in the sector if barriers to global travel remain in place. And the lockdown hasn't even been fully implemented in the U.S. yet, which means that the sector is only going to face more hardships from now on, unemployment rates will skyrocket, and as a result, personal income will sharply drop. 

Previously, consumers' personal income received assistance from several sources. But now, a substantial budget squeeze has begun. In the absence of a steady income and further federal aid, unemployed workers can't find the means to make ends meet, and are missing rent and home mortgage payments. A study forecasts that by 2021 the housing market will have accumulated at least $100 billion in rental and mortgage debt.

In face of a growing number of rental delinquencies, landlords are also dealing with extra pressure to afford their mortgages. And ever since the federal moratorium expired courts have been in favor of landlords' demands and evictions rates are steadily climbing. Approximately 16% of all U.S. renters will face eviction by January 2021.

To avoid eviction, consumers are using credit cards to make their rental payments. This indicates that consumers only reallocated their debt from rent to credit cards, and while unemployed or on reduced income assistance, their debt shortly becomes unsustainable. Defaulting on their credit cards will hurt their credit score and make it more difficult to obtain other housing because they have an eviction record.

In this sense, while renters can't meet their payments, their landlords still have to pay the mortgage on their building. And even though some small business landlords have demanded the eviction of their delinquent tenants to find a paying renter, by the 1st quarter of 2021, millions of people will have been evicted or will have poor credit, and finding another paying tenant will become a difficult mission.

That’s to say, since small business landlords are experiencing a sharp income decline and reduced prospects for new paying tenants, they will likely default on their mortgage. Likewise, homeowners are expected to default on their mortgages just as well. "With unemployment increasing and lockdowns forecast, there may be an increase in the number of forbearance plans," Hill says "other homeowners who don’t qualify for forbearance are delinquent in making payments.”

All of these factors are being layered one upon the other, creating a perfect economic storm. Additionally, consumer spending is also expected to shrink in the first half of next year since the bottom 80% of consumers facing deep financial suffering. 

For that reason, experts say that from now on, any periods of quietness in the markets are only going to be a pause for us to prepare for an economic catastrophe. This isn’t the end of the storm, it is just the eye, the worst is yet to come."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com

○

Musical Interlude: Neil H, "Moonpath"

Neil H, "Moonpath"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax galaxy cluster. 

This impressively sharp color image shows intense star forming regions at the ends of the bar and along the spiral arms, and details of dust lanes cutting across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100820.html

The Poet: W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"September 1, 1939"

"Defenseless

under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out

wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame."

- W.H. Auden

○

"On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of Poland that triggered the start of World War II (though by 1939 Japan and China were already at war). The battle for Poland only lasted about a month before a Nazi victory. But the invasion plunged the world into a war that would continue for almost six years and claim the lives of tens of millions of people."

- https://www.vox.com/

"Never Be A Spectator..."

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

- Christopher Hitchens

"I Am An Invisible Man..."

○

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me."

- Ralph Ellison, "Prologue to Invisible Man"

"The Minds Of Men..."

"The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste. This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard." 

- Edward Gibbon, 

"The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire"

"You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?'

 The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"

- Gore Vidal

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/13/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/13/20"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

○

"The more I see of the monied classes, 

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

○

Gregory Mannarino, PM 11/13/20:

"Markets: Massive Distortions,

Epic Debt, And Economic FREE-FALL"

 - https://traderschoice.net/

○

Updated live.

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

○

- https://markets.businessinsider.com/

○

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

○

Daily Update (Nov. 13h to 17th)

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

○

Insanity... 

○

And now... The End Game...

"A Six-week Lockdown?"

"A Six-week Lockdown?"

by Brian Maher

"Horror succeeds horror… the virus is once again amok. The United States reported over 145,000 fresh cases Wednesday - a record. We are told daily fatalities near 2,000. A vaccine is not yet ready. What, then, is to be done? A four-to-six week national “lockdown” - with little room for escape? If the man from Delaware seizes the White House… as expected… you may have one.

May we introduce you to Dr. Michael Osterholm? Dr. Osterholm directs the University of Minnesota’s Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Mr. Biden has appointed him to his "special coronavirus transition advisory team." Says Dr. Osterholm: "A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine."

“As Comprehensive and Strict as Possible”: In the good doctor’s telling, the previous lockdown was a minimum security jailing. Inmates were granted excessive freedom of movement. He instead would impose a maximum security imprisonment. Inmates must confine themselves to their cells unless absolutely necessary. Many would naturally face solitary confinement.

Yet it is necessary to halt the virus, he insists. Dr. Osterholm (from a joint New York Times column with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari): "The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible."

“As comprehensive and strict as possible.” Meaning, gentlemen? We should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.

Just so. We were informed in March that a two-week jail term would scotch the bug. Yet the jailing was repeatedly extended. Now we are told four-to-six weeks in maximum security is our liberation. We bet high that six weeks would become eight weeks would become ten weeks. “We can’t risk opening too soon,” will be the renewed refrain.

What about the vicious economic carnage that would result - even greater unemployment, more shuttered businesses, shriveled local tax bases?

We Just Need to Print More Money: Fear not, say Dr. Osterholm and Mr. Kashkari: "We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that. If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks."

We can? We can cover all the lost wages for individual workers, losses to companies small to medium-sized, losses to city, state, county governments? Who - precisely - is “we?” And where will “we” find the money? “We” will find it nowhere because it does not exist. It must be fabricated, conjured into being at a keystroke. And so the nation would plunge deeper and deeper into debt. Is it necessary? Under lockdown conditions we suppose it would be. But is a lockdown justified by the facts? Answer shortly. First, an observation…

The Economy Is Not a Machine: Here is the invisible assumption behind lockdowns: Wise men can comatize an economy for weeks or months, then jolt it awake on command. It will proceed to purr, throb, bristle… as if a six-week coma factored nothing at all.

But an economy is not a soulless, inert machine. It will not be switched off and on as the wiseacres please. It will not bend to their wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and drills. The implements are too crude. The economy instead is a dynamic organism… with a dizzying riot of arteries, veins and capillaries… jungles of interconnected nerves… ligaments and tendons… bones and muscles. Its infinite complexity eludes the mechanic with his simple tools. And an extended lockdown risks serious, potentially lethal, economic damage. But do lockdowns even work — as their boosters claim they work?

Kicking the Can Down the Road: The likely answer is no. They may delay infections. But they do not prevent them. The virus will pounce once the inmates are freed. And so lockdowns merely boot the beer can down the street. They only prolong the pandemic.

Johan Giesecke, professor emeritus at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute: "Everyone will be exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and most people will become infected. COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in all countries. There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in 1 year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.

Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future - it will not prevent them. Our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care."

Next, we come to Professor Graeme Ackland of Edinburgh University: "Unless a vaccine magically appears and is rolled out across the entire population in the next six months, then shutting down society is unlikely to reduce overall deaths. Lockdowns essentially just postpone these deaths and prevent immunity building up, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. The way out of any epidemic is herd immunity, which is when enough people in the population are infected that the virus can’t spread. We need to focus on protecting older people who are going to be affected by coronavirus, not people who aren’t."

Meantime, JPMorgan research reveals higher mortality rates in severely locked-down countries. Higher mortality rates, that is, than in lightly restricted countries without the heavy hand.

Sweden: Consider brave little Sweden. She was roundly denounced for leaving her economy largely open… resulting in needless misery and death. Yet through October 10, the data inform us that: Sweden’s COVID mortality rate was 583 per million. And the heavily bolted down countries? The United States mortality rate was 660 per million. Spain: 704. The United Kingdom: 628. Italy: 597. Belgium: 875. That is, each exceeds heartless Sweden’s. And what of the death and suffering lockdowns have wrought?

The Other Side of Lockdowns: Spring lockdowns witnessed dreadful surges in suicides, alcoholism, other substance abuse, domestic violence, etc. We must next consider the unfortunates who succumbed to otherwise treatable maladies because they failed to receive adequate treatment under lockdown conditions.

Dr. Joel Zinberg, associate clinical professor of surgery at New York’s Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine: "Deaths from chronic, non-emergent conditions also increased as patients put off maintenance visits and their medical conditions deteriorated. In the second study of excess deaths, the five states with the most Covid-19 deaths from March through April (Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), experienced large proportional increases in deaths from non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes (96 percent), heart diseases (89 percent), Alzheimer’s disease (64 percent), and cerebrovascular diseases (35 percent). New York City - the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter during that period - experienced the largest increases in non-respiratory deaths, notably from heart disease (398 percent) and diabetes (356 percent)."

Invisible Victims: Do these lives matter - the suicidal, the overdosed, the diabetic, the heart-diseased, the demented? Many hazard that lockdowns will murder more victims than the virus itself. They are the invisible victims. They do not make the news. They serve no political interest. No “dashboard” tracks their demise.

Regardless… we suspect renewed lockdowns are in prospect… especially if Mr. Biden wins his race. Yet one question lingers in the air: Will a frustrated American people go along this time? Many are in a foul frame of mind these days..."

- dailyreckoning.com

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Related:

Chris Martenson, 

"It Doesn't Have To Be This Way"

- https://www.peakprosperity.com/

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"Grandma Killers: Government, Both Left And Right"

The Daily "Near You?"

 
Jasper, Tennessee, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Are There Any Questions?"

"Are There Any Questions?"

by Robert Fulghum

"Are there any questions?" An offer that comes at the end of college lectures and long meetings. Said when an audience is not only overdosed with information, but when there is no time left anyhow. At times like that you sure do have questions. Like, "Can we leave now?" and "What the hell was this meeting for?" and "Where can I get a drink?"

The gesture is supposed to indicate openness on the part of the speaker, I suppose, but if in fact you do ask a question, both the speaker and the audience will give you drop-dead looks. And some fool - some earnest idiot - always asks. And the speaker always answers. By repeating most of what he has already said. But if there is a little time left and there is a little silence left in response to the invitation, I usually ask the most important question of all: "What is the Meaning of Life?" You never know, somebody may have the answer, and I'd really hate to miss it because I was too socially inhibited to ask. But when I ask, it is usually taken as a kind of absurdist move - people laugh and nod and gather up their stuff and the meeting is dismissed on that ridiculous note. Once, and only once, I asked that question and got a serious answer…

Papaderos rose from his chair at the back of the room and walked to the front, where he stood in the bright Greek sunlight of an open window and looked out… he turned. And made the ritual gesture: "Are there any questions?" Quiet quilted the room. These two weeks had generated enough questions for a lifetime, but for now there was only silence.

"No questions?" Papaderos swept the room with his eyes.

So. I asked.

"Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?"

The usual laughter followed, and people stirred to go. Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was.

"I will answer your question."

Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into a leather billfold and brought out a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter. And what he said went like this: "When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place. I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine - in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light - truth, understanding, knowledge - is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it. I am a fragment of a mirror whose design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of men - and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."

And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk."

- Robert Fulghum, 

"It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It"

"Life's Funny..."

"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."

- Alysha Speer

"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."

- Scott Turow

"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."

 - Andrew Klavan

"The Worm in the Machine"

"The Worm in the Machine"

by Jim Kunstler

"The avatars of good government, Joe Biden, and his righteous Democrats, seem a little bit spooked by the globe-of-silence enveloping Mr. Trump and his lawyers the past few days. The Dem’s narrative at this point, mid-game, is that… “the election was the most secure in the nation’s history” (The New York Times). Anything else is a “conspiracy theory.” Here’s what the Democrats don’t tell you: theories are subject to proof, and proof brings theories into compliance with reality, including, sometimes, the part about conspiracy. Such as a conspiracy to queer the recent election with vote tabulation software and other wizardries.

I guess we’ll find out what can be proven, and that is all the president is attempting to do, like anybody with faith in the scientific method. In Oakland County, Michigan, for instance, comprising the northwest suburbs and exurbs of Detroit, the graph shows a mysterious bending of votes off a trend-line at a pretty clear break-point. Each blue square is a voter precinct.

Click image for larger size.

Chart by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

The very same plotline is repeated in several other Michigan counties heavily trending for the president in early voting and then swooning mysteriously for Mr. Biden after a four-hour break in action. How to account for this strange occurrence? The worm in the machine, perhaps: a simple algorithm (i.e., set of coded instructions) embedded in the Dominion vote tabulation software — product of a company, to remind you, partially owned by Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, and represented by lobbyist Nadeam Elshami, Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff. It was Mr. Elshami’s mission to visit state legislators around the country and persuade them to adopt (that is, purchase) the Dominion system. The algorithm appears to subtract votes from one candidate and add them to the other candidate. It’s a feature, not a bug. Weird, a little bit.

So, that’s one thing that remains to be proven. How did the algorithm work? Can it be isolated and described? Did its task leave digital footprints? Not all the software geniuses in the USA work for Silicon Valley. Some may be assisting Mr. Trump’s attorneys in figuring this out and constructing cases for the various courts. Since it takes more than a day-and-a-half to bring lawsuits, that may account for the Democrats’ rush to peremptorily discard such formal inquiries and just declare Mr. Biden the winner. Similar ballot tabulation doings show up in the Georgia vote, where a recount is underway, this time with observers and without four-hour mystery pauses. And then there is Pennsylvania.

If DC is the Swamp, then Pennsylvania is a Nile Valley of ballot harvesting, overflowing its banks every November to fertilize especially the loamy precincts of Philadelphia, where votes spring up like ground ivy. As it happened this season, on top of that rich reaping of cultivated votes was an additional layer of state government monkeyshines now headed for adjudication in the US Supreme Court. Will they dare to take the case? It’s not a sure thing, but they’d better have a good reason not to because a whole lot of vested credibility in our national system of government is at stake.

In the meantime, I’m standing by to see how things pan out. If those three states electoral votes — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia — are shifted to Mr. Trump’s column by re-tabulation, with late-reporting North Carolina added, then the President will end up with 278 electoral votes, making him the winner (and leaving Mr. B the loser with 229). Other combinations of adding or subtracting the electoral votes of these states-at-issue would leave no clear winner and thus propel the matter into the House of Representatives, where the peculiar constitutional math (one vote for each state delegation) does not favor Mr. Biden. Doesn’t look like the extreme long-shot that the captive news media is touting it to be.

Of course, in the event that none of this goes Mr. Trump’s way, then, of course, Mr. Biden moves into the White House with his two German shepherds plus the entire RussiaGate cast-of-characters, a delegation of Silicon Valley nobs, and half of K Street to assist him in governing the USA. That outcome will set up all the right people to preside over the greatest economic collapse in the history of the world. Okay, have it your way. Just sayin’."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"How It Really Is"