Gregory Mannarino,
"Market Updates Plus!
NWO: Covid Concentration Camps, Jail Time, Fines"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
"A 40-Year Trend Comes to an End"
"A 40-Year Trend Comes to an End"
By Bill Bonner
RANCHO SANTANA, NICARAGUA – "Early August, 2020. Was that some kind of hinge point? The end of an era? If so, it’s time to dump anything that depends on a stable U.S. dollar – bank accounts… insurance policies… annuities… bonds. But it’s early days… and this kind of rollover is often not confirmed for years.
No Need to Worry: Besides, there’s nothing to worry about. At least, that was the line coming from the White House at a recent press briefing, via Jared Bernstein, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. “Janet Yellen is our Treasury secretary. She knows a little something about inflationary risks,” he reassured us. But relying on Janet Yellen to protect us from inflation is like asking Stevie Wonder to drive a school bus; it’s asking for trouble.
And it’s why August 2020 could turn out to be such an important date. Since then, bond yields – an important early warning of incoming consumer price inflation – have been going up. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, for example, has more than doubled from its August 2020 rate of 0.52%. After 40 years of lowering inflation and bond yields, the tide may have turned, in other words. If so, in the years ahead, we will see a huge wave of job losses and bankruptcies, as businesses, government, and consumers are forced to refinance debt at higher rates. We’ll see retirement savings – often resting on a bed of U.S. Treasury bonds – collapse. And we’ll see consumer prices rise… as real incomes go down.
“Don’t worry about it,” say the experts. The thinking, if you can call it that, is that the economy is performing “under capacity.” That means there is plenty of slack that must be taken up before prices can rise. People are not fully employed… factories are quiet, etc. They expect no upward price pressure until everything is going full bore, pedal to the metal. Only then, goes the logic, do business or labor have any “pricing power.” Things need to get better, they believe, before inflation takes hold.
Two Routes to Inflation: Inflation happens, grosso modo, (according to the classic Quantity Theory of Money) when the supply of goods and services goes down compared to the supply of “money” that bids for it. That can happen in one of two ways.
Either the economy heats up (cyclical inflation)… and businesses need more labor and raw materials to keep up with the demand. Shortages then arise. Everyone tries to keep up with the whirlwind of getting and spending, leading to higher prices… Or… the other possibility (systemic inflation) is that the economy cools down. Fake money, false price signals, regulation, bubbles, giveaways, and COVID-19 shutdowns could simply cause a cutback in buyable output… while the supply of available money continues to rise.
Closer Look: So let’s look more closely… Last year, the output of money – as measured by the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet – rose by $3.25 trillion. The output of goods and services, on the other hand – as measured by GDP (even somewhat faked by a huge increase in government spending) – fell by $300 billion. This looks like “systemic” inflation to us.
Another way to look at it… Goods and services are produced by people who work. The number of hours they work (setting aside productivity increases, which are very slow) is a good measure of output. Well, since the crisis of 2008-2009, the total number of hours worked in America is practically unchanged. But the Nasdaq – a rough measure of how much hot money is coming into the stock market – is up 500%.
Wacky and Weird: And then, there’s the unbridled wackiness of it all. Two weeks ago, the GameStop saga played itself out… in all its tinseled mania. And now, The Wall Street Journal reports that since Elon Musk said Tesla had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, and that the company would soon begin accepting bitcoin in payment for its autos… the market value of the two of them together – bitcoin and TSLA – rose $110 billion on the news.
Go figure. What we figure is that there’s so much loose change under the seat cushions, it’s becoming uncomfortable to sit down. Look for prices for just about everything to rise as the real economy – the part that actually produces goods and services – cools down…
Regards,"
"What Collapsed the Middle Class?"
"What Collapsed the Middle Class?"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"What collapsed the middle class? In many ways the answer echoes an Agatha Christie mystery: rather than there being one guilty party, a number of suspects participated in the collapse of the middle class. Can we consolidate these dynamics into a few core causal factors? I've made the case in the past few posts that yes, we can: many of these causes are part of a single dynamic, the decapitalization of the middle class and the decay of the ladder of social mobility which enabled tens of millions of workers to transform their wages into productive capital via saving and investment in their own human capital, their own enterprises and assets that earn income. "The Top 10% Is Doing Just Fine, The Middle Class Is Dying on the Vine" (2/4/21)
The second primary dynamic is the substitution of debt and speculation for earned income and productive capital. As the purchasing power of the bottom 90%'s wages declines, the status quo has substituted debt for income and speculation for investing in productive capital. "Debt and the Demise of the Middle Class" (2/9/21)
This dynamic incentivizes debt, speculation and consumption rather than producing, savings and investments in human and productive capital. The source of this incentive structure is the maximization of corporate profits earned by banks loaning money to the middle class and by selling the middle class on superfluous consumption being the signifier of "success" rather than production being the signifier of "success".
In reality, what counts is agency (control of one's life, having a voice in governance) and ownership of productive capital. Becoming a debt-serf to buy more stuff and grab a few chips in the speculative casino sacrifices both agency and the acquisition of productive capital. But this sacrifice is oh-so profitable to the financier purveyors of debt and speculative gambles in the casino.
The third dynamic is globalization, and specifically the tyranny of global markets. Global banks and corporations are ideally placed to profit from the arbitrage of labor, environmental regulations, currencies, corruption (dear in some places, cheap in others) and the price of debt and risk. Wage earners have no such leverage. In effect, all the risks of competition are eliminated for corporate monopolies and cartels while the risks are transferred to workers who face a global race to the bottom in wages, opportunity and income security.
The fourth dynamic is speculative bubbles put many assets out of reach of the bottom 90% who have only their wages and savings. The winners in speculative bubbles are those fortunate enough to have bought homes, bonds, rental properties, land, etc. decades ago when a house could be had for three times median income and bonds paid solid, above-inflation returns.
The bottom 90% attempting to find productive assets at affordable prices now are out of luck. Consider a 900 square foot home built in 1916 in the desirable San Francisco Bay Area community of Albany, CA. The house sold for $135,000 in 1996, 3.8 times the national median household income. Then Housing Bubble #1 boosted the value to $542,000 in 2004, 12.2 times the national median household income. Housing Bubble #2 has pushed the value to slightly over $1 million, 14.5 times the national median household income. Only those inheriting wealth (or who chose wealthy parents), those earning over $250,000 annually or speculators who just scored big gains in bitcoin or GameStop could afford this very small, modest house.
That's what speculative bubbles do to the middle class: they leave them behind forever. Those who bought 25 years ago entered the top 10% in wealth due to the bubblicious increase in the value of their home. A few winners in the casino who sold at the top might have edged into the top 10%, but the vast majority of gamblers in the casino cannot compete with the insiders, manipulators and pros, so they lose ground. This is why the bottom 90% collect an insignificant 3% of all income from capital. "Jay Taylor and I discuss The Upcoming Revolt of the Middle Class" (22 min)
These four primary dynamics manifest in the following ways. Each one helps generate a two-tier Neofeudal Economy of a Financial Aristocracy and its top 9.9% technocrat class who own virtually all the productive capital and the bottom 90%, a disenfranchized ALICE (assets limited, income constrained, employed) workforce.
1. The shifting of pension and healthcare costs and risks from the state and employers to employees. (see chart below)
2. The decline of safe, secure high-yielding investments as central banks have driven savers into risky, crash-prone speculative assets such as stocks and junk bonds.
3. The decline of scarcity value in college diplomas that were once the ticket to middle class security. "How Many Slots Are Open in the Upper Middle Class? Not As Many As You Might Think" (March 30, 2015).
4. The inexorable rise in big-ticket costs: higher education, healthcare and housing. Even as wages stagnate, these costs continue rising, claiming an ever-larger share of household incomes, leaving less to save/invest.
5. The transition from a stable economy with predictable returns to a financialized boom-and-bust economy that wipes out middle class wealth in the inevitable busts but does not rebuild it in the booms.
6. The regulatory and administrative barriers to self-employment, forcing most of the workforce into wage-slavery and/or dependence on the state. "Endangered Species: The Self-Employed Middle Class" (May 2015).
7. The rising exposure of the U.S. workforce to highly educated, lower-cost competing workforces in a globalized economy.
8. The decline of labor's share of the U.S. economy: the slice of the pie distributed to earned income has been declining for decades.
9. The share of the earned-income slice going to the top 5% is rising.
10. The wealth of the middle class is tied up in the family home, a non-income producing asset prone to the wild swings of housing bubbles and busts. "Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds" (October 25, 2017).
The middle class has already collapsed, but thanks to debt and bubbles, this reality has been temporarily cloaked. All bubbles pop and all excessive debt ends in default. When these inevitably occur, the reality can no longer be hidden."
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: The New Normal Valentine, Masked, Tested, Vaccinated, Sanitized, Afraid"
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal:
The New Normal Valentine, Masked, Tested, Vaccinated, Sanitized, Afraid"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 2/10/21"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 2/10/21"
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"When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
- "Sherlock Holmes", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "Doctor Admits Masks Don’t Work: “All Viruses Can Get Through”○
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Feb 10, 2021 12:19 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 106,904,000
people, according to official counts, including 27,233,532 Americans.
Globally at least 2,340,100 have died.
Feb. 10, 2021 12:19 AM ET:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count○
"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
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Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
○
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Feb. 9, 2021, 9:02 AM ET
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Where I Live:
"How It Really Is"
A little late in the game for this, don't you think?
Highest recommendation, an essential Must Read:
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
"8 Million More Living In Poverty, 9 Million Small Businesses In Danger Of Closing, 10 Million Behind On Rent"
"8 Million More Living In Poverty, 9 Million Small Businesses
In Danger Of Closing, 10 Million Behind On Rent"
by Michael Snyder
"The economic downturn that we are currently experiencing is making the last recession look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, 2008 and 2009 were bad, but they weren’t anything like this. Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve has allowed the rich to get even richer during this crisis, but meanwhile millions upon millions of ordinary Americans are deeply suffering. Unfortunately, what we have gone through so far is just the beginning.
As a child, I was a big fan of "Sesame Street", and one of the characters that really stood out to me was Count von Count. I loved the fact that he was always counting things, and that is what I am going to do in this article in order to illustrate how bad economic conditions have now become.
Let’s start with the number 7. According to the Congressional Budget Office, approximately 7 million more Americans would have jobs right now if the COVID pandemic had never happened… But in fact, what the CBO is projecting is dire: around 7 million people out of work in 2021 whom CBO thought before the pandemic would be working. That’s dire – and a call to immediate action, not calm, not wait-and-see.
Personally, I think that estimate is way too low. In fact, the Federal Reserve says that 152 million Americans were working before the pandemic started, and only 142 million Americans are working now. So the CBO estimate appears to be off by about 3 million. Count von Count would not be happy.
Let’s try another number. According to Bloomberg, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 8 million during this crisis… "Support is rising among policy makers to address America’s child-poverty crisis, which is getting worse as the pandemic drags on. More than 8 million Americans - including many children - fell into poverty during the second half of last year, exacerbating the racial and income inequalities that are holding back the U.S. economy." In this case, I think that this is a reasonable estimate, but that number will inevitably keep growing in the months ahead. One of the big reasons why it will continue to rise is because hordes of small businesses will be collapsing, and that brings us to our next number.
According to a study that was recently released by the Fed, 9 million small businesses in the U.S. say that they “won’t survive” in 2021 without more government assistance: "Three in ten small businesses - or 9 million out of the estimated 30 million in the United States - fear they won’t survive in the coming year without additional government assistance, according to a survey recently published by the Federal Reserve. The Small Business Credit Survey, which was conducted last September and October and released last week, showcased the incredible burden the coronavirus pandemic has placed on America’s small businesses, as 88% of the businesses surveyed reported that sales had not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels."
Can you imagine what our country would look like if almost a third of all small businesses permanently disappeared? If you watched the Super Bowl, you were bombarded with messaging about the plight of our small businesses. We have never seen anything like this before, and that is because our small businesses have never had to face a crisis of this magnitude. With each passing day, more small businesses are folding, and nothing that the federal government is going to do will completely stop this trend.
Our next number is 10. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 10 million renters were behind on their rent payments in January, and many more people anticipated not paying rent in February: "An estimated 10 million renters were behind on their rent and at risk of eviction in the middle of January, according to a Census Bureau survey. And an estimated 16 million renters had little to no confidence they could pay rent in February." Overall, U.S. renters now owe at least 30 billion dollars in back rent. This has created extreme financial pain for America’s landlords, and when the rent moratoriums are finally lifted we are going to see the largest tsunami of evictions in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin.
Before I wrap up this article, let me leave you with just one more number. So far in 2021, the number of passengers at U.S. airports is down by more than 60 percent compared to 2019: "Over the past seven days, not quite 707,000 passengers per day on average passed TSA checkpoints at US airports, a measure of how many passengers in the US are flying somewhere. This was down by 61.6% from the same period in 2019, the last full year of the Good Times. At the end of January, the drop from 2019 was over 65%."
I honestly do not know how the airline industry is going to survive this without government help. Speaking of not surviving, Democrats have introduced a bill in Congress that would essentially deal a death blow to the gig economy: "The legislation at the core of their agenda is the PRO Act, which Democrats just re-introduced with sponsors including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer. Among many other things, the bill would severely restrict the legal definition of independent contractors in a way that would largely end the gig economy as we know it.
The legislators’ stated intention is to protect workers and bolster their rights under law. Through the reclassification of independent contractors, Democrats hope to force gig economy companies to hire workers as full employees and thus provide them the accompanying salaries and benefits."
If this bill passes, it would absolutely devastate Uber, Lyft and countless other companies that rely on gig workers. Basically, millions of jobs would go “poof” with one stroke of Joe Biden’s pen. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 50 million Americans are currently employed by the gig economy. It is great to want those workers to have higher pay and more benefits, but if those companies go out of existence there won’t be any jobs at all.
These are very dark times for the U.S. economy, and the outlook for the future is exceedingly bleak. However, in the short-term economic conditions should stabilize somewhat thanks to the huge stimulus payments that the government will be sending out. But that bubble of hope will be very brief, and everyone should be able to see that much more pain is on the horizon."
"Stock Market Crash Approaches: "This Is The Wildest Market I've Ever Seen"
"Stock Market Crash Approaches:
"This Is The Wildest Market I've Ever Seen"
by Epic Economist
"In an epic interview with Tony Pasquariello, the global head of Goldman Hedge Fund Coverage, investing legend Stanley Druckenmiller, the head of the Duquesne Family Office, has affirmed that this is the wildest market he has ever seen. In the face of the most recent developments, Druckenmiller shared his views on the current market frenzy, the U.S. economy, Asian markets' prospects, the dollar collapse, and the end of the American Dream. In this video, we decided to report the highlights of this fascinating conversation which involved several topics we often discuss here on the channel.
In an excellent interview with Goldman's Tony Pasquariello, Stanley Druckenmiller revealed that the investor euphoria taking over the stock markets right now is the wildest cocktail he has ever seen in trying to figure out a roadmap. The expert outlined that the current rally has been largely fuelled by the Federal Reserve's money-printing policies and the multiple rounds of federal fiscal stimulus, which not only failed to assist jobless workers but also increased the inequality gap and the size of the already massive national debt. More concerningly, in a year when 11 million remain unemployed, the U.S. has registered the largest increase in personal income in 20 years, right in the middle of a dramatic economic collapse, and, of course, all of that happened due to the enormous policy support.
"The juxtaposition of the various policy responses is somewhat breathtaking," the economist argues. Since 2018, the money supply represented by M2 has grown 25% more than nominal GDP. In other words, there was a 25% increase in liquidity. In contrast, Druckenmiller points out that in China, M2 to nominal GDP is still where it was 3 years ago. That is to say, while we've had a massive liquidity input primarily because of transfer payments and Fed stimulus while also registering very little investment rates, China hasn't borrowed anything from its futures and did the very opposite the U.S. has done when it comes to government policies.
The expert says that taking into account that China, Japan, and Korea have started the year on a very good note, and considering how much the U.S. borrowed from the future, he thinks Asia is the big winner coming out of the virus-induced recession. In short, Asia owns foundry, memory, they are also ahead in robotics. For that reason, he says that he thinks the next 5 years for Asia will look a lot better than for the U.S., because at some point we have to pay back in terms of productivity, in terms of higher wages, and in terms of a lower dollar due to all these transfer payments the federal government has made over the last nine months and will likely continue to do it. "Long-term Asia is going to be an outperformer vs. the U.S., and especially in the currency market. Net investment into China just passed the U.S. ever this year, and it's the beginning rather than the end of a trend," he highlighted.
In conclusion, moving towards more philosophical topics, Pasquariello asked how Druckenmiller would characterize "the state of American capitalism", and the economist disclosed to be worried, because even in the best days of capitalism, there's always been a "stain" marking the US, which was the widespread belief that the system was actually meritocratic, but as he elucidates, in some sectors of our society it feels much more like we are in a caste system. We have a lot of neighborhoods in our country where millions of Americans just don't have the opportunity to pull up their bootstraps and work hard, he said. "That's always been there and is something we need to address. Which is why I am not sure the events of last summer were a bad thing. It's my own view that they were a good thing because people need to be woken up to the fact that the American Dream is a great thing but there are a significant amount of kids without access to the American dream the way I had."
In sum, as the U.S. continues to engage in money printing policies, we will continue to inflate the stock market bubble, and set the dollar to a major collapse. When all of this money finds its way back into the economy, we will be trapped into hyperinflation while the wealth gap between the rich and the poor will keep expanding. It's no wonder why the American dream is now so distant from most part of our population. Our system is structured in a way that will always benefit the elites while jeopardizing the living standards of our citizens. As we plunge deeper into recession, the American dream becomes nothing but a dream. "
Must Watch! "Kool-Aid Drinkers; Take The Money; Housing Crash Epic; Zombie Companies; Debt Forgiveness"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Kool-Aid Drinkers; Take The Money;
Housing Crash Epic; Zombie Companies; Debt Forgiveness"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Stars can be like artists. With interstellar gas as a canvas, a massive and tumultuous Wolf-Rayet star has created the picturesque ruffled half-circular filaments called WR23, on the image left. Additionally, the winds and radiation from a small cluster of stars, NGC 3324, have sculpted a 35 light year cavity on the upper right, with its right side appearing as a recognizable face in profile.
This region's popular name is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for the famous Chilean poet. Together, these interstellar clouds lie about 8,000 light-years away in the Great Carina Nebula, a complex stellar neighborhood harboring numerous clouds of gas and dust rich with imagination inspiring shapes. The featured telescopic view captures these nebulae's characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to the red, green, and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette."
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "The Journey "
"The Journey "
"One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
Mend my life!
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save."
- Mary Oliver
"As Humans..."
“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.”
- Bill Bryson
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/9/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/9/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/9/21
"Stocks Hit New Highs:
Dollar Craters, Deficit Balloons, Child Poverty Skyrockets”
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Feb 9th to Feb 10th, Updated Daily
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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."
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Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
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Oh yeah...
"The Great Fear Machine of 2020"
"The Great Fear Machine of 2020"
by Paul Rosenberg
"The events of 2020 were unique in human history, and so I think it’s important to give them some perspective. What we experienced was the first televised plague. What it spawned was a unique fear machine. Fear delivery systems go back to the first tyrants, of course, but this one featured a scale and an intimacy that went beyond all others, even those of the vile USSR.
The plague itself, COVID-19, was minor as such things go. The flu of 1919 was far worse, not to mention historical plagues that made this one look like a case of the sniffles. Nonetheless, it was enough to spawn something unique. So, briefly, let’s look at the pieces that came together:
• TV news: Television news was dying; their ratings had cratered and there was no real hope to be seen. Politicians and the elderly still took TV news seriously; the informed and the young did not. To these companies, COVID was salvation. It locked people in their houses for months at a time, with nothing to do but watch.
• Politicians: Nothing in our time empowered middling political officials like COVID-19. Governors and regional officials became gods. They shut down whole states and provinces in a stroke and sent their armed enforcers to make it so, while television cameras hung on their every word. People get into politics for the rush of power, and 2020 gave it to them in spades. The new potentates decided what could or could not be sold, forbade relgious ceremonies, and so on.
• Social media: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Twitter and the rest have become the core of soft power (aka, mass manipulation). As with television, COVID forced people into their arms, and they were pleased to addict them. More than that, the operators of these systems stepped from the land of geeks to the halls of power, where they drank the evil brew and liked it.
To this we could add maniacal health officials and others. It was an orgy for power addicts. And again we saw that fear makes humans manipulable. All of this was bad enough, but what’s coming out of it is worse: These groups became organs of the big hierarchy, joining the inner sanctums of power as essential players. But here’s the important part: Once joined to power, you see the rest of humanity as masses rather than individuals.
You can find psychological studies that demonstrate this with hard data, but its easy enough to see for yourself. Phrases like “managing perceptions” imply precisely this. Furthermore, the actions of the newly powerful demonstrated this. Seeing the rest of the world as nameless serfs, they behaved like hubristic monarchs:
• Tell the masses not to wear masks so there are enough for all the doctors to get them.
• After a week or two, tell the serfs to wear the mask for their safety, so they have something to hang on to.
• As mask-wearing turns into a Good-Bad divide, play to the narrative; keep the masses outraged and engaged.
• Scare people away from fast cures so the opposition can’t seize credit. Hold out for a vaccine.
• Never admit mistakes that your group makes (like ten thousands of predictable nursing home deaths). If the issue persists, double-down and keep repeating “conspiracy theory;” the serfs are terrified of public ridicule.
Aside from a quibble or two, I can’t see many honest disputes with these points; we all saw them.
2021: The Year of Winding It Down: As I write this, a general pulling back of the fear machine has begun. New incentives have asserted themselves and a large segment of the power complex now sees this as necessary. The primary reason for this change is that lockdowns crashed the tax receipts of the middling officials, who are facing broken budgets. That could be solved with money printing, of course, but the money masters are trying not to make the dollar a complete joke; that might collapse the entire Western system.
There are complications, of course, such as tax serfs leaving the regime’s most loyal states and an abused working class that may eventually wake up. Still, the great fear machine of 2020 must be pulled back. Power, however, cannot be seen to admit an error, or to take anything less than a powerful stride forward. And so declining case numbers and vaccines will provide cover for winding down the hysteria. “Peace with honor” and all that.
What Comes Out of This? Obviously it’s hard to predict what comes out of a situation like this one, but there are certain aspects that are reasonably clear:
• Political regimes will hurry to pull as much out of this moment as possible.
• State and provincial bosses will slide back toward to their former roles. Their lives will be overrun with servicing labor unions, preventing citizen revolts and begging for newly-printed money.
• Social media, having made itself power’s best and most reliable friend, will ride high. They’re now the indispensable managers of the herds.
• TV news will shrink back toward what it was: running from one crisis to another, large or small, real or manufactured. To prevent that, they’ll have to operate as court sycophants.
The wild card in all of this is the productive class. Intellectually, these people are quite capable of understanding that they’re living in a totalitarian regime: They are regimented, herded, monitored, restricted and stripped of income far beyond the dreams of any Pharaoh. Emotionally, their ability to accept it is uncertain. They have a great deal of their identity tied to national myths; possibly too much to overcome.
The facts say that the regimes of the West have become totalitarian. Standing against this statement is neither data, nor reason, nor observation: standing against it is emotion, and particularly fear. Good luck to us all."
"Same Old, Same Old"
"Same Old, Same Old"
By Bill Bonner
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
- Ernest Hemingway
RANCHO SANTANA, NICARAGUA – "Today, we’re putting aside our travel tales and turning to more important matters – the future of the nation, that is. For a president, there are only two things that really count: Protecting the citizens’ wealth… and protecting their freedom. Typically, presidents do neither. Instead, they eat away at them, like termites hollowing out a log. They waste the nation’s wealth on jackass programs… inflate the currency… and make enemies all over the world, with their wars, sanctions, bullying, and meddling. With those basics in mind, it is probably not too early to look at what the new Biden team has in store for us. In short: Same old, same old.
Plus Ça Change: Looking back a few weeks, we wonder… What was all the election bruhaha about? What difference did it make who was elected? We forecast that it would make none. And as to the basics, we were right. Nothing much has changed.
War? If anything, the Biden Bunch is likely to make a bigger mess of things than the Trump gang. To his everlasting credit, Donald Trump was the first American president in nearly 50 years not to start a new war. But Biden has already signaled that he won’t cancel Trump’s sanctions… that Russia and China will continue to be regarded as adversaries… and that those in the military/industrial/Deep State complex can begin building new vacation homes.
Lest we forget, as a senator and then as vice president, Biden played his part in getting Democrat support for the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and the other military misadventures of the last 20 years. He and the “queen of the warmongers,” Hillary Clinton, pushed the bombing of Libya and the war in Serbia before that.
Professional Warmongers: And now, the liberal media says Biden is bringing professionalism back to American foreign policy. Yes, he’s replacing Trump’s amateurish incompetents with seasoned war criminals and career cronies. The rascals are taking refuge in the nation’s capital. Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Neera Tanden, and Michèle Flournoy – smart scalawags, every one of them.
Wasting no time, the retreads and has-beens from the Clinton and Obama days are back on the job… desperately trying to remain relevant (and keep the cash flowing) by throwing their weight around. CNN reports: "US deploying B-1 bombers to Norway to send a message to Russia." "The US Air Force is deploying B-1 bombers to Norway for the first time in a move that sends a clear message to Moscow that the US military will operate in the strategically important Arctic region and demonstrate that it will defend allies in the area against any Russian aggression close to the country’s border."
Going Big: As for the other part of the formula – inflation – nothing has changed there, either. The Biden boys and girls are going to “go big,” just like the Trumpistas before them. It’s hard to exaggerate the biglyness of Trump’s inflationary push. During his reign, the spending… the deficit… the budget… the debt… and the money-printing all expanded more than ever. Not even in wartime was so much monetary and fiscal inflation added to the system.
And if Donald Trump had somehow managed a recount, and gotten another four years in office, it would inevitably be more of the same – more spending, more deficits, more debt, and more money-printing. The Donald was all for it.
And so is Joe Biden. The bigness of Biden’s plan is so loony that even the loons themselves are beginning to wonder about it. Here’s Breitbart: "Leading Liberal Economist Sounds Alarm Over Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Covid Bill." "One of the world’s leading liberal economists dealt Joe Biden a blow in recent days, warning that the president’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief legislation could ignite an inflationary conflagration.
Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and perhaps the most cited economist in the world, spelled out his case against the Biden bill in a series of tweets on Saturday. Blanchard’s argument is that the size of the stimulus injected into the economy would be too large, especially when added to the measures taken last year. The additional spending power created by the additional $1.9 trillion budget deficit would drive up prices and force the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates."
But to hear the “experts” tell it, printing-press money is just the panacea that America needs. The only question, for them, is, “How much?”
Bird on a Wing: They believe they can use government spending – funded by fake money – to stimulate the U.S. economy… to rescue American families from poverty… to redress the wrongs of the patriarchy, white supremacy, Big Business, greed, and nature… and even to save the planet from the evils of carbon dioxide. And they believe (according to the now-popular Modern Monetary Theory fantasy) that the only real limit is consumer price inflation.
When the cost of living rises above their target, they say they’ll let the printing presses cool down… and raise taxes to control inflation. But as we know, that’s not going to happen. Those who live by the printing press die by the printing press, with more and more “liquidity” (aka fake money) needed just to stay in the same place. Yes, Dear Reader, it’s “inflate or die.” And Joe Biden, like Trump before him, will continue to inflate the American economy.
And what’s this? Agricultural commodities are up 13% over the last 12 months. Metals are up 18%. The buzzard of consumer price inflation hath but a short way to fly… And as we reported yesterday, lo… the bird is on the wing. Stay tuned…"
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