Gregory Mannarino, PM 6/16/21:
"100% Proof That The Economy Is Collapsing
And The FED Is Buying It All"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)
Full screen recommended.
Moby,
"Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" (Ben-E.dit)
"A Look to the Heavens"
“While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the above gorgeously detailed image was recently taken in infrared light by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in honor of the 23rd anniversary of Hubble's launch.
The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is seen above primarily because it is backlit by the nearby massive star Sigma Orionis. The Horsehead Nebula will slowly shift its apparent shape over the next few million years and will eventually be destroyed by the high energy starlight.”
The Poet: Rolf Jacobsen, "When They Sleep"
"When They Sleep"
"All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
God, teach me the language of sleep."
- Rolf Jacobsen,
"The Roads Have Come to an End Now"
"Actually..."
"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Jim Butcher
Dig your way out, they said...
"The Masses Will Pay the Price"
"The Masses Will Pay the Price"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "We’re in a rush this morning. No time to write a short message. We’ll have to send you a long one. First, here’s Business Insider with a news update: "Michael Burry said markets were in a bubble of unprecedented scale. The “Big Short” investor tweeted his dire warning after a 10-week break from Twitter. Burry has flagged reckless speculation on Tesla stock, bitcoin, and other assets. “People always ask me what is going on in the markets,” the investor tweeted. “It is simple. Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in All Things. By two orders of magnitude. #FlyingPigs360.”
Meanwhile, a dear reader in Canada, Luke K., sees inflation in action: "Hi Bill, inflation is definitely here. And it came with a massive bang. Our pool heater went on the fritz the other day. We called to have a heater technician come by for an inspection from our local pool company. $349 Canadian for one hour of his time. To clean the heater and get it going. Parts extra.
Instead, we called a private individual. Showed me the part that needed replacing. A small circuit board that might cost $10 to build. Local shops, and online ones, were selling the card for $600 CAD. After the tech left (which cost me $100 for his visit), I removed the card from the heater and found a spider had touched two live leads on the other side and virtually exploded all over the circuit board. Cleaned the card with a toothbrush and reinserted. Heater was working again. Best $100 I ever spent. As for new heaters? $2500 (used to be $1000-$1500) and not a SINGLE ONE in the entire city. Backordered until July. Welcome to the beginnings of hyperinflation!"
That’s a shocker! We didn’t even know they had swimming pools in Canada.
No Choice: Another dear reader, Patricia M., wonders what to do: "I’m a very new investor in the stock market. I’m astounded at what I’ve learned in just nine months on the scene, which is that there’s no rhyme or reason to investing in stocks. I know I’m failing to protect myself and my family, but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to turn the tables without having an awful lot of money! I can see something really huge coming down the pike. I think I understand most of it; I’ve been reading like there’s no tomorrow, just trying to learn how to play. But every time I turn around, up pops another story to complicate, obfuscate, misdirect, and so on.
So, my big question is: How does an average Joe get a leg up on this situation? Between Wall Street, governments, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 1%ers, and whoever else is “IN” the game, I don’t believe life will ever again make sense. I used to be an optimist, but how can one remain optimistic in a world that one just can’t relate? I just can’t see a positive outcome for the masses."
You’re right. There’s not going to be any positive outcome for the masses. The game is rigged against them. The feds (representing the entire elite of the U.S.) cannot expect to get much more from them in taxes. And their savings are not enough to cover the deficits. Now, as we told you yesterday, its Inflate AND Die… meaning, the feds have no choice. They have to print money. And this means the masses will pay – via consumer price inflation.
Dangerous Time: But let’s try to be helpful. What should a normal person do to protect himself and increase his wealth? The quick answer: The normal person, in a normal time, should do the normal thing. But this is no normal time. It’s a freaky… weird… and head-scratching time. And a very dangerous time. But we still have to start with the basics.
The trouble with the average Joe is that he has only his time to sell. And the trouble with his time is that even in normal times, it may not be worth very much. It depends on what he does with it. The average wage is about $25 an hour. So, if he works 40 hours, he makes $1,000 per week. If he does that for a full year, after taxes, he ends up with about $40,000. That’s not going to take him very far…
If he is a skilled professional, on the other hand – an accountant, dentist, surgeon, lawyer, engineer, or architect – he should do better. He might net out (after fixed office costs, insurance, and fees) $100 an hour. This would give him $200,000 a year… which might then be reduced to, say, $150,000 after taxes.
The trouble with time is that it is not scalable. Each hour clicks by exactly like the hour before it. And the hourly worker – no matter how skilled – cannot make more of it. So, selling his time, the average Joe cannot increase his earnings easily. He has to take some of his earnings and put them into something that is scalable…
Too Little, Too Late: Investing, for example. He might, for example, buy a rundown house… fix it up on weekends… and rent it out. The house might go up in price, while he is collecting a decent rent. Then, he might be able to borrow against the equity in order to buy another house. That is classic scaling. It works as long as he doesn’t get stuck with too much debt… and empty houses.
This approach also has the advantage of offering some protection against inflation. Typically, people try to escape inflation by buying real estate – something solid that won’t lose value. This pushes up property prices. Plus, the landlord can raise rents to try to keep up with his rising costs. But the poor renter is squeezed. He struggles to keep his wages in line with price increases. But he falls behind… the salary adjustments don’t come fast enough. They’re too little and too late. Inflation makes time less valuable! Not only because the average wage-earner can’t keep up… but also because it destroys capital – which is what gives value to time.
Unhealthy Economy: In a healthy economy, people save… and invest their money to try to earn more money. They start businesses and hire workers. Wages go up. But in an inflationary economy, nobody wants to save. Capital gets frittered away on meme stocks… NFTs… dogecoin… overpriced zombie companies… gambling… super yachts… and government boondoggles. An air of Sha… na… na… Live for today takes hold. And then it turns grim… and the masses are robbed. We’ll be back tomorrow with more helpful comments!"
"If We Have No Idea..."
“If we have no idea what we believe in, we’ll go along with anything.
Truth takes courage. Courage to stand up for what we believe in.
Not necessarily in a confrontational way, but in a gentle yet firm way.
Like an oak tree, able to sway gently in the wind, but strongly rooted to the ground.”
- A.C. Ping
“Fortune’s Fools”
“Fortune’s Fools”
by Phil Rockstroh
“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
- Miles Davis
“As a general rule, musicians, artists, and writers, as well as those possessed of an ardor for self-awareness and a commitment to political activism have been advised to avoid a habitual retreat to comfort zones… to take note of the criteria that causes one’s pulse to quicken, brings flop sweat to the brow, causes sphincters to seize up, and delivers mortification to the mind. In order to quicken imagination and avoid banality, it is imperative to explore the fears that cause one to awaken in the darkest of night to stare bug-eyed at the ceiling until dawn; to embrace discomfort; to shun crackpot complacency; to wander through the teeming polis of the psyche, and, in so doing, to not only stray and mingle among the outcasts, demimonde and mad, but proceed to the locked-down wards of the region’s lunatic asylum, and make an exhausting inquest into the nature of the hopeless cases that have been hidden from public view.
As of late, my darkest thoughts and angst-engendered imaginings have involved the following: The ecological debasement of the earth, the ongoing degradation of daily life within U.S. society, and the attenuated destiny of the individual under the yoke of late stage, coronavirus-destroyed global capitalism. My ruminations have been, in large measure, engendered and inflamed by the following: On Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013 August Franklin Rockstroh came into this world at a time when the planet he will inhabit is warmer than it has been in 11,000 years, a condition caused by the industrial production of man-made greenhouse gasses. He arrived into an age wherein it is imperative that we as a species re-imagine nearly all we know. Thus far, from the halls of power to the floors of minimarts, our avidity for avoidance of the realities at hand does not augur well for humankind’s chances.
Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well “spill” (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world’s oceans. The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline. Holding an eternity of suffering in his remaining eye, the fish turned to face me. Ever since, this dream image has lived within me. I carry the fish’s suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home – this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into… my sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage… bottomless. Who will speak for the voiceless – who will make amends for their suffering?
This much is clear: The means that sustain the present economic order not only defies moral justification (i.e., a culture dependent on the enforced misery of the multitudes and the wanton exploitation of nature) but the order has proven anathema to the balance of the earth’s life-enabling forces – a balance of forces mandatory to the continuance of the human species on the planet. The fate of the earth is inexorably linked to our personal destiny.
Deep down we know this to be true, but the atomizing nature of late capitalism inflicts learned helplessness. Social and political change seems impossible. Personal transformation is relegated to the realm of New Age snake oil. Human longing is deracinated. The Tree of Knowledge rendered a Chia Pet. The unruly call of destiny is bowdlerized into sterile careerism.
Yet, my son, as we all do, will long to embrace his own authentic destiny. The alienation at the mechanized heart of the corporate/consumer state’s structure will present a daunting challenge to him, for it is difficult to live a life imbued with depth and resonance without meaningful human engagement. Abiding bonds that bring the depth of oneself deep into life must be formed. A social milieu must be in place that allows for love and friendship, for coming upon mentors, for grappling with antagonists, whereby one is destroyed by catastrophic victories and enlarged by propitious failures.
Although every individual arrives at a fate uniquely his/her own, soul-making is a collaborative effort. Destiny only appears to be a solo act. My character, like yours, is a composite of all the events, happenstance, and circumstances that transpired before, and after, I arrived in this world. It is resultant from the accumulation of my choices – and the choices of those in positions of power and authority, over which, I am, all too often, powerless.
But if you discern what I yearn for, you will know who I am.
One’s destiny awaits just over the crest of the horizon. It is glimpsed in sublime snatches like a beautiful stranger who catches your gaze from a passing train. Yes, it sleeps within, but must be roused into being by interaction with the outer world. It awaits you in the vastness of life. The truth of your being is honeycombed into life’s intricacies. As a general rule (Emily Dickinson excepted) one’s destiny does not make house calls.
If character is destiny, the soul of the world is the catalyzing agent that conjures manifestation. While, to some degree, all who live are imprisoned by the past, it is best to be aware of what criteria brought about your incarceration to habit and circumstance. It is essential to become aware of the contours of your cage… to be in possession of a blue print of the prison. In this way, your odds of escape are greatly enhanced.
Are you weighted down by feelings of powerlessness… nettled by feelings of helpless rage? Good. Your feelings are appropriate to the tone and tenor of the times. Use the feeling of being weighted down to your advantage: Descend deep into the deepest recesses of your being and listen to the garrulous silence therein.
Appropriate your blessed rage as well: What admonitions cry out from the heart of light ensconced within your darker places? What is it that is essential about your deepest nature that needs to find its way into Animus Mundi – the soul of the world… must seek out collaboration with even the most mundane moments of the breath of day. This is how the creative spirit flourishes, how every moment is made holy.
And remember: Your life is a question that you live your way into. Any attempt to coerce an answer amounts to vivisection, not art.
Conversely, and anathema to the process, the guiding principle of the neoliberal economic order reduces the things of the world to mere economic entities. At this point, this much is, or, at least, should be grimly obvious: Existence within a system that defines all things by their ability to enrich the fortunes of a predatory class of elites starves the soul and blights the landscape; it has come to exist…as a thief, defiler, and squanderer. Exploited and demeaned, the populace grows callow and empty. Desperate to sate the hollowing emptiness within, the citizens of the corporate/consumer state have internalized the noxious mythos of endless growth, peddled by their exploiters, and have been driven to devour their seed crop.
In doing so, all concerned will condemn their society to the landfill of history. Yet, even in this age of corporate despotism, political duopoly, communal atomization, ecocide and the attendant alienation and ennui, life can be lived with passion and grace, and, as individuals, we can take measures to promote a transformation of the prevailing order.
There are simply too many hidden variables involved to predict and control the future. Consequently, this is what we can do: resist the present, corrupt order; organize to bring it down; and strive to create more viable alternatives. All of which exist within the spectrum of the doable.
At the end of the day, it is a far better choice to err on the side of your inner calling, than to languish as a simulacrum of yourself… evincing a counterfeit consciousness that demands you spend your days compliant to the demeaning dictates of a ruthless few. As a general rule, one stands powerless before the sweep of history and the caprice of the ruling elite. Regardless, you must choose to slouch in the direction of your destiny, or else your life will consist of a litany of thwarted longings – an agonizing death within life that is absent death’s release and resists the warmth and proffered consolation borne of the living.
All the world may be a stage, but don’t allow yourself to be miscast as an expendable, one dimensional character, conceived by miserable hacks. Deep down, your life’s calling is encoded within you. Throughout your lifetime, it will arise as inchoate yearnings, reveal itself as implausible daydreams, or as dream-borne symbols that seem, in regard to your daytime exigencies, abstruse or useless. You may know it as a hollow ache in your chest. Or a nettling voice, in the recesses of your awareness, that asks, “How did it come to this?”
Ignore destiny’s entreaties at your own risk. Although, your soul will stay at you; it will implore you to pay attention… even if it must pummel you with nightmares or conjure a state of depression that brings on a darkness at noon.
“We are all subject to the fates.
But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.”
- Philip Pullman
To paraphrase Rilke, if you ignore the beckoning call of your own uniqueness, your soul will serenely distain to annihilate the false notions that propel you through the harried hours of meaning-denuded day. When shunted aside or blocked by barriers of calcified habit, the soul’s inexorable agency will be experienced as a kindly cataclysm. At times, becoming ensnared in the dark night of the soul will allow a lodestar to reveal itself.
Withal, on a cultural basis, the nature-decimating, soul-shredding agendas of the neoliberal enterprise are propelling us collectively towards economic and ecological cataclysm. When questioned by the youth of future generations, those born into the world created by our myopic choices, about how you responded when the earth was burning, will you reply that you went to the mall, sat in public places staring at a glowing electronic box, engaged in cretinous palaver about the private lives of sub-cretinous celebrities and the dim machinations of reality show jerk-rockets?
At this critical juncture, one’s individual calling will be interwoven with the fate of the earth and the collective destiny of all of humankind. The age of elitist narcissists is drawing to a close. The time for dreamers, visionaries and activist has arrived, and their time of arrival is long past due.”
“The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting
for our senses to grow sharper.”
- W.B. Yeats
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/16/21: "Alert! The Fed. To Hyper-Inflate And Maintain "Emergency" Monetary Policy"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/16/21:
"Alert! The Fed. To Hyper-Inflate
And Maintain "Emergency" Monetary Policy"
"Many U.S. Cities Are Already Starting To Resemble Post-Apocalyptic Cesspools As America’s Collapse Accelerates"
"Many U.S. Cities Are Already Starting To Resemble
Post-Apocalyptic Cesspools As America’s Collapse Accelerates"
by Michael Snyder
"For a moment, I would like you to take an imaginary tour of a major U.S. city with me, and I would like for you to try to guess which city I am talking about. As you stroll along the sidewalks in the heart of this city, it seems like tents have been erected everywhere. Homelessness is completely and utterly out of control in this particular city, and even though city officials keep making more promises the crisis just continues to get worse. As you continue your tour, you notice multiple addicts doing drugs right in front of you. Drug needles, human waste and other trash are strewn all over the place, and you wonder why nobody from the city has cleaned up the mess. All of this filth has created a stench that is overpowering at times, and you try not to gag. As you travel deeper into the urban core of this city, you are shocked to see two men with guns carjack a woman a couple of blocks away. Not wanting to get involved, you abruptly change direction. You are startled when a couple of addicts that look like they were pulled straight out of a zombie movie start asking you for money, and you begin instinctively walking faster without even thinking about it. Unfortunately, you have stumbled into an alley that you should never have gone down, and you now find yourself completely surrounded by curious street people. You try to make a break for it, but it is too late.
I’ll stop our imaginary tour right there. Can you guess which major U.S. city I am talking about? Sadly, the reality of the matter is that there are many U.S. cities that closely fit the description that I just gave you. For example, Los Angeles was once one of the most beautiful cities on the entire planet, but today it is being described as a “squalid cesspool”… "The Democrat-controlled city of Los Angeles has devolved into a squalid cesspool of rampant crime, uncontrolled homelessness and filthy streets littered with trash, drug paraphernalia and human waste."
That’s the observation of numerous Californians, including award-winning actor James Woods, who lamented on Monday that the picturesque city he once loved “is gone.” If you walk through the streets of Los Angeles today, you will find that homeless people have erected tents literally all over the city. Jeremiah Babe has demonstrated this over and over again in his excellent videos, and the footage that he captures during his visits to the core of Los Angeles just seems to keep getting worse over time.
As conditions in Los Angeles deteriorate, it is fueling a dramatic rise in violent crime. The murder rate in Los Angeles is up 95 percent so far this year, and it is now the number one political issue in the entire city.
Further north, San Francisco officials are dealing with their worst drug epidemic ever. San Francisco has always had a big problem with drugs, but Dr. Christopher Colwell says that the widespread use of fentanyl has taken things to an entirely different level… “Our most immediate threat right now is the opioid epidemic and the trauma we are seeing. We are seeing increases I haven’t seen in my career around dependency and overdoses, mostly involving fentanyl. We always had problems with opioids, specifically heroin, but fentanyl has changed the whole landscape of drugs.”
When we think of addicts, we tend to envision street people in our minds, but in San Francisco a lot of people that are overdosing these days are respected professionals… "A physician, two nurses, a professional athlete, a drug dealer and a lawyer who had nodded off in court. Teenagers, specifically a 14- and a 15-year-old. And a 7-year-old who got into a stash in her mother’s purse. These are some of the types of people Dr. Christopher Colwell, the chief of emergency medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, has recently seen in the emergency room for medical issues related to fentanyl use and overdoses."
Whenever you have large numbers of drug addicts in a particular city, you are going to have a problem with property crime. Addicts are always looking for more money to pay for their next hits, and shoplifting has gotten wildly out of control in the city. What makes things even worse is that shoplifters in San Francisco face very light consequences if they are actually caught, and so at this point they have become extremely brazen…
"Alarming video captured the moment a brazen robber filled a garbage bag with products at a San Francisco Walgreens and bicycled out of the store after no one tried to stop him."
The footage posted on Twitter by ABC7 Reporter Lyanne Melendez was filmed on Monday afternoon in a Walgreens at the corner of Gough and Fell streets in the Bay Area – where 17 of the pharmacy’s stores have been forced to close in recent years due to theft. I watched the video, and the thief actually brushes right up against the security guard without any concern whatsoever.
On the other side of the country, police in the Atlanta area are operating under new rules that restrict them from chasing criminals. This is infuriating many residents, because now violent criminals can literally get away with just about anything if they just drive away fast enough…"This is the moment cops appear to do nothing amid a drive-by shooting in Atlanta as residents of the wealthy Buckhead area say it’s a ‘warzone’ and demand to secede.
The video, which was played on Tucker Carlson Tonight, shows people lining up near a dark-colored van that is parked on the side of the road when a white car passes by and shots ring out, with one going straight through the dark van, striking one of the passersby and sending people scrambling. A few seconds later, blue lights could be seen reflecting off the windshield of the black van, symbolizing police cars passing by and not stopping at the scene in the wealthy Buckhead neighborhood."
By the way, the murder rate in Atlanta is up 60 percent so far this year, and officials in Atlanta say that they are desperate for solutions. Here is a solution. Perhaps they should actually allow the police to chase down criminals that are shooting at people. Just a thought.
Up north, New York City hasn’t seen this much degradation since the dirty days of the 1970s. Crime is wildly out of control, and filth is seemingly everywhere. Earlier today, I came across a report from the local Fox affiliate that discussed the fact that the number of subway cars that are soiled by “feces, vomit, and blood” is increasing… "As people return to the subway system in New York City, they are finding more trash and filth, according to a new report. There has been a rise in soiled train cars this year according to Daily News including cases of feces, vomit, and blood."
Do you ever wonder who gets to clean up those messes? I hope that whoever has to do that job is well paid.
As our major cities degenerate into cesspools of crime, drugs and filth, vast numbers of ordinary citizens are fleeing for greener pastures. In fact, North American Van Lines has just released a report that confirms that there was a huge wave of migration from “blue states” to “red states” in 2020… "The pandemic saw people leave Democratic blue states in droves and head towards sunnier climes in the red states of the south to escape the strict lockdowns and spiraling crime. A migration report from moving company North American Moving Services found those living in the states of New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland headed for Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Idaho."
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. As our cities continue to deteriorate, millions more Americans will be seeking to relocate. Of course this ongoing mass exodus has already pushed home prices in many desirable rural and suburban areas to absolutely absurd levels. If you are thinking about relocating, I would recommend doing it as soon as possible, because the collapse of our major cities is only going to get worse."
○
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Gerald Celente, PM 6/15/21: "Trends Journal: Covid-19 War, It's a MIND F#&K"
Gerald Celente, PM 6/15/21:
"Trends Journal: Covid-19 War, It's a MIND F#&K"
As only Gerald could... lol
"Scars..."
"Never be ashamed of a scar.
It simply means you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you. "
- Unknown
"And it was pointless to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. "
- Charles Frazier
"Global Shipping Chaos Is Worsening Supply Chain Crisis As Freight Rates Shot Up By 300 Percent"
Full screen recommended.
by Epic Economist, PM 6/15/21:
"Global Shipping Chaos Is Worsening Supply Chain
Crisis As Freight Rates Shot Up By 300 Percent"
"For the past twelve months, global supply chains have been facing a crippling shipping crisis that has only become more acute. But now, global traders are extremely alarmed about the proportion of the chaos the world is about to experience as a new round of lockdowns is severely aggravating the logjam of box ships and containers in Asian ports. Since 2020, a critical shortage of shipping containers has been causing massive delays in the delivery of imported goods from China to Europe and the U.S., which resulted in widespread shortages and rising prices for businesses and consumers. But again, businesses and consumers have to brace for yet another shipping crisis, more shortages and more expensive products, as a virus outbreak in southern China is interrupting port services and delaying deliveries.
In the Chinese province of Guangdong, a sudden uptick in new infection cases was recorded during the past week. In response, authorities decided to completely shut down districts and businesses to prevent the virus from spreading uncontrollably. However, major Chinese ports are currently halted, which has been jacking up already-soaring shipping costs as waiting times at berth "skyrocketed," according to analysts in the shipping industry. "The disruptions in Shenzhen and Guangzhou are absolutely massive. Alone, they would have an unprecedented supply chain impact," said Brian Glick, founder and CEO at supply chain integration platform Chain.io.
Spiking shipping costs have been a direct effect of the closure of the Chinese ports. But higher freight costs are plaguing the industry since the burst of the sanitary outbreak, skyrocketing by almost 300% over the past 18 months. Small and medium-sized businesses that managed to navigate through the recession are now facing extra hardships to send their products overseas as they can't afford the exorbitant freight rates. According to Drewry Shipping Consultants, prices for containers climbed from $1,486 per 40-foot container in May 2020 to $5,472 by May 2021, but as more and more companies have started to look to convert ocean freight shipments to air freight - since they simply cannot afford both the delays and the huge costs - that is likely to further increase shipping costs.
"This is uncharted territory in terms of carrier profits - in terms of freight rates, in terms of just the level of disruption that the supply chain is seeing," emphasized Simon Heaney, Drewry's London-based senior manager for container research. Heaney revealed he hadn't seen this level of disorder in the market in his career of more than 20 years. "It's unprecedented in terms of the chaos that we're seeing right now," he said.
In a recent Bloomberg piece, one leading economist argued that most Americans are not fully aware of the full impact the current shipping crisis will have on higher prices for consumer goods. It's a ripple effect, and even if companies pass the cost of rising shipping fares directly to their customers, this will only have a minor effect on headline inflation - "but its full impact might be being overlooked," argued Volker Wieland, an economics professor at Frankfurt's Goethe University. "Even if the order of magnitude is smaller than estimated, the dynamic builds over a year and has significant effects. That means there's a danger we're underestimating the impact."
Some big companies, including Costco and Chipotle, have announced that they will pass some of the higher freights costs to their customers, while industry analysts told Bloomberg that the prices of low-cost and bulky goods, such as toys and cheap furniture, is going to soar in the coming months. This crisis may also affect the delivery of other international products that don't come from China. For instance, olive growers in Europe can no longer afford to export to the U.S. This news couldn't have come at a worse time for U.S. supply chains, given that much of California and other key agricultural states are experiencing the worst drought in history and millions of acres of crops are at risk of being destroyed since there's no available irrigation water to all the farmers of the region.
"If you would have asked 100 economists a year ago on this date where the world would go, probably 100 economists would have told us: "it's going to be doom and gloom, we're going to go into a recession". And that is what it looked like: Global shipping volumes tanked," said Sanne Manders, the Chief Operating Officer of Flexport. With all things considered, we should all be preparing for the challenges that are looming on the horizon because we're about to enter times of horrific inflation, turbulence in international trade, acute food shortages, explosive prices, extreme weather, and another worldwide wave of virus infection that can send our economy back to rock bottom with the blink of an eye."
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "The Royal Albert Hall Concert" ( 2010 )
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi, "The Royal Albert Hall Concert" ( 2010 )
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The southern Milky Way appears spectacular in this composite image taken from Mangaia, the most southerly of the Cook Islands. Few sources of light pollution exist here, home to only 500 people.
The two bright stars at the Milky Way’s center are Alpha (left) and Beta Centauri. They point to Crux the Southern Cross. Near the horizon, two of the satellite galaxies of our Milky Way, the Small (left) and Large Magellanic Clouds are easy to spot.”
"Your Only Choice...:
”There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”
- Graham Greene
○
“When swimming into a dark tunnel, there arrives a point of no
return when you no longer have enough breath to double back.
Your only choice is to swim forward into the unknown… and pray for an exit.”
- Dan Brown
"Inflate AND Die"
"Inflate AND Die"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "That was fast! Already… the inflation threat is over. Bloomberg tells us more: "With investors anxious to hear the Federal Reserve’s latest take on inflation after last week’s hot reading, certain corners of the market are already simmering down.
Take lumber, one of the biggest gainers among commodities in the past year as stuck-at-home Americans poured money into remodeling. It’s slumped 40% since its peak in May. The booming housing market has also cooled, with an index that measures consumer plans to buy homes tumbling last month. And copper has eased from an all-time high.
[…]
The Treasury market, for one, has shown itself unperturbed by the latest readings that highlighted the fastest year-over-year acceleration since 2008. Stocks haven’t minded either, with the S&P 500 breaking out to its first record since early May last week."
Or is it? Breitbart reports: "Worries About Big Ticket Item Inflation Hit Worse Level Since 1982." "The University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment showed U.S. consumers more concerned with higher prices of appliances, houses, and cars than anytime in 39 years, according to the survey’s chief economist Richard Curtin."
Critical Distinction: So what’s ahead? Tomorrow, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest policy move. Most recently, it has been “thinking about thinking about tapering.” What that means is that if it thinks it is already reaching its inflation target – 2% per year – it might begin to think about backing off from its $120 billion-a-month counterfeiting program. But it’s this money-printing itself that is the real “inflation,” not the price increases you see at the grocery store. The point of today’s Diary: While the future price of strawberries is unknowable, the future of the Fed’s inflation is unavoidable.
True Prices: We saw last week that prices are not a problem. It doesn’t matter that they are high or low… as long as they are true. A true price tells us something important – input costs, supplies, demand. A phony price misleads, confuses, and defrauds us all – investors, producers, and consumers alike.
When the U.S. was flooded with imports from China, Mexico, and Vietnam, for example, prices fell. The lower prices told us that the foreign manufacturers could produce many things more cheaply than we could in the U.S. American retailers rushed to source their goods from overseas… and consumers rushed to Walmart to buy them. American labor, meanwhile, lost its bargaining power.
But when Wall Street prices rose – without the additional profits to justify them – the information content was ersatz. It misled investors into supporting zombie companies, gambling on further capital gains, and wasting precious time and resources.
Real Prices: And it soured the social stew. Artificially low interest rates, an implicit stock market guarantee, and bond purchases (such as its current $120 billion-a-month program) shifted trillions of dollars’ worth of wealth. The elite, who own stocks and bonds, took the Fed’s money without even a “thank you.” The factory girls and toolbelt guys, who provide real goods and services, got nothing – leaving them, relatively, even worse off.
Real prices – based on shifting labor and raw material costs, shipping patterns, retailing methods, consumer preferences, and innumerable other factors – are inherently unpredictable. Bad summer weather could raise the price of watermelons, for example. (The Fed’s attempt to raise prices at a steady 2% annual rate is therefore as preposterous as it is unattainable.)
Inflate AND Die: But while we can’t know what will happen to real prices… we can make a fair guess about what’s ahead for the Fed’s inflation campaign. It’s now inevitable… deliberate… and disastrous. Dear reader H.R.E. has suggested a revision of our “Inflate or Die” description. It’s now “Inflate AND Die,” he says. He’s got a point. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. The feds gotta inflate. No matter when or how real prices react, the fake signals and hidden robbery in the feds’ inflation is gonna kill us all. Everybody must get stoned. How? When…? Woody Allen remarked, “Just tell us where… and we’ll avoid the place."
No Escape: But as we saw yesterday, there may be nowhere – at least in the G7 nations – you will be able to escape to. France, Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom – all the other G7 nations are in on the caper. All G7 nations have staggering levels of debt – Japan, for example, has government debt greater than 250% of its GDP… or more than twice the U.S. level… All have more and more old people and fewer and fewer young people to look after them. Italy’s population is expected to be cut in half by the end of the century… All are facing huge social and political problems, since they are unable to make good on the promises they’ve made to voters… All are caught in the “Inflate AND Die” trap… forced to finance deficits with printing-press money… All believe they can and should switch to “green” energy, though none has the huge amount of capital that the “great transition” would require…
Global Spree: Yes, Dear Reader, the scam has gone global. And we are looking at the first international, coordinated inflation spree in history. Hundreds of millions of people will be ripped off… by globalized inflation, globalized taxes, and globalized claptrap. And it will be harder than ever to avoid it."
"Alert! Inflation & Shortages at Critical Levels"
Full screen recommended.
Dr. Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity PM 6/15/21:
"Alert! Inflation & Shortages at Critical Levels"
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