Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/6/22:
"I'm Worried About You; Cash Is King;
Aggressive Interest Rates; FED Intervention Will Stop"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, January 6, 2022
Gerald Celente, "Trends in The News 1/6/22"
Full screen recommended.
Very strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, "Trends in The News 1/6/22":
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Gregory Mannarino, "What?! Another Bailout? Trade Deficit Hits New Record"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/6/22:
"What?! Another Bailout? Trade Deficit Hits New Record"
“Every High Civilization Decays by Forgetting Obvious Things”
“Every High Civilization Decays by
Forgetting Obvious Things”
by Brian Maher
“'Every high civilization' - wrote Chesterton - 'decays by forgetting obvious things.' We begin to suspect American civilization is down with a hard amnesia. It has forgotten such obvious things... we fear it is decaying beyond hope.
It has forgotten, for example, that: The free lunch has no existence… A nation hopelessly indebted is a nation hopelessly enchained… Money and wealth are not synonyms… Savings form the granite foundations of wealth... And a man must produce before he can consume.
The True Drivers of Economic Growth: Mr. John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets: "Savings and investment, not consumption, are the true drivers of economic growth. Entrepreneurs cannot innovate, and companies can’t grow or be founded without savings first. There’s no getting around this truth…"
Just don’t expect to hear this simple truth from most any economist. Deep believers in the religion that is consumption, they can’t see that the latter is the easy part. That what really powers growth is the capacity to save the fruits of one’s production so that workers can produce (and ultimately consume) even more. It is obvious. Yet it is forgotten. Nonetheless… as the gentleman states… “There’s no getting around this truth.”
Let us recall, then - we believe it is necessary - Say’s law…
Supply Creates Its Own Demand: Say’s law is the iron law of economics demonstrating that supply creates its own demand. “Products are paid for with products,” argued Jean-Baptiste Say over two centuries ago. His law has yet to be overturned, despite the fevered efforts of Lord Keynes and his countless disciples who even today burn incense at his altar.
Consider: One man produces bread. Another produces shoes. Let us assume the baker bakes a baker’s dozen - 13 loaves of bread. Three of them go upon his dinner table, then into his family’s bellies, consumed. The remaining 10 loaves represent his savings. He can hold them out against other goods he needs… shoes in our little example.
Meantime, the cobbler cobbles together 13 pairs of shoes. He places one new pair upon his blistered and aching feet. He places two additional pairs upon his children’s growing feet. This fellow “consumes” three pairs of shoes, that is. The remaining 10 constitute his savings. Like our baker, he can exchange his shoes — his savings — for other goods he requires. In our example he requires bread.
The Illusory Veil of Money: Each exchanges money to fetch him his goods - direct barter is primitive. But lean in for a closer examination. Squint your eyes a bit. Concentrate your attention. You will now see the transaction in its true aspect. You will see that money merely throws an illusory veil across the exchange. You will see that the baker ultimately purchases his shoes with the bread he has baked and that the cobbler ultimately purchases his bread with the shoes he has cobbled.
Concludes Monsieur Say: Money performs but a momentary function in this double exchange; and when the transaction is finally closed, it will always be found that one kind of commodity has been exchanged for another. We must conclude that there can be no excess of savings. Savings equal stored wealth. To argue that savings injure society is to argue that wealth injures society. Only an Ivy League economist can argue it. And savings spring from production as the fruit springs from the seed.
Outlawing Say’s Law: Yet the consumptionists would turn Say’s law upon its head. They sob not about a lack of production but a “lack of demand.” They insist that government race the printing press to make the shortage good, to furnish the lack. But no new production accompanies the blitz of money. The additional money merely chases the existing stock of goods. It represents the attempted outlawing of Say’s law.
That is, the money-printers place the wagon cart of consumption before the draft horse of production. Yet the horse must go in front. The cart does not tug the horse. Consider the thought experiment of another 18th-century thinker David Hume…
False Wealth and True Wealth: Imagine a benevolent fairy slips money into all the nation’s pockets overnight. And so the money supply doubles at a stroke. Is this nation doubly rich? Alas, it is not doubly rich. The money supply has been doubled, yes. The nation’s pockets are doubly deep. Men feel flush and are eager to spend. But no additional goods have entered existence. Where is the gain - except in prices?
Explains the late “Austrian” economist Murray Rothbard: "What makes us rich is an abundance of goods, and what limits that abundance is a scarcity of resources: namely land, labor and capital. Multiplying coin will not whisk these resources into being. We may feel twice as rich for the moment, but clearly all we are doing is diluting the money supply. As the public rushes out to spend its newfound wealth, prices will, very roughly, double - or at least rise until the demand is satisfied, and money no longer bids against itself for the existing goods."
There you have the wisdom of classical economics - the forgotten wisdom of classical economics. We would refresh the memory.
Savings Equal Investment: And as we would remind the consumptionists: There can be no investment without savings, as there can be no bread without grain. Again, Rothbard: "Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other. Aside from bank credit, investments can come from no other source than savings… In order to invest resources in the future, he must first restrict his consumption and save funds. This restricting is his savings, and so saving and investment are always equivalent. The two terms may be used almost interchangeably."
The more accumulated savings in the economy, the more potential investment - a nice point to put somewhere. An economy built atop a sturdy foundation of savings is therefore a rugged economy, a durable economy. No passing gale will knock it over.
Saving Is Spending: And as we have argued before… When society saves, it is not eliminating consumption. It is merely delaying it. It is a future bird in a future hand. The demand that is supposedly lost is not lost at all. It is simply shifted away from the present… and toward the bountiful future.
Today’s savings are therefore tomorrow’s spending, tomorrow’s consumption. By reducing consumption today… society consumes more tomorrow. By increasing consumption today, society consumes less tomorrow. It devours the seed corn.
Or according to Henry Hazlitt, author of the classic "Economics in One Lesson": “Saving, in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending.” More from whom: "From time immemorial proverbial wisdom has taught the virtues of saving, and warned against the consequences of prodigality and waste."
We have forgotten this immemorial proverbial wisdom. Yet it echoes deep within the heart, it echoes deep within the soul. It is time to remember…"
Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
English Lyrics:
"Turn With Me Tonight"
"The world turns with me tonight.
Small steps that I make with you.
I follow your heart, and I follow the moon
So hidden far from me.
The world turns with us tonight,
Ah, if only far from here there existed
A place where to discover my heart,
To know if it can love you or not.
And it will turn, and it will turn,
My heart together with you,
And the earth will turn,
And my life will turn,
And one day, yes, it will understand.
It's you who turns with me tonight,
It's you who turns far from here.
But I know that you are my moon,
Something you show, something you don't.
There are blue streets in the sky
There are eyes, and the sky is already there
Yes, I believe they are the stars
Ah, if I could stop myself like this.
And it will turn, and it will turn,
My heart together with you.
And the earth will turn,
And my life will turn,
And one day, yes, it will understand.
Heart already far away,
Yes, you are the moon,
If only I could discover it in the sky.
And it will turn, and it will turn,
Yes it will turn, this heart of mine.
And the earth will turn,
And my life will turn,
And one day, yes, it will understand.
And one day, yes, it will understand you.”
"A Look to the Heavens"
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe.”
“The Descent Of Man”
“The Descent Of Man”
Has Human intelligence been on an intellectual and
emotional decline since its peak thousands of years ago?
by Steve Connor
"Is the human species doomed to intellectual decline? Will our intelligence ebb away in centuries to come leaving our descendants incapable of using the technology their ancestors invented? In short: will Homo be left without his sapiens? This is the controversial hypothesis of a leading geneticist who believes that the immense capacity of the human brain to learn new tricks is under attack from an array of genetic mutations that have accumulated since people started living in cities a few thousand years ago.
Professor Gerald Crabtree, who heads a genetics laboratory at Stanford University in California, has put forward the iconoclastic idea that rather than getting cleverer, human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on there has been a slow decline in our intellectual and emotional abilities.
Although we are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species, Professor Crabtree said. His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effective stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical "intelligence" genes.
"I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues," Professor Crabtree said in a provocative paper published in the journal "Trends in Genetics". "Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago," Professor Crabtree says. "The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile," he says.
A comparison of the genomes of parents and children has revealed that on average there are between 25 and 65 new mutations occurring in the DNA of each generation. Professor Crabtree says that this analysis predicts about 5,000 new mutations in the past 120 generations, which covers a span of about 3,000 years. Some of these mutations, he suggests, will occur within the 2,000 to 5,000 genes that are involved in human intellectual ability, for instance by building and mapping the billions of nerve cells of the brain or producing the dozens of chemical neurotransmitters that control the junctions between these brain cells.
Life as a hunter-gatherer was probably more intellectually demanding than widely supposed, he says. "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate," Professor Crabtree says.
However, other scientists remain skeptical. "At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren't any," said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London. "I could just as well argue that mutations have reduced our aggression, our depression and our penis length but no journal would publish that. Why do they publish this?" Professor Jones said. "I am an advocate of Gradgrind science - facts, facts and more facts; but we need ideas too, and this is an ideas paper although I have no idea how the idea could be tested," he said.
The Descent of Man:
• Hunter-gatherer man: The human brain and its immense capacity for knowledge evolved during this long period of prehistory when we battled against the elements
• Athenian man: The invention of agriculture less than 10,000 years ago and the subsequent rise of cities such as Athens relaxed the intensive natural selection of our "intelligence genes".
• Couch-potato man: As genetic mutations increase over future generations, are we doomed to watching soap-opera repeats without knowing how to use the TV remote control?
• iPad man: The fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations."
"The Extra Ounce..."
"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can
reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the
extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."
- Muhammad Ali
"Tell Yourself..."
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
- Louise Erdrich
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/6/22"
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/6/22"
Updated as available.
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"The more I see of the moneyed classes,
the more I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
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CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Jan 6th to 7th 2022
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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...
"Reality Avoidance"
"Reality Avoidance"
by Morris Berman
"It’s quite amazing how the news is endlessly about nonsense. Filler, is what I call it. Very little of this has anything to do with reality, which the Mainstream Media and the American people avoid like the plague. What then is real?
1. The empire is in decline; every day, life here gets a little bit worse; all our institutions are corrupt to varying degrees; and there is no turning this situation around.
2. A crucial factor in this decline and irreversibility is the low level of intelligence of the American people. Americans are not only dumb; they are positively antagonistic toward the life of the mind.
3. Relations of power and money determine practically everything. The 3 wealthiest Americans own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, and this tendency will get worse over time.
4. The value system of the country, and its citizens, is fundamentally wrong-headed. It amounts to little more than hustling, selfishness, narcissism, and a blatant disregard for anyone but oneself. There is a kind of cruelty, or violence, deep in the American soul; many foreign observers and writers have commented on this. Americans are bitter, depressed, and angry, and the country offers very little by way of community or empathy.
5. Along with this is the support of meaningless wars and imperial adventures on the part of most of the population. That we drone-murder unarmed civilians on a weekly basis is barely on the radar screen of the American mind. In essence, the nation has evolved into a genocidal war machine run by a plutocracy and cheered on by mindless millions.
Most Americans hide from these depressing, even horrific, realities by what passes for ‘the news’, but also by means of alcohol, opioids, TV, cellphones, suicide, prescription drugs, workaholism, and spectator sports, to name but a few. This stuffing of the Void is probably our primary activity. In a word, we are eating ourselves alive, and only a tiny fraction of the population recognizes this."
1. The empire is in decline; every day, life here gets a little bit worse; all our institutions are corrupt to varying degrees; and there is no turning this situation around.
2. A crucial factor in this decline and irreversibility is the low level of intelligence of the American people. Americans are not only dumb; they are positively antagonistic toward the life of the mind.
3. Relations of power and money determine practically everything. The 3 wealthiest Americans own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, and this tendency will get worse over time.
4. The value system of the country, and its citizens, is fundamentally wrong-headed. It amounts to little more than hustling, selfishness, narcissism, and a blatant disregard for anyone but oneself. There is a kind of cruelty, or violence, deep in the American soul; many foreign observers and writers have commented on this. Americans are bitter, depressed, and angry, and the country offers very little by way of community or empathy.
5. Along with this is the support of meaningless wars and imperial adventures on the part of most of the population. That we drone-murder unarmed civilians on a weekly basis is barely on the radar screen of the American mind. In essence, the nation has evolved into a genocidal war machine run by a plutocracy and cheered on by mindless millions.
Most Americans hide from these depressing, even horrific, realities by what passes for ‘the news’, but also by means of alcohol, opioids, TV, cellphones, suicide, prescription drugs, workaholism, and spectator sports, to name but a few. This stuffing of the Void is probably our primary activity. In a word, we are eating ourselves alive, and only a tiny fraction of the population recognizes this."
"The Economy/Market Look 'Healthy' Until They Have A Seizure & Collapse"
"The Economy/Market Look 'Healthy'
Until They Have A Seizure & Collapse"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Some readers occasionally make the point that I've been predicting a market crash for ten years and been dead-wrong for ten years. I'm all for mocking presumptuous pundits of either the tin-foil hat or mainstream variety, but that's not quite what I've been saying for 13 long, tedious years.
What I've been saying is that living on junk food and sugar-cocaine speedballs isn't "health" just because a handful of pills has dropped cholesterol readings to "healthy" levels. If we define "health" by a metric that is easily manipulated, then the illusion of "health" can be maintained right up until the supposedly "healthy" individual has a seizure and drops dead.
Since the 2008-2009 financial-coronary and emergency-intervention that revealed the abjectly poor health of the global financial system, central banks and states have jacked up stocks and other assets as the metric of a "healthy" economy. Just as banging down cholesterol doesn't actually make a chronically ill person subsisting on junk food, sugar and cocaine healthy, jacking stocks to new highs doesn't make the economy or financial system healthy. All it does is mask the decay of real health and amplify the eventual reckoning.
There are three dynamics at work in the artifice that ever-greater monetary and fiscal stimulus and jacked-up stock markets will restore the health of a decaying, sickly economy. One is that sugar-cocaine speedballs generate miraculous results at first: the manic rush of energy and the delusional confidence in god-like powers looks like robust health if viewed through a distorted lens that filters out all the hidden trade-offs and costs to depending on speedballs to function.
The second is the addiction to stimulus and manipulated metrics of "health" is unfailingly fatal. If the economy / market continue relying on sugar-cocaine speedballs to keep racing higher, the second-order consequences and distortions eventually trigger a seizure and collapse. (Please read "What Will Surprise Us in 2022" for an explanation of how addiction to stimulus triggers second-order consequences).
But going cold-turkey and stopping the speedball stimulus and manipulation of metrics will also trigger seizure and collapse. This is the downside of depending on feel-good stimulus and faking metrics of "health": once the artificial stimulus becomes the lifeblood, withdrawing it leads to collapse. Once ginned-up metrics are worshiped as "proof" of health, when the manipulation finally fails then all the confidence and trust in the metrics and those doing the manipulation is lost.
The third dynamic is the greater the initial buffers of wealth available, the longer the fake "health" can be propped up. Consider Japan's three decades of stagnation and largely hidden decay. Japan continues to hold vast overseas wealth and cultural cohesion, and these sources of wealth enable Japan's state and central bank to conjure trillions of yen out of thin air and trade the yen for natural gas to maintain the illusion of "health."
Less wealthy nations without central bank-issued "money" can only sustain the sugar-speedball illusion of "health" for a few years before reality intrudes and the artifice collapses.
The United States has burned virtually all of its social cohesion and trust in institutions in the past 13 years of sugar-cocaine speedball stimulus and artifice. All the sugar-cocaine speedball stimulus did was enrich the already-rich and impoverish everyone else, to the point that the top few collect 97% of all income generated by capital and own more wealth than the bottom 80%. This extreme distortion and inequality is tearing apart the economy, society and political order - all to keep 'the key metric of "health" - the stock market - soaring to new highs.
It's frustrating watching the doped-up wreck living on Cheetos, sugar and cocaine proclaiming how much energy he has and how his portfolio is soaring, as we all know his demise is inevitable. Just as the body keeps trying to compensate for the ravages of junk food, sugar and cocaine and re-establish homeostasis, the real-world economy staggers on as the people left behind by the sugar-cocaine wealth boost keep doing the real work of keeping the whole rotten edifice functioning.
But the efforts of all those keeping the real-world economy glued together can't put off the consequences of our total dependence on sugar-cocaine speedballs and the artifice of asset bubbles being "proof" of "health. The junkie living on speedballs keeps going right up until the moment they have a seizure and collapse. Right up until this sudden demise, the junkie insists they're healthy because "look at my low cholesterol reading."
The decay is hidden and gradual, but the collapse is sudden and irreversible.
So one index or asset or another hits a new high, wow, more proof everything is so robust and healthy, we never had it so good - right up to the seizure and collapse."
"Dire Warnings? The Financial Crisis Is Already Here"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/6/22:
"Dire Warnings? The Financial Crisis Is Already Here"
"It seems that bad news spurs the stock market.
We keep getting Dire Warnings about the economy.
Trouble is coming they say. No, it's already here."
"Wall Street Banks Have an Alibi for their $11.23 Trillion in Emergency Repo Loans from the Fed – It’s a Doozy"
"Wall Street Banks Have an Alibi for their $11.23 Trillion
in Emergency Repo Loans from the Fed – It’s a Doozy"
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
"From September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020, the trading units of the Wall Street megabanks (both domestic and foreign) took a cumulative total of $11.23 trillion in emergency repo loans from the Federal Reserve. The loans were conducted by one of the 12 regional Fed banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which is literally owned by megabanks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and others."
Please view this complete article here:
So, while you lose your jobs and homes,
these psychopaths get $11.23 TRILLION in 9 months...
And don't hold your breath waiting for it, it's never coming...Why?
Strong language alert!
George Carlin, "The Big Club"l
"It's a Big Club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the Big Club."
Gregory Mannarino, "Freefall - The Economy Continues To Meltdown"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/6/22:
"Freefall - The Economy Continues To Meltdown"
"Stocking Up At Sam's Club! Buying What We Can!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 1/6/22:
"Stocking Up At Sam's Club! Buying What We Can!"
"In today's vlog we are stocking up at Sam's Club! With stores struggling to get in products we head to Sam's Club to stock up on some essential items, and check out some of their rising costs on items. We are buying what we can to save a few dollars, and take you along with us to see if they have any of the missing items everyone is looking for. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next video!"
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
"IRS Is Watching You; FED About To Crash The Market; Assault On Small Business; Tax Target"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/5/22:
"IRS Is Watching You; FED About To Crash The Market;
Assault On Small Business; Tax Target"
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