"Las Vegas, Nevada has been our resort for these past several days. Here we have witnessed several madnesses - madnesses large, madnesses small. Madnesses public, madnesses private. Yet the public madness, the mass madness, the extended madness is our concern today. That is, the market madness.
And so we publish once again our reflections on the madness of crowds. As we have written before: When a man enters a crowd he exits civilization. He goes in, his blood goes up… and his reason goes out. As Herr Nietzsche long ago observed, madness is a rarity in individuals - but the rule in crowds. Or as argued Mr. Charles Mackay, author of the 1841 classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds": "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
“A Crowd Runs Not on Thought but on Hormones”: A man in a crowd ceases to be a man. He is instead a face. He is but a cog in a lunatic machine. And a man in a crowd does not think for himself. The crowd thinks for him. That is, the man ceases to think whatsoever. For a crowd runs not on thought but on hormones. The crowd’s lusts become the man’s lusts. The crowd’s will becomes the man’s will. The crowd’s devils become the man’s devils. It is these devils - in fact - that cement together a crowd.
A Crowd Needs a Devil: These devils may appear in the form of policemen, of whites, of blacks, of Muslims, of Christians, of Chinamen, of Russians, of conservatives, of progressives, of capitalists, of anti-capitalists, of greenhouse gas-geysers, of meat-munchers. One crowd has its devil. A second crowd, another. A third, a devil of its own. Above all: Any crowd’s hate for devils vastly exceeds its love for angels.
Angels do not excite the blood. Angels do not bubble the hormones. Angels do not furl the fingers into fists. Devils do excite the blood, get the blood up. Devils do bubble the hormones. Devils do furl the fingers into fists. Once you understand this you understand politics - politics yesterday, politics today, politics tomorrow.
A Crowd Is Not Necessarily a Street Mob: Let us now extend our analysis, beyond crowd, beyond mob… to nation…A crowd is not merely a mass on a street or a mob. A nation is a sort of crowd and a sort of mob. For our purposes we will label it a supercrowd. And no greater menace exists than a supercrowd after a devil… This supercrowd is given to the same madnesses as the street crowd… only its madnesses are amplified by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions, by the hundreds of millions. It often leaves “rivers of blood” and a “harvest of groans and tears” trailing behind them.
From the aforesaid "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds": "In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity."
The Madness of Market Crowds: A market too is a crowd, a mob… and equally susceptible to lunacy. Do you doubt it? Mr. Mackay consecrates page upon page to the Tulip delirium (1636–37), the Mississippi Bubble (1718–20) and the related South Sea Bubble (1720). And let us say it now: It is a pity the fellow no longer writes.
The stock market bubble of 1929, the technology bubble of 2000 and the housing bubble of 2008 added entire chapters to the literature of mass delusion. Additional chapters - no doubt - await writing. We hazard the 2020-2021 market deliriums will rank high among them. Here is the common element that unites them all: The man in a crowd. Only the man under crowd influence heaves his reason into a ditch. Why do men do it?
Man Must Choose Between Freedom and Happiness: Mankind confronts a choice, argued George Orwell in "1984." He must choose between freedom and happiness. And the mass of men prefer happiness to freedom: "The choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better."
The great bulk of men seek the peace and contentment of herd living - of life in a crowd. The man truly divorced from the social influence is a man truly exceptional. Freedom is too hot for most hands, as Mencken described it - or too cold for most spines, as Nietzsche described it. Either way… freedom runs to temperatures too extreme for most constitutions.
Here we do not judge. Nor do we evaluate or condemn. We merely describe, describe a phenomenon. The crowd offers safety. Numerical strength. Solidarity. Companionship. Reassurance.
“Freedom Includes the Freedom to Starve”:
As we have written before: The free man must go upon his own hook. He must push along under his own steam, weave his own safety net, face cruel fate alone. Do not forget: Freedom includes the freedom to starve. We therefore have no heat against the man who chooses security over freedom, the full belly over the empty belly.
We enjoy happiness ourself. Safety. Security. And a belly stretched to capacity. Extremes of heat and cold, meantime, immiserate us. And - despite all evidence - we enjoy human companionship. We nonetheless confess a vast respect for the man who never wanders into a crowd, for the man who does not flock. For we prefer humanity in batches of one. The free man’s example is the eagle, the free and noble eagle.
The Eagle: We would emulate the solitary eagle over the flocking birds - over the birds that crowd. For the eagle does not flock. You find him one by one. That is, the eagle takes the individual view. In our experience, that view is often the higher view, the superior view. The free man is the eagle high aloft, wheeling and wheeling on motionless wings, on steady wings, on confident wings…On free wings. He is free to starve, it is true. But he is also free to soar. And the man in a crowd? As the bird in a flock… he is free only to follow…
"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."
"The Bond market is affecting everything. The stock market and the real estate market are crashing. Get ready. Today I’m lucky enough to bring back Bob Kudla. He runs Trade Genius."
“What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides.
Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.”
“There is a concept in physics called angle of repose. Set an object, a book say, on a plank. Now slowly tip up one end of the plank until the moment when the book just starts to slide. The angle between the plank and the horizontal is the angle of repose, where the component of the gravitational force down the plank becomes greater than the maximum friction force holding the book at rest. Or, in more evocative terms - as I write I am lying on the couch with the laptop in my lap, in perfect repose. If you started tipping up the couch, at some point I'd go sliding into a heap at the bottom. That's the angle of repose, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the angle of the end of repose.
This comes to mind because I just spent fifteen minutes on my knees in the yard watching ants excavate a nest in the ground. One by one they scurry out of the hole carrying a tiny grain of sand, which they dump in a ring around the hole. A circular pile. Now if the ants just dumped their burdens at the mouth of the hole, pretty soon the pile would get so steep that the sand grains would slide back into the hole. Instead, the circular ring gets higher and wider, with a slope that never exceeds the angle at which the grains will slip - the angle of repose. Now here's the thing: the ants almost invariably carry their grain to just beyond the top of the pile. If the grain slips, it will slide away from the hole. These tiny ants, hardly bigger than sand grains themselves, understand a little physics in their mysterious instinctive way.
Wallace Stegner has a novel titled "Angle of Repose." It is indeed an evocative phrase. In a job, in a relationship, in life itself, many of us instinctively seek that maximum degree of individual gratification that will satisfy emotional needs without doing violence to our essential repose, and that of those around us - the art of walking close to the edge, the thrill without the spill. Every day in the news we hear of folks - politicians or celebrities - who tipped the plank too far, whose lives went sliding into self-destruction, who failed to grasp, metaphorically speaking, something that a tiny ant instinctively understands.”
"Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become."
"War does not determine who's right... only who's left."
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Full screen recommended,
10/13/22: "Col. Douglas MacGregor:
Ukraine Is In A Very Serious Crisis, It May Not Survive"
"Ukraine is reeling from the targeted strikes from Russia. Much of the country is without water and electricity because of the critical infrastructure strikes. It is a signal that Russia knows what is happening behind the curtain in Ukraine and can reach into wherever they'd like. What happens when the soil freezes? Massive offenses? We have chilling predictions from Colonel Douglas MacGregor."
"All wars have their unique character, but the war in the Ukraine is probably one of the strangest in the history of the West. Its strangeness is due to the two sides operating from a different set of facts and a different framework for those facts. It is as if the two sides are fighting entirely different wars. In point of fact, the two sides are fighting different wars, despite doing so on a common battlefield. That reality is about to become clearer as the war moves into winter.
The first main difference in the war is that the Russians are fighting it from a highly legalistic and bureaucratic perspective. The West does not seem to grasp this and keeps treating it like a cartoonish war of conquest. They frame Putin as a version of Hitler, who is now a cartoon villain in the Western imagination. Putin is attacking Ukraine for no reason at all and has no real plan other than war. It is just some irrational land grab, like when Hitler conquered Poland¹.
In reality the Russians have conducted this war like a group of lawyers engaged in complex civil litigation. They spend a lot of time on legalistic points like the official legal status of the disputed territory. Before the start of the war, the Russians put a lot of time into legally recognizing Luhansk and Donetsk as independent territories. The ongoing attacks on these areas by Ukraine was the legal pretext for the Special Military Operation that started eight months ago.
This legalistic mindset is turning up in the response to the terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge in the Crimea. The facts were quickly established. Ukraine took credit for the attack and promised more. Once the Russian investigators confirmed the essentials of the attack, that it was terrorism and sponsored by Ukraine, the Russians could then conduct anti-terrorism activity. Again, this an important legal distinction for the Russians, as it permits specific activities.
Russia launched one hundred missiles at key Ukrainian facilities overnight as a response to the attack and as a warning. Much of the internet is down in Ukraine and parts of various cities are without power and water. You see, Russia can legally attack civilian infrastructure in response to terror attacks. The warning here is that if the terrorism continues, the Russians have the legal right to take out all of Ukraine’s power, water and communications systems.
Contrast this with how the West is fighting the war. At the start, Western governments seized the property of Russian companies and individuals. There was no court case or legal arguments about it. They just did it. They filled Western media with gleeful stories about stealing the yachts of Russian oligarchs. The owner of the Chelsea football club was forced to sell the team. Germany seized the assets of Gazprom, the Russian energy firm that supplies its natural gas.
Then you have the sanctions war. Much of what has been imposed on Russia has been done outside the normal channels. The whole point of the New World Order is that it is a rules based world and those rules are administered though global entities like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The point of these groups is to hash out difference between countries. All of those were bypassed. Even the legislatures of the respective countries were bypassed.
When you put the two ways of waging the war side-by-side, you get a picture that is the opposite of what is presented. The one side is bogging itself down in paperwork and legalism while the other side is cutting through the red tape and the rule of law to implement the latest polices. In a way, it is like this war is being waged between the bureaucracy of the post office and the leadership of the Mafia. It is a war between two entirely alien ways of viewing the world.
Another place you see the contrast is in public relations. The Russians have abandoned the field when it comes to the meme war. They have invested no effort in winning the daily news cycle or spinning events into clever narratives. Instead, they provide daily updates on the granular details of the war. If you care about how many flat tires were fixed by Russian forces every day, the Ministry of Defense is your source. Their reports are a dry accounting of the basic facts.
On the other hand, the Western side of the war is a carnival of creative stories that are splashed across Western media. The occupation of abandoned territory in the north was treated like the Battle of the Bulge. The terror attack on the Kerch bridge was a great blow to the Russian army. Once it was clear the bridge was not destroyed and was back in service, it was off to the next narrative. The West has been waging this war on the internet as if it is actually taking place there.
Probably the biggest difference between the two sides is how they explain their respective involvement in the war. The Russians see it as a defense of the Russian people and the Russian homeland. The people in the Donbas are Russians and therefore must be defended by Russia. Further, Western activity in Ukraine is portrayed as part of a larger American effort to destroy Russia. The Russian people are once again being called upon to defend the motherland.
In the West, the war is an abstract thing. It is a defense of democracy, which is a thing no one bothers to explain. In fact, if you ask what it means you get shouted down as a threat to our democracy. Like so much of what has happened in the West over the last three decades, this war is a moral signifier. If you support it, you are a good person, but if you have doubts, it means you are a bad person. Even thinking about why this is true is a sign you may be a bad person.
All wars have consequences but it is never easy to see what they are until they finally arrive, usually long after the fighting has ended. No one at the end of the Great War imagined the events of the 1930’s. In this case, the West is sure that what lies ahead is their New World Order. The Russians think what lies ahead is a multipolar world of which they are an important part. Two powers, fighting two wars with two visions of what comes next and both cannot be right.
“We are not threatening anyone. We have made it clear that any further NATO movement to the east is unacceptable. There’s nothing unclear about this. We aren’t deploying our missiles to the border of the United States, but the United States IS deploying their missiles close to our home, to the porch of our house. Are we asking too much? We’re just asking that they not deploy their attack-systems to our home… What is so hard to understand about that?” - Russian President Vladimir Putin, YouTube, Start at :48 seconds:
Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do? Would he brush it off like a big nothingburger and move on or would he threaten the Mexican government with a military invasion that would obliterate the Mexican Army, level their biggest cities, and send the government running for cover? Which of these two options do you think Biden would choose?
There’s no doubt what Biden would do nor is there any question what the 45 presidents who preceded him would do. No US leader would ever stand by and do nothing while thousands of Americans were savagely slaughtered by a foreign government. That just wouldn’t happen. They’d all respond quickly and forcefully. But if that’s true, then why isn’t the same standard applied to Russia? Isn’t the situation in Ukraine nearly identical?
It is nearly identical, only the situation in Ukraine is worse, much worse. And if we stretch our analogy a bit, you’ll see why: Let’s say, the US Intelligence agencies discovered that the Mexican government was not acting alone, but was being directed to kill and maim American ex-pats on orders from the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. Can you imagine that?
And the reason the Chinese government wants to kill Americans in Mexico is because they want to lure the US into a long and costly war that will “weaken” the US and pave way for its ultimate splintering into many pieces that China can control and exploit. Does any of this sound familiar? (Check out the Rand Strategy for weakening Russia here.)
So, let’s say, the Chinese are actually the driving force behind the war in Mexico. Let’s say, they toppled the Mexican government years earlier and installed their own puppet regime to do their bidding. Then they armed and trained vast numbers of troops to fight the Americans. They supplied these warriors with cutting-edge weapons and technology, logistical support, satellite and communications assistance, tanks, armored vehicles, anti-ship missiles, and state-of-the-art artillery units all of which were provided with one goal in mind; to crush America in a proxy war that was concocted, controlled and micro-managed from the Chinese Capital of Beijing
Is such a scenario possible? It is possible, in fact, this very same scenario is playing out right now in the Ukraine, only the perpetrator of the hostilities is the United States not China, and the target of this malign strategy is Russia not the US. Surprisingly, the Biden administration isn’t even trying to hide what they’re up-to anymore. They’re openly arming, training, funding, and directing Ukrainian troops to prosecute a war aimed at killing Russian soldiers and removing Putin from power. That’s the objective and everyone knows it.
And the whole campaign is based on the sketchy claim that Russia is guilty of “unprovoked aggression”. That’s the whole deal in a nutshell. The moral justification for the war rests on the unverified assumption that Russia committed a criminal offense and broke international law by invading Ukraine. But, did they? Let’s see if that assumption is correct or if it’s just another fake claim by a dissembling media that never stops tweaking the narrative to build the case for war.
First of all, answer this one question related to the analogy above: If the US deployed troops to Mexico to protect American expats from being bombarded by the Mexican army, would you regard that deployment as an ‘unprovoked aggression’ or a rescue mission? Rescue mission, right? Because the primary intention was to save lives, not seize the territory of another sovereign country.
Well, that’s what Putin was doing when he sent his tanks into Ukraine. He was trying stop the killing of civilians living in the Donbas whose only fault was that they were ethnic Russians committed to their own culture and traditions. Is that a crime? Take a look at this map:
This map is the key to understanding how the war in Ukraine started. It tells us who did the provoking and who was being provoked. It tells us who was dropping the bombs and who was getting bombed. It tells us who was causing the trouble and who was being blamed for the trouble-making. The map tells us everything we need to know.
Can you see the yellow dots? Those dots represent the artillery strikes that were documented in daily summaries by “observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontlines.” The vast majority of the strikes were in the area inhabited by Russian-speaking people who have been under military siege for the last 8 years. (14,000 ethnic Russians have been killed in the fighting since 2014.) The Minsk Agreements were drawn up to resolve the issues between the warring parties and end the hostilities, but the government in Kiev refused to implement the agreement. In fact, the former President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, even admitted that the treaty was just a vehicle for buying time until another full-scale offensive on the Donbas could be launched.
In short, the Ukrainian government never had any intention of reaching a peaceful settlement with leaders of the Donbas. Their goal was to intensify the conflict in order to provoke Russia and draw them into a protracted war that would exhaust their resources and collapse their economy. The long-range objective was to remove Putin from office and replace him with a Washington-backed stooge that would do as he was told. US officials – including Joe Biden - have even admitted that their plan involved regime change in Moscow. We should take them at their word.
The map provides a visual account of the events leading up the Russian invasion. It cuts through the lies and identifies the true origins of the war which can be traced back to the heavy artillery strikes launched by the Ukrainian Army more than a week before the Russian invasion. (February 24) The massive shelling was aimed at the Russian-speaking people living in an area in east Ukraine. These are the people who were being bombarded by their fellow Ukrainians.
What Really Happened? On February 16 - a full 8 days before the Russian invasion - the shelling of the Donbas increased dramatically and steadily intensified for the next week “to over 2,000 per day on February 22.” As we said, these blasts were logged in daily summaries by observers of the OSCE who were on the frontlines. Think about that for a minute. In other words, these are eyewitness accounts by trained professionals who collected documented evidence of the Ukrainian Army’s massive bombardment of areas inhabited by their own people.
Would this evidence hold up in a court of law if a case against the Ukrainian government was ever presented before an international tribunal trying to assign accountability for the hostilities?
We think it would. We think the evidence is rock-solid. In fact, we have not read or heard of even one analyst who has challenged this vast catalogue of documented evidence. Instead, the media simply pretends the proof doesn’t exist. They have simply swept the evidence under the rug or vanished it from their coverage altogether in order to shape a Washington-centric version of events that completely ignores the historical record. But facts are facts. And the facts don’t change because the media fails to report them. And what the facts suggest is that the war in Ukraine is a Washington-concocted war no different than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. Once again, Uncle Sam’s bloody fingerprints are all over this sorry affair.
Check out this summary of ceasefire violations posted on podcast host Martyr Made’s twitter account:
Martyr Made @martyrmade
On Feb 15, the OSCE recorded 41 ceasefire violations as Kiev’s forces began shelling Donbas.
Feb 16: 76 violations
Feb 17: 316 violations
Feb 18: 654 violations
Feb 19: 1,413 violations
Feb 20-21: 2,026 violations
Feb 22: 1,484 violations
…virtually all by the Kiev side.
Feb 24: Russian forces intervene.
Notice how the shelling of the Donbas increased every day before the invasion? I’d call that a thoroughly-calculated provocation, wouldn’t you?
Why does this matter? It matters because the vast majority of people have been hoodwinked into supporting a war for which there is no moral justification. This is not a case of “unprovoked aggression”. Not even close. And Putin is not an out-of-control tyrant bent on reconstituting the Soviet Empire by terrorizing his neighbors and seizing their territory. That is a complete fabrication based on nothing but speculation. In Putin’s own words, he invaded Ukraine because he had no choice. His own people were being ruthlessly exterminated by an army that acts on Washington’s orders alone. He had to invade, there was no other option. Putin felt a moral obligation to defend the ethnic Russians in Ukraine who could not defend themselves. Is that aggression? Here’s a bit more background from an article at The Intercept by James Risen:
Despite staging a massive military buildup on his country’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
In December, the CIA issued classified reports concluding that Putin hadn’t yet committed to an invasion, according to the current and former officials. In January, even as the Russian military was starting to take the logistical steps necessary to move its troops into Ukraine, U.S. intelligence again issued classified reporting maintaining that Putin had still not resolved to actually launch an attack, the officials said.
It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added. With few other options available at the last minute to try to stop Putin, President Joe Biden took the unusual step of making the intelligence public, in what amounted to a form of information warfare against the Russian leader. He also warned that Putin was planning to try to fabricate a pretext for invasion, including by making false claims that Ukrainian forces had attacked civilians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The preemptive use of intelligence by Biden revealed “a new understanding … that the information space may be among the most consequential terrain Putin is contesting,” observed Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution.”
Biden’s warning on February 18 that the invasion would happen within the week turned out to be accurate. In the early hours of February 24, Russian troops moved south into Ukraine from Belarus and across Russia’s borders into Kharkiv, the Donbas region, and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.” (“U.S. Intelligence Says Putin Made a Last-Minute Decision to Invade Ukraine”, James Risen, The Intercept)
There’s so much baloney in this excerpt, it’s hard to know where to begin. But just review the timeline we provided earlier; a timeline that has been verified by officials from the OSCE. Can you see the discrepancy?
Biden issued his warning on February 18; that’s two days after monitors from the OSCE reported an intensification of the bombing in the Donbas. In other words, Biden already knew that his buddies in the Ukrainian army were bombing the shit out of east Ukraine when he tried to make it look like he was privy to some sensitive, insider information about the upcoming invasion.
Of course, he knew Putin was going to invade! They created the provocation that forced him to invade! They were bombing the hell out of the people Putin is obliged to protect. What else could he do? Any leader worth his salt would have done same thing.
What bothers me is that people continue support the war in Ukraine because they have no idea of what actually happened in the lead-up to the invasion. They know nothing about the relentless bombing of civilians, or the defiant rejection of Minsk or the repeated military attacks on the Donbas, or the or the plan to retake Crimea through force of arms. or the laws directed against ethnic Russians, or the rise of Nazi fascism in Kiev. They know nothing about any of these things. Their views on Ukraine are entirely shaped by the rubbish they read in the western media or hear on the cable news channels where the deluge of propaganda issues like a mighty river pulling the population inexorably towards another vicious neocon bloodbath. People must know the truth or this war will escalate into something far worse."
Baltimore, Maryland - "A lot of red on the screen this morning. The latest inflation readings were worse than expected. The Dow dropped 500 points. Remember, we’re only in the very first stage of what we believe will be a multi-stage disaster, like a traffic pile-up on I-95 during a foggy morning rush hour.
After the Bubble Epoch, created by misters Greenspan, Bernanke, (Ms.) Yellen, and Powell, came consumer price inflation. It is still with us. Bloomberg: "US Core Inflation Seen Returning to 40-Year High as Rents Rise." "CPI excluding food, energy probably rose 6.5% from year ago. Report expected to keep Fed on path to big November rate hike. A key US inflation measure due Thursday is set to return to a four-decade high, underscoring broad and elevated price pressures that are pushing the Federal Reserve toward yet another large interest-rate hike next month."
And here’s CNBC with the latest on wholesale prices: "Wholesale prices rose more than expected in September despite Federal Reserve efforts to control inflation, according to a report Wednesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The producer price index, a measure of prices that U.S. businesses get for the goods and services they produce, increased 0.4% for the month, compared to the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% gain. On a 12-month basis, PPI rose 8.5%, which was a slight deceleration from the 8.7% in August."
The Next Shoe: The inflation numbers guarantee that we will stay in this deflation stage of the disaster at least a bit longer. Then, something will give. It could be a major pension fund, such as Calpers, with half a trillion in assets. It could be a Wall Street finance house, such as BlackRock, with $8.5 trillion in assets. Or it could be a big corporation forced into bankruptcy by rising interest payments.
The longer the Fed remains on course – to exterminate inflation – the closer we get to the ‘pivot,’ when a financial shock keeps it from getting the job done. The big questions are: when will the Fed do its pirouette? And what happens then? Most people think the Fed will soon go back to normal – which, for them, means rising stock prices, with inflation subdued.
Maybe it is just our imagination. But we notice a big difference between how young people look at the situation and how older people do. Anyone younger than 60 has no adult recollection of any financial world other than the one we’ve had since 1980. They think that was normal. And after this hissy fit is over, and the Fed turns around, they believe things will go back to the ‘normal’ they have known.
But there was nothing normal about the 1980-2020 period. Is it normal for stock prices to multiply 36 times – as the Dow did between 1982 and 2021? Is it normal for real bond yields to drop from the high teens down to under zero? Is it normal for the Fed to “print” more new money 18 months than it had in nearly 100 years… or for the federal government to multiply its debt by 30 times… even as its carrying cost (interest payments) went down?
Back to the Future: We could go on. There were more freaks in this show than in Barnum and Bailey’s circus – zombie corporations, goofy cryptos, billion-dollar valuations for companies with no plausible way to earn money. And yet… for so many callow investors… that was Planet Earth – the way things have been… the way they are… and the way they shall ever be. They think stocks always go up “over the long run.” Yes, there may be sell-offs, they admit, but a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds will always pay off. Maybe. But not necessarily in your lifetime.
You’ve got to go back before the ‘80s… and you’ve got to look at it in terms of real money – gold – to see what ‘normal’ really looks like. If you’d bought stocks in the late 1920s, you would have gotten all 30 Dow stocks in exchange for 16 ounces of gold. Then, by 1933 you would have lost 90% of your money… and waited another 26 years to break even again.
Yes… prices move in cycles… but they are long cycles. Same thing in the 1960s. Inflation was dogging the economy then, as it is now. And then, a stockbroker would have told you what he will tell you now – “don’t worry about market timing; just get good companies and hold on.”
If you’d owned stocks in the mid-60s, your 30 Dow stocks would have been worth as much as 24 ounces of gold. Then, it took 15 years for the market to hit a bottom, in 1980… and you’d be down 93%. Then what? You would have waited another 17 years to breakeven. Altogether, if you’d bought stocks at age 40 in 1965, you’d be 72 years old in 1997… with not a penny of capital gain to show for it.
But imagine that you followed your broker’s advice… and you just stuck with the program. Today, you’d be 97 years old. And instead of stocks worth 24 ounces of gold, as they were in 1965, they would be worth 17 ounces! Congratulations, your stocks lost 30% of their value over the last 57 years. (Not including dividends).
Is there a better way? Maybe. Tune in tomorrow..."
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Joel’s Note: We asked Bill yesterday what he sees coming down the pike next, now that the three sources of modern superabundance are, in their own ways, coming to an abrupt end?That is, if we’re witnessing the end of cheap and abundant energy… as the situation in Europe, vis-a-vis Russia, plus news of a 2 million bpd reduction in output from OPEC Plus countries, seems to be indicating…
And the end of cheap and abundant manufactured goods, now that China is weaponizing its supply chains and the geopolitical world order has been pitched into disarray as sovereign nations scramble to ink energy and strategic alliances…
And, arguably the grand daddy of them all, the end of cheap and abundant credit… which has been gushing forth from the spigots of the world’s central banks now for decades, inviting malinvestments and price distortions of truly epic proportions… the kind that beckon, and even deserve, commensurately epic repricing, potentially to the tune of trillions of dollars in losses…
Meanwhile, Bonner Private Research’s Investment Director, Tom Dyson, has been on the case since the inception of this humble, Substack project, warning readers about the end of what he calls the “Greatest Financial Experiment in History.” Here he was yesterday, bringing members up to speed with the latest…
"Over the last 30 years, the Feds inflated a gigantic bubble. Every time the bubble burst, they doubled down, bailed out Wall Street and blew an even bigger bubble, culminating in a post-pandemic Everything Bubble. Not only did this Everything Bubble go global, but it seeped into every area of finance, including the government bond market and the savings of nations.
And as we’ve seen in the UK, the low interest rates which enabled the bubble also encouraged bad risk taking. Hedge fund managers, pension funds, and banks all resorted to massive borrowing at low rates (leverage) to try and goose returns. Now, you’re seeing a global margin call. To meet that margin call, you sell whatever you can (usually what is most liquid).
In short, the bubble has burst and the world economy is now deleveraging. This is just the beginning. The Fed is still in rate hiking mode. But even if the Fed relented, I’m not sure it would make any difference. Once the dam breaks…"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"Russia Prepares its People... NATO's Nuclear 'Exercise'"
"Is Russia advising its citizens to prepare for nuclear conflict? Shanghai is Stockpiling water, France gasoline and USA fried chicken and winter hasn't arrived yet!"
"The West’s $1 Trillion Bid To Collapse Russia’s Economy'
by Epic Economist
"Seven months have passed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States along with its European allies has so far slapped more than 11,000 coordinated Sanctions on Russia. Economic experts agree that Russia is wounded, but despite the embargos Putin’s aggression only escalates. Ukraine remains under siege and the economic sanctions are bleeding many unintended victims.
The answer to whether the Sanctions work or not is certainly subjective. However, the one indicator of failure is that even after months of sanctions, Russia is keeping the war going.
What the West really wanted was to take away Moscow's ability to finance the war. However, Putin remains dedicated to his war and even announced the annexation of Donbas - an area that makes up 18% of Ukraine's total land and is home to 6 million people.
Even the early passionate Ukraine supporters and backers aren't as confident now. Elon Musk for example, recently invited a Twitter war over his controversial comments urging Ukraine to be neutral and suggesting that they should let Russia have the annexed Territories. Any Impact desired from the sanctions will be gradual, however, the Suffering of the War is immediate and not just for its direct victims but for millions of unintended victims around the world.
An economic winter was predicted with hopes that the Russian economy will shrink by more than 15%. A fortified currency isn't always an indicator of a functioning economy but other markers show why the Russian Collapse hasn't happened at the pace it was predicted.
Unemployment hasn’t shown a noticeable surge and 7 months later, Moscow's restaurants and bars remain busy as ever. Grocery shelves are stocked, and shopping malls are filled with people. The International Monetary Fund has revisited its initial gloomy forecasts and now thinks that Russia's economy will contract by just over 4 percent.
What the West really wanted was to take away Moscow's ability to finance the war. However, Putin remains dedicated to his war and even announced the annexation of Donbas - an area that makes up 18% of Ukraine's total land and is home to 6 million people. Even the early passionate Ukraine supporters and backers aren't as confident now. Elon Musk for example, recently invited a Twitter war over his controversial comments urging Ukraine to be neutral and suggesting that they should let Russia have the annexed Territories."
“Planetary nebula Abell 78 stands out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. In fact the colors of the spiky Milky Way stars depend on their surface temperatures, both cooler (yellowish) and hotter (bluish) than the Sun. But Abell 78 shines by the characteristic emission of ionized atoms in the tenuous shroud of material shrugged off from an intensely hot central star. The atoms are ionized, their electrons stripped away, by the central star's energetic but otherwise invisible ultraviolet light.
The visible blue-green glow of loops and filaments in the nebula's central region corresponds to emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms, surrounded by strong red emission from electrons recombining with hydrogen atoms. Some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Cygnus, Abell 78 is about three light-years across. A planetary nebula like Abell 78 represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience... in about 5 billion years.”
"In this video I discuss my predictions for how things play out, war economies; USA troop deployments to Europe; NATO dissolves, record energy prices; Russias official declaration of war; Poland clashes with Belarus, enters conflict; Taiwan straight flare up; Nuclear incident; market crash; cyberattacks on critical infrastructure; hard times ahead."
"Belarus Joins Forces with Russia, Threatens Ukraine from the North"
"Russia’s so-called special military operation against Ukraine is now eight months old and running. The United States and NATO countries have provided Ukraine with military and financial aid worth several billions of dollars. Ukraine though, does not really miss an opportunity to berate the West for what it views is insufficient military aid. Ukraine has gone as far as accusing its backers of fearing Russia and trying to avoid direct conflict with Moscow. Joe Biden is understood to have taken up Ukraine’s ungrateful behaviour with Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the Washington Post, Biden told his Ukrainian counterpart that it would be difficult for him to keep asking money from the U.S. Congress if Zelensky appeared ungrateful and kept saying the aid being provided was not enough. That means there is a degree of annoyance against Ukraine’s behaviour that has taken hold of the United States’ political leadership."
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile - and the rest of us are f****d until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.”
"A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you're willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you've spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don't see coming, when we don't have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that's when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear."
- Dr. Meredith Grey , "Grey's Anatomy"
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Full screen recommended.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, "How Russia Might Win WW3"
"What we are seeing is a fiction... the bigger conflict is coming."
"How the Russia-Ukraine War Could Turn into a Nuclear Nightmare"
"Since the beginning of Russia's invasion Ukraine, nuclear weapons have loomed in the background. The rhetoric sharply increased after Ukraine's successful counterattacks. Although we are still many steps away from serious nuclear problems, the groundwork for concerns has been laid. This video explains what tactical nuclear weapons do, how Russia might try to deploy them, and what might deter Putin from taking such steps."
"Hypersonic missiles are proliferating. In the last several years, Russia added its Tsirkon missile and China added 2 or possibly 3 such system types to their inventories. This video explores those hypersonic missile threats in existence today as well as US defenses against those."
"Russia's strange love of nuclear weapons takes a dark turn. The Status-6 Poseidon nuclear torpedo is designed to render entire coastal regions uninhabitable for 100's of years. This new threat is unlike anything we've seen since the Cold War."
