Debt Rattle January 2 2021
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Les Grands Boulevards 1875 • Israel Zooms Past 1 Million Vaccinations In Sprint To Vanquish Pandemic (ToI) • 100s Of Isra
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 2 2021]“The virus is absolutely rampant now in the community. Everybody is at extreme risk of contracting the virus.”
…Of which almost everybody will survive. Why do I have to keep saying this? “Fear of contracting”…and I know it’s been oversaid, but it’s the old example, before everyone lost their minds, of the common cold. That’s what it’s going to be like for almost everyone. And 94% of people not over 80 or with several comorbidities. If you’re 80, were you planning 90? Of course you were, but that’s not statistics. You were already 10 years over and living on charity of God.
You’re also — as I said the first month — going to get it. You probably already had it, although they refuse to test, so we won’t know there’s herd immunity. On Fauci’s sliding scale that started at 40%, then 50, 60,70, 80, and is now over 90%. So since you had it, you’re in terror of a virus you CAN’T get, and killing everybody else in your community in your fear, because risking your own life going about your business is “selfishness.” But destroying the entire community, all social structures, the economy, all small business, minority workers, and the poor, is pure love and selfLESSness. Got it.
I ask you, when does this end? When it it enough?
YOU. ARE GOING. TO DIE. Someday. And not of COVID. And you can hide and cower til then, scratching and begging, and babbling til then. Or not. You could sacrifice yourself, open up, and let your neighbors live. But Karen don’t want that, and Pfizer certainly doesn’t.
“Paper Dollars in Circulation Globally Spike Amid Hot Demand (WS)”
Interesting. Opposite of what I expected, and maybe they expected too. I haven’t heard the all-digital PR push being engineered for a while now. I hope this means there’s a rapid black market. Jersey girls were opening a speakeasy, and naturally – hang for a penny as a pound – immediately set up illegal gambling too. Nice going, idiots. Since they’re going to do it anyway, all you did was increase their risk. Like Pot dealers having some rock, or maybe point out that if you go to a bar, not a college house party, there’s a bouncer protecting teen girls from cruisers and a bartender who can cut you off.
They busted the Jersey Girls – thus how we know they exist – but where there’s a demand, there will be a supply. I mean, the French Laundry just HAS to stay open or who’s going to make $800 parties for Governor Newsom and the State Medical board? And soon the States will be as perennially black-market, black-money, tax-evading as Greece and Italy, and for the same reason: unending, irremovable corruption.
Now if only we were MORE corrupt like places in Asia, we could just speed, get pulled over, and hand the officer $100 bill. That’d be both cheaper AND more efficient than the present legal system. And more free. Instead, it’s “Papers Please!” “You are 10.1km from your house, comrade! Do you have your transit pass? The uranium mines are thirsty.”
Why bother? They’re already doing this in Australia, and long since rounded up innocent black minors in California for-profit workers, and refused to let them go on a Judge’s direct order. …Under President Kamala Harris. We used to say “Irony is dead.” Now it’s “Reason is dead.” The only thing I’ll get if I share this provable, legal fact is, “No it isn’t.”
See? Fixed it with the power of my LIES! Hahahaha! And if that doesn’t work, more lies! Can you feel the power? Can I get an amen, brother?
We’re nowhere in Bitcoin though. While it will certainly go to $100,000 this time, at $30k it could easily make a $10,000 drop to harvest all the little guys and Robinhood traders. Already saw that in XRP, banker-run and directly manipulated: 60% drop in one day. So if you’re not in, I can’t advise, you’ll have to figure out your more day-trading approach on your own. We’re not in sure-safety land like we were back at $6,000.
Since BTC is more desired than the US$, (or the price wouldn’t go up) what does that say about the dollar right now? Or the system? What did Kunstler just say about the USDX, DOW….?
Still need a negative test within 72 hrs if you want to get on a plane.
• Israel Zooms Past 1 Million Vaccinations In Sprint To Vanquish Pandemic (ToI)
• 100s Of Israelis Get Infected With COVID19 After Receiving Pfizer Vaccine (RT)
• Fauci Says Mandatory COVID19 Vaccines Possible For Travel, School (NYP)
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If you need health care …. you want to get into the hospital
the hospital finds it more profitable and easier to collect from the gov. than from you.
Join the scam
• 2 Minnesota Lawmakers Demand Nationwide Audit of COVID19 Deaths (ET)
“If you could hit a threshold of 161 admissions to your hospital with COVID-19 diagnosis between January and June, you received $77,000 of additional money for each one of those admissions” through the CARES Act, Jensen told Fox News. “I don’t think there’s any questions that reverse incentives have been created.”
———Its legal – its been legalized by the enablers
Only in the USA
Janet Yellen, has raked in more than $7.2 million in speaking fees from Wall Street and large corporations including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Google, City National Bank, UBS, Citadel LLC, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Salesforce and more.
Who do you think payed to listen to Janet?
Other enablers using money collected from ????• Fauci Says Mandatory COVID19 Vaccines Possible For Travel, School (NYP)
Mandatory vaccinations are also being considered (by the NY State legislature) for everyone in the state who doesn’t have a medical exemption.
Currently “in committee” at the New York State Assembly, Bill A11179
“IF PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS DETERMINE THAT RESIDENTS OF THE STATE ARE NOT DEVELOPING SUFFICIENT IMMUNITY FROM COVID-19, THE DEPARTMENT SHALL MANDATE VACCINATION FOR ALL INDIVIDUALS OR GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS WHO, AS SHOWN BY CLINICAL DATA, ARE PROVEN TO BE SAFE TO RECEIVE SUCH VACCINE.”Skip the intro essay and read all the detail by Kunstler. He has an engineer’s perspective, particularly on Peak Oil, which he’s been head of for decades and this site is based on.
So, just as soon as fracking failed, bailing out would re-set and crash the economy, pointing up THEY were the root and intentional cause, suddenly LO! A Pale (Green) Horse! Suddenly, even though Global Warming/CO2/Green New Deal all failed as people smelled the world’s biggest, deadest rat, that it would ruthlessly crush the poor, minorities, small business, even the middle class and transfer all that money to oligarchs in a $10T rush, refusing because it would clearly lead to undemocratic, unresponsive, even illegal totalitarian government and the end of all human rights forever…
LO! Covid suddenly makes 100% of everything they had planned for 30 years happen anyway. Just under a new premise. Yes, the day Fracking ran out, and with fracking, oil, and with oil, the debt-compounded economy, and with the debt-compounding economy tax revenue, the government, and all the monopoly oligarchs who depend on it to force people to buy — hypothetically of course — health care, vaccines, and false screening tests, along with airline bailouts and no stop to military spending. Ever. Even if every citizen PAYS $600 instead of getting it. …Which I assure you, they do. Much more.
And then THIS happened: (next post) https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2021-chinese-fire-drills-with-a-side-of-french-fries-jacobin-style-and-russian-dressing/
“Oil
Hardly anyone paid any attention to the oil story this year with all the frightful distractions of Covid-19, the economic havoc of lockdowns, and the janky election. The oil story is probably more important than any other single factor in the current situation, and is largely responsible for America’s economic mess. Everything in the USA runs on oil and our business model for doing that is broken. De-growth changes everything.
From 2000 to 2008, we were on a downward slide with our conventional oil supply — the kind of oil where you just drill a pipe into the ground and the oil flows out, or, at worst, gets sucked out by a pump-jack — all-in-all, a simple procedure. In 2008, total US oil production was under 5-million barrels-a-day, down from the old production peak of just under 10-milliion b/d in 1970. And of course, our consumption kept going up to about 20-million b/d by 2008. So, we were importing most of our oil then.
That created terrible problems for our balance-of-payments in international trade, but we fudged that by pretending for decades that deficits don’t matter, as Veep Dick Cheney famously put it. The result, via the recondite and pernicious operations of financialization — that is, replacing a production economy with one based on the sheer manipulation of money and its derivatives — was the 2008-9 Great Financial Crisis. The GFC was presaged in the summer of 2008 by the price of a barrel of oil reaching just under $150 — which badly strained what remained of real productive industry. The dynamic in play induced political authorities to quit regulating wild misconduct in finance and banking, as they attempted to replace productive industry with money games. These malfeasances played out most vividly in real estate and the “innovative” securitized mortgage bonds that were gamed to a fare-the-well by the banks. The abstruse crimes have been chronicled widely elsewhere (e.g., my 2012 book Too Much Magic). But consider, also, that all the mortgage fraud of the early 2000s was based on the last gasp of the suburban expansion, and understand that suburbia was entirely at the mercy of mass motoring, which depended on affordable oil.
So, oil shot up to just under $150, the economy wobbled, the banks and the automobile companies had to be bailed out and central bank interventions became normalized, including zero interest Federal Reserve policy, a desperate legerdemain to keep up the appearance of a sound economic-financial gestalt. And that led to the “shale oil miracle.”
It was more a stunt than a miracle, really. First, you had this suite of techniques that could be employed to goose the last bit of oil from otherwise unproductive source rock. These included computerized horizontal drilling and the injection of fluids plus chemicals to fracture the impermeable rock and release the oil. This was “fracking.” It was not new but had not been scaled up into a major activity while the easier pickings were good. It was way different from the old simple method of drilling a pipe in the ground and letting it flow out of permeable rock. The old simple method cost about a half million dollars (in current dollars) per well to drill and start the oil flowing. Shale oil, with all its complications, cost between $6-12 million per well. The old 1960s conventional oil wells produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. The new shale wells produced maybe 100-odd barrels a day for the first year and they were done after four years. The depletion rate was horrendous.
Shale oil was made possible by the Federal Reserve’s ultra-low-interest, easy lending policies. They made a lot of cheap capital available, and hundreds of billions migrated to the new shale oil plays in expectation that they would produce excellent steady revenues. Big institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies especially were looking for reliable revenue with bond interest rates so low due to Fed policy. They thought they’d be swimming in shale oil company dividends and revenue streams from loans to shale drillers that paid better than US treasury bonds. One thing for sure, they thought: America wasn’t going to stop needing lots of oil. So, shale oil seemed like a sure thing. Except that after a few years, it turned out that nobody was making any money producing shale oil.
It just cost so damn much to get that stuff out of the ground. And the depletion rate was so savage that you had to drill and re-drill incessantly. And what was worse, the economy had evolved to the stage where there was no sweet spot for oil prices. Oil over $75 destroyed the business model for productive industrial activities that relied on cheap oil; while oil under $75 destroyed oil companies because they couldn’t make a profit at the well head. The melodrama played out over ten years through several rounds of Fed Quantitative Easing (money creation from nowhere) and relentless run-ups of government deficits. The oil companies themselves were caught in a “Red Queen syndrome” (ref.: Alice Through the Looking Glass) in which they were producing as much and as fast as they could just to keep up their cash flow to make loan repayments, without generating any profits — and quite a few companies couldn’t even keep up with their loan repayments, so shale was a total bust for them and they went bankrupt. It all came to a head in early 2020.
Just before the Covid-19 virus hit, shale oil production stood at over 9 million barrels a day, with another roughly 4 million from conventional oil, offshore oil, and natural gas liquids, for a grand total of nearly 13 million barrels a day in US oil production, a new record! That was 3 million b/d higher than the previous peak of 1970, at just under 10 million b/d. Quite a feat! Added to that was just under 5 million b/d in natural gas liquids. Daily US consumption was around 20 million b/d heading into 2020. It fell briefly during the initial Covid panic to around 15 million b/d and bounced back a little to around 18 million b/d in the fall of 2020. So, production appeared to be basically equal to our consumption.
However, the quality of the oil skewed the equation of “oil independence.” Shale oil tended to be ultra-light oil, composed mostly of gasoline-grade distillates. Fine, America uses a lot of gasoline because we drive everywhere and incessantly so. The trouble is, shale oil contains little of the crucial heavier distillates: diesel fuel, which the trucking industry and heavy machinery depends on, aviation fuel (basically kerosene), and bunker fuel, a heavy oil fuel for home heating and ships’ engines. Neither did those nearly 5 million barrels a day of natural gas liquids, which were really only used for cutting heavy oil, which was mostly what the USA did not produce and was not well-equipped to refine. The bottom line was that the US had to swap a lot of gasoline to other countries to get heavier distillates to keep the economy going. It worked, but it was awkward and involved a tremendous amount of transport. So, America’s oil situation coming out of 2019 was superficially stabile but fragile.
But entering 2020, shale oil production was in collapse. The lack of profitability finally caught up with the industry. Investors finally noticed that the shale oil producers couldn’t make money. At one flukey point in the Covid-19 spring of 2020, the oil markets became so disordered by collapsing demand that oil on the futures market cratered to a surreal negative-$40 a barrel. It soon corrected to the positive-$30-40 range, which was not nearly enough for the shale oil business to turn a profit. Consequently, the companies could not get new financing to continue their “Red Queen” operations, and without new financing they could not keep up cash flow… and they crapped out. Thirty-six producers filed for bankruptcy in 2020, including Chesapeake, Oasis, Lonestar, Ultra, Whiting, and Chaparral. Oil field service companies that are subcontracted to perform the drilling and fracking have also gone bust.
Shale oil production fell by roughly 2.7 million b/d from March to May 2020, recovered a little at mid-year and stumbled again with the winter wave of the virus. Oil analyst Steve St. Angelo predicts that total US oil production (shale and everything else) will fall to between 9.5 and 10 million b/d in 2021, which would put us back to 1970 levels when the nation’s population was just 205 million (compared to 330+ million today). So, that’s a lot less oil-per-capita, to view it from another angle. Independent oil analyst Art Berman is predicting a more severe production crash by midyear 2021 to roughly half what it was at year-end 2019. Nafeez Ahmed, Director Institute for Policy Research & Development, is simply calling this the end of the oil age. Ahmed says it “will begin over the next 30 years, and continue through to the next century.”
I believe it will go down much quicker than that because falling production is so destructive to the business model of industrial society that it will induce gross economic, social, and political disorder. All that disorder will generate self-reinforcing feedback loops making a return to previous levels of comfort, convenience, prosperity, and order much less likely. The net effect will be a much lower standard-of-living among formerly “advanced” nations, and also falling populations. We’re just experiencing the beginning of that process with the destruction of America’s middle-class. It is the essence of the long emergency. We just can’t tell right now how far down these dynamics will drive us, and how fast. 2021 is likely to manifest intense disorder in the USA as people reel from the loss of small businesses, economic conditions deteriorate further, and political grievance gets amped up by institutional failure to resolve, or even address, our many problems and quandaries.
As for transitioning into a “sustainable economy” powered by “renewables” such as solar and wind power, that just ain’t going to happen — unless you’re talking about oxen and firewood, and a human population about ten percent of what the planet currently carries. All our fantasies about a high-tech utopia driven by wind and sun depend on a fossil fuel economy to produce the hardware for it and then the replacement parts for the hardware, ad infinitum. It’s not worth going into it further here, but if you want to see more elaborate arguments, they’re in my recent book Living in the Long Emergency (BenBella Books, 2020).”
Leading to:
The consolidation of commerce into a few giant companies such as Walmart, Target, Amazon had reached a deadly and tragic pitch before Covid-19, destroying all lesser organisms in the business ecosystem, and thousands of local Main Streets in the process. With the Covid lockdowns, the big boxes were somehow exempted from closure. Though they seem to be triumphing for the moment, these giant national chain merchandising outfits are in their sunset phase headed for twilight. As I’ll surely state again in this forecast, the macro-trend is for downscaling and re-localizing in everything, all activities. The chain-stores and big boxes depend on systems and arrangements that won’t persist, for instance, the long supply lines from the factories of Asia. The end of mass motoring will also prove problematical for commerce at the giant scale smeared all over suburban landscapes. And, of course, Amazon’s business model of home delivery for absolutely anything and everything, was perfectly suited to the Covid-19 crisis — though in the longer term its model will prove fatally flawed, since it depends on trucking every single item to its customers, and the reason will become evident further down.
The catastrophic failure of so much small business in America through 2020 will provide the seeds for a rebirth of small businesses when the giants fall. A lot of equipment will be available at dimes on the dollar. Rents will be cheap. Enterprising people will have to be careful about where they decide to set up for new businesses: better Main Street than out on some empty strip-mall. Consolidation will be working in a different way — not to make companies bigger, but to bring many small businesses closer together in places people can get to without a car (what used to be known as a business district or downtown or Main Street). America is not going to need nearly as much shopping infrastructure as we had before 2020, and also not nearly as many restaurants. But we’re going to need some of these things and done in a new way. I can also imagine new businesses that would have been unthinkable a year ago. At some point when Covid-19 exits the scene, people will want to get together with other people very badly. Think about opening a dance hall or a nightclub with live music, even a life performance theater.
The American economy had already entered a zone of dangerous structural fragility before Covid-19 stepped onstage. As Tim Morgan and Gail Tverberg argue so well in their respective blogs, the economy is an energy system that, in the advanced techno-industrial form, depends absolutely on fossil fuels, which have become a problem the past two decades, leading to the present inflection point bringing on de-growth, the onset of a long emergency, and what others call a fourth turning. Same things, really. We’ve entered a state of contraction, and it’s in the nature of large economic organisms to move from contraction to collapse fairly quickly, because the complex interconnections in their systems ramify and amplify each other’s failures. The virus has made it all worse, and faster.”
And therefore their total failure, as failures, idiot sons of idiot sons, 7 generations deep, their answer is this, same as King Kanute:
“The So-called Great Reset
Life in the USA, and other “advanced” nations will reset, but not in the way that most people blabbering about “the Great Reset” think or say it will.
Surely, there are groups, gangs, claques, and covens of people in the world who have some consensual agreement about how things might work, and how they would run them to their benefit, in their hypothetical ideal disposition of things. For instance, the so-called “Davos Crowd.” What are they? A convocation of bankers, market movers, politicians, business moguls, tech entrepreneurs, Hollywood catamites, black ops runners, and PR errand boys who have plenty of financial and political mojo in their own realms, but not enough collectively to carry out the kind of global coup that comprises the standard paranoid Great Reset fantasy. That they meet-up in an ultra-luxurious setting out of a James Bond movie every year stokes terrific fascination, envy, anger, and paranoia that they are capable of anything beyond a festival of ass-kissing, mutual self-congratulation, and status-jockeying, which are the actual activities at the Davos meet-up.
For another thing, in the USA, at least, there are too many pissed-off people with small arms, hardened by years of proffered bad faith and dishonesty from the political/media/higher-ed complex, to just bend over and take it up the back-door from a gang of seditious, would-be aristo-totalitarians with lèse-majesté dreams of nostalgie-de-la-boue Marxist redemption. If you have any doubt about how disruptive angry people with small arms and lots of ammo might be to condescending elites, just review the events in the Middle East the past twenty years and imagine those dynamics transferred to Kansas.
What does the “reset” fantasy supposedly include? A “new world order,” a phantasm of a unified world government, which is preposterous because the macro-trend at this moment of history worldwide is the opposite of consolidation and centralization of power, but rather breakup, downscaling, and re-localization. Why? As you saw in the Econ chapter, because the scale, pitch, and range of all our activities must be reduced to survive in the post-industrial conditions of resource and capital scarcity. And it will happen whether we like it or not and despite anybody’s objections.
What else is in the Reset grab-bag? Supposedly a single world currency, also absurd for reasons already stated — unless you are talking about gold and silver, which may eventually become the universally-accepted medium of exchange (and store of value, index of price) if the post-industrial contraction is severe and destructive enough. But fuggeddabowt “digital currencies,” especially in the USA because too many people are “un-banked,” or otherwise depend on cash-money in the informal “gray” economy of just-getting-by (and there will be a lot more of these types as the middle-class gets pounded further down into the mud), plus a large cohort of digitally-capable people just plain ornery about being herded into an IRS surveillance cul-de-sac — and the whole lot of them will fight like hell to prevent government-sponsored crypto-dollars from replacing what used to be considered money. And, if, in the unlikely event that rebellion fails, it’s back to gold and silver by default — and that might literally mean by default.
Now, I grant you that there are fer sure problems with all the major currencies, especially the USA dollar, and they are all liable to become worthless eventually for all the usual and traditional reasons. The US dollar is especially vulnerable since its status as the world’s “reserve” currency — a reliable medium of exchange in global trade — is no longer consistent with the true financial condition of our country, which is morbidly obese with debt that will never be repaid — a terminal case. There will eventually be some kind of default, either the straightforward way, by declaring nonpayment to bond-holders and creditors outright, or by sneakily engineering a hyper-inflation of the money supply to destroy the value of the dollar. If either of those events plays out, the nation will be thrust into serious social and political disorder, blame will get cast, people will get hurt, and it will be a while before the finer points of the social contract get pasted back together — such as any agreement to introduce a “new dollar” of some kind to replace the ruined old one. By then, the old USA may not still be standing intact, and it would be up to states or regions to address the money issue.”
Reading Nomi Prins (we talk occasionally) at DailyReckoning.com. Her point: Central Baks ARE the markets. And I’m thinking I said that so long ago I don’t even remember how long. Do remember that my conclusion was way back when that if that is so, then there are no markets. Not sure of she draws the same conclusion. But it’s been true for years, nothing to do with the year-old COVID craze.
Debt Rattle Jun 16 2014: Central Banks Have Become The Markets
@ Dr. D
I’ve noticed changes.
People are prepping.
Purchases of RV’s, camping gear, and bikes are causing shortages of supplies.Dr Faici is a master of long talk without saying anything, given that one has to endure extremely irritating raspy voice. In tandem with California high-school-freshman-like elected governor (another saw mill) they create cacophony in which we, somehow, have to appreciate and oblige to their never ending effort of reaching some moving Goldie Lock target of “safety”.
Renoir had painted in quite of few styles, some of them I found “sugary”. This one is true to spirit of impressionism.
It appears that the Pfizer vaccine is not super popular, the new rage, etc. in Europe.
A paper in Nature, from Oct. 2020.
A global survey of potential acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine
.. is hardly encouraging, and since then (afai can judge) what is now called ‘vax’ “hesitancy” or “skepticism” (to avoid ‘refusal’ / ‘anti’) has but grown.
France. Guardian:
Covid: France ‘pandering to anti-vaxxers’ with slow vaccine rollout. 31 Dec.
…just over half of French people said they were happy to be vaccinated…
By Wednesday evening, only 332 people had received the vaccine, according to health ministry officials. The ministry has said the aim is to vaccinate 1 million elderly and at-risk people in January, requiring more than 31,200 vaccinations every day…
From about low 100s a day to 31K every day is a leap. If, incredibly, 1 million ‘at risk’ ppl are vaccinated in Jan, at that rate, it would take more than 5 years to vaccinate everyone in F.
One possible obstacle is that F ppl have to sign an agreement form to accept the vax. Which relates to F’s bureaucratic, contractual mindset. E.g. during lockdown, going out to -x/y..- requires ppl to carry a signed personal affidavit, as to purpose, timing, etc.
Macron has been warned, by ppl above him, that he cannot make the vax obligatory, there would be a revolution, heads would roll, and not metaphorically. (The proverbial last straw, following the Gilets Jaunes, etc.)
When asked recently, will he be a candidate for a 2nd term as Prez? Macron answered that he might not be able to ‘present himself’ as he may have to enforce some measures so ‘draconien’ that…..no.
———————
Why did (some .. EU) Gvmts. buy these huge nos. of vax doses that they knew they could not ‘roll out’, or efficiently administer (see temp. requirements, timing, already broken by UK as I posted previous, for ex.), or that wouldn’t be accepted by the sheeples, or that might in fact be completely ineffective, etc. ?
The answer that they were going for a ‘magic bullet’ that would stop COV19 in its tracks and ensure a return to normalcy (seen this touted on F MSM TV, in CH as well) is nonsense.
@Dr. D. wrote:
““The virus is absolutely rampant now in the community. Everybody is at extreme risk of contracting the virus.”
…Of which almost everybody will survive. Why do I have to keep saying this? “Fear of contracting”…and I know it’s been oversaid, but it’s the old example, before everyone lost their minds, of the common cold. That’s what it’s going to be like for almost everyone. And 94% of people not over 80 or with several comorbidities. If you’re 80, were you planning 90? Of course you were, but that’s not statistics. You were already 10 years over and living on charity of God.”
You don’t have to keep saying it Doc. I can go back thru my archives and find your post from way back in Feb(?). The one I forwarded to Joe Norman and all my fraidy cat friends.
But yeah, this was a classic Dr. D post and I concur 100%.
Well I’m kinda sad that the new years eve orgy is over. Business as usual it’ll have to be. That *inertia* thing I suppose.
@dr. D.
I didnt understand you position on bitcoin. Sounds like you are got having bitcoin or some form of crypto? It feels like it will not stop going up.
Doc Robinson,
Debt Rattle Jun 16 2014: Central Banks Have Become The Markets
6.5 years ago. I had no idea it was that long ago. Should I have patented the phrase, the notion, the idea?
“Janet Yellen Made Millions In Wall Street, Corporate Speeches (Pol.)”
Who knew public service could be so profitable? Every third world dictator and warlord, that’s who. Always portrayed in the movies with trunks full of US currency which need laundering. We’ve taken it to the next level in the US, where bribery payments are delayed by a few years so that the “cause and effect” linkage is somewhat muddied to the average onlooker. We even have a name for it: “Revolving Door Politics”.
Obama knew how it worked, or was certainly instructed during his first weeks in office. He was blessed with a silver tongue (which most often says nothing in lengthy verbiage of flowery rhetoric), but not worth $400K per speech. Janet Yellen, I’ve heard, is a real snooze-fest, but why labor the point. It’s corruption pure and simple. It is the engine which powers DC – paid speeches being just one of their many money-laundering schemes.
“Central Banks Have Become The Markets”
I got a whiff of this after the dot-com bust in 2000, when Greenspan lowered interest rates to a whopping 1% and held them there until the housing bubble inflated. That’s when the business cycle was declared persona non grata and banished forever by the Fed. It was also when the strategy of “market timing” also died. Watching the business cycle became “what is the Fed going to do?”. Today, they are front-and-center in the economy with entire segments on TV shows like 60 Minutes. They are the economy. They are the market.
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I love the smell of Dr. D in the morning… It smells like sanity.
Hillary could have, should have, done what Trump and the republicans are doing in the quest of delegitimizing the result of the election of 2016.
Several Republican congressmen have said they will object to the Electoral College results when Congress meets in January to formally certify the votes.
An Illegitimate Election Plunges the Republic into a Crisis
This is how elections are conducted in Third World countries – and now in America.Fri Nov 27, 2020 Daniel Greenfield
Democrats delegitimized Bush and then Trump by attacking the legitimacy of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections. Is it any wonder that by 2020 no one trusts election outcomes anymore?
The Democrats have made it clear that they want absolute power and that their own legitimacy isn’t a problem because they control the distribution of information through the media and now through an alliance with tech companies that monopolize internet search and social media.
But propaganda doesn’t grant legitimacy, it destroys the public’s trust in institutions.
The Democrats embraced a strategy of delegitimizing elections because they don’t derive their power from the traditional political system of the country, but from subverting it. Everything they did this year and the last four years was aimed at subverting elections and voters. And if the public loses faith in elections, that will make elections that much easier to steal in the future.
Zerosum:
Letting a few powerless Republicans object to the illegitimate election is the Uniparty’s final step towards making the election legitimate!
The Uniparty’s “No Standing” courts have done their part!
The Uniparty’s MSM have done their part!
Raul/Doc Robinson:
The central banks are the market.
The year 2014 sounds about right!
That is when I realized that there was no longer any free markets left and stopped investing.
This central banker’s business of making money free by reducing interest rates to zero and even paying people (negative interest rates) to borrow money has produced weird real world consequences.
Twenty years ago, if I had said you would be standing on a street corner lending out your money to strangers for free, you would have said I was crazy!
But now we have gone past that crazy point!
You are now standing on a Street corner paying strangers to take your free money!
Now I think you are the one who is crazy!
BTC $10k, $20k, $30k, $31k, $32k, $33k, $34k….
It’s hard to know what to do since it could drop not $10k, but $20,000 next week and still be in play. And next problem: feels like it can’t stop going up, and maybe so. We don’t know what confidence in the US$ will be in four days.
But you can’t buy the vertical, the FOMO. Only on fishing lines, on the drops.
Now more than ever since I don’t know what level chart or what dividers, what Log I’d have to use to find some trend or supports. It’s a madhouse. And this is BEFORE Coinbase shuts off their servers “for a glitch/service/hack” to lock everyone in when Sachs and Morgan sell off on the inside track. …And Coinbase admits it. They have a Tier 1 direct trading. And you’re not in that club.
Not only is bitcoin just another ludicrous bubble based on copycat behavior like the infamous Tulip Mania a few centuries ago, but it is based on unsound everything, beginning with it requiring ever-growing data farms using ever more energy merely to keep it’s virtual essence of a non-entity from being hacked to (excuse me) bits..
It’s WAY cheaper to “print” traditional currency than bitcoin.
Plus, the rigged aspects Dr. D mentioned. Plus, you can’t stuff it in a mattress. Plus, it is beginning to be likely that robust quantum conmputing is pretty close at hand, and that will crack bitcoin wide open.
If the banks are now the markets, which I certainly believe is true, it’s almost as if all the genuine speculative risk-taking investment energy, that used to make Wall Street the global jitter joint of economic outcome, is now piled into markets based on sheer speculatioon on sheer speculation on sheer speculations*… and nothing else: bitcopin. It produces nothing, not even a stable currency.
*turtles!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!It’s more or less a symbol for our time: digital nonsense about nothing conflated with genuine wealth which is Energy&Matter times Intelligence. Bitcoin is the quantum woo of investment. It is a religion not a currency. How can you ride the wave when it’s also a stream of particles with bank teller windows as the slit screen of the famous experiment?
Madamski:
Regarding bitcoin, you have to admit it is “extremely green” as it requires more energy be put into it than you get out!
Actually it is the truest green energy there is!
No matter how much energy you put into creating a bitcoin, you never get any “green” energy back out!
“‘@Farang-V.Arnold: You live in lovely northern Thailand.'”
“Actually no; I live in west central about 40k from the infamous bridge on the river Kwai and about 40k from the Burmese border (as the crow flies)”
OK, I checked that out. I thought you lived around Chiang Mai.
We liked Chiang Mai, got a Toyota to Pai, trekked and white water rafted along the Burmese border to Mae Hong Son, then flew to Luang Prabang, and did the slow boat up the Mekong and Nam Ou rivers, to go trekking into the jungle a couple of days and visit some “Kamu” (Khmer) people in a village, then trek back and boat back down, Lotta’ adventure. I got malaria near Burma. We could see Burma, but I couldn’t see the malaria.
I got sick in Luang Prabang, and when my fever broke, after 8 hours, I thanked the heavens it was just malaria, not Dengue, and took my doxycycline.
The malaria near Burma still responded to the cheap stuff.
I carried my pack the next day, with a complete lack of enthusiasm.The conflation of genuinely feasible alternative energy with “green” was given more momentum by Maggie Thatcher than all the Stewart Brands combined.
She wanted a PR weapon to use against striking coal-miners, and heard about this fossil-fuel global warming thing. Perfect, she thought. The public loearned about global warming.
Ever since, we’ve focused more on how bad for the environment are fossil fuels (true) while ignoring an equally pressing problem: we’re running out of fossil fuels while building an unsustainable petrotech socioeconomic system that requires ever more fossil fuels.
When Scams Collide, truth is the result, usually painful. The truth: we’re running out of energy while the climate’s weather goes insane for at least a few decades but perhaps a few centuries or millennia.
@madamski: You’re a gold girl, physical gold girl. Right on.
The entire internet is not needed to verify the existence of a transaction or the existence of physical gold.
It is star-treasure, brought to earth by meteorites long, long ago.
It is so very stable, and so readily identifiable by direct observation.
It is the ideal abstract store of value with no other technology or network required.
You still need rice, beans, salt and cooking oil.Will there be a constitutional showdown at the not-OK Corral Wednesday?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ted-cruz-leads-senators-challenge-electoral-count-demands-emergency-audit@Dr D: Good end of oil article , brother. Your take is very much like that of Nate Hagans.
Fracking died after April in the Eagle Fordshale. Poof.
They can come pump some from the wells they drilled in 2019 when oil looks like it will stay over $50/bbl for a couple of months, if that happens, but those wells deplete so very fast, and they can’t drill any more, or even refrack the ones they have to get them to puke out another payday.
Seneca’s cliff…Madamski:
Now that Dr. John Day has given you a “gold” prescription, please forgive me for not recognizing that you are a “golden” girl!
I got sick in Luang Prabang, and when my fever broke, after 8 hours, I thanked the heavens it was just malaria, not Dengue, and took my doxycycline..
Yeah, I did the Dengue Fever thing about 10 years ago; not recommended based on personel experience… 😉
Madamski
Not only is bitcoin just another ludicrous bubble based on copycat behavior like the infamous Tulip Mania a few centuries ago, but it is based on unsound everything, beginning with it requiring ever-growing data farms using ever more energy merely to keep it’s virtual essence of a non-entity from being hacked to (excuse me) bits..Kudos for that shot of reality; bitcoin is at best a blatent fraud, and at the worst, an outright, cruel theft…
This looks completely plausible to me. My grandmother Day grew up in China. I grew up with nice Chinese things all around, and later went to high school in Japan. I really like Asia, and am not a Sinophobe, but all of China’s neighbors know Chinese history, and so do the Chinese.
Chinese world history is China and tribute-countries with ups and downs.
Read The Art of War, please.
Patrick Byrne: China Is Taking Us Out From Within
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/patrick-byrne-china-taking-us-out-withinBeing old, I hate all the harbingers of change that will continue through 2021;
Suffering Montezuma’s revenge in Maryland, all of today.
No US federal public health system.
Rushed vaccines with no efficacy or long term safety data.
Gas tank filled a year ago that is still more than half full.
Paying thousands of dollars for dental and auto insurance that I am not using.
Electricity going out for hours in the middle of the night for no reason.
Two Chase credit card accounts that didn’t receive my analog checks that I mailed weeks ago – now with late charges.
Paying credit cards yesterday on a slow internet with digital payments from my bank’s checking account.
Senator Ted Cruz taking the first steps for the secession of Texas.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s incompetent California hypocrisy.
The fall of the Western Empire. The ascendancy of nations that controlled coronavirus.
Going stir crazy while trying to stay alive.
Joe Biden/Kamala Harris
Read The Art of War, please.
Patrick Byrne: China Is Taking Us Out From WithinHave read Sun Tzu more than once (can’t read too many times)…
China is indeed “taking us out from within”; and we’re making it so damn easy for them with our overly hysterical anti-China rants…
The U.S. at war with the world can only end one way; losing all it ever dreamed to be…
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