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Debt Rattle November 4 2020

Nov 042020
 
 November 4, 2020  Posted by at 10:18 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  15 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Etude Pour Mercure 1924

 

• The Democrats and the Presstitutes Will Not Admit a Trump Win (PCR)
• Trump: Presidency Has Been ‘Mean’ And Filled With ‘Horrible People’ (Pol.)
• How Violence Became A Forecastable Event In America (Turley)
• Field Evaluation Of A Rapid Antigen Test For The Diagnosis Of COVID19 (medrxiv)
• Radio Host Crushes Leading UK Epidemiologist’s Credibility (ZH)
• No Matter Who Wins (Nate Hagens)
• China Halts Ant Group’s Mega IPO (R.)
• Jack Ma: Traditional Banks Are Operating With A ‘Pawn Shop’ Mentality (TC)
• US Pushes Greece To Stop Acting As China’s ‘Dragon’s Head’ Into Europe (SCMP)
• Refugee from Moria Camp Signs Professional Football Contract in Greece (GR)

 

 

Been following election news bits for hours now, and still nothing is sure. Both sides claim a win, both sides accuse the other of cheating.

I’d say Trump won, but then I just get more people claiming I’m a Trump supporter. Got another mail from an “ex-reader” asking me why I changed so much. Never occurs to these people that maybe they’re the ones who changed, not me. Sure, I’m not anti-Trump, but why should I? Everytime such mails come in, and the frequency has increased, there’s also always generous donations coming in. Balance.

Trump is doing much better then most of the pollsters said, but we’ll have to wait. There certainly is no landslide for either side. Some states just stopped counting mid-way in, and some counters took the ballots home with them.

I’ll cover this is a series of tweets I picked up along the way. I know it looks crap in mailing lists, but I still haven’t figured out why the tweets stopped appearing in mails. Something to do with javascript, but they did use to appear.

 

 

Trump wins in all demographics except white men.

 

 

@joelpollak “And so we have the anticipated scenario: on Election Night, it looks like a Trump victory based on votes counted so far, but there are enough uncounted states that Biden can tell his supporters that he will win. Media, lawyers, tech companies, and protesters will try to help him.”

 

 

Greenwald Biden Landslide

McEnany Rustbelt

@PpollingNumbers

Tucker zero credibility

Biden

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts from October 29. The documentary The Plot Against the President is no longer available on YouTube.

• The Democrats and the Presstitutes Will Not Admit a Trump Win (PCR)

If Trump wins the election, unless it is an overwhelming victory that cannot be challenged, the Democrats and the American media will not admit that Trump won. The plan in place is to blame Trump’s win on fraud and to use the tactics of the “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine, recently employed again in Belarus, to prevent Trump’s inauguration. The documentary, The Plot Against the President, explains the “Russiagate” plot by the FBI, the Democrats, and the media to remove President Trump from office. The venality and corruption of FBI Director Comey, the American media, and Democrats, such as Adam Schiff, is scary. That such an obvious plot against American democracy involving the country’s security agencies and one of the two ruling political parties could go on for three years without a single question by the media proves that the Establishment will not tolerate a non-establishment President or those who support him and that the media dares not cross the Establishment.

The fact that Comey is not in prison testifies to the power of the Deep State. Had it not been for US Rep. Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee the coup would have succeeded. The coup attempt is not over. The documentary, which consists of the testimony of members of the House Intelligence Committee, National Security officials, and outside experts, shows that both Democrats, especially Adam Schiff, and the US media simply denied that Independent Prosecutor Mueller and the House Intelligence Committee failed to find any evidence of the Russiagate charges. Adam Schiff stood before the American media and lied time and time again. The media knew he was lying and never called him on his lies. Not even once. The undeniable fact that Russiagate was a three-year hoax, an orchestrated deception to foreclose the Trump agenda, has not been admitted by Democrats or the presstitutes.

In other words, nothing is true unless the media admits it. And they don’t admit the truth. The Elite use the presstitutes to control the explanations and to keep the population in a false reality. As our Founding Fathers said, without a free and independent media, there is no liberty. The United States does not have a free and independent media. It has a propaganda ministry for the ruling Elite. Be sure you comprehend the implications, because you are about to see it again. If Trump wins the election, the media and the Democrat Party are not going to acknowledge the fact that Trump won–unless Trump’s win is so overwhelming that it cannot be challenged.

Virginia vote count stops, counters take ballots home with them.
https://twitter.com/JusticeMAGA/status/1323856601858494464

Read more …

Well, he’s been fair game for 5 years.

• Trump: Presidency Has Been ‘Mean’ And Filled With ‘Horrible People’ (Pol.)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered a bitter assessment of his tenure in the White House, saying the experience has been “mean” and marked by “horrible people.” The comments came in an Election Day interview on “Fox & Friends,” after co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Trump whether he has enjoyed being president and if the job has been “worth it.” “Well, it’s been mean. It’s been — you’ve dealt with horrible people,” Trump replied, adding: “You deal with people that are very deceptive.” Trump, who participated in five campaign rallies Monday, sounded noticeably hoarse throughout his phone interview Tuesday, and seemed relatively despondent compared with his previous appearances on his preferred cable morning news show.


Reflecting further on his time in office, Trump said that his friends “used to call me Donald, [but] now they call me president,” and he argued that the United States itself was more “difficult to deal with” than America’s international adversaries. “They’ll go, ‘Mr. President, tell me, who’s the country that’s most difficult to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea? Sir, is it North Korea?’” Trump said. “And I go, ‘No. Well, by far, the most difficult country to deal with is the U.S. It’s not even close,’” he continued. “And they all say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ And I say, ‘No, I’m actually probably not kidding.’ We have very, very deceptive people.”

Read more …

So far so good. But then, both sides still think they can win.

• How Violence Became A Forecastable Event In America (Turley)

Driving around Washington, D.C. a couple days ago was a shocking experience. Block after block of businesses are boarded up and anything throwable or movable has been removed from the streets. In the meantime, faculty, staff, and students at George Washington University (where I teach) have been told to stockpile medicine and food “as you normally would for a hurricane or a snowstorm.” The reason? We are about to have a democratic election. The expectation is that is, unless it is a landslide for Biden, there will be rioting and arson in Washington and other cities. A warm front moving in with “possible election related disruptions” is being reported like an electoral meteorological event.

When exactly did election rioting become as forecastable as inclement weather? The forecast for rioting with a chance of passing looting and arson is being repeated across the country as if it is now an inconvenient truth of the political version of global warming. The most likely disruption would come a close election or Trump lead. That risk is heightened after Democratic leaders like House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C. declared on Sunday that the only way Democrat Joe Biden could lose the election would be “for voter suppression to be successful.” Thus, if Trump is close or winning on election night, it can only be due to unlawful conduct. When President Trump made such statements about stealing the election, the media went into full alert over his laying the foundation for a coup.

Yet, the media seems entirely comfortable with Clyburn’s pre-election declaration that either Biden wins or the election is invalid. The fact is that the odds are against President Trump. However, the current polling shows a tightening of the race in critical states. The country remains sharply divided with even the best Biden polls still showing a solid 45 percent for Trump. Yet, Democratic members like Clyburn are already stating that either Biden wins or the election is stolen. No wonder officials are declaring a violent front moving into major cities with political doppler readings with developing protest vortexes and political depressions. Yet, rioting is not an act of God, but the criminal acts of those who only embrace democratic elections to the extent that they result in the “right” outcomes.

Read more …

“NEW terrific study on rapid tests The importance of this figure canNOT be overstated! Rapid tests caught 80% of PCR positives but all missed had very low viral loads. Thus, as expected it will successfully capture ppl most likely to be contagious.”

• Field Evaluation Of A Rapid Antigen Test For The Diagnosis Of COVID19 (medrxiv)

Previous studies evaluating SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen test (RAD), tests either used retrieved specimens, which had been cryopreserved for a wide range of times, were conducted at central laboratories or both [3-7]. To our knowledge this is the first report on the performance of a RAD assay conducted at POC. As such, it may provide a realistic view of how implementation of RAD tests in clinical practice can contribute to the management and control of the COVID-19 pandemics. When compared to RT-PCR, the Panbio™ COVID-19 AG Rapid Test Device assay yielded an excellent specificity and a fairly good overall sensitivity (79.6%); the latter slightly improved when the time to testing was less than 5 days since the onset of symptoms (80.6%).

This figure is less impressive than that claimed by the manufacturer (93%); however it is close (86.5%) to that reported by Linares and colleagues [3] in a mixed cohort including patients attended at the Emergency Department or primary healthcare centers and centralized testing at the hospital laboratory. Sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 RAD assays has been reported to vary between 45%-97% [3-7]; yet, direct comparison between studies is hampered by relevant dissimilarities regarding clinical characteristics and age of patients, site of testing, type of specimen processed, and time to testing, among others. Interestingly, the sensitivity was higher in adults (82.6%) than in pediatric patients (62.5%). Previous studies found no age-related differences in SARS-CoV-2 RNA load in the upper respiratory tract [8]. Although speculative, dating the accurate onset of symptoms could have been less reliable in children than in adults.

[..] In summary, we found the Panbio™ COVID-19 AG Rapid Test Device to perform well as a POC for early diagnosis of COVID-19 in primary healthcare centers. More importantly, our data suggested that patients with RT-PCR-proven COVID-19 testing negative by RAD are unlikely to be infectious. Further studies are warranted to confirm this assumption. The inconsequentiality of false negative RAD results, from a public health perspective [12], would support the implementation of a laboratory diagnostic approach which excluded confirmatory RT-PCR testing for negative RAD tests in non hospitalized patients, even when the pretest probability is high. This would certainly alleviate laboratory workloads while dealing with RT-PCR supply shortages.

Read more …

The costs and risks of having a lockdown vs NOT having a lockdown. Nobody’s done the math. They didn’t even try.

From John Day, TAE resident physician, a few days ago: “COVID-19 is here to stay [..] It has become endemic. It’s never going away. There is no way to make it go away. Immunity lasts something like 6 months, though some reinfections occur before that. A good vaccine will always be 6 months away. Then you will need another, different one in 6 more months, but the first one is still 6 months away. “

• Radio Host Crushes Leading UK Epidemiologist’s Credibility (ZH)

In the most thorough demolition of an ‘expert’ epidemiologist who unabashedly advised the UK government of the desperate need for a second lockdown to “suppress” the virus, Independent SAGE member Professor Gabriel Scally was completely unable to respond when LBC’s Maajid Nawaz cornered him on how severely a lockdown would cost the nation. As LBC’s Seán Hickey reports, Maajid asked whether the member of the Independent SAGE considers “the potential cost and deaths from having a lockdown and weigh them up.” Professor Scally insisted that “you can’t have a response to this virus that doesn’t take into account the economic factors, social factors and the psychological factors” and his department would definitely take these factors into consideration.

He reiterated the over-used mantra that the bottom line is that “we have to stop the virus – we have to stop it spreading,” and a second national lockdown is the best way to do so. However, when pushed on the cost, Scally told Maajid he hasn’t seen it, to which Maajid asked the epidemiologist after explaining that the sum is £2.4billion a day whether such funds could be spent elsewhere. “I would imagine as a public health expert you would have some idea,” Maajid noted. And that’s when Scally lost all ‘science’ credibility and barked back at Maajid: “Oh, don’t be silly, you are really now being stupid…” Which Maajid did not take kindly to the President of Epidemiology & Public Health at the Royal Society of Medicine’s response.

“Is the scientific evidence for why we need to go into lockdown being compared with the scientific evidence for what happens if we don’t and then the death that can come from lockdown versus the death that can come from not locking down compared and the costs compared so we can have a holistic approach to it. Have you done that work?” “I would have done that work if I was a member of cabinet,” Professor Scally said, when Maajid Nawaz turned the screw.

Read more …

Long from my old friend Nate.

• No Matter Who Wins (Nate Hagens)

Humans – during periods of growth – and contraction – self-organize around energy. Oil is central but our entire energy balance sheet is going to be a critical issue in the coming decade. Under a Biden win, various Green New Deal schemes will massively scale renewable energy. In many ways this is good news, because it will be good for GDP, it will create jobs, and grow our supply of low carbon energy. But there are many problems with this because it won’t be approached systemically. Briefly: 1) renewable energy isn’t renewable, it’s rebuildable, 2) only 20% of (current) energy mix is electricity which is the type of energy produced from most renewables 3) the higher % of RE in our mix the more important back up (NG and coal) become – and the US is facing an impending gas shortage as US drilling has plummeted. (the largest growth component of supply was the associated gas from tight oil production), 4) the full system cost of integrating RE into the grid is higher than consumers currently pay, weighing on the economy 5) all RE plans expect a LARGER economy in the future when (see above) most realistic scenarios using systemic inputs point to a smaller economy.

Still, renewables are our only hope – they are mature, robust and inexpensive vis-à-vis even a decade ago. The problem will be how to ‘add renewables to a smaller and more complex system’. No matter who wins the election, we will have to face a more complex and less certain energy future. One of the silver linings (if you will) of the pandemic is that now a great number of people personally are aware US GDP/ 330 million does not represent how well we are doing as individuals or as a nation. The constant media reminders that the SP500 and Dow Jones just made all-time highs is incongruous with most peoples real lived experience (and most of whom have zero money in the stock market).

Whether one understands or agrees with the risks of climate change, energy depletion or limits to growth, tens of millions of people are now hungry for living a decent life with access to basic needs, while doing something good. The coming decades – by definition but also by desire – are going to be more about well-being than they are about growing our consumption of stuff. No matter who wins the election, our nation needs to embark on a deep conversation about what our cultural goal is – we are going to need complementary metrics to the econometric measures quantifying how much energy we burned. What is all this energy for is a question that should be part of our national discourse.

Read more …

And people thought the US would do it.

• China Halts Ant Group’s Mega IPO (R.)

China suspended Ant Group’s $37 billion stock market listing on Tuesday, thwarting the world’s largest IPO with just days to go, in a dramatic move that left investors and bankers scrambling for answers.

Fraser Howie, independent commentator and author of several books about china’s financial system: “It is embarrassing for Ant Group, it also looks bad for sponsors and the exchange and regulators.The SSE (Shanghai Stock Exchange) says the suspension is based on changes of structure which breach the listing disclosure rules. How could this happen? No excuse at all for such failings around disclosure. Or perhaps this is really politics at play, the state is reining in the private sector in the most embarrassing of ways but that I think is somewhat foolish an approach. Ant Group should be regulated as a financial company but China has made a major push to open its markets and welcome foreigners and then this happens. The world’s largest IPO, China’s most famous tech group and this mess. Everyone looks foolish.”

Dave Wang, portfolio manager, Nuvest Capital, Singapore: “For now, markets will sell off Alibaba and likely Tencent as well as other relevant exposures like HSCEI Tech due to anticipation of Ant’s listing. Chinese banks may be a beneficiary and given they are underowned, we could see a rally. More details will come and if this is an isolated incident to Ant, then the new economy stocks that have done well so far should be fine, which is the base case now. If not, markets may start to price in uncertainty on tighter regulations on private enterprises and we could see a significant pull back on Chinese growth stocks.”

Francis Lun, CEO of Geo Securities : “The Communist Party has shown the tycoons who’s boss. Jack Ma might be the richest man in the world but that doesn’t mean a thing. This has gone from the deal of the century to the shock of the century. Jack Ma got ahead of himself by criticising the commercial banks and the regulatory regime.”

Read more …

Some background to the Ant Group IPO fail.

• Jack Ma: Traditional Banks Are Operating With A ‘Pawn Shop’ Mentality (TC)

Whenever Alibaba founder Jack Ma makes a speech, it often becomes a hot topic. This past week, the Chinese internet has been abuzz with a speech of his. This time though, he seems to have gotten more brickbats than praise. At the Bund Summit in Shanghai last weekend, while Ma self-deprecatingly said that he was an unofficial and non-professional member of the financial sector, he nonetheless criticised the financial supervision system in front of top financial leaders like Zhou Xiaochuan, former governor of the People’s Bank of China, and Yi Gang, current governor of the People’s Bank of China. His fiery speech quickly made the rounds on the internet and sparked debate in the financial circle.


In his speech, Ma referred to the Basel Accords – a set of internationally agreed banking supervision regulations – as a “club for the elderly” and stated that these regulations should not apply to China, which does not have a mature financial ecosystem yet. He also claimed that the world now “only focuses on risk control, not on development”. As a representative figure of innovation in China’s financial industry, Ma believes that innovation comes with a price. He said: “Risk-free innovations stifle innovation.” He also added this blunt criticism: “Your risk-free departments are putting the entire economy at the risk of non-development.” Ma further criticised traditional banks for operating with a “pawn shop” mentality, saying that they will be unable to support the financial needs of the future world.

Read more …

Still can’t read the name “Geoffrey Pyatt” without getting nauseous.

• US Pushes Greece To Stop Acting As China’s ‘Dragon’s Head’ Into Europe (SCMP)

As Europe was fighting a seemingly unmanageable Covid-19 outbreak in September, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis rolled out the red carpet for an inconspicuous foreign guest. Neither a state leader nor a health expert called in to fight the virus, Adam Boehler heads the US International Development Finance Corporation, created last year and hailed by Washington as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the multibillion-dollar Beijing plan to fund infrastructure projects and expand trade ties around the world. Fresh in his job, Boehler’s visit – quickly followed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – was a clear signal of Washington’s concern over China’s expanding interest and influence in Europe, especially Greece.

The country is home to one of the most iconic belt and road projects: the port of Piraeus, among Europe’s biggest and now controlled by China’s state-owned shipping giant Cosco. Greece may be on the fringe of the European Union geographically, but it has become a key focus in the intensifying scramble for global influence between the US and China, which has spilled over into Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. “China itself has identified [Greece] as the dragon’s head of the Belt and Road Initiative in Europe,” the US ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt, told local newspaper I Kathimerini earlier this year. “We’re going to have a debate in terms of how we get the balance right in dealing with the challenge that China presents. China’s not going to go away.”

Boehler’s specific goal was to convince Mitsotakis that Greece’s second-largest but near-bankrupt shipyard in Elefsina – just 13km west of Piraeus – should accept investment from the US body, lest it “fall into the wrong hands”, according to a diplomatic source briefed on the matter, who declined to be identified. US companies are reportedly interested in buying controlling stakes in Alexandroupoli port, according to local media. Alexandroupoli is being privatised by the Greek state and, while much smaller than Piraeus, is strategically located near the border with Turkey. Washington has piled the pressure on Greece regarding the future of Piraeus, said to be the oldest port in Europe and just 12km (7 miles) from the capital Athens. That showed when Cosco found itself struggling to get approval from Greek authorities to build a fourth container terminal in the port.

The Chinese shipping giant has said it will invest 600 million euros (US$698 million) in the Piraeus port to make it the biggest commercial shipping hub in Europe. This would also allow it to boost its stake in the port to 67 per cent from the 51 per cent it bought in 2016 for 280.5 million euros under a deal with HRADF, Greece’s privatisation agency. Greek officials have reassured Beijing that the delay in expansion approval was caused by local opposition based on archaeological and environmental concerns, not global politics.

Read more …

Let’s end with some good news.

• Refugee from Moria Camp Signs Professional Football Contract in Greece (GR)

The Historic Greek football club Panionios announced on Tuesday that a refugee from the West African nation of Guinea signed a contract to play with the team in late October. Twenty-two-year-old Alia Camara came to Greece on a boat from Turkey when he was just 17 years of age. He traveled to Turkey from his home country after he was promised a contract with a football team there. Since it had been Camara’s dream to play football, naturally he eagerly accepted the deal — which turned out to be a scam which left the teenager penniless. Upon arriving in Greece, Camara was sent to Moria, Greece’s notoriously overcrowded refugee camp, the largest in Europe, which burned down after a series of fires in September.

While in the camp, located on the Greek island of Lesvos, Camara explained his situation to everyone he could — including his love for football, the scam he fell victim to in Turkey, and his desire to play the sport in Greece. With the help of a Greek couple, whom he calls his parents, who heard his story, Camara was able to submit his papers to legally reside in Greece, and was put in contact with Panionios, the historic Greek football club. Panionios, the oldest such club in Greece, was founded in 1890 in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey. After the destruction of the city in 1922, the surviving Greek residents of the city, including the entire club, were forced to relocate to Greece as refugees.

Panionios, along with many refugees from Smyrna, found a new home in the Athenian suburb of Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna). The connection between Camara’s refugee status and the club’s history moved the owners of Panionios, who offered the talented young player a contract to play for the team.

Read more …

 

 

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Greenwald Corbyn

Panda dogs

Fish crossing road

 

 

 

 

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America is The Poisoned Chalice

Nov 082016
 
 November 8, 2016  Posted by at 4:59 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Joe Schwartz/Jewish Museum May Day Parade, New York City 1936

Neither candidate in the US presidential election has had many specifics to offer on their economic ideas and projected policies, and that may be a smart move for both. If only because none of the two has indicated any real understanding of what awaits America as per November 9. And I don’t mean where the stock markets will be tomorrow morning, or the price of gold, though short term volatility is obviously certain.

The November 7 rally on Wall Street made plenty clear where everyone’s bets are placed -on Hillary-, so much so that there’s not much of a rally left if she wins. A Trump win could well see some panic, downward pressure for the dollar and stocks, upward pressure for gold, but there’s no telling how long that would last.

It’s the medium to long term future that’s far more interesting. Because who wins makes no difference for the reality of the US economy. It’s been abysmal for years, and there are no plans available for turning that around. Government debt – across the board- and budget deficits don’t help, but they’re not the biggest deal; the US controls its own currency.

It’s private debt, consumer debt, that will offer the winner his or her poisoned chalice. With 94 million Americans not counted as part of the workforce, and untold million others in jobs that pay hardly or no living wage, with so many millions of jobs that no longer pay sufficient or even any benefits, consumer spending has nowhere to go but down.

In an economy where that spending is good for 70% of GDP -perhaps a bit less by now, a bad enough sign-, taking spending power away from people is deadly. The only way people have been able to either keep up appearances or even just make ends meet is going into debt.

 

 

This graph from Wolf Richter shouldn’t really need any explanation, but people have been so numbed by endless repetitions of sunny skewed data that it does. Sure, mortgage debt no longer looks as bad, thanks to foreclosures, jingle mail etc. So Wolf depicts debt without mortgages.

In just 9 years, from let’s say Bear Stearns to roughly this summer, consumer debt in America has gone up more than 50% ex-mortgages. And it’s not as if it was low in 2007, quite the contrary. The graph shows us what the American economy has survived on. It’s as plain vanilla as that. It’s the only graph you need, all the rest is just decoration. And it’s every inch as scary as it looks.

There was a time when America worked for its money, for its homes, for its cars, its healthcare, for the education of its children. There was a time when America produced and sold enough to be able to afford all that. Those days are long gone. Today, the prospect is one of borrowing more money to be able to pay back what you borrowed yesterday.

If and when interest rates start to rise, either in and of themselves or because the Fed has an epiphany, all that debt will get much harder, and much more expensive, to repay. Increasingly, Americans will unceremoniously and rapidly start to fall off the back end of the truck, and one by one lower consumer spending even more.

There’s nothing a new president can do about this. There is a slight difference, granted, in that Hillary largely thinks she can let things continue as they have -but look at that graph, they cannot continue!-, while Donald Trump wants to tear up international trade deals and bring back jobs to America.

Trump’s idea look a tad wiser, but so much manufacturing infrastructure has been obliterated that there’s no telling how fast it can be rebuilt. It’ll take years, for sure. Moreover, America cannot produce most items as cheap as many other countries can, so already squeezed consumers will get squeezed even more.

It’ll have to be back all the way to Henry Ford, paying people more so they can afford what they produce. But, again, look at that graph. If Americans didn’t have that debt burden, and again that’s ex-mortgages, the ‘Ford model’ might have been more feasible. It is not now.

Either of the candidates would have had to base their campaigns on a story of ‘we need to take a few steps back in order to do better later’, and that’s still a politically deadly message in today’s realm of eternal growth, fictional as it may be. People will vote for the better promise, not for the more realistic one. After all, how can they tell? It’s not as if the media will enlighten them.

There’s only one set of possible circumstances under which people will even just accept the ‘few steps back’ idea, and that’s wartime. Which is exactly what Hillary seems to be going for, judging from her neverending anti-Russia, anti-Putin and anti-Assad ‘utterances’ that look very hard to step back from. Maybe she understands America’s economic predicament better than I think?!

I like Wikipedia’s definition of a Pyrrhic victory, couldn’t hardly have put it better myself: “A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Someone who wins a Pyrrhic victory has been victorious in some way. However, the heavy toll negates any sense of achievement or profit.”

That sounds about right. I just have the idea that Hillary would enjoy it a bit more, and more blindly, than the Donald would. But it wouldn’t make much difference regardless. Obama’s had the luck that he’s been able to hide the economic downfall on his watch behind a $10+ trillion increase in the Fed balance sheet and a multiple trillion, 50% increase in household debt.

The next president won’t have any such gift thrown into their laps. The new president will have to empty the poisoned chalice.

Imagine being -almost- 70 years old, well-off, and still wanting that job. What’s that make a body? In urgent need of a lifetime of therapy? Mariana Trench-deep unhappy?

And on top of that both candidates already know close to half the country hates their guts to begin with.

Remember, not even Socrates could beat the poisoned chalice.