Bugaluu :: News

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

By some miracle – actually, by the printing of $5.4 trillion that has shown itself in persistent inflation – the United States has so far avoided a financial crisis. That’s the one sector that so far the establishment has been able to protect from disaster.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

How long can this be forestalled?

Watching the highly leveraged economic environment carefully, it seemed fairly likely that this would begin with a commercial real estate bust in the big cities. New York in particular is the hot spot and bellwether.

The story goes like this.

After a long real estate boom in the cities, with workers commuting long distances, and zero interest rate policies that massively subsidized corporate leverage and an unhinged hiring binge, the sudden lockdowns of four years ago changed everything.

Suddenly vast swaths of the professional managerial class were forced to do their fake work from home. This not only led to a sudden shortage of household toilet paper. It introduced into corporate America a new way of managing the workforce. Even after all this time, the habit of the daily commute will not come back the way it was.

Looking from the outside in, it might seem like the obvious answer was to convert huge office skyscrapers to apartments, of which there is a tremendous shortage. But that turns out not to be so easy. These office spaces are set up to be what they are and cannot simply become apartments. There was really only one choice: either get the workforce back on a full-time basis or shrink the amount of leased space.

These commercial leases typically run for 5 to 10 years. Two years ago, the clock began to tick on many of them. Many began to expire last year and many more this year. Companies are looking at their huge office spaces and realizing that they could cut their footprint by half or more. The hybrid work schedule simply didn’t require the multifloor leases that they previously had.

As a result, many are cutting back, resulting in fewer revenue flows to the mortgage holders and thus less available to service the gigantic loans on large properties as held by big financial companies.

A major player in the New York City market is New York Community Bancorp. Last year, it began reporting that it was missing its metrics and falling on some hard times. Its stock started taking a beating. As the reports grew worse, the sell order mounted.

From a high of nearly $14, the stock began to tank, falling even lower than $2. That’s when the panic began from the banking community. Its CEO was fired and replaced. Then several major lenders ponied up $1 billion in a rescue package to make things right again. The stock has recovered slightly.

Notable is the source of the funds: former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Involved are Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital, Hudson Bay Capital, and Reverence Capital Partners and including Citadel. The new CEO is the former Comptroller of the Currency.

In other words, this is a deep-state bailout, an all-hands-on-deck attempt to stop contagion. It’s very serious. And though the action did get many headlines, it might be, in the poetic phrase, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.

“Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings have both downgraded New York Community Bancorp’s credit ratings to below investment grade,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

All the bailouts in the world are not going to solve the underlying problem. The commercial real estate issue in the big cities, particularly in Boston, New York, and Chicago, is not going away. They will worsen this entire year, leading to more weakness among the major lenders. This will provoke more centralization and bailouts. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department will be watching closely throughout.

Will they be able to contain it? Not likely, not over the long term. The financial crisis is coming. They are only kicking the can down the road.

If you wonder why the Fed keeps talking up rate cuts—despite the reality that inflation is nowhere near under control by any historical marker—this is why. It’s a means by which the Fed assures markets that it is ready to crank up the printing press at a moment’s notice. They will not let the system unravel.

What does this mean for you? Well, for starters, it means that inflation is not going away, not for a very long time. It might get vastly worse starting next year and the next. We could be headed into a repeat of the 1970s with three distinct inflationary waves. We might have been through the first and only waiting for two and three.

Sophisticated investors have figured this out, which is why gold and Bitcoin have hit new highs. It’s the only real safe haven in such an environment. No matter who is elected president, this is going to be a huge problem for the next term. It might emerge as the central issue. When that happens, please remember the roots of the problem, which trace not only to lockdowns but to the response to the 2008 crisis and even earlier with the loosening of credit after 2001.

So far, it’s been a century of inflationary finance. How could this not end in financial crisis? The only question is what pathway it will take to unfold. We are only now seeing the beginning of it.

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the “most ridiculous in recent history” but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let’s take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month’s record 4-sigma beat, today’s print was “only” 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR… and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was “the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history”: it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month’s ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month’s jobs print won’t be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that’s the only tool left in the Biden admin’s box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

In the past month the Biden department of goalseeking stuff higher before revising it lower, has revised the following data sharply lower:

– Jobs
– JOLTS
– New Home sales
– Housing Starts and Permits
– Industrial Production
– PCE and core PCE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 30, 2023

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years – and thus denying expectations from Sahm’s Rule that a recession may have already started – in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years…

… for one simple reason: last month’s average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic…

… but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS’s latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month’s wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it’s more than just the Biden admin hanging its “success” on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge… such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There’s more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of “new jobs” has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that’s great… until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there’s even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers…

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

… but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue – especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border…

… and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened – i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden’s handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November… and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

While previewing Joe Biden’s ‘jacked up’ State of The Union address Thursday, an MSNBC talking head declared that if Biden doesn’t win the election, the US “could be a dictatorship next year.”

The network brought on ‘presidential historian’ Michael Beschloss, who compared the unhinged screaming Biden to FDR warning Americans about the rise of fascism.

Anchor Andrea Mitchell asked Beschloss “take a big picture, zoom out for us on what’s at stake for [Biden] tonight,” adding “You point to FDR’s Four Freedoms speech in 1941, obviously war time, a bigger challenge, but let’s, you know, talk about the challenges tonight.”

Beschloss proclaimed “this is a real historical moment” adding, “We could be a dictatorship next year if Donald Trump is elected and carries through on his threats and carries through on his threats to suspend the Constitution. That’s what’s at stake.”

He continued, “This is a year when we Americans have to choose whether we’re going to live as a democracy, as a republic, or as an authoritarian system.’That’s what FDR was doing in 1941, Nazis, fascists, Imperial Japanese were rampaging around the world, and he said ‘you Americans have to choose ‘”

“This is a year when we Americans have to choose whether we’re going to live as a democracy, as a republic, or as an authoritarian system,” Beschloss declared.

Watch:

MSNBC declares that by next year America “could be a dictatorship,” and compares Biden to FDR warning about Nazis. Report herehttps://t.co/Ts9v8brctj pic.twitter.com/InftrtMwPk

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) March 8, 2024

Truly deranged.

MSNBC will happily suggest that Trump is going to suspend the Constitution, but then literally laugh at the notion that mass immigration on an unprecedented scale is a concern:

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Spot Gold prices spiked above $2185 this morning on the jobs data – a new record high for the precious metal – dipped back lower… then saw another wave of buying to lift it to another record high at $2195…

Source: Bloomberg

As we detailed previously, in recent years the swing buyers have been ETFs, which hold about 2,500 tonnes of gold. But ETF holdings have been falling even as the dollar price of gold has been rising…

Source: Bloomberg

…and, as Peter Schiff recently noted, the real driving force behind gold’s price increase appears to be foreign central banks, which have been significant buyers of the metal.

This shift towards gold by central banks is seen as a strategic move away from holding U.S. dollars, signaling a broader trend of de-dollarization among global financial institutions.

These developments come at a time when retail interest has been diverted towards more speculative investments like cryptocurrencies, overshadowing traditional safe havens like gold.

However, should retail investors start to show renewed interest, filling that gap would mean ETFs would have to source almost 40mm oz of gold?

With the Fed still poised to cut interest rates as 2024 unfolds, the longer-term outlook is perhaps a more interesting topic, with the forward curve trending toward $2,500/oz…

As Bloomberg’s Jake Lloyd-Smith remarked, there could be more life yet in the barbarous relic, as John Maynard Keynes once called gold.

What is gold pricing in about future Fed action? Real rates dramatically negative? As Luke Gromen noted on X:

“When gold rises in your currency DESPITE positive real rates, the gold market is saying ‘Your government will have a debt spiral if real rates remain positive’.“

With all-time highs for gold, incoming interest rate cuts, and more war on the horizon, 2024-2025 could be the time when the fiat chickens finally come home to roost for good.

Ron Paul recently offered a sliver of hope, imploring freedom lovers not to become too complacent or demoralized to continue the fight:

“We must continue our efforts to reach a critical mass of people with the message of liberty while making plans to ensure our families can take care of themselves when the next crash occurs.”

From the ashes of fiat money, we will have a unique chance to create a new society where sound money policies have a better chance than ever to take political hold – and, slowly but surely, repair the moral fiber of a society destroyed by endless war and overstretched welfare that are only possible with infinite debt to fund them.

Submitted by blueapples on X

Following his release after spending 20 years in prison, Sheldon Johnson pledged to turn his life around following and a beacon of hope for other ex-convicts. By becoming an advocate of criminal justice reform, Johnson was well on his way to fulfill that mission. His work saw him bump elbows with the likes of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Gragg and even garnered him an appearance on the world’s most-watched podcast; The Joe Rogan Experience. Yet in one fell swoop, Johnson shattered his promise to be an example that ex-convicts can turn their lives around when he was arrested for murder after police discovered the decapitated head of one of his victim’s in the freeze of his Fifth Avenue apartment.

Johnson cozies up to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg

New York City Police discovered the Dahmeresque crime scene after they were called to 979 Summit Avenue in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. Officers were responding to a wellness check on the tenant in Apartment 6G of the building after building superintendent Orlando Medina called 911. Medina told NYPD that he received a distressing call from another tenant around 1 in the morning. “Someone was pleading for their life. She said she heard two gunshots, someone said ‘please don’t kill me I got family,’ something like that and two more gunshots pretty quickly,” Medina said.

Despite receiving the call in the early hours of March 5th, Medina hadn’t called the NYPD until 8:25 pm that evening. Police subsequently identified Johnson after reviewing surveillance footage from the building. Footage showed Johnson in the building on separate occasions on the morning of the murder. He was seen entering the building wearing a yellow hoodie, sunglasses, and grown coat while carrying a mop and bag of cleaning supplies. Johnson was also carrying a large blue plastic bin that was brought into the apartment which he never brought out. Building superintendent Medina stated he saw the suspect leave driving the victim’s stolen Audi before returning in an Uber later that evening.

Subsequent surveillance footage saw Johnson return to the scene of the crime but this time he was wearing a blonde wig as a disguise. Witnesses corroborated the surveillance footage, adding they saw the suspect coming and going into the apartment with cleaning supplies before police had responded to the call for a wellness check.

Sheldon Johnson, a black man who turned his life around, is arrested for murder even though a blonde woman was videotaped leaving the crime scene. Systemic racism is too much. pic.twitter.com/I1a56INYFu

— Shade Slimy (@5slimy) March 8, 2024

The victim, identified as 44 year-old Colin Small, had previously served time in Sing Sing prison concurrent to Johnson’s own prison sentence. While NYPD made no remarks about any motive behind the murder, speculation surrounding the gruesome case is that the two had become enemies during their time together in prison at Sing Sing. After identifying Johnson as the suspect, police obtained a search warrant for his Harlem apartment on Fifth Avenue. There, NYPD found the remaining body part’s missing from the scene of the crime in Johnson’s freezer; namely Small’s severed legs and decapitated head. Following his arrest Johnson was charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.

Despite the ghastly crime Johnson was caught committed red handed, his supporters flocked to court to attend his arraignment. Among his supporters was Lori Zeno, the executive director of his employer the Queens Defenders. One supporter in attendance was adorned in a jacket that read “specializing in wrongful conviction arrests”, alluding to the work Johnson did as a victim’s rights advocate which saw him rub elbows with some of the most high profile members of NYC’s criminal justice system, like DA Alvin Bragg. That notoriety even led to Johnson appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience just one month before his arrest to talk about how he turned his life around.

Though Johnson was held without bail, the fact that people so fervently came to his side following his arrest shows the disingenuousness of their claims that they are advocates for victim’s rights given that their callous disregard of the life of Johnson’s victim. Instead, Johnson’s self-proclaimed mission is very much analogous to the platform of his associate Alvin Bragg. Each exploited the moral imperative of the cause they supposedly fought for in order to achieve political gain instead of effectuating real change. If Johnson’s example proves anything, it’s that the likes of him calling for criminal justice reform only seek to reshape the system so that it is works for their benefit.
 

Former President Trump posted a bond of $91.6 million on Friday while appealing the recent verdict in advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit.

“President Trump respectfully requests that this Court recognize the supersedeas bond obtained by President Trump in the sum of $91,630,000.00 and approve it as adequate and sufficient to stay the enforcement of the Judgment, to the extent that the Judgment awards damages, pending the ultimate disposition of President Trump’s appeal,” Trump attorney Alina Habba wrote in court filings.

In January, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019, when he denied sexually assaulting her three decades earlier.

The decision came after a separate jury ruled that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll, which led to him paying her $5.5 million in cash – which he’ll get back also if he wins on appeal.

Carroll, 80, testified that Trump’s lies destroyed her reputation for telling he truth.

“I am here because Donald Trump assaulted me, and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened,” Carroll said, adding “He lied, and it shattered my reputation.”

During Trump’s trial, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and the former president got into frequent verbal altercations – with Kaplan at one point threatening to toss the former president out of the courtroom if he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Kaplan also told Habba to “sit down” after she requested an adjournment tomorrow so Trump could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral – a request Kaplan had previously denied.

And once Carroll ‘won’ the $83.3 million, she went on a disgusting ‘price is right‘ diatribe over how she’ll spend her ‘winnings.’

Talk to a real rape victim. They never laugh about anything regarding the rape or the conviction. This is vile @MSNBC

— shelovesbravesbaseball (@AmyPhillipsJoh1) January 30, 2024

As Donald Jeffries of I Protest noted last week in regards to the Carroll ‘show trial’;

I don’t know what the Soviet legal process really was like, before they sent dissidents off to Siberia, but how much more corrupt could it have been? Trump was convicted, and forced to pay millions, to a certifiable lunatic, who paints her trees blue and named her cat vagina. For sexually assaulting her in a crowded department store dressing room, at some point in the 1990s. She couldn’t recall the exact year. Seriously. And she is on the record having joked about having sex with Donald Trump on social media. She is the poster child for uncredible witnesses. But a jury, and one of the endless biased judges assigned to Trump’s cases, ruled in her favor. As the “Woke” White women say, “I believe her!”

*  *  *

Carroll also *helped* New York Dems pass the new law in 2022 that extended statute of limitations for sexual assault civil lawsuits beyond 20 yrs, which allowed her to sue Trump. She also has a batshit tweet history and named her cat “Vagina”, & her two dogs “Tits” & “Bloody”. https://t.co/tyGOBi8lKr pic.twitter.com/nehTUKZ90i

— Tiffanie Tx (@tiffanie_tx) January 16, 2024

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It took just three days.

After drag performer RuPaul announced the creation of a “no censorship” Allstora bookstore, censorship was back with a vengeance after many on the left learned that free speech meant that opposing views might be sold at the site.  While the sentiment was appealing, it became intolerable when activists noted that a “no censorship” store would mean that they could not censor others.

In the rollout, RuPaul stood in a blue suit before a flag to defy the censors and embrace access to works of different authors and viewpoints. For many of us, it was an exciting moment. The anti-free speech movement on the left has grown exponentially. Now, this iconic figure from the left was taking a bold stand for free speech.

With ten million titles, readers could buy most any book, including writers like Riley Gaines who have challenged transgender theories.

Various sites like National Review have covered the rise and rapid fall of the free speech initiative.

The rollout was promising. Like many of us, the founders objected to book bans across the country. Such bans have been implemented by both the left and the right.

Allstora was founded on the pledge that “We’re a marketplace for all books and all stories, with a focus on elevating marginalized voices.” Co-founder Eric Cervini and drag performer Adam Powell, welcomed visitors to the website with a pop-up message that warned “you may find books you disagree with.”

The site declared “censorship of any book, perspective, or story is incompatible with the survival of democracy.” After all, “banning books is never the answer.”

The pledge was heralded in the media. Many viewed it as a jab at conservatives to show that there is nothing to fear in access to opposing views.

Then someone thought about what free speech means.

Liberal critics raised the alarm that the bookstore would be selling “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and “anti-woke” works.

Drag performer “Lady Bunny” noted that the store would be selling works by figures like Mike Huckabee, Chaya Raichik, and Matt Walsh.

Lady Bunny asked “Why not just stop selling what many on the left consider to be hate speech?”

That is all that it took.

Allstora first implemented a flagging system for offensive books and then just got rid of the no censorship pledge.

While some sites state that Allstora only moved to add disclaimers, it appears that the no censorship pledge is gone and various authors are missing.

I searched for books by writers like Gaines and Matt Walsh and found nothing.

The obvious response to Lady Bunny is that she is the answer to her question. In the name of combatting hate speech, she is embracing the very tool used by the most hateful movements in history from book burning to black listing of opposing views. Censorship becomes insatiable as the list of offensive topics or views grows from transgender politics to climate change to abortion. Every advocacy group finds opposing its own views to be dangerous and harmful.

It is analogous to what Gandhi said about vengeance:  “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” The same is true about censorship. Eventually it leaves the whole world ignorant.