Huge Financial Shock Inevitable & Hitting Now by Ed Dowd

  The everything bubble; China Real Estate, US Office Building, Tokyo second bubble and many others worldwide will burst eventually. They always do. The only thing which cannot be predicted is when. The behavior is similar to that of a sand pile. You cannot predict which grain of sand will start the crash but you can with certainty predict that one will. Ed Dowd believes this will happen before the end of the year. I agree. In fact most people agree which may be why there is a sense of panic in Brussels and Washington. A new world order is being born. This might be the signal!

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com  

Former Wall Street money manager Ed Dowd is a skillful financial analyst.  Even though he has a wildly popular book on CV19 vax deaths and injuries called “Cause Unknown,” he is now turning his attention back to the economy.  Dowd warns the economy can fall out of bed at any time.  Dowd explains, “What’s coming up next is a credit cycle.  We are going to see commercial real estate go into problem mode.  There are a lot of loans that need to be rolled over in 2024 and 25.  A lot of these properties are down 80% . . . .  There is huge credit risk coming.  The prediction of bank failures is accurate.  We are going to see, over the next 12 to 24 months, banks go belly-up.  Then, they will have to get merged with bigger banks.”

What happens to the Biden economy?  Dowd says, “The economy is going to take a nosedive sometime in the next 12 months.  The real economy is not doing well. . . . The only thing that has been holding up the GDP growth is government spending.  We are spending $1 trillion every 100 days.  That’s adding $1 trillion to the deficit.  The only job creation is government jobs, and they don’t actually add to the economy. . . . Reports are coming out now that the low-income consumer is getting absolutely hammered.  McDonald’s talked about it in their most recent earnings call. . . . So, low-income and the middle-class are getting squeezed while the rich continue to plug along.”

Dowd told me off camera that the economy could get into trouble without warning.  Dowd explains, “You’ve got to look at history.  In 2008 and 2009, everyone talks about the crisis, but bank failures started showing up in 2007. . . . I suspect as we roll through time in the real economy and the money supply issues start to hit the economy, we will see more bank failures and more businesses shut down.  46% of small businesses are having problems paying their rent.   There is going to come a time in the next 6 to 12 months this huge shock that we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2000 bubble where massive layoffs start to happen–it’s inevitable.  This is what happens when you crank up interest rates from 0% to 5.5%.  There is a lag in the real economy, and it’s hitting right now.  It’s only going to intensify as time goes on.

China Is Facing An Epic Deflationary Crash That It Can No Longer Hide

  The Chinese real estate bubble has been imploding for a few years now. But how bad is it, really?

  With over 30 years of experience with "bubbles" in Japan, I am afraid we won't know the answer for quite some time. As in Japan, the Chinese government can and will paper over the deflationary trend with huge budget deficits as the article below suggests. Eventually, just as in Japan, the potential for destroying the money his huge.

  This said, as my next article explains, the West will already be in recession at that time so does it matter in the end? Just another black swan among many? 

China Is Facing An Epic Deflationary Crash That It Can No Longer Hide

It has long been understood that most financial data provided by the Chinese government is propaganda designed to misrepresent the country's true economic circumstances.  At best, their statistics provide half the truth and the rest has to be discerned through deeper investigation.  When systemic crisis events take place in China it usually comes as a shock to much of the world exactly because they expend considerable resources in order to hide instability behind a thin veneer of fabricated progress.

The biggest story in China in the new millennia has been nation's debt explosion.  China's debt-to-GDP ratio is currently estimated at nearly 300% (official numbers), with most of the liabilities accrued in the past 15 years.  Chinese debt spending accelerated in part because of the global credit crash of 2008, but a lesser known factor is their entry into the IMF's Special Drawing Rights basket.  The process started around 2011 and the IMF requires any prospective applicant to take on a wide array of debt instruments before they can be added to the global currency mechanism. 

By the time of China's official inclusion in the SDR in 2016 they had nearly doubled their national debt.  After 2016 debt levels skyrocketed.

The debt problem is harder to quantify in China because of their communist structure posing as a free market structure.  Corporate debt in China has to be included into the national debt picture because of state funded enterprises and the level of government investment in property and industry.  

It is here where we find the most blatant warning signs of deflationary crisis, particularly in property markets and infrastructure development.  The CCP has put a "great information wall" in place to prevent accurate data from leaving the country, but some reports on China's failing infrastructure still escape.  China's export market is crumbling in the past year, in large part because western consumers are tapped out due to inflation.  However, what they prefer not to mention is the damage they did to themselves after three years of near constant covid lockdowns.  This destroyed their retail sector and things have only grown worse since.

Then there is the real estate market which has suffered extreme deflation over the past decade, with a larger drop expected in the next year.  China deliberately popped the housing market bubble as a means to disrupt what officials considered out of control speculation.  This led to the now famous "ghost towns" dotting the Chinese landscape; thousands of neighborhoods and high rises left unfinished and empty after development companies went bankrupt.  

One of the more disturbing trends in China, though, is the effort to use large infrastructure projects to hide the nation's deflationary decline.  China's propaganda machine is pervasive across the world and most people in the west assume  that China is on the cutting edge of progress because of videos on social media.  In reality, the Chinese have been building cheaply constructed and poorly designed false-front landmarks that look technologically impressive on the surface but fall apart in a matter of months.

China is planning another 1 trillion Yuan ($137 billion) in infrastructure projects in 2024 alone, but the debt cycle and the deflationary spiral seem to be catching up with them.  The IMF claims that China's economy has stumbled but is "unlikely to fall", yet, with their global exports falling, property markets plunging and consumer activity in decline it's hard to see how they can continue without a depression-like event in the near future.

Lost in the Vast Wasteland of Social Media

  Interesting Article on Social Media, the disease of our time, by Charles Hugh Smith. What else to say but highlight the artificiality of the whole edifice and its destructive effect, especially on the younger generations? 

  I am by essence a libertarian and would prefer by far that people decide for themselves in most matters of life, especially for things like alcohol. One valid argument against that is the fact that some things like alcohol and drugs are addictive and that consequently people cannot decide by definition since they fall into the addiction. Well, if that is true, then why not submit Social Media to the same rule since their addictive power is even stronger? 

  Lost in the Vast Wasteland of Social Media

May 9, 2024

Once we've made "digital visibility" the primary source of our identity, status and self-respect, we've doomed ourselves to wandering, compass-less, in a vast artificial wasteland.

That social media is addictive is self-evident. The temptation to continue scrolling is as limitless as the vast wasteland of content.

The destructive nature of this addiction is also self-evident. The net result of this addiction is depression, anxiety and rising rates of self-harm and suicide.

The immense profitability of addiction to screens and social media establishes the corporate incentives to increase their addictive power and thwart attempts to limit this profitable power. Who cares about self-harm and depression when shareholder value is at stake?

Though social media is pitched as connecting us all, it's actually about control: the platforms control the flow of user-created content, the addictive mechanisms and the monetization of user engagement.

What's less obvious is the incentive for users to keep creating content for the tech platforms to monetize. This is of course the great "innovation" of social media: entice users to create content so the corporation gets all this content for free. The second "innovation" is to monetize the users' attention / "engagement," a two-fer: monetize the free user-created content and then monetize the addicted users who can't stop scrolling.

The incentive for users is core to human nature: to gain recognition and respect. We observe the tremendous status and respect lavished on those with high digital visibility on screens, and this ignites our Mimetic Desire--we want what we see others wanting and value what others desire--to increase our digital visibility so we too can enjoy some of the status and respect heaped on those with screen presence.

Concurrent with the rise of digital visibility as the key source of status and respect is the decline of other social means of gaining status and respect. The economy places a premium on mobility of both capital and labor, so the workforce and neighborhoods are in constant flux. Unlike the previous economic model of stable employment, where people routinely worked for the same company for decades, as did their peers, now there's no stable community at work that provides social ties and respect: everyone is an atomized, free-floating individual.

Sure, we can pass physical prints of our selfies in famous locales around to our stressed-out, here-today, gone-tomorrow co-workers, but who cares? How much status and respect can we possibly gain in the limited, unstable circles of work and neighborhood? Very little.

The same is true of neighborhoods: here today, gone tomorrow. There is no stable social order left in the real world to provide the recognition and respect every human needs. So we turn to the artificial media-world of screens and social media.

What defines the media? That it's staged, scripted, enhanced, edited, artificial. TV programs are artificial representations of real life, not real life: the boring bits have been edited out, the drama enhanced, the actors made up and the scenes staged.

Real life can't compete with this carefully edited, distilled, enhanced simulation of real life. We understand this and so our goal on social media is to stage, script and edit our real-world selves and lives into an enhanced artificial facsimile that is worthy of a higher status than that earned by our unstaged real life.

So even as we share a crowded apartment with five other low-paid workers, we post photos of ourselves in luxe bars holding $20 cocktails. This is only half the battle for digital visibility; the other half is building an audience so our visibility increases. As our visibility increases, the status and respect we gain increases proportionately.

As the means to gain status and respect in the real world have diminished, the potential to increase our status in the digital realm has skyrocketed. This is the difference between the old legacy mediums of TV and print: we could only be passive observers, as it was extremely difficult to get through all the gatekeepers and actually get on TV or in print media.

Anyone can get on the screen and page in social media. There are three billion Channels of Me, and so the Darwinian struggle is to stage, edit and enhance one's channel to somehow become more appealing and compelling than the millions of competing channels.

This generates another addictive dynamic: did anyone "like" my last post or comment? The desire for an audience introduces an emotional vulnerability: we want the higher status awarded to larger audiences, and so we become obsessed with monitoring our "likes" and views. We become easy targets for trolls who relish crushing the hopes and spirits of those seeking to out-stage and out-enhance everyone else trying to increase their digital visibility.

This is the potent source of much of the depression, anxiety and self-harm stripmining the mental health of the younger generations. Once we've made digital visibility the primary source of our identity, status and self-respect, we've doomed ourselves to wandering, compass-less, in a vast artificial wasteland.

To avoid self-destruction, we must understand the nature of social media--that it's been carefully crafted to addict us--and to free ourselves of the illusion that an enhanced digital representation of ourselves is a worthy foundation for our identity, social status and self-respect.

The artificial digital realm is not a substitute for real life, nor is "status" gained on social media a substitute for an authentic identity and selfhood. We reach through the screen for the proffered feast and are left even more starved when we finally turn the screen off.

Addiction is profitable:



Smartphone addiction:



I've written dozens of essays on social media over the past 13 years;

The Proof Of Censorship Is…Censored

 

  This is one point on which I am optimistic: Censorship will fail for the simple reason that eventually a censored society becomes less efficient and therefore less competitive. (This said, it is very difficult to predict what AI could do to censorship since the hallmark of an advanced AI will be its ability to outsmart us. But by then it will also outsmart the people doing the manipulation...)

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via the Brownstone Institute,

It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. 

The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind. 

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society. 

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it. 

Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality. 

The censors developed a belief at the highest levels of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: our side favors banning gatherings, closing schools, says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake, favors masking, mass vaccination, and mail-in voting, and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury, whereas their side takes the opposite approach. 

It was a war over information, undertaken in total disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn’t even exist. Moreover, the operation was not only political. It clearly involved intelligence agencies that were already hip deep in the “all-of-society” pandemic response. 

“All of Society” means all, including the information you receive and are allowed to distribute. 

A vast swath of unelected bureaucrats took it upon themselves to manage all knowledge flows in the age of the Internet, with the ambition to turn the main source of news and sharing into a giant American version of Pravda. All of this occurred right under our noses – and is still going on today. 

Indeed, censorship is a full-on industry now, with hundreds and thousands of cut-outs, universities, media companies, government agencies, and even young people in school studying to be disinformation specialists, and bragging about it on social media. We are just one step away from a New York Times article – as follow-ups to their recent praise of the Deep State and also government surveillance – with a headline like “The Good Society Needs Censors.”

Incredibly, the censorship is so pervasive now that it is not even reported. All these revelations should have been front page news. But so captured is the news media today that there are very few outlets that even bother to report the fullness of the problem. 

Not receiving nearly enough attention is the new report from the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government of the US House of Representatives. 

Running nearly 1,000 pages including documentation (however many pages are purposely blank), we have here an overwhelming amount of evidence of a systematic, aggressive, and deeply entrenched effort on the part of the federal government, including the Biden White House and many agencies including the World Health Organization, to tear out the guts of the Internet and social media culture and replace them with propaganda. 

Among the well-documented facts are that the White House directly intervened in Amazon’s own marketing methods to deprecate books that raised doubts about the Covid vaccine and all vaccines. Amazon responded reluctantly but did what it could to satisfy the censors. All these companies – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon – became acquiescent to Biden administration priorities, even to the point of running algorithmic changes by the White House before implementation. 

When YouTube announced that it would take down any content that contradicted the World Health Organization, it was because the White House instructed them to do so. 

As for Amazon, which is like every publisher in wanting full freedom to distribute, they faced intense pressure from government.

These are just a few of thousands of pieces of evidence of routine interference from government against social media companies, either directly or through various government-funded cut-outs, all designed to enforce a certain way of thinking on the American public. 

What’s amazing is that this industry was allowed to metastasize to such an extent over 4-8 years or so, with no legal oversight and very little knowledge on the part of the public. It’s as if there is no such thing as the First Amendment. It’s a dead letter. Even now, the Supreme Court seems confused, based on our reading of the oral arguments over this whole case (Murthy v. Missouri). 

One gets the sense when reading through all this correspondence that the companies were more than a bit rattled by the pressure. They must have wondered a few things: 1) is this normal? 2) do we really have to go along? 3) what happens to us if we just say no?

Probably every corner grocery store in any neighborhood run by a crime syndicate in history has asked these questions. The best answer is to do what you can in order to make them go away. This is precisely what they did time after time. After a while, the protocol probably begins to feel normal and no one asks anymore the basic questions: is this right? Is this freedom? Is this legal? Is this just the way things go in the US?

No matter how many high officials were involved, how many in the C-suites of big companies participated, however many editors and technicians of the best credentials played along, there can be no question that what took place was an absolute violation of speech rights that very likely exceeds anything we’ve seen in US history. 

Keep in mind that we only know what we know, and that is severely truncated by the force of the machinery. We can safely assume that the truth actually is far worse than we know. And further consider that this censorship is keeping us from knowing the full story about the suppression of dissidents, whether medical, scientific, political, or otherwise. 

There might be millions in many professions who are suffering right now, in silence. Or think of the vaccine-injured or those who have lost loved ones who were forced to get the shot. There are no headlines. There are no investigations. There is almost no public attention at all. Most of the venues that we once thought would police such outrages have been compromised. 

To top it off, the censors are still not backing down. If you sense a lessening of the grip for now, there is every reason to believe it is temporary. This industry wants the entire Internet as we once conceived of it completely shut down. That’s the goal.

At this point, the best means of defeating this plan is widespread public outrage. That is made more difficult because the censorship itself is being censored. 

This is why this report from the US House of Representatives needs to be widely shared so long as doing so is possible. It could be that such reports in the future will themselves be censored. It could also be the last such report you will ever see before the curtain falls on freedom completely. 

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

The Land Of The Setting Sun: The Currency Crisis Of Japan Has Just Started

  Japan is the poster's child of what you should NOT do to save a bankrupt economy after a bubble has popped. 

  1 - The crisis is far from over. It will in fact never be over until the underlying problem is solved. (which it cannot be now since it has been allowed to grow to such immense proportions.) 

  2 - This is a lesson to China of how NOT to solve a solvency problem post bubble. In a nutshell: If you allocate credit to bankrupt companies and banks instead of liquidating them and financing healthy start-ups, eventually you bankrupt your economy and reduce massively the standard of living for everyone.

The Land Of The Setting Sun: The Currency Crisis Of Japan Has Just Started

By Tuomas Malinen of The MT Malinen substack

On Tuesday, we shortly commented the flash crash and the (assisted) recovery of the Japanese Yen between Friday and Monday, 26-29 April, on the GnS Economic’s Deprcon Outlook. In this entry, I will detail the reasons behind the crash, which go way back in history starting from the post-WWII growth model of the Japanese economy, leading to the the financial crash of early 1990s. They imply that the currency crisis of Japan is far from over.

Boom and bust

The Japanese economy was devastated in the Second World War, which created a need for a major reconstruction effort. Japanese also switched their model of governance to democracy, which laid the foundation for a stable society supportive of investments. The economic boom after WWII was fueled by financial regulation that kept the nominal interest rate below inflation and successful economic reforms that supported, e.g., neutral recruiting of labor and education. The mandarins at the Ministry of Finance issued ceiling on interest rates of both lending and deposit rates, which led to a notable investment boom. Export sector grew fast with the composition of the exports changing from toys and textiles to bicycles and motorcycles and further to steel, automobiles and electronics over the decades.

Japanese government began to deregulate the financial sector in the early 1980's, following a global trend. Also, in the mid-1980's, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) tried to aggressively limit the appreciation of yen (because it decreased country's trade surplus), by cutting interest rates. These led to a rapid growth in the supplies of money and credit. A financial boom ensued.

The credit expansion led to notable gains in the real estate and stock markets, where bubbles grew to massive sizes. By the late 1980's, the price index for residential real estate in the six largest Japanese cities had 58-folded from 1955. During the 1980's alone, the price of real estate increased by a factor of six. At the peak, the value of Japanese real estate was double of that in the US. According to the chatter at the time, the market value of land under the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was greater than the market value of all real estate in California. The Nikkei stock market index rose 40000 percent from early 1949 till late 1989, with massive increase during the 1980's. In the late 1980's, the market value of Japanese equities was twice the market value of US equities.

The real estate and stock market booms were highly connected. A substantial portion of firms listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange were real estate companies, which held considerable positions in property of major cities. Construction activity surged due to the combination of booming real estate prices and financial deregulation. Banks held large volumes of real estate and stocks, whose increasing value led to appreciation of banking stocks. Borrowers were usually required to pledge real estate as collateral, which meant that increase in the value of the real estate increased the value of the collateral enabling banks to increase their loan portfolio and grow in size. Also industrial firms bought real estate as the profit it produced was many times higher than that of, e.g., producing steel and automobiles. There was a 'perpetual motion machine' of ever-increasing prices and financial wealth, until suddenly there was not.

In the mid-1989, the BoJ started to rise interest rates, with the obvious effort to prick the asset bubbles. It succeeded. The stock market peaked at the last trading day in 1989, and fell over 38 percent in 1990. It bottomed out in Spring 2003 after falling close to 80 percent from the peak (Nikkei actually broke its previous record, set on December 29, 1989, on February 22 this year). The fall in real estate prices was slower, but extensive. For example, commercial real estate fell close to one-tenth of its peak value. Because the collateral of the banking sector was tightly connected to real estate, its value collapsed. Many industrial firms suffered crippling losses from their investments in the real estate.

The collapse of stock markets and real estate wiped out a large chunk of capital of banks, which in collaboration with the declining value of bank collateral, hurdled the banking sector into insolvency. Credit creation collapsed and the economy tumbled. A financial crisis set in.

The bailout

After the crash of the real estate sector, majority of the large Japanese banks remained bankrupt for most of the 1990's. It was a tradition in Japan to socialize the losses of the banking sector, and regulatory authorities were reluctant to close banks considered bankrupt.

While the BoJ was somewhat slow to respond to the crisis, it started to lower its target interest rate in 1991, which eventually reached zero in early 1999. When the crisis intensified, the BoJ started to act as lender of last resort, the main task of a central bank in a crisis, but it also bailed out several financial institutions. This was mostly done by providing funds to different bodies, including the Housing Loan Administration assuming bad loans from the off-balance sheet, or jusen, companies banks had created to provide mortgages and the New Financial Stablization Fund, which provided capital both to banks and private financial institutions. This was very exceptional as central banks do usually provide only liquidity, not capital, to banks not to mention to private financial companies.

Facing a public anger over bank bailouts in the early stages of the crisis, the government allowed, and in some cases even encouraged, banks to extend loans to ailing businesses. Government, e.g., allowed for accounting gimmicks which, with the lacking transparency, enabled banks to downplay their loan losses and overstate their capital.

These measures saved the financial sector, but at a heavy cost. Because the banking sector was not restructured, bank lending collapsed and was diverted towards ailing unprofitable companies. The reason for this was simple: banks tried to avoid further losses from bankruptcies.

After the implosion of the asset bubbles, the domestic non-traded goods sector held the largest share of unprofitable companies. While bank lending to exporting (trading goods) sector diminished in the 1990’s, bank lending to the non-traded good sector actually increased. Thus, Japanese banks kept extending lines of credit to unprofitable firms to avoid losses that would have occurred if the firms would have gone bust. This zombified the Japanese economy.

So, while government policies were effective in restoring some trust to financial sector, they let the "zombie" banks to linger. They were kept standing without recapitalization or clearing their books. Subsidies from the government and ‘zombie-lending’ from banks kept unprofitable firms operating, but also blocked creation of new firms, because when banks use their diminished lending capacity to support ailing companies, the funding for risky new enterprises dries up. The old unprofitable firms also tie private capital, which could otherwise be used to support the creation of new businesses. This leads to a vicious loop of depressed innovation, falling production and diminishing profits. As a result, the Japanese economy stagnated. Moreover, these policies led to misallocation of credit on a massive scale, fall in the investment rate, and a prolonged slump in productivity.

(Note that you should not use inflation corrected, or “real”, gross domestic product nor GDP per capita to measure the economic development of a county with decades-long deflation and declining population.)

The drag

When the private sector becomes infested with so called zombie companies, which are able to stand only with the help of easy credit, it becomes a serious drag to the economy. This is clearly visible in the growth of the Total Factor Productivity of Japan.

The figure above presents the three-year moving average of the growth of the TFP. We can see a rather clear collapse in the growth rate of the TFP of Japan from around 1992 lasting till 2012. In 2018, the TFP growth fell negative again, and spiked in 2023. The U.S. series provides a reference point.

You can think of the TFP as a your productivity at work. If your productivity increases, you (usually) earn more income, which makes you able increase your livings standards and, e.g. to pay back your loans. However, if your productivity stagnates, or even starts to fall, you earn less income, which starts to eat into your living standards, unless you support it (artificially) through borrowing. Moreover, if a considerable share of this borrowing does not go into productive investments, which would increase your productivity and thus income stream in the future, you just go deeper into debt with your ability pay it back hindered. This is exactly what happened to Japan. Because her productivity fell for a very long time, the only way to keep the living standards and the economy afloat was through massive government borrowing and monetary stimulus (low interest rates). Due to this, the ability of the Japanese government to pay back its debt has diminished as the economy has now grown, while the debt pile has grown to a monstrous size.

The problem Japan currently faces can thus be depicted as follows:

After the crisis of early 1990's, the leaders of Japan decided not to let the economy to crash, because of e.g. cultural issues. In Japan, bankruptcies are considered highly shameful often leading to suicides. While the bailout of the Japanese economy was understandable culturally, the fact is that the restructuring of the Japanese economy after the financial crisis was an utter failure. Another country which experienced a financial crash at the same time, but recovered quite remarkably, is Finland.

Currency crisis

Currency and debt crises tend to be deeply intertwined. This is because the foreign exchange value of a currency reflects the trust of international investors and businesses on the keeper of the currency, i.e. the government of a country.

Essentially, a currency crisis or a crash is an “attack” on the exchange value of the currency in the markets. If the foreign exchange (FX) rate is fixed or pegged, this attack will test central banks (the monetary authority) commitment to the peg. The current view is that the timing of the attacks is not predictable (forecastable). If the FX-rate is fixed or pegged, market participants expect the policy of monetary authorities will be inconsistent with the peg and they will try to force authorities to abandon the peg, thus validating their expectations.

What matters for speculators are the internal economic conditions with respect to external conditions set for the currency (like stable FX-rate) . If these are incompatible in some meaningful way, like when the government has an unsustainable debt burden, monetary authorities face a trade-off between external and domestic goals for the exchange rate. In these circumstances, random shocks in the foreign exchange markets, called sunspots, can trigger an attack on the external value of the currency. This means that, when internal economic conditions are deteriorating, due to e.g. an unsustainable sovereign debt load, random events or shocks, can break the trust of investors leading them to sell the currency in the exchange markets causing the (external) value of the currency to drop suddenly or even to crash.

If a country holds a large external debt pile, a crashing currency will naturally increase its (foreign-currency) value threatening to create a wave of defaults. This applies to private entities, as well as to local and central governments. A currency crash is often expected to lead to interest rate rises by the monetary authority to defend the FX-rate of the currency. However, if the government holds a large amount of debt, higher interest rates can easily succumb the government under interest payments, which will eventually lead to a sovereign default. Rising interest rates would thus lead to further deterioration of trust by investors in the currency of a highly indebted government. This is why the Bank of Japan is trapped. If it would start to raise rates, the debt service burden of the Japanese government would rapidly become unsurmountable.

Conclusions

The bailout of the Japanese economy in early 1990s, which caused the slump in productivity leading to the very high indebtedness of the Japanese government, is the main culprit behind the ‘flash crash’ of the Japanese Yen. On April 26, it seems, a ‘sunspot’ triggered the selling. The response of the monetary authority, i.e., the BoJ, was to start to defend the yen at USDJPY pair of 160. Its intervention (buying of yen) pushed the pair to under 153 on May 3, where it has started to creep back up.

As the underlying problems of the Japanese economy have not gone anywhere, the attack on the yen in the markets is likely to continue and escalate, again, at some point. The question is, what is the breaking point in the USDJPY pair after which investors start to flee? Moreover, we should remember that monetary authorities have their limits, while markets don’t. Thus, it is very likely that the currency crisis of Japan has but just started. See my other post for analysis on its implications.

Why the West should NOT confront China the way it does right now.

  Here's the giant 2024 Guangzhou Fair. 74,000 booths. (Video - 18mn)

 And here the 2024 Beijing Auto Fair. (Video - 16mn)

  Now, here's my prediction: Whatever absurd and stupid measures Washington takes, Beijing will NOT attack Taipei. Why should they? China is on the bring of becoming the engine of the world. Imperial ambitions may come later but for now, Beijing means business. China is developing and needs to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. Eventually, it may represent a danger for the West, but to my opinion it would be far wiser to learn to deal with the country than systematically confront it in a way which will fare no better than the military confrontation with Russia. 

  China is not out of the woods yet. It still has to deal with its giant real estate bubble and a fight against pollution and land degradation which is far from won at this stage. Dealing with China means competition and cooperation. This is what we had 10 years ago to everybody's benefit. The desperate and absurd profiling of China as an enemy of the United States and therefore the West must be reversed. This is the only way we can walk away from the edge of the precipice. Will this happen? Let's be optimistic against the odds for once. The alternative will bring absolutely nothing to anyone, including the narrow minded elites who believe they can come on top of a confrontation. They can't! 

  Two important events will take place in the next few weeks: The G7 and the BRICS. If the G7 is conciliatory, unlikely but not impossible, the BRICS will be another "working cession". If not, the process of integration will accelerate and the confrontation will become more acute. As I predicted earlier, the world we live in from now on will be decided by the end of this month. Let's hope for the best. This may be our very last chance!

Douglas MacGregor Interview - The war in Ukraine is over! Now what? (Video - 18mn)

  For anybody who has been following this conflict, it was easy to understand that this was a war of attrition. Russia was not moving, just creating extremely difficult conditions for the Ukrainian army which for some reasons was expected to perform miracles with the much superior armament of the West. The weapons ended up stuck in the mud, the professional army was decimated and replaced by reluctant conscripts, add incompetence and corruption and it is obvious that the Ukrainians never stood a chance. It would have been wise to understand this 2 years ago. Now somehow, the war must end. 

  Can the West let it end or will they up the ante? Douglas MacGregor see some signs that the war will end. I am afraid it cannot be so easy. You only need to remember how the British sunk the agreements which were about to be signed to understand that the balance is fragile and it is extremely easy for people with bad intentions to create mayhem. Other factors, the beginning of a recession?, may convince a soon to be defeated US administration that war may in the end be an option. This is only a possibility among many. Although history says this is likely, we all know that it doesn't repeat, it only rhymes.

 

Virtual Home Invasions: We're Not Safe From Government Peeping Toms

  Some new technologies are becoming extremely dangerous from a privacy point of view. Personally, I have always declined working with IoT companies for that reason. The price of convenience is slavery, first virtually then eventually in the real world. When everything will communicate with everything else, your every move, action and thought will be registered, monitored and if needs be acted upon.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man’s life at will.”

- Justice William O. Douglas

The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

Without our realizing it, the American Police State passed the baton off to a fully-fledged Surveillance State that gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like an electronic prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. Yet when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

To our detriment, we are fast approaching a world without the Fourth Amendment, where the lines between private and public property are so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic—the hallmark of a healthy and free society—has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, none of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the electronic concentration camp.

The (Anti) Social Cost Of Carbon

  These people are completely destroying the industrial base in The US and Europe with made-up unachievable eco-targets. Then you wonder why the West ends up with armies which can't fight and companies which can't compete. Now would be a good time to wake up although history says it won't happen. 

Authored by Jonathan Lesser via RealClearEnergy,

Forty-two was the mystical number that explained “life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’ comic novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Today, another mystical number, the so-called social cost of carbon (SSC), is providing the excuse for the Environmental Protection Agency and green-energy-enamored state regulators to enact crippling energy policies.

The SCC is the thumb on the scale that can justify virtually any policy aimed at eliminating fossil fuels. When the EPA first proposed its rule to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, the agency’s cost-benefit analysis determined the benefits would be minuscule. Any putative benefits, it turns out, would come instead from reductions in carbon emissions and, here’s the key, based on a calculated value for the SCC.  The same was true for the EPA’s earlier attempt at carbon regulation via a “Clean Power Plan,” which was shut down by the Supreme Court. But here we are again with the agency’s newest rules trying to force coal plants to further reduce mercury emissions and to force both coal and natural gas-fired power plants to capture 90% of their carbon emissions. The technology to accomplish this doesn’t exist and EPA Administrator Michael Regan admitted the rule will force the closure of fossil-fuel power plants.

The SCC values used by the EPA are derived from calculations in integrated planning models (IPMs). Those models assume a simplistic linear relationship between carbon emissions and world temperature (never mind that the validity of that linear assumptions is a subject of deep debate in scientific circles). The models then assume that the resulting temperature increases cause all forms of environmental doom – rising sea levels, more disease, and declining agricultural production – for which yet more estimates are made to assign future cost consequences. Here’s the key: the IPMs project these costs out for the next 300 years (not a typo). Then, those far future costs are “discounted” to estimate a value in today’s dollars by using truly absurd assumptions about such things as inflation and economic growth.

A tongue-in-cheek forecaster’s creed is “Give them a number or give them a date. Don’t give them both.” Attempting to predict the future three centuries hence may be standard fare for science fiction writers, but basing energy policies on such predictions is insane.

Imagine someone in the year 1724 predicting life – and technology – today. Benjamin Franklin was 18 years old and working in his father’s print shop. George Washington would not be born for another eight years. The French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, who first identified carbon as an element in 1789, would not be born until 1743. The first patent on a flush toilet would not happen for another half-century. Thomas Edison would not invent the light bulb and the telephone for another 150 years. Could anyone in 1724 have imagined automobiles, mobile phones, and MRI machines? How about integrated circuits, nuclear power, and B-2 bombers?

To presume we can accurately predict, or even imagine, what the world will look like 300 years from now is just as preposterous. Yet, simplistic models and arbitrary assumptions are being used to drive energy policy decisions today. Using the SCC estimates, and assuming that new technologies will magically appear, the EPA can justify virtually any pollution control regulation, including those that effectively mandate electric vehicles. Similarly, even though offshore wind generation costs five times more than natural gas and coal, the SCC can “prove” the benefits of offshore wind exceed its costs. New York State, for example, assumes that, by 2040, thousands of megawatts of “dispatchable emissions-free generators” (the equivalent of a natural gas generator burning pure hydrogen) will provide the necessary backup for unreliable offshore wind, even though no such generators exist.

Contrary to the economic fantasies peddled by green energy advocates, policies to eliminate fossil fuels based on the supposed benefits captured by the SCC will cripple the U.S. economy. Electricity prices, coupled with ill-considered plans to electrify virtually everything, will soar. Supplies will dwindle, requiring rationing, either explicitly or through rolling blackouts, such as those experienced every day in South Africa. Rather than creating some green energy nirvana, the lack of adequate and affordable electricity will cause societal decay.

All of this based on a made-up number.

Jonathan Lesser is a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics and president of Continental Economics.

Russia's final warning to Macron and Cameron (Video - 46mn)

  I find it extremely strange to say the least that people are not panicking as we are on the very edge of a nuclear war which looks more probable by the day. Maybe this is due to the radio silence from the Medias in order not to spook the market. Maybe.

  The real worry is not per se what is being said but the dynamic and the fact that there is no turning back possible. We have the BRICS meeting coming, then the G7, a desperate Ukraine with a president soon to become illegitimate at least in the eyes of the Russians, a recession which except in name is already here, the US elections at the end of the year. If I was a Greek mischievous god, now would be a good time to sow more confusion!