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Authored by James Rickards via the Daily Reckoning,

This is a highly consequential election year, to say the least. The policy differences between Biden and Trump are enormous. Whether it’s taxes, regulation, borders, energy or foreign policy, the differences couldn’t be clearer.

And though I prefer to focus my analysis on markets alone, I can’t. These days especially, politics plays too great a role in how markets behave.

But this year’s election is about far more than policy.

In the past, the D.C. establishment could live with a typical Republican or Democrat. They knew neither candidate would rock the boat too much if he got elected. Both candidates were cut from the same basic cloth and played by the accepted rules.

But all that goes out the window with Trump.

He’s the most polarizing political figure we’ve seen in our lifetimes. You’d probably have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find a parallel.

And it’s clear that Trump’s political enemies will stop at nothing to keep him out of the White House this time.

Lawfare 

“Lawfare” is their primary tactic. They just want to get Trump convicted of a felony before the election so they can brand him a criminal, believing that the American public won’t elect a convicted felon.

They don’t care if the conviction is subsequently overturned by a higher court. The damage will already be done. And if it trashes the Constitution, Trump’s political enemies are prepared to live with that.

They’re convinced that Trump is the equivalent of Hitler and that he’ll destroy democracy if he’s elected. So in their minds, the ends justify the means. They’ll justify any action, legal or illegal, to ensure his defeat.

They don’t seem to realize that the harder they go after Trump with bogus charges, the more popular he becomes.

I’m not here to defend Trump or oppose him. No doubt, he’s a deeply flawed character with personality traits that alienate many people. But voters don’t expect a billionaire real estate magnate from New York City to be a saint. They vote for him because they think he can get things done.

And under honest democratic elections, the administrative state, or deep state, whatever you want to call it, stays out of it. But that’s not the system we have today.

And that should concern every American, regardless of his or her political affiliation.

Again, it doesn’t matter if you love Trump or hate him. But in a democracy, the people rule. Not the bureaucrats. And if the people elect Trump, then he should be allowed to enact the policies that got him elected. That didn’t happen when he won in 2016.

Stop Trump!

The first two years of his administration were hobbled by the fake Russian collusion hoax and the numerous investigations that resulted. Those investigations showed that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia, but Trump’s enemies didn’t care (and certainly did not apologize).

They just moved on to the next fake scandal, which was the first impeachment over a brief phone call to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy asking about Biden family corruption. It turns out that Biden family corruption was rampant in Ukraine, but that didn’t stop phony “whistleblowers” (actually lawbreakers) like Eric Ciaramella from leaking classified transcripts to Adam Schiff to get the impeachment process going.

Trump was acquitted by the Senate. Then came the second impeachment where Trump was also acquitted. Since leaving office, Trump has been hit with federal criminal charges relating to Jan. 6 and the Mar-a-Lago raid, as well as state criminal charges in New York and Georgia.

Trump’s enemies never quit. They’re also going after Trump’s advisers and confidants. It’s meant to isolate Trump because anyone who advises him will fear they’ll be hauled into court on some bogus charge and have to spend a fortune on lawyers, win or lose.

The latest lawfare tactic has been unveiled against Trump attorney John Eastman. It’s called “debanking.”

Good Luck Living Without a Bank

In Eastman’s case, it started with Bank of America closing his bank accounts for no good reason and with no recourse. Then he turned to his accounts at USAA, which specializes in accounts for military veterans and their families. Shortly thereafter, USAA also closed Eastman’s bank accounts.

We tend to take banking services for granted and don’t think much about what would happen if we were shut out of the banking system. No checks, no savings accounts, no wire transfers, no ATMs, no bank-issued credit cards, no lines of credit or mortgages, etc.

It’s like trying to survive without food or water. It’s impossible. And that’s the whole point. It’s designed to make the victim’s life miserable.

The same thing happened in the U.K. when NatWest and Coutts debanked Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit movement. Farage fought back and the CEO of NatWest was eventually fired over the incident. But it was a brutal fight and a tough transition for Farage when he suddenly found himself debanked.

Unfortunately, debanking is just an extension of the “woke” cancel culture that’s taken root in much of the West.

Shut up, Bigot!

When we look around at places like New Zealand and Scotland, there seems to be a bizarre competition to see which country can pass the most fascist laws and imitate George Orwell’s dystopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four in the least amount of time.

Scotland has imposed so-called hate crime laws that subject you to imprisonment for exercising free speech if it happens to offend a long list of protected parties. No actual violence or physical act is needed. If you simply say the wrong thing, you can be arrested, fined and imprisoned for “inciting hate.”

A similar law has just passed in Ireland. The Polish government wants to pass a law that makes it a crime to “defame” members of the LBGT community. Of course, the term “defame” is ill-defined and is in the eye of the beholder. Any choice of words, even if derogatory or hurtful by some standard, should be protected by free speech provisions. But in Poland, it may soon land you in jail.

I’ve never understood hate crime laws anyway (and I’m a lawyer). If you murder someone, it’s murder. If you assault someone, it’s assault. Subject to due process of law, you should go to jail if convicted or perhaps face capital punishment.

Prosecutors have to show intent, but what does “hate” have to do with it? The perpetrator may, in fact, hate the victim but that’s not the crime. The crime is assault or murder. Those crimes have been considered crimes for millennia.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Was Supposed to Be Fiction

Adding hate to the definition just blurs the line between thought and action in ways that make it easier for fascist governments to target political enemies with flimsy allegations of “hate” when no actions were involved.

The most egregious example of this trend toward thought crimes is Canada. The chief neo-fascist there is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has proposed a law called the Online Harms Act that expands the definition of “discrimination” to include online speech “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group.”

What exactly does this law mean by “foment”? Who defines “vilification” or “detestation”? What’s the definition of “group”?

All of these questions will be answered by a new Digital Safety Commission, which will not be bound by “any technical or legal rules of evidence.” If accused, you can be ordered to pay $20,000 to any “victim” and $50,000 to the state with no limit on how many victims might crawl out of the woodwork.

This is practically an invitation for grifters and activists to attack political enemies with fake claims of having been subject to “detestation.” It gets worse. If a court believes you are likely to commit a “hate crime” under this law, you can be placed under house arrest and held in isolation.

In other words, just thinking the wrong thing as imagined by an unaccountable magistrate is enough to put you under house arrest. This is actually worse than what the Thought Police did in Orwell’s novel.

You can expect censorship in the U.S. to increase as we get closer to the November election. Get ready for it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be fiction. Unfortunately, it’s becoming reality.

In yet another among the latest signs that Moscow is escalating its war against Ukraine, pushing sustained strikes deeper into its territory, Russian forces have mounted a large attack against Ukraine's military headquarters for the southern region. 

The ministry of defense confirmed an attack on Ukraine’s Operational Command South headquarters, coming amid stepped up operations against the southern port city of Odessa. RIA Novosti separately confirmed the attack on the Ukrainian HQ in the center Odessa, citing a ballistic missile strike on the city and three explosions, which reportedly killed three people.

This week a Gothic-style building in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa was also struck.

Just last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu pledged that his forces will step up attacks on warehouses and logistics hubs with West-supplied weaponry. Moscow has also said it will push back the front lines deeper into Ukrainian territory in order to better prevent NATO-supplied longer range missiles from striking inside Russia. It seems the next big target is Odessa, which would greatly expand Russian military hold in the south.

But Russia also seems to be responding to the increased attacks against Crimea. On Tuesday Russian officials said that the peninsula came under attack with US-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS).

It was revealed only within the last week that these long-range systems were secretly transferred to Kiev by Washington in March. Politico previously documented that the White House "quietly approved the transfer of a number of Army Tactical Missile Systems with a range of nearly 200 miles, said a senior Biden administration official and two U.S. officials, allowing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces to put at risk more Russian targets inside Ukrainian sovereign territory."

A prior, older version of the ATAMCS missiles were sent last year, but the range was reportedly limited to 100 miles. President Biden and his officials throughout the early phase of the war warned Kiev against attacks on Russian territory but this caution seems to have been abandoned by the US administration.

Governor of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov said of the Tuesday attack that the inbound ATACMS were shot down by Russian air defenses. Russia's defense ministry (MoD) specified it shot down six of the missiles. 

Additionally, French-made projectiles were also reportedly shot down elsewhere in the country, with TASS reporting that "Russian air defense systems have taken down 29 Ukrainian drones and five French-made AASM Hammer smart bombs over 24 hours in the special military operation in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Uragan rocket was also shot down."

Ukraine's skies remain by and large undefended and unprotected, which is why President Zelensky is essentially begging for more Patriot anti-air defense systems from the US and Europe. Kiev further wants to see the F-16 program hurried along. 

Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ilya Evlash on Wednesday told a public broadcaster that the first batch F-16 jets could arrive as early as within weeks, after Orthodox Easter (celebrated on May 5 this year); however, other observers have said that this timetable is a stretch and remains unrealistic.

Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

It is not clear whether a Chinese official was at the Beijing airport to bid farewell to Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he ended his three-day visit to China on Friday, but the send-off was in any event low-key and Chinese leader Xi Jinping slighted America's top diplomat at the end of his troubled stay.

Also, China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for his arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane.

"The Chinese government flouted international protocols at the airport on the secretary of state's arrival in Shanghai and departure from Beijing," Charles Burton of the Prague-based Sinopsis think tank told Gatestone.

"It was petty."

"This was more than a slight," Burton, a former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, said.

"Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore."

Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America's complaints on matters such as Beijing's support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging.

As a result, America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative. "I think it's important to underscore the value—in fact, the necessity—of direct engagement, of sustained engagement, of speaking to each other, laying out our differences which are real, seeking to work through them, as also looking for ways to build cooperation where we can," Blinken said to Chen Jining, Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, ahead of his talks in the Chinese capital.

After the end of fruitless sessions in Beijing—Blinken met with, among others, President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi—all the secretary of state could do is highlight new dialogue issues.

"I'm pleased to announce that earlier today, we agreed to hold the first U.S.-PRC talks on artificial intelligence to be held in the coming weeks," he said at a press availability on April 26, as he wrapped up his trip to China.

"We'll share our respective views on the risks and safety concerns around advanced AI and how best to manage them."

Blinken's comments repeated those of President Joe Biden after his November 15 meeting with Xi Jinping in Woodside, California. In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.

There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic.

"The latest shambolic display by the Biden administration comes in the form of Secretary of State Antony Blinken groveling before China's Ruler-for-Life Xi Jinping for a new set of protocols for governing the development of artificial intelligence between America and China, the two nations contributing the most to both the advancement of AI and its weaponization," Brandon Weichert, a national security analyst at The National Interest, told Gatestone.

"Although creating such protocols may sound like a good idea, it seems like a bad idea for Washington to unilaterally agree to limit its own activities."

"Unilaterally"? Burton and Weichert point out that China never honors agreements, so any deal with Beijing is akin to a unilateral promise.

"China is deeply committed to the weaponization of AI and would be counting its lucky communist star if the Americans basically deterred themselves with such a protocol," Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life, added.

He suggests the United States spend its time getting the world to restrict tech trade with China "rather than pleading with Xi Jinping for mercy."

On the AI front, the Biden administration to its credit has been restricting sales of chips and chip-making equipment and has been coercing cooperation from others, most notably the Netherlands, the home of equipment-maker ASML.

Nonetheless, Biden needs to do more: China has been able to buy chips on the black market. For instance, Reuters reported this month that ten Chinese entities were able, despite U.S. rules, to acquire Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips through resellers.

The risk now is that the Biden administration will trade away its restrictions for meaningless promises from China's Communists.

Biden is willing to sign agreements with China's regime because he believes it is merely a "competitor," refusing to label it an adversary and certainly not using the term that the Chinese Communist Party reserves for America: enemy. He and his predecessors have not wanted to acknowledge that the Party, as it openly proclaims, seeks the destruction of the United States.

Enemy? In May 2019, People's Daily, the Party's self-described "mouthpiece" and therefore the most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark piece declaring a "people's war" on America.

This phrase has special meaning. "A people's war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods," declared a column carried in April 2023 by PLA Daily, an official news website of the People's Liberation Army.

Therefore, Biden's measures, like those of presidents before him, have been inadequate.

America still suffers from an inability to appreciate the hostility and maliciousness of the Communist Party. Blinken left China talking about how it was in America's interest for China to prosper. China's regime, however, fueled with American investment and trade, has been waging "unrestricted warfare" against the United States for decades. Beijing's unrestricted warfare has included the killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with fentanyl, the equivalent of one plane crash every day and more American deaths than in the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars combined.

Now, Xi thinks he has the upper hand. From the moment Blinken touched down in Shanghai to the moment he left, China's ruler went out of his way to humiliate the secretary of state. The secretary of state, however, exhibited inexhaustible patience for humiliation.

Unfortunately, acceptance of rough treatment has consequences, because the meekness leads the Chinese to think they can do what they want, making them even more arrogant and aggressive. Biden has yet to figure that out.

Xi met Blinken on Friday, but China's leader let the cameras record his disdain for his visitor. Seconds before the secretary of state walked half-way across the room to shake hands, Xi asked an aide, "When will he leave?"

"Not soon enough," Blinken should have replied.

The secretary of state should never have gone to China in the first place.

Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

Last week, Japan saw its currency, the yen, rapidly depreciate against the U.S. dollar and other world currencies to near record low levels. This drew the attention of financial markets and other observers, and—in some quarters—led to panic. There was concern that Japan, a formerly great nation now increasingly viewed as the “sick man of Asia,” was on the brink of a currency and financial markets crisis.

It wasn’t so long ago that Japan was the envy of the world. Japan’s postwar recovery and subsequent economic miracle produced by the 1980s the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. Numerous Japanese multinational corporations were admired by the business world as a result of their growth, efficiency, and managerial discipline. The state and big business were closely aligned in what appeared an unstoppable formula. Flush with cash and confidence, Japanese companies and investors were aggressively expansionist, acquiring market share, trophy properties, resources, and businesses in the United States and elsewhere. Much like concerns about China today, fears then abounded that Japan would overtake the United States as the global economic leader.

These fears were unfounded. “Japan Inc.” was a house built on a faulty foundation. Overly accommodative easy money, along with high leverage throughout the financial and corporate sectors, facilitated a massive stock market and real estate bubble, which eventually burst in 1990. The crash led to a depression from which Japan has never recovered, even after three decades. The question is, why not? Herein lies a lesson for the United States.

Repeated government bailouts of failing financial and industrial companies have perpetuated Japan’s crisis. Japan’s leaders and policies have repeatedly blocked the process of creative destruction, which—if allowed to run its course and cleanse the system—would have been a massive stimulus to entrepreneurship and economic vitality. However, rather than allow capitalism to work, the Japanese system doomed the country to a generation of stagnation.

As a result, Japan has endured three “lost decades” of weak economic growth, diminished purchasing power, lower and lower standards of living, loss of prestige and influence in the global community, and an aging population that the island nation’s resources are straining to support.

Japan now has the world’s highest government debt-to-GDP ratio, at 264 percent. Japan’s banks are walking zombies, unable to grow or lend because they have never restructured their balance sheets to clean up massive piles of debt left over from excesses of previous decades. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) holds government bonds and other assets equal to 127 percent of Japan’s GDP, the highest ratio of any central bank in the world. This portfolio resulted in over $70 billion in unrealized losses for the BOJ in six months of 2023 alone.

The Japanese yen has devalued against the U.S. dollar by more than 30 percent in just three years since 2021. Since the global financial crisis 2008–09, the yen has lost 75 percent of its value against gold. Because of Japan’s high reliance on imports, this loss of purchasing power has translated directly into a substantially lower standard of living for the Japanese people. In theory, Japan could support the yen by raising interest rates, but this is a political, monetary, and fiscal impossibility.

Decades of easy money policies are a central culprit and cause of this slow-moving trainwreck.

The Bank of Japan only began raising interest rates this March, some three years after the United States and the European Union brought their own easy money policies to an end. This was the first time the BOJ has raised rates since 2007, a move that pulled the official rate out of negative territory. Nonetheless, with inflation now approaching 2 percent, a short-term policy rate of zero to 0.1 percent means that real rates remain around negative 2 percent. This serves as an additional tax on Japanese households and an intended stimulus to spend today rather than save for tomorrow.

Money essentially is free in Japan, but no one can afford to borrow it, even if the banks can manage to lend it. The BOJ and the entire banking system stand in the penumbra of insolvency. Only Japan’s decade-long zero interest-rate policy has allowed Japan’s decrepit financial system to continue to stand following the 2008 financial crisis and the effects of COVID economic shutdowns. Japan cannot afford to raise interest rates to support its currency more than nominally above the zero bound without substantially raising debt service costs and exploding losses. This would bring the entire rickety system to the ground.

A growing economy might help ease the burden, but Japan’s economy is moribund. This is not surprising, as meaningful growth is impossible under mountains of debt. GDP shrank by 0.8 percent in the third quarter and eked out 0.1 percent growth in the fourth quarter. While the country thus barely escaped technical recession (two consecutive quarters of GDP decline), Japan hasn’t posted GDP growth above 2 percent in more than 20 years, save for two rebound quarters after the global shocks of the financial crisis and COVID.

Japan represents a slow-moving demographic disaster. Japan has the oldest median population of any major country in the world and the lowest fertility rate at 1.37. Japan’s fertility rate has been below the minimum population replacement rate (2.1) for 40 years, meaning that the country is both aging and losing economic productivity, and it is probably too late to reverse it.

This all represents a grave warning to the United States.

The U.S. government is chasing Japan for the ignoble title of most indebted nation. Overly indebted nations cannot grow. With federal government debt to GDP of 129 percent, a ratio which is increasing rapidly, the United States is now the fourth most indebted country in the world. Debt is growing more quickly now because the federal government refuses to wean itself off of deficit spending, including an additional $1.7 trillion in 2023, which must be funded by new debt, as must over $1 trillion in interest expense. This debt—and the cost to service it—acts as a drag on our economy. Deficit spending and the borrowing required to support it crowds out private market investment and financings.

Rather than let more insolvent banks and unprofitable firms fail, U.S. monetary policy since at least the 2008 financial crisis has propped up bad business models—and the asset values of otherwise worthless investments—by subsidizing the cost of capital well below the natural rate of interest. In a nation that has been the standard bearer and exporter of capitalism for more than two centuries, socialistic government policies are preventing capitalism from working at home. This will eventually catch up with our financial markets and economy, just as it did for Japan.

It is not just shortsighted monetary and financial policy that threatens U.S. competitiveness.

If Americans’ worsening attitudes toward the importance of marriage and children do not reverse course dramatically, the United States will face the same demographic fate as Japan. The fertility rate in the United States has been in decline since at least 2008, and reached a record low of 1.62 in 2023. This is well below the replacement rate, and thus unsustainable.

Progressives point to declining fertility rates and aging populations to justify mass illegal immigration, but this is a red herring. Bringing tens of millions of unskilled, uneducated, and culturally unassimilated migrants into the nation is not a benefit but rather an untenable burden on social infrastructure, an enervating drain on economic productivity, and an unbearable tax on legal citizens.

At least Japan got that part right.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, participants use the month to focus efforts on “eradicating stigma, extending support, fostering public education and advocating for policies that prioritize the well-being of individuals and families affected by mental illness.”

The topic of suicide is an important part of this conversation. As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, it is a truly global issue, even though estimated rates vary around the world. For example, according to OECD data, out of every 100,000 men in the United States an average of 23 committed suicide in 2021, while for women the average was close to six per 100,000. In several countries these figures are even higher, such as in South Korea, Lithuania and Hungary.

You will find more infographics at Statista

While there are significant differences between countries, one pattern is clear to see: the rates of men taking their own lives are higher than women in each of the 15 countries selected here.

South Korea and Lithuania had the highest rates of suicide among men in 2022 (out of the countries reporting data), at 34.9 and 33.1 cases per 100,000 population, respectively.

For women, South Korea and Japan had the highest rates of the selected countries, with 14.9 and 9.8.

If you or somebody you know are in need of help, you can find a list of suicide crisis lines and website for countries around the world here.

It's been no secret that the fiercest and most sustained criticism of Israel's military operation in Gaza has come from Global South countries. Many of these have also supported South Africa's taking Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on allegations of genocide.

But now the next big step is taking place: governments are formally severing ties with Israel and expelling diplomats. On Wednesday Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that his country will cut relations with Israel over what he called its "genocidal" war against Palestinians. He said this will be formally initiated starting Thursday.

Gustavo Petro, center. Colombian President's Office

"Tomorrow (Thursday) diplomatic relations with the state of Israel will be severed... for having a genocidal president,"  Petro told a May Day rally in Bogota.

"If Palestine dies, humanity dies, and we will not let it die," he said at one point in the speech. Petro is Colombia's first ever leftist president, and he proclaimed that "democratic peoples cannot allow Nazism to reestablish itself in international politics."

However, Bloomberg has noted that his motives could partly be to distract from the ongoing economic crisis in the country:

Petro is looking to counter large anti-government rallies that took place on April 21 and said his administration will send a package of bills to congress meant to boost economic growth.

The package will include measures that force the financial sector to provide cheap financing to productive sectors, Petro said.

“It will consist of bills that generate forced investment in the Colombian private financial system aimed at credits for small, medium, and large industries, agriculture, and tourism in Colombia, to reactivate the country,” he said.

President Petro has for months been a fiery vocal critic of Israel, having first threatened to sever relations with Israel back in March. Already Bolivia had cut ties with Israel by the end of October as the Gaza offensive entered full swing.

NOW - Socialist president of Colombia: "Tomorrow diplomatic relations will be broken with Israel due to having a genocidal president."pic.twitter.com/FbkVBnaHIn

At that time Foreign Minister Israel Katz had condemned the Colombian leader's call to cut ties, writing on X that his support for "the Hamas murderers who carried out terrible acts of slaughter and sexual crimes against babies, women and adults is a disgrace to the Colombian people."

"Israel will continue to defend its citizens and will not give in to any pressure or threats," Katz had declared at the time. Israel has already halted security exports to Colombia as of last year following the worsening rift with Bogota in the wake of Oct.7.

Tel Aviv fears that such dramatic actions by Global South and non-aligned governments could spread, damaging trade in some corners of the globe and its standing on the world stage. A similar domino-effect momentum also happened in the late 20th century with apartheid-era South Africa.