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Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Your mother likely imparted valuable investing lessons you may not have known. With Mother’s Day approaching and bullish market exuberance present, such is an excellent time to revisit the investing lessons she taught me.

Personally, when I was growing up, my Mother had a saying, or an answer, for almost everything… as most mothers do. Every answer to the question “Why?” was immediately met with the most intellectual of answers:

“…because I said so”.

Seriously, my Mother was a resource of knowledge that has served me well over the years, and it wasn’t until late in life that I realized that she had taught me, unknowingly, valuable investing lessons to keep me safe.

So, by imparting her secrets to you, I may be violating some sacred ritual of motherhood knowledge, but I felt it was worth the risk of sharing the knowledge that has served me well.

1) Don’t Run With Sharp Objects!

It wasn’t hard to understand why she didn’t want me to run with scissors through the house – I think I did it early on to watch her panic. However, later in life, when I got my first apartment, I ran through the entire place with a pair of scissors, left the front door open with the air conditioning on, and turned every light on in the house.

That rebellion immediately stopped when I received my first electric bill.

Sometime in the mid-90s, the financial markets became a casino as the internet age ignited a whole generation of stock market gamblers who thought they were investors. There is a vast difference between investing and speculating; knowing the difference is critical to overall success.

A solid investment strategy combines defined goals, an accumulation schedule, allocation analysis, and, most importantly, a defined sell strategy and risk management plan.

Speculation is nothing more than gambling. If you are buying the latest hot stock, chasing stocks that have already moved 100% or more, or just putting money in the market because you think you “have to,” you are gambling.

The most important thing to understand about gambling is that success is a function of the probabilities and possibilities of winning or losing on each bet.

In the stock market, investors continue to play the possibilities instead of the probabilities. The trap comes with early success in speculative trading. Success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds ignorance. Most speculative traders tend to “blow themselves up” because of early success in their speculative investing habits.

When investing, remember that the odds of making a losing trade increase with the frequency of transactions. Just as running with a pair of scissors, do it often enough, and eventually, you could end up hurting yourself. 

2) Look Both Ways Before You Cross The Street.

I grew up in a small town, so crossing the street wasn’t as dangerous as in the city. Nonetheless, she yanked me by the collar more than once as I started to bolt across the street, seemingly anxious to “find out what’s on the other side.” It is essential to understand that traffic does flow in two directions. If you only look in one direction, you will get hit sooner or later.

Many people want to classify themselves as a “Bull” or a “Bear.” The savvy investor doesn’t pick a side; he analyzes both sides to determine what the best course of action in the current market environment is most likely to be.

The problem with the proclamation of being a “bull” or a “bear” means that you are not analyzing the other side of the argument and that you become so confident in your position that you tend to forget that “the light at the end of the tunnel…just might be an oncoming train.”

It is an essential part of your analysis, before you invest in the financial markets, to determine not only “where” but also “when” to invest your assets.

3) Always Wear Clean Underwear

This was one of my favorite sayings from my Mother because I always wondered about the rationality of it. I always figured that even if you wore clean underwear before an accident, you’re still likely left without clean underwear following it.

The investing lesson is: “You are only wrong – if you stay wrong.“

However, being an intelligent investor means always being prepared in case of an accident. That means simply having a mechanism to protect you when you are wrong with an investment decision.

You will notice that I said “when you are wrong” in the previous paragraph. Many of your investment decisions will likely turn out wrong. However, cutting those wrong decisions short and letting your right decisions continue to work will make you profitable over time.

Any person who tells you about all the winning trades he has made in the market – is either lying or hasn’t blown up yet.

One of the two will be true – 100% of the time.

Understanding the “risk versus reward” trade-off of any investment is the beginning step to risk management in your portfolio. Knowing how to mitigate the risk of loss in your holdings is crucial to your long-term survivability in the financial markets.

4) If Everyone Jumped Off The Cliff – Would You Do It Too?

Every kid, at one point or another, has tried to convince their Mother to allow them to do something through “peer pressure.” I figured if she wouldn’t let me do what I wanted, she would bend to the will of the imaginary masses. She never did.

“Peer pressure” is one of the biggest mistakes investors repeatedly make. Chasing the latest “hot stocks” or “investment fads” that are already overvalued and are running up on speculative fervor always ends in disappointment.

Investors buy stocks that have moved significantly off their lows in the financial markets because they fear “missing out.” This is speculating, gambling, guessing, hoping, praying – anything but investing. Generally, when the media begins featuring a particular investment, individuals have already missed the major part of the move. By that point, the probability of a decline began to outweigh the possibility of further rewards.

The investing lesson is to be aware of the “herd mentality.” Historically, investors tend to run in the same direction until that direction falters. The “herd” then turns and runs in the opposite direction. This continues to the detriment of investors’ returns over long periods.

This is also generally why investors wind up buying high and selling low. To be a long-term successful investor, you must understand the “herd mentality” and use it to your benefit – getting out from in front of the herd before you are trampled.

So, before you chase a stock that has already moved 100% or more, figure out where the herd may move to next and “place your bets there.” This takes discipline, patience, and a lot of homework, but you will often be rewarded for your efforts.

5) Don’t Talk To Strangers

This is just good, solid advice all the way around. Turn on the television, any time of the day or night, and it is the “Stranger’s Parade of Malicious Intent.” I don’t know if it is just me or if the media only broadcasts news revealing human depravity’s depths. Still, sometimes, I wonder if we are not due for a planetary cleansing through divine intervention.

However, back to investing lessons, getting your stock tips from strangers is a sure way to lose money in the stock market. Your investing homework should NOT consist of a daily regimen of CNBC, followed by a dose of Grocer tips, capped off with a financial advisor’s sales pitch.

To succeed in the long run, you must understand investing principles and the catalysts to make that investment profitable. Remember, when you invest in a company, you buy a piece of it and its business plan. You are placing your hard-earned dollars into the belief that the individuals managing the company have your best interests at heart. The hope is they will operate in such a manner as to make your investment more valuable so that it may eventually be sold to someone else for a profit.

This also embodies the “Greater Fool Theory,” which states that someone will always be willing to buy an investment at an ever higher price. The investing lesson is that, in the end, someone is always left “holding the bag.” The trick is to ensure that it isn’t you.

Also, you must be aware of this when getting advice from the “One Minute Money Manager” crew on television. When an “expert” tells you about a company you should be buying, remember he already owns it and most likely will be the one selling his shares to you.

6) You Either Need To “Do It” (polite version) Or Get Off The Pot!

When I was growing up, I hated to do my homework, which is ironic since I now do more homework than I ever dreamed of in my younger days. Since I wouldn’t say I liked doing homework, school projects were rarely started until the night before they were due. I was the king of procrastination.

My Mom was always there to help, giving me a hand and an ear full of motherly advice, usually consisting of many “because I told you so…”

Interestingly, many investors tend to watch stocks for a very long period, never acting on their analysis but idly watching as their instinct proves correct and the stock rises in price.

The investor then feels that they missed his entry point and decides to wait, hoping the stock will go back down one more time so that he can get in. The stock continues to rise. The investor continues to watch, becoming more frustrated until he finally capitulates on his emotion and buys the investment near the top.

The investing lesson is to be aware of the dangers of procrastination. On the way up and down, procrastination is the precursor of emotional duress derived from the loss of opportunity or the destruction of capital.

However, if you do your homework and can build a case for the purchase, don’t procrastinate. If you miss your opportunity for the correct entry into the position – don’t chase it. Leave it alone, and come back another day when ole’ Bob Barker is telling you – “The Price Is Right.”

7) Don’t Play With It – You’ll Go Blind

Well…do I need to go into this one? All I know for sure is that I am not blind today. What I will never know for sure is whether she believed it or if it was just meant to scare the hell out of me.

However, kidding aside, the investing lesson is that when you invest in the financial markets, it is very easy to lose sight of your intentions in the first place. Getting caught up in the hype, getting sucked in by the emotions of fear and greed, and generally being confused by the multitude of options available can cause you to lose your focus.

Always return to the basic principle you started with. That goal was to grow your small pile of money into a much larger one.

Putting It All Together

My Dad once taught me a fundamental investing lesson as well: KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

This is one of the best investment lessons you will ever receive. Too many people try to outsmart the market to gain a small, fractional increase in return. Unfortunately, they take disproportionate risks, often leading to negative results. The simpler the strategy is, the better the returns tend to be. Why? There is better control over the portfolio.

Designing a KISS portfolio strategy will help ensure that you don’t get blinded by continually playing with your portfolio and losing sight of what your original goals were in the first place.

1. Decide what your objective is: Retirement, College, House, etc.
2. Define a time frame to achieve your goal.
3. Determine how much money you can “realistically” put toward your monthly goal.
4. Calculate the return needed to reach your goal based on your starting principal, the number of years to your goal, and your monthly contributions.
5. Break down your goal into achievable milestones. These milestones could be quarterly, semi-annual, or annual and will help ensure you are on track to meet your objective.
6. Select the appropriate asset mix that achieves your required results without taking on excess risk that could lead to more significant losses than planned.
7. Develop and implement a specific strategy to sell positions during random market events or unexpected market downturns.
8. If this is more than you know how to do – hire a professional who understands essential portfolio and risk management.

There is much more to managing your portfolio than just the principles we learned from our Mothers. However, this is a start in the right direction, and if you don’t believe me – just ask your Mother.

Crude prices slid back to unchanged this morning - from some overnight gains - after a hotter than expected CPI print took demand-seducing rate-cuts off the table.

However, as Bloomberg reports, oil is still up 19% this year as OPEC+ cuts supply and geopolitical tensions across the Middle East create strong tailwinds. The market is bracing for Iran’s response to a suspected Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria last week, and top traders have been striking an increasingly bullish tone in recent days.

API reported a sizable crude build and another gasoline draw - all eyes will be on the official data for any confirmation.

API

• Crude +3.03mm (+800k exp)

• Cushing +124k

• Gasoline -609k (-1.4mm exp)

• Distillates +120k (-600k exp)

DOE

• Crude +5.84mm (+800k exp)

• Cushing -170k

• Gasoline +715k (-1.4mm exp)

• Distillates +1.66mm (-600k exp)

Bigger than expected crude build surprised traders but a build in gasoline stocks was probably the most notable aspect of the report...

Source: Bloomberg

In aggregate, this is a pretty chunky nationwide inventory build. Total crude and product stockpiles climbed by 12 million barrels, excluding SPR last week. That’s the biggest weekly gain since July last year. In addition to crude build, there were also increases in the other oils category, as well as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.

The Biden admin added 595k barrels to the SPR last week...

Source: Bloomberg

US gasoline stockpiles, which have plunged to the lowest levels this year, though they remain above the same period last year.

Source: Bloomberg

US Crude production was flat at 131.mm b/d, near record highs...

Source: Bloomberg

WTI was hovering around $85.25 ahead of the official data, dipped on the data then rallied higher...

Meanwhile, pump-prices continue to rise, as we expected, tracking wholesale gasoline prices higher...

Source: Bloomberg

...and if you think this morning's CPI was hot, with the highest pump-prices in six-months, just wait for next month...

Source: Bloomberg

Not at all what President Biden wanted to see, but we are sure it's all 'mom and pop' retail gas station owners' greed that is driving this!!!

A large share of affordable homes vanished over the pandemic, leading the supply to hit its lowest level on record in 2023.

Many buyers have become priced out of the market due to soaring home prices and high interest rates. Last year alone, the number of affordable homes shrank by almost 41%, equal to over 243,000 properties.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld, shows the dwindling supply of affordable U.S. homes, based on data from Redfin.

The Sharp Decline in Housing Affordability

In 2023, only 16% of homes were affordable in America, falling from 21% in the year before.

An affordable listing was defined as one with a monthly mortgage payment no more than 30% of the median monthly income of that county. Below, we show the share of affordable listings in the 97 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas by population:

As the above table shows, housing affordability has grown increasingly out of reach as mortgage rates have more than doubled in just two years.

While affordable homes made up 39% of the market in 2021, the share dropped precipitously as interest rates climbed higher. In 2023, the average annual 30-year fixed mortgage rates reached 6.81%—hitting its highest level in 20 years.

Although mortgage rates may decline over the year if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, it may not be enough to boost the supply of affordable housing.

That’s because rates may not fall sharply enough to undo the “golden hand-cuff” effect, where homeowners are reluctant to sell in order to hold on to their low mortgage rates. Adding to this, home construction has fallen significantly since the global financial crisis. During this time, home builders and lenders became increasingly cautious, leading home construction to drop 55% between 2006 and 2021.

What Comes Next?

The good news is that new-home construction is forecast to increase in 2024, with single-family housing starts projected to grow 4.7%.

While new home sales have historically comprised 10-12% of the single-family home market, they have recently surged to 30% due to the collapsing supply of existing homes. But even as new supply enters the market, it will likely take a number of years for housing affordability return to historical levels.

In fact, JP Morgan suggests that it could take two years if mortgage rates drop by 1 percentage point, assuming that home prices remained at all-time highs and wages continued rising at their current pace.

Each person in the European Union generated an average of 131 kilograms of food waste in 2021, according to estimates by the European statistics office Eurostat. This is based on data from the 27 member states.

Total food waste in the EU amounted to over 58 million tons in 2021.

Private households made up 54 percent of this, with more than 31 million tons of "fresh mass" generated by the category every year.

The second largest waste sector (21 percent) was the processing and production of food, while the remaining share came from the primary production sector (5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total), restaurants and food services (over 5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total) and retail and other food distributors (just over 4 million tons, 7 percent share).

As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, Cyprus had the highest amount of food waste per capita, at around 400 kg.

You will find more infographics at Statista

However, Belgium, Denmark, Greece and Portugal are also at the top end of the scale.

By contrast, Sweden, Croatia and Slovenia had a far lower waste output per person.

In addition to leftover food, food waste also includes non-edible by-products such as nut and fruit shells, stalks and leaves, coffee grounds and bones.

A new analysis by the energy think tank Ember has found that several countries in Europe could soon face bottlenecks in their national transmission energy grids, as more solar and wind power will be generated than these networks have capacity for.

As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the following chart , Spain, France and Poland are just some of the countries that will have energy grids which undershoot their country’s respective 2030 policy targets for wind and solar capacity.

Out of the 26 countries studied by Ember in this comparison, 11 will not have enough capacity for the expected wind and solar build out if the present grid plans are realized.

You will find more infographics at Statista

This pattern is not Europe-wide though: several grid plans were found to be closely aligned to the renewable energy targets and and in four countries they were even more ambitious (Croatia, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands).

According to the writers of the report, these latter countries have adopted a “sensible approach that better prepares transmission networks to accommodate potential future step ups in national ambition levels.”

Ember analysts say that the misalignment between grid plans and policy targets is likely due to a time lag between the creation of national policy and the development of grid plans, adding that the current lack in grid plan capacities is due to previous policy targets.

The deficit in capacity is problematic, as the writers of the report explain:

“Since it takes far longer to increase grid capacity than it does to deploy wind and solar projects, grids may not be prepared to meet the scale of future increases.”

This will make it harder to achieve energy policy targets.

Authored by Chris Morrison via DailySceptic.org,

An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. This fascinating fact of a 369.67 square kilometre increase has recently been discovered by a group of Chinese scientists analysing both surface and satellite records. Overall, land was lost during the 1990s, but the scientists found that in the study period of three decades to 2020 there was a net increase of 157.21 km2. The study observed considerable natural variation in both erosion and accretion. Of course, the findings blow holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. By means of such flimsy scare tactics, as we have seen in many other cases, desperate attempts are made to terrify global populations to accept the insanity of the Net Zero collectivisation.

The scientists said their data suggested that sea-level rise has not been a widespread cause of erosion for island shorelines in the studied regions.

“Presently, it is considered one of the contributing factors to shoreline erosion but not the predominant one,” they explained.

Needless to say, none of this will detain the attention of climate hysterics in both mainstream media and politics.

The Guardian was in fine form last June stating that rising oceans will extinguish more than land.

“It will kill entire languages,” it added, noting the effect on Pacific islands such as Tuvalu. Those areas of the Earth that were most hospitable to people and languages are now becoming the “least hospitable”.

Silly emotional Guardianista guff of course, but happily it does not seem to apply to Tuvalu.

A recent study found that the 101 islands of Tuvalu had grown in land mass by 2.9%.

The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average”.

The Maldives is also a poster scare for rising sea levels, with the attention-seeking activist Mark Lynas – he of the nonsense claim that 99.9% of scientists agree humans cause all or most climate change – organising an underwater Cabinet meeting of the local Government in 2009. As it happens, the Maldives is one of a number of areas that have seen recent increases in land mass.

Other areas include the Indonesian Archipelago, islands along the Indochinese Peninsula coast, and islands in the Red and Mediterranean Seas. Notably, the  coastal waters of the Indochinese Peninsula had the most substantial gain, with an increase of 106.28 km2 over the 30-year period. Of the 13,000 islands examined, the researchers found that only around 12% had experienced a significant shoreline shift, with almost equal numbers experiencing either landward (loss) or seaward (gain) movement.

The scientists identify many reasons why islands can grow in size despite the small annual rises in sea level seen in many parts of the world. It is noted that island shorelines are constantly changing due to factors such tides, winds, nearshore hydrodynamics and the transport of sediment. On inhabited islands, human action such as fish farming and land reclamation can be important.

Of course, humans action can have a number of unintended consequences, notably the mining of coral and the breakdown of natural water barriers. Island states such as the Maldives have not been slow in coming forward to claim ‘climate reparations’ from guilt-tripped citizens in the developed world. But tourism has dramatically boosted income in the Maldives to first world levels at a time when the locals have mined coral in industrial quantities to build ports, airports and resort developments. In the process, ocean life diversity has been lost and the islands are often less protected from storm waves that can flow direct to the shoreline. In a recent essay, a group of scientists and economists charged that coral mining “has resulted in massive degradation of shallow reef-flat areas, with important negative impacts on coastal protection”.

The Chinese findings are important in helping destroy the claim that many low-lying islands will simply disappear beneath the waves in the near future due to human-induced climate change. They show how shoreline changes are a persistent and ongoing process that is subject to many natural and human influences. Most of the poster islands used for climate scares such as Tuvalu and the Maldives have increased in size of late, and are hardly suitable to whip up fear of a claimed climate ‘emergency’. Sea level rise is not a “predominant” cause of the changing coasts, the scientists note.

By Dorothy Li of The Epoch Times

China commonly floods global markets with cheap products, and the United States will not allow this to threaten U.S. jobs, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on April 8 as she concluded a return visit to China.

After Bejing’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization, massive quantities of low-priced products exported from China killed about 2 million jobs in the United States and led to the hollowing out of industrial production in many parts of the country, Ms. Yellen told reporters in Beijing, calling it the “first China shock.”

“I simply would say, [the situation] would not be acceptable to the United States,” she said.

On her second trip to China as treasury secretary, Ms. Yellen repeatedly expressed Washington’s concerns about Beijing’s burgeoning production in green-energy sectors, including electric vehicles, their batteries, and solar panels, as household consumption remains weak in the country.

She criticized China for flooding the global market with cheap products, as Beijing shifted its policy focus by investing in manufacturing factors to boost the country’s stagnant economy.

The message recurred through the four days of talks with senior Chinese officials, including Premier Li Qiang and Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees China’s economic and financial systems.

Following the April 8 meeting with the Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng, Ms. Yellen raised the issue again.

“I am particularly worried about how China’s enduring macroeconomic imbalances—namely, its weak household consumption and business overinvestment, aggravated by large-scale government support in specific industrial sectors—will lead to significant risk to workers and businesses in the United States and the rest of the world,” she told reporters at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing.

“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. And when the global market is flooded by artificially cheap Chinese products, the viability of American and other foreign firms is put into question.”

The treasury secretary acknowledged that addressing the issue takes time. “Our concerns will not be resolved in a week or a month,” she said....

There are signs that Beijing is reluctant to change its economic strategy.

...

But she emphasized that the Biden administration would push Beijing to change its course.

Over a decade ago, China’s massive state subsidies “led to below-cost Chinese steel that flooded the global market and decimated industries across the world and in the United States,” she said.

“I’ve made clear that President Biden and I will not accept that reality again.”

Continue reading at The Epoch Times

Over the past year, there has been a surge in doom-and-gloom headlines about China's economy. The country's mercantilist policymakers have spent months attempting to stimulate a fragile economy through monetary easing while keeping the real estate crisis at bay. However, a more optimistic view is emerging as Chinese macroeconomic data and stocks stabilize, with the commodity market now indicating signs of a more favorable economic outlook heading into spring. 

Bloomberg reports iron ore prices in Asia are headed for the largest two-day rally in more than two years, fueled by prospects of a bump in steel demand and output in the world's second-largest economy. 

According to financial firm Macquarie Group, April and May are the most active periods for construction across China. They noted that iron ore inventories are peaking at ports, and steel output at the nation's blast furnaces has already increased. 

There's a "bit of a reversion back to normal seasonal trends where you have higher hot metal production throughout the middle of the year," Rob Stein, a metals analyst at Macquarie, told Bloomberg in a phone interview. Stein added that this should help iron ore to achieve a price range between $110 and $120 a ton. 

Nick Savone, global head of equity sales at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients that his "team's supply/demand model shows a closely balanced market, supporting prices well above the cash cost curve, which continues to move higher. They see upside to spot price, to $120/t in Q3, as Chinese stocks draw down on stable demand and lack of further upside to seaborne supply."

Despite China's economy being plagued with many problems, including a real estate bust, deflation, debt troubles, demographic winter, foreign investor exodus, supply chain fracturing, and deteriorating Sino-US ties, recent macroeconomic data shows a potential bottom forming. 

China's official factory purchasing managers index moved into expansion last month, the first time since September. The services sector index hit the highest level since June, and a separate factory index from and S&P Global hit to a 13-month high. 

Late last month, China's President Xi Jinping met with more than a dozen American business leaders, including Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Inc. and Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm Inc., to restore confidence in the Chinese economy. 

The CSI 300 Index found a floor at the start of February and rose 13% through early April. After halving since February 2021, the multi-year equity rout appears stabilized (for now). 

Meanwhile, the JPM Global MFG PMI index bottomed for the past year and recently moved into expansion territory. 

The question on everyone's mind is if the world's second-largest economy has finally bottomed. If so, the global economy could be on a soft landing path. If not, look out below... 

The recent spread of bird flu—also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI— across several US states has been hyped by corporate media. Some journalists are quoting 'experts' who warn the bird flu pandemic could be '100 times worse' than Covid.' 

According to Bloomberg data, the story count in corporate media for all things "Bird Flu" last week hit a record high on data going back to 2014. 

The context here is crucial. Bird flu is not just a US issue anymore; it's 'going global,' and this is happening just before the US presidential elections in November.  

On Tuesday, Hong Kong's food safety authority published a memo stating, "Import of poultry meat and poultry products suspended in some areas of the United States." 

Here's the full memo from the Center for Food Safety (CFS) of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department:

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department announced today (April 9) that in response to a notification from the World Organization for Animal Health regarding an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in Ionia County, Michigan, and Parmer County, Texas, USA, The CFS immediately instructed the trade to suspend the import of poultry meat and poultry products (including poultry eggs) from the above-mentioned areas to protect public health in Hong Kong.

A spokesman for the CFS said that according to the Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong imported about 37,770 tonnes of chilled and frozen poultry meat and about 83.84 million poultry eggs from the United States last year.

The spokesman said: "The CFS has contacted the US authorities regarding the incident and will continue to closely monitor information on the outbreak of avian influenza from the World Organization for Animal Health and relevant authorities, and will take appropriate actions in light of the development of the local epidemic."

If it's bird flu or whatever "Disease X" could possibly be, there appears to be a push to "intersect" some type of 'Covid crisis' before the 2024 US elections.

"They will surely try to run their "Disease X" ruse. But they have already lost the trust of the people they made war against in their own country. In which case, expect resistance among the un-sick," James Howard Kunstler penned in a note earlier this month.

By Jan-Patrick Barnert, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist

There are two pieces of stock market wisdom which — unlike many others — often ring true: “buy protection when you can, not when you must” and “a hedged pot never boils.” Both seem to be at play right now.

Last Thursday’s equity drop was followed the next day by a 1% gain on Wall Street and a late-session bounce in the Stoxx 600. That fits the pattern we’ve seen since December — that of an uptrend punctuated with occasional drops, before markets to cruise back to record highs in a day or two.

Strategists at Tier 1 Alpha acknowledge Thursday’s move was “one of those exogenous events that took markets unexpectedly for a loop.” But they note that as the selloff accelerated, oil prices and Bitcoin spiked, while US short-term rates and gold snoozed. With no across-the-board flight to safe havens, Thursday was likely more about individual investors hedging positions, rather than everyone rushing for the door, they say adding that “somebody felt more pain than the rest of us.”

Indeed, buying and pricing of put options is picking up both in Europe and the US. Levels are certainly not extreme but the trend indicates investors are less complacent than before, as the timing of the first US interest-rate cut recedes further into the year.  

“For the first time this year, we saw real demand for protection on Thursday, as the GS Panic Index reached its highest level since last fall,” Goldman Sachs’s Derivatives Sales Trading desk tells clients. And the bank’s prime desk points to net US equity sales heading into Friday’s non-farm payrolls print, with short sales outpacing long buys.

Meanwhile, Thursday’s move lifted the VIX above 16 points — a departure from the pattern of recent months, whereby the gauge mostly closed below the 15-point mark. If the correlations illustrated by our chart below hold true, stocks might be in for some more trouble — essentially a VIX spike along the lines of last spring and summer would imply a 4-6% equity decline over a 20-day rolling period.

Finally, take a look at market momentum. That’s deteriorated over the past two trading days, with pro-cyclical benchmarks such as DAX and Dow lagging, alongside US mid- and small-cap stocks. These areas are usually sensitive to interest rates, yet for months they have largely ignored the US rate-cut re-pricing, widening the stock-bond gap to a level many would consider uncomfortable.

“This gap combines with various risks, technical indicators and signals to suggest not chasing equity markets here. We would look for better entry points ahead,” writes Berenberg analyst Jonathan Stubbs. His view echoes that of Amundi, which missed the recent rally yet plans to wait for a market pullback before wading into buy.

It all suggests investors plan to stay in the game for now, merely adjusting their portfolios to their highest conviction trades. But at such cheap levels, putting hedges in place increasingly looks like a no-brainer.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If the leadership chooses happy-story PR and toothless reforms for show in the hopes it will all blow over, these subterfuges have the potential to push dissatisfaction beyond the point of control.

Whatever else we might say or think about the leadership class, they tend to have a keen sense of self-preservation. The ability to issue optimistic visions of sunshine and unicorns with a straight face is valuable, to be sure, but so is the ability to sense that the BS is no longer working and something must be done to stave off a potentially career-ending collapse of confidence.

As a general rule, the ability to maintain a delusional confidence that it's all going to work out just fine tends to end very poorly for the leadership class. However sincerely it may be uttered, let them eat brioche doesn't resolve the extreme asymmetries that generate revolutionary disorder. Something more is required, something that either reduces the asymmetries of wealth and power or gives the appearance of doing so.

Staving off revolution requires some action that benefits those for whom the status quo is no longer working. While borrowing and distributing "free money" works for awhile, this profligacy generates its own destabilizing dynamics, and so eventually reducing the asymmetries of wealth and power requires the leadership to take a chunk out of the perquisites and spoils of the financial elite.

Since the leadership class is either beholden to the financial elite or has dual membership in both clubs, the leaders are quickly declared "traitors to their class" even as they are acting to stave off the overthrow of the predatory financial elite that pushed asymmetries to destabilizing extremes.

In other words, the leaders saving the financial elite from the consequences of their own rapacity will get no credit from those they're saving. Rather than grasping that giving up 10% of their gains will preserve the remaining 90%, the infinite greed and hubris of the financial elite locks their minds in a delusional fantasy that their wealth and power are "deserved" and therefore untouchable.

That the system is rigged so that every pitch is a gentle toss and every base hit becomes a home run is conveniently ignored.

That doing nothing could lead to a one-way ticket to Devil's Island issued by a revolutionary government doesn't compute. That they could soon be fighting over the MREs occasionally flung from aircraft doesn't penetrate their hubris-soaked echo chamber of entitlement. The task of saving their own class falls thanklessly to the leadership.

Policies that would have been rejected out of hand as politically impossible become normalized as leaders rush to stave off revolution. The historical path from complacency to denial to policy extremes is well-worn: first the leadership tries the sunshine and unicorns cover story. When this fails to satisfy the disenfranchised mob, the leaders issue grand sounding edicts that suggest "hope and change" is right around the corner.

Once this well-used ploy fails to quench the social distemper, then the leaders accept that "when things get serious, you have to lie," and so they lie, at first to cool the ugly sentiment and then to buy time.

Eventually, some real action has to be taken, and then it gets dicey. There are mistakes to be made in any policy choice: doing nothing can trigger disaster, but so can doing too little or too much. The luxury of calibrating a response is no longer available, and so extreme policies are thrown at the wall until something sticks.

Those who counseled caution are cashiered, for their advice led to the current crisis. Those who counseled radical responses are elevated and freed to unleash whatever they claim will work like magic.

But alas, by this late stage, magic is in short supply, and extreme policies set off second-order consequences no one anticipated, except perhaps those overly cautious voices who did not understand that the option of good choices had long since dissipated, and the only options left were bad or possibly worse than merely bad.

The extremes of wealth-power asymmetries that generated the crisis are eventually matched by equally extreme policies designed to stave off the overthrow of the ruling elites. If these actually rebalance what was allowed to drift out of balance, order and stability can slowly be restored.

If the leadership chooses happy-story PR and toothless reforms for show in the hopes it will all blow over, these subterfuges have the potential to push dissatisfaction beyond the point of control, and predictions about the next stage of events become folly: beyond this event horizon, anything becomes possible.

*  *  *

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Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Gun control activist David Hogg has been hit with allegations over the spending practices of his group Leaders We Deserve PAC. Conservative outlets are reporting that the group spent comparably little on actual candidates as opposed to travel and expenses. His prior counsel is a familiar name in such controversies in Washington: former Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias.

(Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

Hogg created a group in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections to elect Generation Z politicians to offices throughout the country. The group was given favorable national coverage in major media outlets. He explained that contributions would be used to elect young Democrat candidates:

“[We’re] trying to pick them and say, you know, we would like to help you run for office, we’ll supply you with all of the resources that you need and help basically coach you and hold your hand to get there, which is kind of the gap that’s in the space right now, for at least young people at the state legislative level.”

Federal filings reportedly show that year-end 2023, Leaders We Deserve raised over $3 million. That is impressive for its first year in operation.

The conservative sites allege that the group spent “only about $263,000 on its stated mission of electing candidates from Generation Z to office combined with donations to other Democrat Party committees and groups—and instead spent more than $1.4 million on disbursements to themselves for payroll and to political consulting firms and legal fees, in addition to travel and entertainment expenses like hotels, flights, and meals.”

However, it spent reportedly spent more than $1,314,000 on travel and related expenses while giving $80,000 to the Elias Law Group.

Previously, when allegations of self-dealing and accounting improprieties were raised with regard to Black Lives Matter, the group’s attorney, Elias, immediately stood out for many. Elias resigned from his “key role” with BLM as the scandal exploded.

(MSNBC/via YouTube)

Elias’s name has now again popped up in the controversy involving Hogg, who is accused of raising millions to support liberal candidates but allegedly spending only $263,000 on such candidates while paying $83,000 to the Elias law firm. (These figures are reportedly from federal filings but neither Elias nor Hogg have specifically addressed the media reports).

Elias has long been a controversial figure, including being sanctioned in court. He was named as the key figure in hiding the funding of the Steele dossier by the Clinton campaign, which led later to a FEC fine. Reporters accused the campaign of lying to them about the funding. Elias was also reportedly with campaign chair John Podesta when he allegedly denied such funding to congressional investigators.

Despite accusing the GOP of election denial and manipulation, Elias was also involved in alleged gerrymandering efforts and challenging the outcome of elections based on alleged problems with voting machine tallies.

Back to the most recent controversy, Hogg could argue that, as a well known activist figure, his travel to these campaigns is the boost that the group promised donors. He is the assistance. Likewise, the group could argue that it is still getting ramped up for greater spending efforts in the fall. As for the legal fees, the group could argue that start up legal fees and reporting fees tend to be higher at the outset.

The controversy does raise some novel questions about the purpose of contributions. Hogg coming to a local campaign is likely to generate media attention for a candidate. He can also claim that he and his staff bring needed expertise and advice to novice or young candidates. That could be their interpretation of the promise to “basically coach you and hold your hand to get there.” Critics are focused on the pitch to “supply you with all of the resources that you need.”

The group is only the latest political or business effort launched by Hogg, who previously tried to start a “progressive pillow company” before stepping away from the enterprise.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An illegal immigrant who had been deported seven times and arrested 11 times was charged with aggravated murder after an unidentified body was found in Ohio, according to local authorities.

A man in handcuffs in a file photo. (Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)

Police found the body in Hamilton on Monday after responding to a 911 call. Investigators interviewed suspect Fermin Garcia-Gutierrez the following day.

Butler County Sheriff’s Office stated that Mr. Garcia-Gutierrez, a 46-year-old Mexican national, was detained on an ICE holder and held in the Butler County Jail for weapon charges, aggravated murder, and drug possession.

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said that Mr. Garcia-Gutierrez had previously been deported and arrested multiple times using seven different names and three different birth dates.

“Who knows how many people this guy has been involved in and has killed? Here in the United States, in our jail, he’s had two or three weapons charges, he’s had domestic violence [charges] … driving while intoxicated.

“We don’t know how many he’s killed in Mexico,” Mr. Jones said at a press conference.

Mr. Jones also blamed the Biden administration for the surge in illegal crossings at the U.S.–Mexico border.

“Our border is broken, and these individuals are the cause of it,” he said. “We’ve got to stop this border invasion, it’s killing us and its killing innocent people.”

The Hamilton Police Department is continuing its investigation into the murder case, according to Butler County Sheriff’s Office.

Border Patrol has encountered more than 7.6 million illegal immigrants trying to cross the border since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.

Former federal officials and experts have said in the past that there is a real possibility that hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have slipped into the United States among the millions of other illegal immigrants over the past three years.

Both FBI Director Christopher Wray and Border Patrol’s former chief, Rodney Scott, have been sounding the alarm about the state of U.S. borders amid an increasing number of known criminals and terror suspects being caught trying to enter the United States.

Customs and Border Protection data show that in fiscal year 2023, which ended in October 2023, Border Patrol agents apprehended 172 people on the watchlist from along the southwest border. However, when all ports of entry are added, the total number rises to 736. Some illegal immigrants were also caught with explosives.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens has previously called for stricter immigration policies to deter illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border with Mexico, including imposing jail time for violators.

Mr. Owens also suggested reviewing the country’s asylum laws to ensure that only migrants with legitimate claims will be allowed to seek asylum in the United States. He thinks that if people know there will be a consequence for breaking the law and entering the country illegally, they'll be less likely to do it.

Stephen Katte contributed to this report.

Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClear Politics,

“What is a woman?” “Can a man get pregnant?” Questions like those are frequently raised at Senate hearings for progressive nominees to the federal bench or Cabinet positions. Republicans pose them for a reason. They know the witnesses will fumble the answers.

Some try to wriggle out with circumlocutions, offering only convoluted mumbling. That works brilliantly for French academic articles but not so well for U.S. Senate hearings. Other witnesses, mostly judicial nominees, claim they cannot answer because the questions might come before them in future cases. They breathe a sigh of relief since their real motto is “Loose lips sink ships.”

Often, Republicans discover the witnesses have already proclaimed their views in opinion pieces, social media posts, or academic articles when they were appealing to like-minded audiences on the left. When the audience is more skeptical, however, they are less eager to repeat those answers or to defend them.

Progressive witnesses may not have answers, but ordinary voters certainly do. They tell pollsters that men cannot get pregnant. Shocking, I know. They think it is ludicrous to place tampons in men’s bathrooms, which some universities and elite high schools do now.

The question of “who is a woman?” is more vexed. The reason is that common sense and cultural tradition point in one direction (“he was born a male and that’s what he is”) but those are opposed by another tradition: our respect for human autonomy. The Western values of human autonomy and deference for individual choices mean we normally acknowledge an adult’s self-identification. (Here is a hard question, though. If my autonomy is to be respected on issues of self-identification, why can’t I simply identify myself as an African American or Native American, even if there is no DNA evidence of that identity? Why shouldn’t that be my choice, just like gender? Yet self-identification as a racial minority without that bloodline is fiercely condemned as a malicious fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, or Ward Churchill.)

These issues are far from settled politically. If an adult male identifies as a woman, many people say, “So be it. Live and let live.” Others are more dubious. Still others reject it outright.

What most people agree on, finally, is that children should not be subjected to irreversible biological procedures or medications. That’s child abuse. It took U.S. hospitals several years to reach that conclusion and end those profitable operations, probably because their lawyers pushed them to stop. In years to come, you can expect lawsuits by adults who will claim they were mutilated as children when they were too young to give informed consent. They will say their parents, doctors, and hospitals should be held liable for the damage they caused. Dial 1-800….

Some of these issues were on the table again this week in Wisconsin. The state legislature in Madison passed a law protecting biological women (the fashionable term is “cis-women”) from competing against transgender women in sports. The governor, a progressive Democrat, promptly vetoed the bill.

Why he exercised that veto is an interesting question. It’s certainly not because there are many transgender voters, even if we include their supportive families and friends. The real reason is that the issue has been folded into the gaping ideological divide between progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans. The governor did not want to risk being caught on the wrong side of that fault line, alienated from his political base. He may also believe, quite sincerely, that the veto was the ethical thing to do.  It’s always hard to separate a politician’s ethical principles, if there are any, from hard-nosed calculations.

Feminists are a vital part of the progressive base in every state, including Wisconsin. What’s so striking here – amazing, really – is how silent most feminists have been about transgender competition in women’s sports. Although a few have spoken out, nearly all have remained silent, probably because they do not want to be excoriated for their views or outflanked by those claiming to be more progressive.

Note that the issue here is not whether a biological male who now identifies as a woman can compete in sports. Of course she can. The issue is whether she (formerly a “he”) should be allowed to compete against biological women.

There are really two basic questions at play. One is whether the inclusion of transgender women poses any physical danger to biological women. In contact sports, it might. Indeed, some injuries have already occurred.

The larger, more profound issue is whether this competition would be fundamentally unfair. That ethical standard applies to any sport where strength and body composition matter, even if there is no threat of injury.

Take golf.

The easiest way to think about transgender women in sports is to ask yourself, “Should all golfers, both men and women, be grouped together in the same tournaments, competing on equal terms?”

Put differently, should there be women’s golf tournaments at all? If the answer is “Yes, there should be a separate competition for women,” then ask yourself why? Surely that’s because men can hit the ball much farther, putting women at a severe disadvantage. If that’s the reason, doesn’t it apply equally to transgender women, who can hit the ball much farther than biological women?

This difference in physical strength matters in many sports, from swimming to weight-lifting, from bowling to track and field. Currently, there are single-gender tournaments in all of them. That includes every Olympic event except one equestrian competition. But why continue this sex segregation? If you think transgender women should compete against other women in those sports, despite their marked differences in strength, what is your rationale for any single-gender competition?

And what is your rationale for prohibiting testosterone supplements for biological females? Allowing them would actually level the playing field since transgender women already have that male hormone.

These arguments are not meant to degrade transgender men or women. They are not about respect for them as persons. They do not imply, for instance, that adults shouldn’t be able to identify as a gender different from their biological sex at birth.

Respect for individuals and their self-identification is not the point here. The point is to call out unfair competition, condemn it, and stop it. That can happen only if people slip off their ideological blinders, at least for a moment, and face the issue squarely. Honestly.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Old movies and new ones often turn on the theme of corruption. For generations, viewers have enjoyed discovering the ins and outs of a gang of people who are up to no good, financially and otherwise.

It’s always a shock to see the way the insiders treat each other so brutally, and how they lie, cheat, and steal to get their way. It’s especially satisfying when they get caught in the end.

Countless movies in the old days followed this basic plot.

One of my favorites is the American classic “On the Waterfront” (1954) with Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, and Karl Malden. It’s the story of a rough gang of thugs that has taken control of a longshoreman’s union. They pillage the workers for dues and make paychecks contingent on loyalty.

For years, everyone in the union is told to be “D&D” or deaf and dumb, never saying a word to the authorities for fear of bad outcomes. As the corruption gets worse, the tactics of enforcement grow more violent. New Jersey kicks off a crime commission to look into the problem with the focus on a murder. A local priest plays a role in convincing a worker who is tight with the gang to rat on the bad guys.

It all turns out well in the end, even if Brando gets badly beaten up. The bad guys are overturned and the workers get their union back. The movie is a brilliant reflection of a culture at the time: yes, there are imperfections but we are making great progress to root out the bad and replace it with the good, thanks to moral leadership and courage.

But notice how the plot absolutely depends on the existence of a not-corrupt higher power.

That’s almost always the case in the old movies. Once the authorities find out that something bad is happening, they work to clean it up. Their success turns on the ethical tenacity of one insider who is willing to stand up for what is right. To make that courage operational, you need means of redress that are not part of the problem.

That’s all great but we have a different problem in our own time. The higher powers on which we depend for redress are themselves part of the issue.

This truly came home to me lately with the Supreme Court hearing for Murthy v. Missouri, which documented how dozens of federal agencies worked with social media companies, directly and indirectly, to censor free speech.

Seems like a no-brainer of a case. But based on the oral arguments, a third of the court couldn’t see the problem at all. A third was confused. The last third got that this was a problem for the First Amendment.

This is alarming but a realistic accounting of where we are in the United States today: divided by thirds into clear, confused, and corrupt.

In other words, we can no longer count on the highest powers and the most authoritative institutions to save us from evil.

Let’s cite an astonishing example from this past week that should have been headline news but was utterly invisible to legacy media (speaking of corruption at the very top). The case involves the COVID medication Paxlovid. It was approved under “emergency use” in December 2021, and trumpeted by Fauci, President Biden, and the rest of the usual crowd. It was 90 percent effective, they said!

The White House authorized $11 billion and more to pay for it, and dispatched the whole army of media mavens to push this thing. The White House was able to claim it was free, if you had insurance but even that would last only for so long. Eventually, the consumer had to pay and it was nearly $1,500 for 20 pills.

In many places, the entire medical profession was insisting that this was the way to treat COVID, even as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were banned or impossible to get.

Paxlovid was greeted with all the usual hosannas from the drug company as echoed by big media. The drug is 89 percent effective, they kept saying. The governments of Canada, the United States, and the UK all celebrated and showered Pfizer with multiple rounds of billions of dollars.

But even from the outset, it seems there were many reports of rebounds. The drug would reduce symptoms for a few days even to the point of generating a negative test but then COVID would come back. This happened often enough that pharma skeptics grew deeply suspicious of it, especially because of such a very long run of patented failings in this realm.

Mr. Biden, for example, seems to have gotten COVID four times after being treated repeatedly with Paxlovid. So too with Biden’s wife. The same happened with Fauci himself. Most every prominent person reported something similar. But that did not stop the gravy train from running, with the entire medical professional rallying around this drug.

COVID-19 treatment pill Paxlovid in a box at Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, Italy, on Feb. 8, 2022. (Jennifer Lorenzini/Reuters)

From the outset, The Epoch Times was reporting skeptically about it, the only media venue to do so. More and more doubts emerged, not in official circles but online in alternative media.

Now we come to the kicker. Pfizer itself has finally published its randomized placebo-controlled trial of several hundred individuals with the Delta variant, which would have been two and a half years ago. The title of the results as published in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Nirmatrelvir for Vaccinated or Unvaccinated Adult Outpatients with Covid-19.”

Notice the absence of the word Paxlovid, making it all the more difficult for regular people to find. Nirmatrelvir is the clinical name.

And the conclusion: “Nirmatrelvir–ritonavir was not associated with a significantly shorter time to sustained alleviation of Covid-19 symptoms than placebo, and the usefulness of nirmatrelvir–ritonavir in patients who are not at high risk for severe Covid-19 has not been established.”

In other words: this drug does not work. At all. It is no better than nothing. It is not useful. Countless billions later and this is what we have, a completely useless thing. At best. In fact, that Pfizer itself admits that its own drug is useless, one wonders what the bad news is!

The drug was not a game changer at all. It was a vast waste of money.

This whole thing stuns me, even now, even after everything we know about the industry, its relationship to government, the way the media goes along with all the nonsense, the manner in which all top officials go along with the racket. This to me is as much a scandal as the vaccine in some ways.

You will notice that you have not seen this reported in any mainstream media, even though it appears in the top medicine journal in the United States. That’s because the mainstream media is entirely in the pay of pharma.

The conspiracy is out in the open, and all official channels are implicated. There seems to be zero accountability or appeal. It’s no wonder that RFK, Jr., is calling for racketeering investigations to be made against the whole industry and its industrial partners. This is aggressive robbery and fraud.

Very few people even know to care because they are not being told the brutal facts of the case.

One also wonders how it is that Pfizer held onto this study for two years before releasing it.

Why would Pfizer choose just now to announce that its wonder drug is actually useless? My own theory: its accounting ledgers are showing that the drug’s period of high profitability is at an end. There’s no more high-margin profits associated with it. Might as well retire it.

With a complicit legacy media, it has no egg on its face. It can just chalk up its wild Paxlovid push as profitable and done, like a seasonal beer or a pumpkin-spice latte. There is essentially no downside to moving onward to other products in its arsenal.

But think about what this means for this company and for the system that protects it. What does this say about the vaccine? What does it mean for the whole network of protection, from regulators to journals to media? They are all in on the game. And how deep and wide is this game?

What we have in operation here is a form of vampiric capitalism, an entire industry that has colonized our health and bodies in the interest of wealth extraction even though its products do not work and actually make us more sick, providing more opportunities to innovate products that do more of the same.

It’s time that this system came to an end, but where is the crime commission to investigate and stop it?

It doesn’t exist. That’s the great dilemma of our time.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment.

For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

As a result, for one of the few times in American history, the hard left now had undreamt of power. And it was enhanced by a chorus in our compliant media, academia, corporations, the administrative state, foundations, entertainment, and popular culture.

So we were all to embark on a great adventure led by the foot soldiers of DEI, the Chicken-Little green extremists, the critical race and critical legal theory crowd, the modern monetary theorists, the woke commissars, the transgendered zealots, Antifa, BLM, the hate-Israel lobby, and the Trump Derangement Syndrome media sorts.

Ostensibly, America was to be reset financially, economically, socially, culturally, militarily, and politically. The nation would be arbitrarily divided into oppressors and oppressed—with one caveat: hyper-rich, left-wing white architects had to be exempt from the damage inflicted on those they targeted. Thus, like Orwellian pigs who walked on their two hind legs, they were free to fly their private jets, get their kids into racially quota-bound Ivy League schools, burn lots of fossil fuels to heat and cool their massive homes, and be protected by their walls, security details, and zip codes from the crime wave they would soon unleash on others.

Now, as we enter the fourth year of the great experiment, America is $35 trillion in debt, borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. Home mortgages are at 7 percent. Key prices for food, insurance, rent, and fuels are 30-40 percent higher than when Biden entered office.

The nation has been humiliated and emasculated abroad. Racial relations are the worst in a half-century. The military is in virtual receivership. Biden is polling about 40 percent approval and is behind in key swing states in most of the 2024 polls.

As a result, the Biden administration is furiously trying to find a way to release more of its hated oil and natural gas on the world market. It stopped refilling the strategic petroleum reserve that it had earlier drained to lower gas prices before the 2022 midterms.

So it will quietly pump more oil and gas, appease Iran in fear of a war in the oil-producing Middle East, plead with the once “pariah” Saudis, and order the Ukrainians not to hit Russian oil installations—all to get more oil produced to lower November 2024 gas prices.

It will head nod to eliminating fossil fuels, mandating EVs, banning natural gas stoves, and subsidizing more inefficient wind and solar farms. But it now realizes that its green agenda on its watch will wreck the United States economy and throw the left out of power. So it pivots to an old-fashioned “Drill, World, Drill” mantra—at least until the election is over.

Biden fulfilled his agenda of getting 10 million illegal aliens into the United States by destroying the southern border. The point was to swarm America with poor, unaudited migrants, all in need of massive federal and state assistance, all supposedly now loyal to their entitlement benefactors. Who could stop them from voting as repayment to their enablers in the new age of 70 percent mail-in ballots, same-day registration, inadequate authentication and audit of ballots, third-party vote harvesting, ballot curing, and Zuckbucks pouring into key precincts to absorb the work of the registrars?

Most of the illegals went to Texas and Florida, key swing states that the left still thinks it can flip to blue status.

Long term, the 10 million will recalibrate congressional districts to favor neo-socialist agendas. Short-term, millions of new arrivals unlawfully may still try to vote in 2024.

Any who object to or publicize this agenda will be dammed with boilerplate smears of “election deniers,” “voter suppressions,” “racists,” and “xenophobes.” Yet all that said, the administration is now desperately trying to distance itself from its greatest “new Democratic Majority” border success, given that public opinion abhors what Biden had done at the border to the country at large.

So it floated a phony “bipartisan border security” bill in hopes of luring naïve Republicans to support a stealth de facto amnesty agenda that would have still allowed 5,000 illegals in a day rather than the now customary 10-15,000. The hope was that when it failed (and the left knew it would), to blame Republicans for what the left had wrought.

Biden knows destroying the border will ruin America for generations to come, costing billions of dollars in subsidies and legal and policing costs to integrate the massive influx. So until the election, it is thrashing about, claiming that it never did such a thing at all. Its duplicity is again proof that the open borders agenda was hated by the public, a human catastrophe, and not sustainable before an impending election.

Biden’s foreign policy is also in ruins.

Biden destroyed deterrence in an effort to beg, appease, and buy off America’s enemies to behave and not cause an election-losing war. But the more it fled from Afghanistan in humiliation, the more it appeased Russia as it massed on Ukraine’s border, the more it snored as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States, the more it put early holds on aid to Ukraine, the more it assured Putin a “minor” offensive into Ukraine would not elicit a US response, so all the more it convinced Putin that he could take Ukraine without an American pushback, the Chinese to threaten Taiwan, and Hamas to prepare for massacring Jews.

So here we are in Ukraine with nearly 800,000 dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians.

The administration has no clue how to stop the Verdun that its appeasement birthed. The entire therapeutic approach to foreign policy lies in ruins.

Ditto the Middle East. National security advisor Jack Sullivan’s “quiet” portfolio that he inherited from the Trump administration simply blew up. Biden is now scrambling to stop the Israeli response to the encircled Hamas remnants, trapped in their last redoubt in Rafah.

Biden is now replaying the 1950s CIA-stereotype of the “Ugly American,” as he does his best to overthrow the Netanyahu government, and to allow the trapped Hamas remnants to escape and claim they defeated the Zionist entity, despite butchering more Jews in a single day than any time since the Holocaust. No matter: the Biden administration is stealthily communicating with the Israeli opposition concerning the best joint strategies to force Netanyahu out. Mass protests in the streets of Tel Aviv attest to the success of destabilizing the current Israeli government.

Team Biden whispers to the media about slow-walking or stopping key arms shipments, abdicating America’s once protective role in the UN, or encouraging the “international community” to go after Netanyahu for “war crimes” for accidentally hitting a civilian team in Gaza. (By such logic, are Biden and Gen. Mark (“righteous strike”) Milley equally culpable for being in charge when a US strike in Kabul blew up 10 innocent civilians by similarly mistaken targeting?). Meanwhile, Biden keeps courting Muslim-American Michigan voters, who repay his appeasement with cries of “Death to Israel! Death to America!”.

The release of violent criminals and an uptick in property crimes, murders and assault follow a similar script. The Biden administration outsourced criminal justice to defund the police/critical legal theorists at the federal, state, and local levels. No bail arrests led to violent offenders released the next day. Thousands were let go from jails and prisons.

The word spread in the criminal community that in the new Biden years, there were no real consequences, no serious punishments for violent assault or major felonies.

So in 2021-2023, crime exploded. When it reached the point of making life unlivable in the major cities and began to max out, the administration declared “crime is declining”—in the same way that hyper-inflation supposedly did so on the economic front.

After spiking the prices of key food staples, insurance, fuel, and interest rates, such hikes could not go too much higher without destroying outright the American way of life. So as the rate of inflation slowed, Biden bragged about “lowering inflation”—but not the 30-40 percent higher food prices since his own inauguration.

The common denominator for these disasters is the embrace of left-wing “theory.”

Critical legal theory mandates that jurisprudence is a construct.

Laws have no morality since they favor the powerful. The latter use “white privilege” arbitrarily to invent crimes and punishments to protect their own power hierarchies. All that nonsense has now led to a pre-civilizational free-for-all in our dirty, dangerous, and dysfunctional cities.

Modern monetary theory - printing lots of money to spread around to those who have none while diminishing the value of money of those who have it - only led to hyperinflation and high interest rates.

When DEI theories were unleashed on the military, potential recruits hesitated, and thousands quit. After Pentagon grandees virtue signaled their fear of “white rage” and “white privilege,” after DEI made promotions and assessments often contingent on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and after the new military was humiliated in Afghanistan, it found it could no longer deter the enemy, recruit sufficient soldiers, or win back the confidence of the American people.

In all these cases, the woke genie left the bottle—and won’t go back in. So it will be hard for the administration to assure a long-suffering public that things are just wonderful, much less to reverse these policies, if indeed they are reversible, before November.

Expect instead nonstop distraction as the left beats the January 6 horse to death, calls for abortion on demand, and waits for its underling judges, prosecutors, and juries to jail or bankrupt Trump and therefore do what balloting cannot.

In other words, the long-awaited Great Fundamental Transformation finally got its moment, crashed, and now has torched the nation—middle-class Americans most of all.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The White House quickly responded Monday following a declaration published by the Vatican that denounces ‘gender affirming’ surgery and gender ideology as “deeply harmful,” a “violation of human dignity,” and aimed at “eliminating the basis of family.”

The 20 page declaration approved by Pope Francis outlines that a person’s gender is a “gift from God” and that any attempt at gender reassignment infringes on God’s creation.

The document further asserts that attempts to introduce new rights in relation to gender theory in recent years have “led to instances of ideological colonization,” which the Catholic Church regards as “extremely dangerous.”

“Human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God. This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good,” the declaration states.

It continues,”Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.”

The push for allowing people to identify as any gender they choose, rather than accepting the gender given to them by God denies “the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference,” the Church further decrees, adding that modern gender ideology “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”

The document further clarifies that it is not possible to “separate the masculine and the feminine from God’s work of creation, which is prior to all our decisions and experiences, and where biological elements exist which are impossible to ignore.”

The Church states that only in accepting the difference between genders “each person can fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity.”

“Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,” the document further asserts, adding “At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.”

Pope Francis previously described gender theory as an “ugly ideology of our times which cancels out the differences [in humanity] and makes everything the same.”

Responding to the declaration during a briefing, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated “We are pleased to see that the document… furthered the Vatican’s call to ensure that LGBTQ+ are protected from violence and imprisonment around the world. However, the president will continue to be an advocate for the rights, safety and dignity of the LGBTQ+ community, including transgender people here in the U.S.”

Audio: Biden's Press Sec. stating that he essentially disagrees with the Vatican's declaration that gender affirming surgery and gender ideology is “deeply harmful,” a "violation of human dignity," and aimed at "eliminating the basis of family." Report: https://t.co/kLluhUMr37 pic.twitter.com/Xiia1VbZNb

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 9, 2024

“What about the more specific comments about gender theory and transgender individuals?” a reporter pressed.

Jean-Pierre responded, “I can speak to the president’s stance, and he’s always been very clear on the importance of protecting or having protections for the transgender community and the broader LGBTQ+ community, and that’s been very clear since day one of his administration.”

Between this and declaring Easter Sunday Transgender day, many are now highly suspicious of Biden’s claim to be a ‘devout Catholic’.

Why has Joe Biden not been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his little stunt on Easter Sunday?

Is this proof that the Pope is choosing liberal politics and politicians over God AGAIN?

— MAGATrumpFan7383 (@TrumpFan7383) April 9, 2024

*  *  *

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.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

The New York Times has published a strange article by Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. The headline is that his economist brain makes him say with regard to inflation: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The article gives the reader as much reason to trust economists as you do epidemiologists, which is to say none at all.

The idea is that if both prices and income go up together, it all pans out in the wash. Yes, the article goes on for 1,000 words to say that but that’s its essence. The thought is that the 25% inflation we’ve experienced over the last four years really hasn’t done any damage. Money is neutral to economic exchange and so is inflation.

So just chill!

Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet. Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes… we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

Now, on the face of it, this claim is notable because he nowhere claims that inflation does actual good, so perhaps that is a step in the right direction.

If that’s true, what’s the point of printing up $5 trillion-plus in 2020 and following?

No question that this is the direct cause of the loss in purchasing power of the dollar that we’ve experienced.

If money is entirely neutral and inflation essentially irrelevant, the Fed should simply freeze the money stock if only to reduce anxiety.

Inflation Is Taxation

Of course the professor doesn’t suggest that. This is for a reason. Inflation is a form of taxation and wealth redistribution from the poor and middle class to the rich and powerful. Without it, that pathway to wealth transfers would not happen.

Let’s see what the article overlooks about inflation in real life.

First, every inflation comes with injection effects. Not all new money enters the economy at the same time. Some people get it earlier and thereby can spend it before its value starts to fall and fall. They are the winners from inflation. It’s a giant subsidy to the ruling classes.

Think about 2020 and early 2021. Millions of banked businesses and consumers, plus governments most especially, found themselves flush with new cash. Savings soared but so did spending on high-tech goods and delivering services to make the work-at-home economy function.

Many institutions benefited: banks, governments, online learning platforms, online merchants like Amazon, streaming services and so on. This was part of the Great Reset, to enrich digital enterprise over physical enterprise.

This tendency for new money to affect different industries in different ways was uncovered by the Irish-English economist Richard Cantillon, writing even earlier than Adam Smith. He said that money is never neutral to economic exchanges but rather integral, so every increase in the supply of money has the effect of rewarding some at the expense of others.

Savers Are Suckers

Second, you know what’s not affected by the tendency of prices and wages to go up under inflation? Savings. Your money in the bank was not somehow adjusted further up by virtue of inflation. So Professor Wolfers’ entire analysis is blown up as a result: It simply does not pertain to any deferred consumption of the past.

Savings is the basis of investment and thus future prosperity, so inflationary regimes always punish those who are frugal and reward those who live for today and save nothing. Indeed it is deeply punishing toward long-term thinking in general.

Third, none of Wolfers’ thought accounts for the huge transition costs associated with accounting during inflationary bouts. Every business that runs on small margins in a competitive environment has to deal with balancing income versus expenses on large items and small.

Accounting alone consumes vast amounts of operational attention in every business. If your costs are randomly going up for all inputs from labor to materials to just keeping the lights on, and each at different stages and in different ways, it becomes much easier to make mistakes.

In addition, it’s easier said than done to “pass the costs onto the consumer.” The ability to do so always depends on the price elasticity of demand, which is a measure of just how trigger-happy consumers really are toward higher prices. How much will demand be affected by changing prices?

There’s no way to know in advance, which is why merchants end up testing and treading carefully with hidden fees and shrunken packages. It’s all a matter of making the economy work.

Companies facing less competition and larger profit margins are in a better position to achieve this than those like small businesses, which cannot.

Therefore the high costs of accounting transitions fall disproportionately on smaller businesses. Did you notice, for example, that alcohol prices have not increased nearly as much as other prices?

That’s because they were in a position to eat some of their large margins rather than risk reducing demand for their product. That was certainly not true of the corner grocer or the small restaurant.

They’re Gaslighting You

These are three reasons why this professor’s opinion — born of models in which there are no transition costs, injection effects or accounting uncertainties — has nothing to do with the real world. And you know this, based on the experience of the last four years.

It’s an enormous source of frustration when intellectuals use their high-status positions to instruct the public on matters we know to be untrue.

They’re gaslighting us.

It’s also an annoyance to cover up the terrible truths we know. The years 2020–2024 were times of one of the greatest head fakes in the history of government and central banking. They showered the world with seemingly free money only to take it all away and then some merely a year later and continuing to this day.

And who won? Look around. Big government is bigger and so is tech and digital businesses in general, while the banks are flush with cash. That tells you all you need to know about who is winning and who is losing in the great inflation racket.

Any economist telling you otherwise needs to let go of the unrealistic otherworld models and take a look at the reality on the ground.

He might discover that members of the public are not irrational to be upset but rather entirely in touch with the truth about what has happened to us.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham dared to criticize Donald Trump's new stance advocating that abortion law should be left to individual states -- and was promptly subjected to withering fire from the former president. 

On Monday morning, Trump posted a video in which he implicitly rejected the idea of creating a federal limit on abortions, saying that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade, abortion is now a state-by-state issue:

"States will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land; in this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different...many will have a different number of weeks, or some will [be] more conservative than others, and that's what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people." 

The announcement disappointed proponents of a federal ban who had been encouraged by February media reports that Trump had told his advisors and others that he favored a 16-week federal limit on abortions, with exceptions for rape, incest or to save the mother's life. 

Graham quickly posted a tweet-thread declaring his "respectful" disagreement with Trump's new stance, saying that a states' rights rationale against a federal limit "will age about as well as the Dred Scott decision," which helped perpetuate slavery.   

I respectfully disagree with President Trump’s statement that abortion is a states’ rights issue.

Dobbs does not require that conclusion legally and the pro-life movement has always been about the wellbeing of the unborn child – not geography. https://t.co/WloOJ0ImaW

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 8, 2024

Trump responded via Truth Social, writing that "Senator Lindsey Graham is doing a great disservice to the Republican Party, and to our Country." He elaborated on the political realities: 

"[Democrats] love this Issue, and they want to keep it going for as long as Republicans will allow them to do so. Terminating Roe v. Wade was, according to all Legal Scholars, a Great Event, but sometimes with Great Events come difficulties.

Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this Issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency…"

A few hours later, Trump was back for more, this time chiding both Graham and Marjorie Dannensfelser, who leads SBA Pro-Life America. Dannensfelser had issued a statement saying her organization was "deeply disappointed in President Trump's position." 

With that particular scolding message, Trump took a more philosophical tack, saying Graham and Dannensfelser "should study the 10th Amendment." A cornerstone of federalism, that final component of the Bill of Rights states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

By deferring to the states on abortion, Trump is taking the truly "conservative" position on the issue, compared to those who advocate for national regulation. As James Madison summed up the federal system:

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. [Federal powers] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce…

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.”

In a third Truth Social posting, Trump threw in another jab at Graham while also boasting about the power of a Trump endorsement: "I blame myself for Lindsey Graham, because the only reason he won in the Great State of South Carolina is because I Endorsed him!"

Trump and Graham's relationship has blown hot and cold over the years: 

• After losing to Trump in the 2016 primary, Graham said the GOP should have "kicked him out of the party." He'd earlier called Trump "a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.
• On Jan. 6, Graham said, "Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey” but “all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
• In September, Trump stuck up for Graham at a South Carolina campaign rally, telling the crowd that Graham is "[A] man who's always there, I tell you what, when I need help on the left, he's great. And he's my friend too—Lindsey Graham." The crowed booed.  

Trump: Lindsey Graham

Crowd: Boo

Trump: He helps me on the left pic.twitter.com/UytEWGouKa

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 25, 2023 

 

Authored by Uri Berliner via The Free Press (emphasis ours),

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley. 

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI. 

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise. 

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

*  *  *

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency. 

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff. 

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming. 

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story. 

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media. 

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. 

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency. 

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. 

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists. 

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded. 

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” 

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.” 

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work. 

Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)

I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming. 

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR. 

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. 

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too. 

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing. 

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage. 

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview. 

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity. 

*  *  *

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line. 

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world. 

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking. 

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!” 

And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None. 

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star. 

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism. 

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo. 

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from. 

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust. 

In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about. 

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name. 

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @uberliner.

And fast https://t.co/JwCLUrcTlz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2024

The first coupon auction of the week and the month is in the history books and boy, was it ugly: maybe it was nerves ahead of tomorrow's CPI, maybe it was the realization that there is a lot more where this came from. A LOT more.

With $58 billion in 3Y paper for sale today, tied for the biggest amount on record for sale in the tenor...

... the reception was anything but warm.

The high yield of today's auction was 4.548%, up markedly from last month's 4.256% and the highest since November's 4.701%, the auction tailed the When Issued 4.528% by 2.0bps, which was not only the first tail after 3 stopping though auction, but the biggest tail since February 2023.

The bid to cover dropped to 2.50% from 2.60%; it was the lowest since December's 2.42 and well below the six-auction average of 2.584%.

The internals were also ugly, with foreign demand fading as Indirects took down just 60.3%, the lowest since December's 52.1 (and below the 62.3 recent average), leaving 20.4 to Directs, the most since December, and Dealers awarded 19.31T, the most since, you guessed it, December.

In response to the auction, yields - which were sliding all day in a flight to safety as stocks dumped - moved higher by about 2 bps although remained near session lows amid the general selling everywhere else.

That said, if tomorrow's CPI ends up being hot again, watch out below as all of today's buyers end up being deeply underwater in less than 24 hours.

Via SchiffGold.com,

As the Democratic Party has shifted away from its traditional base of working-class and middle-class Americans, to an increased reliance on college professors, students, and highly educated but low-paid professions, such as social workers, a new policy has risen to prominence: student loan forgiveness. 

Borrowed money to advance your career or to study something you got pleasure from but don’t want to pay your loans back?

The new favorite argument by progressive policymakers is that you shouldn’t have to; the taxpayers can take the financial hit for you.

President Biden early in his term tried to deliver on that left-wing commitment by unilaterally canceling $400 billion in student loans. Biden claimed that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students Act, which allowed the Secretary of Education to modify loans in response to national emergencies, combined with the pandemic coronavirus let him waive and modify student loans. The Supreme Court rejected his interpretation of that law.

Now, President Biden is back at it trying for another round of student loan forgiveness despite the mountains of criticism earlier actions took. Beyond the legal criticisms, policy experts have pointed out that student loan forgiveness is regressive because much of the debt is held by students who borrowed tens of thousands to go to graduate school, some of whom will go on to lucrative careers as doctors, dentists, lawyers, and more. Further, when debtors no longer devote part of their budget to repaying loans, this will free up their spending on other goods and services. The influx of new dollars chasing goods and services will make the prices increase in general. This is another inflation-pushing policy.

On Monday, April 8, Biden revealed the details of his new student loan forgiveness plan. It involves several planks. One plank would allow wiping away tens of thousands of accrued interest for borrowers and would extend forgiveness to relatively wealthy borrowers- couples making almost a quarter of a million dollars annually would be eligible. It would also reward borrowers who delayed paying back their loans, providing forgiveness to borrowers who still have not repaid their loans after 20 years for undergraduate students, or 25 years for undergraduate students.

The legal basis for this executive action is a law from the 1960s, the 1965 Higher Education Act, which as written allows the Secretary of Education to amend student loan terms.

When Senator Elizabeth Warren ran for president, she argued that this meant the Secretary of Education could be ordered by the president to forgive student loan borrowers en masse.

Perhaps the worst thing about these student loan forgiveness moves for the broader public is that even if courts limit or strike down some of these executive actions, student loan borrowers, to the extent that they are rational, should price in a now higher probability that at some point a Democratic president will try to bail out their loans, no matter how regressive such a policy might be.

These “rational expectations” that student loan borrowers now have an increased probability of a sudden windfall in the form of student loan forgiveness, should encourage them to save less, deprioritize paying off loans they voluntarily took, and increase their spending on consumption.

This increased consumption is rational already and encouraging additional dollars to chase the same supply of goods and services will drive inflation.

Another major downside of these student loan forgiveness plans is how they might encourage borrowers to run up higher tabs because they know there is some possibility that Biden or some other left-wing politician might waive their loans. While college students might reasonably borrow loans to pay for educational programs, each dollar borrowed with under market rates or forgiven by the federal government is fundamentally paid for by the rest of society. Students might also rationally borrow money they don’t strictly need for educational purposes to increase their standard of living, a practice that actually has sound economic logic and is known as consumption smoothing. However, to the extent this practice increases due to the risk of student loan forgiveness it will just be another factor propping up the painful Biden-esque levels of inflation we are already stuck with.

Until Congress changes the law to prevent unilateral executive action on student loan forgiveness or proponents of it pay a heavy political cost, inflation will be higher than it should be due to the specter of student loan forgiveness.

It is not a secret that the biggest market debate of 2024 is when - and even if - the Fed will cut rates: after all, with the US labor force adding hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, and core CPI bubbling along at a blistering hot ~4% pace, many - such as Larry Sanders and even Neel Kashkari - are warning that the Fed does not need to cut rates (in fact, a rate hike may be prudent). On the other hand, we have a growing roster of Democrat politicians (most notably Senator Elizabeth "Pokarenhontas" Warren) demanding Powell cuts rates to "help address the affordable housing crisis" and also reduce the record high credit card APRs for their voters.

It's not just the politicians: the dovish Fed itself in its latest dot plot indicated that it still expects to cut rates 3 times in 2024, a schedule which - when accounting for the November elections - would mean the Fed has to start cutting in June if it wishes to avoid delaying the start of the easing cycle and also avoid the impression that it is hoping to influence the outcome of the presidential elections (much to the chagrin of Bill Dudley who wrote a 2019 op-ed demanding Powell do just that).

Yet even as the market has recently taken a machete to its own dovish expectations, and after pricing in more than 6 rate cuts in 2024 at the start of the year, has since trimmed its forecast to less than 3 full cuts...

... or even fewer than the Fed has telegraphed...

... suggesting that the market is convinced that the Fed is wrong, the economy will run hotter than expected, and Powell will be forced to delay, or even scrap, the easing cycle.

But maybe not, because while signs mounts - especially in the realm of higher commodity prices - that a June cut is a pipe dream, some financial institutions are aggressively taking matters into their own hands: consider that in the last week, not one but two financial giants, have quietly cut the interest rate they pay on their "high yield" savings accounts, a step that usually takes place just around the time they are dead certain the Fed will cut rates or right after.

We are talking about Goldman and American Express: starting with the former, last Wednesday, Goldman’s consumer bank Marcus lowered the rate on its high-yield savings account for the first time in more than three years, trimming the APR on the bank’s flagship product to 4.4%, down from 4.5% in March. It was the first cut since November 2020, when Goldman lowered the rate from 0.6% to 0.5%.

“Our current rate places us ahead of the majority of our peers,” a Goldman spokesperson told Bloomberg in an email when asked to explain the rate cut. “We will continue to focus on providing value to our customers and growing our Marcus deposits business which is a priority for the firm.”

Well, you can only keep growing deposits if the rate cut does not lead to deposit outflows... which can only happen if Goldman knows that everyone else is also about to cut rates, following in the footsteps of the Fed

And then moments ago, doubling down on the clear dovish trend that is suddenly sweeping banks for "reasons unknown", American Express did the same, when it cut the rate on its High Yield Savings Account to 4.30% from 4.35%.

Or maybe the cuts are not for "reasons unknown": maybe the banks realize that they can start cutting rates because soon everyone else will do the same for one simple reason: the Fed will fire the starting pistol to an easing cycle so many believe will start momentarily.

As Bloomberg notes, the move signals that financial institutions are on alert for when they can lower interest rates for individuals, and the fact that not one but two of the biggest players in the game just did that, should be enough to raise a lot of eyebrows about the Fed's rate cutting plans...