S.T.

Detective Walker

Let’s do a little multi -decade macroeconomic recap, shall we? The dot-com bubble burst around 2000, then 9/11 happened. Instead of allowing a much needed, detoxifying recession.. then Fed Chair, Alan Greenspan, decided it’d be best to ‘lessen the blow’ by gradually cutting interest rates. By 2004, those rates were at the miniscule 1% level. Remember those stimmy checks that GW Bush mailed out to everyone? (I bought USA-made GoreTex for the rainy days I knew were coming.) Lower interest rates were great, right? It would allow poor people, who could never afford a home, to finally get their slice of the American Dream. That cheap credit allowed for easier and easier borrowing, laxed lending standards, and a real estate market that kept rising so exponentially, that home owners could re-fi at will, using their homes as a perpetually self-loading ATM.

How did that go? Boom. Collapse in 2008 that nearly brought the world’s economy to shambles. Fed chair Ben Bernanke told us Sub-Prime was contained… hmmm. Anyways, what was the Fed’s response? Even lower rates, and introduce unprecedented money-printing, giving it a fancy name: QE (Quantitative Easing). So, a relatively short period of 1% rates nearly destroyed the global economy… curious to see the effects of 12+ years of Zero (ZIRP). Oh wait.. the Fed did try to cut QE and raise rates. They got to a blistering high number of 2.5% at the end of 2018 and the stock market did a nose dive. A reverse course rate cut immediately followed Xmas that year.

Bernanke made the cover of Time Magazine, as “Man of the Year 2009”, receiving praises for ‘saving the world’. Does sweeping poop under a rug define bravery? Yellen and Powell doubled-down on terrible monetary policy and trapped the Fed into the box they find themselves today.  Perhaps the term ‘terrible’ is in the eye of the beholder. Many people made a lot of money in stocks and real estate during the past two decades of super-bubble. The inflation genie was initially kept in the bottle in the form of bank capital reserves, higher asset prices like homes and stocks… but the response to Covid19 (what’s the survival rate again?), let the genie loose, and all the chickens have begun coming home to roost now. The CPI and PPI (both suppressed, cooked stats the govt concocts using intentionally faulty methodology) are at 40+ year highs.. and this party is just getting started. Maybe another 0.5% rate raise will tame 8%+ inflation, right Mr. Powell?

We’re screwed… monetary reset on the horizon, and me and you will get a lot poorer once these A55hole5 have their cake and eat it too.

Detective Walker- Fight Club

SOURCE: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-will-next-market-bottom-look

COUNTERPUNCH

MAY 20, 2022

BY PAM MARTENS - RUSS MARTENS 


SNIPPET:

The largest components of the Fed’s balance sheet are the short and intermediate term U.S. Treasury bills and notes and long-term U.S. Treasury Bonds it has been buying up from Wall Street since it first launched its so-called “Quantitative Easing” or QE program following the Wall Street crash of 2008. To a smaller extent, QE also includes the Fed buying up bundles of federal-agency-backed mortgages (Mortgage Backed Securities, or MBS). As of last Wednesday’s H.4.1 release, the Fed’s balance sheet included $8.48 trillion in securities, of which Treasuries accounted for $5.766 trillion; MBS accounted for $2.7 trillion; and federal agency debt securities accounting for the balance.

The bulk of the Fed’s balance sheet resides at just one of its 12 regional Fed banks — the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, known simply on Wall Street as the New York Fed. Conveniently, the New York Fed is the only regional Fed bank to have its own trading floors with speed dials to Wall Street’s megabanks — one in New York and one stealthily added in Chicago near the futures exchange. (See The New York Fed Has Quietly Staffed Up a Second Trading Floor Near the S&P 500 Futures Market in Chicago.) Also, conveniently, the New York Fed oversaw the bulk of the Fed’s trillions of dollars in bailout programs to Wall Street during and after the 2008 financial crash as well as the trillions the Fed made in cumulative repo loans in 2019 and 2020. (Many trillions of dollars of those repo loans occurred in 2019 , months before there was any pandemic.)


By the Fed buying up trillions of dollars in debt instruments from Wall Street, it is creating artificial demand that would not otherwise exist. This, in turn, pushes down interest rates and creates an artificial level of interest rates that would not otherwise exist.

The Fed’s artificially contrived “zero-bound range” of interest rates incentivized risk taking because it becomes easy for hedge funds and other speculators to obtain vast sums of money to gamble in markets at very low interest rates. (For more on that topic, see our report from April 13 of last year: Margin Debt Has 💥 Exploded by 49 Percent in One Year to $814 Billion. The Actual Figure May Be in the Trillions. Here’s Why.) ... ...

And thanks to the Fed’s history of rubber-stamping megabank mergers, as of December 31 of last year, just six bank holding companies (out of a total of 4,839 federally-insured commercial banks and savings associations) hold $13.699 trillion or 61 percent of all assets of all commercial banks. (That is the most dangerous concentration of risk in the history of federally-insured banking in the United States.)


Full article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/20/jerome-powells-fed-in-two-frightening-charts/

June 3, 2022 The Loadstar By Mike Wackett

Container loading in a Cargo freight ship with industrial crane. Container ship in import and export business logistic company. Industry and Transportation concept.


SNIPPET:

Ocean and air freight benchmarking firm Xeneta reported this week that its XSI long-term contracted crowd-sourced rate index had soared 30% this month, and is now 150% higher than a year ago.

“This is a staggering development, just last month we were looking at an 11% rise and questioning how such continued gains were possible,” said Xeneta CEO Patrik Berglund. “Now we see a monthly increase of almost a third, blowing previous records out of the water

“The breath-taking gains reflect the sharp increase of the average all valid long-term contracts, as older contracts, with lower rates, expire and are replaced by newer agreements with much higher rates.”

The Oslo-based company’s data, sourced from global shippers, recorded the most dramatic jump in its XSI component for US imports, which saw a huge 65% hike on the month for a year-on-year rise of 205%. For European imports, there was a more modest rise of 11% in Xeneta’s XSI, taking the index to a year-on-year gain of 122%.

Full article:
https://gcaptain.com/shippers-bled-dry-as-long-term-contract-rates-soar-above-spot/

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

JUNE 1, 2022 BY KARL HANSEN

Passengers disembark from a train at Sheffield railway station on 28 February, 2022. Giannis Alexopoulos/NurPhoto via Getty Images

BRITAIN’S RAIL WORKERS ARE POISED TO STRIKE AGAINST AUSTERITY

SNIPPETS:

Forty thousand rail workers across 16 companies in Britain have voted to strike. Their strike would be the biggest rail walk-off in decades, against funding cuts that would destroy Britain’s rail system as we know it. ... ...

The history of the railway tells us much about Britain as a nation.

Over the years, rail has both driven and reflected wider social and economic trends: the locomotive was the most famous incarnation of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution, the creation of British Rail following nationalization was an icon of the postwar consensus, and privatization has epitomized the era of neoliberalism in which we live.

Full article:
https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2022/06/britains-rail-workers-are-poised-to.html

AGelbert COMMENT: Selectively imposed Austerity is an evil that has been visited on we-the-people since the first murderous greedball named himself king and decided he was "superior" to his fellow humans.

Please note, the above representative of the "😈 Church" was "Christian" in name only. In thought, word and deed, said "Church" was, and in many "😈 churches", still is, the opposite of Jesus Christ's Commandments.

The morally bankrupt (i.e. Social Darwinist) privileged class now running (i.e. ruining) this world is the aristocracy of the 21st century. Over 133 years ago (i.e. 1889), Samuel L. Clemens ✨ explained [clarification in brackets by me] why we can never expect justice, equity, compassion, altruism or even common sense from them:
 
"The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He [the King and fellow aristocrats are] as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest." -- Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) A CONNECTICUT YANKEE in King Arthur's Court


🍑 Freeze Peach   > AGelbert • 19 hours ago
USA

AGelbert > 🍑 Freeze Peach
Samuel Clemens, in that same book published in 1889, knew what we need to do (see graphic below). It is a sad commentary on our civilization that the Soil of Common Sense has been methodically polluted by Social Darwinist ideology. 🥺
"A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction." -- Chris Hedges ✨

A heuristic (/hjʊˈrɪstɪk/; from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω (heurískō) 'I find, discover'), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

THURSDAY, JUN 16, 2022 - 10:05 AM By Michael Every of Rabobank



SNIPPET:

Heuristically, after their initial 🎩 creation to 😈💰 finance wars (such as the Bank of England vs. Napoleon), 💰🎩🍌 central banks’ modern-day track record is one of almost continual policy failure – it’s just that we refuse to take the big picture view to frame it properly, instead focusing on the here-and-now pockets of coincidental historic ‘success’. A quick time-line recap of ‘amateur decades’ follows.

Pre-WW1 central banks are seen as having worked well under a gold standard. Actually it was British imperialism that tied things together. The global system ‘worked’, in a far simpler economy, by ripping off swathes of countries at gunpoint: and even then inflation swung massively positive and negative all the time. The gold peg was what mattered, not inflation. Then America got too big, and Germany got too big for its boots and tried to copy British imperialism. That was the end of the pre-WW1 period.

Post-WW1 central banks never all got back on a milquetoast gold standard due to huge war debts, or destroyed societies where they tried if they didn’t let credit boom anyway. All they rustled up was fascism, the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, and then Nazism and WW2.

Post-WW2 central banks under Bretton Woods and Cold War saw international capital flows regulated and credit rationed or allocated in a hypothecated manner domestically. As such, even their Keynesian models couldn’t screw things up too badly, and we got 25 years of low inflation and solid GDP growth. Yet the Triffin Paradox kicked in, and the US was forced off gold, and Bretton Woods collapsed. Then we saw deregulation of capital flows domestically and externally.

Central banks decided that following monetary aggregates was then the key to keeping inflation in check, because “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Except this policy didn’t work in the slightest, because once you deregulate markets, especially allowing US dollars to flow to the Eurodollar market, all your M0, M1, M2, M3 data are useless. Central banks had to abandon the policy framework.

Only with the emergence of true globalisation did inflation plunge and stay low - due to the breaking of unions , privatisation 😈🎩, and 😈💰 offshoring , especially to cheap-as-chips China. Again, this was nothing to do with central banks – who nonetheless took all the credit.

Such deregulation of course caused rolling financial instability, but the central bank response was always to cut rates into any crisis to blow more air back into the global bubble. Likewise, as society became more unequal and real wages lagged behind productivity growth, the response was to push up asset prices, not wages. Greenspan was the “maestro”. Then we got the GFC in 2008-09, which central banks’ didn’t see it coming at all despite being ‘experts’ in it.

Then it was the post-2009 ‘new normal’ decade, where central banks tried to get inflation back up to 2% by making rich people even richer with acronyms, and the ECB did “whatever it takes”, leading to yesterday’s door opening to structural, inefficient, mutualised monetisation of debt. 

Then we rediscovered fiscal and monetary policy during Covid in 2020…and inflation came roaring back.

In short, central banks can look smart for a long time, but entirely due to exogenous developments. They can blow things up by being crazily ahead of the curve, or very much behind it. But most of the time they are just making it up as they go along.

Full article:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabobank-central-bank-amateur-hour-means-growing-risk-people-sharpening-guillotines

AGelbert COMMENT:  It's the Social Darwinsim, stupid! The morally bankrupt (i.e. Social Darwinist) privileged class running (i.e. ruining) this world are the aristocracy of the 21st century. Over 133 years ago (i.e. 1889), Samuel L. Clemens explained [clarification in brackets by me] why we can never expect justice, equity, compassion, altruism or even common sense from them: 

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. They are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He [the King and fellow aristocrats are] as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.

-- Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) A CONNECTICUT YANKEE in King Arthur's Court

February 22, 2021 Howard Lisnoff:

In the post-industrial US, a person matters only as much as that individual produces wealth for the economic or political elite.

February 21, 2021 Scott Kurashige:

During Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy engineered through a state takeover, the autocratic “emergency manager” worked with moneyed interests to take away or gut union jobs, homes, water, pensions, and health care benefits in order to impose austerity on the people and pave the way for billionaire developers and investors. This was an extreme form of a national trend to dismantle social programs and impose a Social Darwinist neglect of human needs by writing oppressed communities out of the social contract.

👉The righteous man wisely considereth the house of the wicked: but God overthroweth the wicked for their wickedness. Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard. Proverbs 21:12-13 👈 👉The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous, and the transgressor for the upright. Proverbs 21:18 👈  👉The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead. Proverbs 21:16 👈

Senator Bernie Sanders 214K subscribers

It's TIME to REVERSE 40 years of Republican attacks on We-the-people❗

JULY 7, 2022 BY MEL BUER


Draconian labor policies, “cost-cutting” measures, and mass layoffs are decimating US railroad workers for the sake of corporate profits. And the effects are reverberating throughout the supply chain.

“These giant companies can quit complaining about a worker shortage when they’re the ones who are causing it.” -- CHARLIE WISHMAN, PRESIDENT OF THE IOWA FEDERATION OF LABOR

Read the TRUTH the main stream media is hiding from you:
https://therealnews.com/corporate-billionaires-are-wrecking-the-supply-chain-just-look-at-the-railroads