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It will be an interesting year.
We know that the age of peak performance for humans varies, depending upon the activity. Peak performance for an athlete tends to come between ages 20 and 30, while peak performance for a person writing academic papers seems to come between ages 40 and 50 years. By the time people are 80 years old, they have a strong suspicion that health and other aspects of performance will deteriorate in the next 20 years.
Economies, in physics terms, are similar to human beings. Both are dissipative structures. They require energy of the appropriate kinds to keep their systems growing and operating normally. For humans, the main source of this energy is food. For an economy, it is a mixture of energy that the economy is specifically adapted to. Today’s economy requires a certain mixture of energy directly from the sun, plus energy from fossil fuels, burned biomass, and nuclear energy. Electricity is a carrier of energy from different sources. It needs to be available at the right time of day and the right time of year to allow today’s economy to continue.
Most people don’t realize that economies grow and eventually collapse. For example, we know that the Roman Empire started its growth in 625 BCE and reached its peak extent in 211 CE. It declined somewhat between 211 CE and 456 CE, when it finally collapsed after several invasions. The growth and collapse of economies is very much expected because of their nature as dissipative structures.
In 2024, the world economy is acting more and more like an 80-year-old man than like a young vigorous economy. Perhaps the economy can continue for quite a few more years, but it increasingly looks like it is in danger of falling apart, or of succumbing as a result of what might be regarded as minor problems.
Trying to predict precisely what will happen in the year 2024 is difficult, but in this post, I will examine some of the things that are going wrong in this increasingly creaky old economy.
[1] Too many parts of the world economy are changing from growth to shrinkage.
The blue circles can illustrate many different things:
- The total goods and services produced by the economy;
- The quantity of energy required to produce the total goods and service produced by the economy;
- The total population that is supported by these goods and services (which will generally be rising or falling, too);
- Goods and services per person (which tend to rise during periods of growth and fall in a shrinking economy);
- And, strangely enough, the ability of the economy to maintain complexity. Without enough energy, structures such as governments tend to fail.
As the economy moves away from growth, toward shrinkage, major changes can be expected.
[2] In a growing economy, repaying debt with interest is very easy. In a shrinking economy, repaying debt with interest becomes close to impossible.
If an economy is growing, there will likely be an increasing number of jobs available over time, and they will pay relatively more. If a person loses his/her job, it is not very difficult to get a position that will pay as much or more. Paying back a loan on a house or an automobile tends to be easy.
A corresponding situation occurs for businesses. If the business can count on an increasing number of customers, overhead becomes easier and easier to cover with a growing consumer base.
The reverse is obviously true in a shrinking economy. Jobs may be available if a person loses his/her current job, but the jobs don’t pay very well. Businesses may face periods with suddenly lower demand, as in 2020. There is a sudden need to reduce overhead, such as payments for office space, if the space is no longer being utilized by employees.
Clearly, if interest rates rise, it becomes increasingly difficult for borrowers of all kinds to repay debt with interest. Raising interest rates is thus a way to intentionally slow the economy. If the economy is growing too quickly (like a 20-year-old sprinter), then such a change makes sense. But if the economy is behaving like an 80-year-old, hobbling along on a walking stick, it becomes likely the economy will figuratively fall and become severely injured. This is the danger of raising interest rates when the world economy is having difficulty growing at an adequate rate.
[3] The physics of the system dictates that as the system shifts in the direction of shrinkage, the wealth of the system is increasingly distributed toward the rich and very powerful, and away from those of modest means.
Physicist Francois Roddier writes about this issue in his book, The Thermodynamics of Evolution. He likens energy (and the goods and services produced using this energy) as being like energy applied to water. When energy levels are low, the less wealthy members of the economy tend to be squeezed out, just as (low energy) frozen water turns to ice. The reduced amount of energy available (and goods and services produced using this energy) increasingly bubbles up to the small number of economic participants at the top of the economic hierarchy. This issue tends to make the already rich even richer.
In some sense, the self-organizing economy seems to preserve as much of the economy as it can, when energy supplies are inadequate. The wealthy seem to be important for keeping the whole system operating, so the physics tends to favor them.
Inflation, in general, is a problem, especially for people with limited income. Higher interest rates also take a big “bite” out of spendable income. This problem is greatest for low income people. The benefit of higher interest rates, and of capital gains, tends to go to high income people.
High food prices especially affect the poor because, even in good times, food tends to be a high share of their income. For example, in a poor country, if food costs amount to 50% of a person’s income when food prices are moderate, a 20% increase in food prices will lead to food prices costing 60% of income. Such a situation quickly becomes intolerable because there is not enough income left for other essential goods.
The figure above shows that between 1990 and 2022, the share of total wealth held by the top 1% of US citizens rose from 23% to 32%. This means that other citizens were increasingly squeezed out of the benefits of the growing economy.
[4] With their newfound power (arising from the growing concentration of wealth), the wealthy are tempted to exert increasing control over the economic system.
The fact that the world economy was likely to reach annual limits of fossil fuel extraction about now has been known for a very long time. I have referred to a 1957 speech by US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover pointing out this bottleneck many times. Wealthy individuals have known about this bottleneck for a very long time. They have been asking themselves, “How can we increasingly benefit from this change?”
Clearly, reducing the population growth rate has been one of the goals of some of these wealthy individuals. With fewer people to share the resources available, everyone will benefit.
But the wealthy can also see that hiding the energy bottleneck would be of huge benefit in keeping the current system operating as usual. These individuals, through the World Economic Forum and other organizations, have pushed for zero global warming emissions. They have tried to reframe the problem of inadequate inexpensive-to-produce fossil fuels as a problem of too large a quantity of fossil fuels for the system to handle. In their view, we can decide to transition away from fossil fuels without significantly adverse impacts.
By hiding the energy bottleneck, companies selling vehicles can claim they will be useful for many years. Educational systems can claim that we are well on our way to finding substitutes for fossil fuels, and that there will be good jobs available in the new systems. With the bottleneck problem hidden, politicians do not have to present citizens with a very concerning and intractable issue. Since a happily-ever-after narrative is desired by all, it is easy for the wealthy (and politicians who want to be reelected) to influence the major news outlets to present only this view to readers.
[5] Major cracks in the economy are likely to start showing soon. The energy bottleneck is already pulling the economy down, even if major news media are reluctant to discuss the problem.
The problem displays itself in several different ways:
(a) The economy has moved toward two widely differing views regarding today’s energy situation.
The narrative presented in the press is that we have an excessive amount of fossil fuels. In this view, any shortage of fossil fuels (or any other resource) would be quickly accompanied by rising prices. These rising prices would allow an increasing quantity of these materials to be extracted, quickly solving the problem. But the real story, for anyone who examines the details, is quite different. Affordability becomes very important, holding prices down. History shows that nearly every civilization has collapsed. Populations tend to grow but the resources supporting the economies don’t grow quickly enough. Rising prices don’t fix the problem!
People who work with fossil fuels know how essential they are for our current civilization. The story about intermittent wind and solar substituting for fossil fuels sounds very far-fetched if a person thinks about the need for heat in the winter and the difficulties associated with long-term storage of electricity. The two widely differing narratives surrounding our energy future sound like they could have come from the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
(b) Repaying debt with interest gets to be an increasing problem.
Strange as it may seem, added debt can temporarily act as a placeholder for additional energy. Debt is a promise for goods and services that will be made with future energy. This placeholder can allow capital goods, such as factories, to be made which allow more goods and services to be made in the future. This placeholder can also be used as the basis for money to pay workers, so that they can afford to purchase more goods.
At some point, the debt becomes too much for the system to sustain. We are seeing some of this in China, where there have been debt defaults in the real estate market. In the US, the commercial real estate market is experiencing high vacancy rates. There is increasing concern that, in many places, commercial real estate can only be sold at a huge loss. In this situation, the holders of debt are likely to sustain massive losses.
(c) Political parties start differing widely on whether to increase government debt.
The more conservative parties do not want to keep adding more debt, but the more liberal parties insist that there is no other way out: If there isn’t enough energy of the right kind, the added debt can perhaps be used to fund projects in the renewable energy sector that will create the illusion of progress toward an adequate supply of energy of the right kind at the right price. The added debt can also be used to continue the many social programs promised to citizens and to provide support for activities such as the war in Ukraine.
So far, adding debt has worked for the US because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and because the US has tended to keep its target interest rates high, encouraging other countries to invest in US securities. If other countries try to add substantially more debt, their currencies will tend to fall, leading to inflation.
The US may soon also run into an inflation problem because of added debt. This happens because it is possible to “print money,” but it is not possible to print goods and services made with inexpensive energy products. For example, the temptation is to bail out failing banks and pension plans with added debt. To the extent that this debt gets back into the money supply, but there aren’t added goods to match, the result is likely to be inflation in the prices of the goods and services that are available.
(d) Broken supply lines are another sign of an economy reaching limits.
When there aren’t quite enough goods and services to go around, some would-be buyers of goods have to be left out.
In the last three years, all of us have experienced at least some problems with empty shelves in stores and the unavailability of needed parts for repairs. Many kinds of drugs are in short supply around the world. Heavy industry has been encountering problems, as well. In 2022, Upstream Online wrote, “Drill pipe shortages causing headaches for US producers [of oil and natural gas].”
If we are reaching the limit of inexpensive fossil fuel available for extraction, an increasing number of these problems can be expected. These supply line problems tend to raise costs in a different way than “regular” inflation. Often, a more expensive product must be substituted, or a higher cost workaround is needed. For example, a person may need to use a rental vehicle while his current vehicle is being repaired because of unavailable replacement parts.
(e) Conflicts arise when there are not enough goods and services to go around.
Part of the conflict comes from wage and wealth disparity. For example, an increasing number of people are finding reasonably-priced housing impossible to find. The combination of high interest rates and high housing prices tends to make home-buying a luxury, available only to the rich. An increasing share of young people are also finding automobiles too expensive to afford. One way “not-enough-goods-and-services-to-go-around” manifests itself is by many people not being able to afford the products in question.
There is often a belief that a more equitable distribution of income would solve the problem. But, if the economy cannot build more cars or homes because of energy shortages, this doesn’t fix the problem. Providing more money to the poor would instead cause inflation in the price of the goods that are available.
Another way this conflict manifests itself is in conflicts among countries. Countries selling fossil fuels, such as Russia, would like higher fossil fuel prices, so that the standards of living of their own people can be higher. However, if fossil-fuel-importing countries, such as those in Europe, are forced to pay higher prices for the fossil fuel they use, it becomes difficult for companies in these countries to manufacture goods profitably. Also, the higher fossil fuel prices make the cost of growing food higher. Customers often cannot afford higher food prices.
In the case of the fight between Israel and Gaza, at least part of the conflict relates to the natural gas field that Israel is developing, but which arguably belongs to Gaza. If Israel can develop this resource, it may be able to keep its own economy expanding for a while longer. The people of Gaza will remain very poor.
(f) Manufacturing around the world seems to be reducing in quantity. It definitely is not rising to keep up with population growth.
The big shortfall today is in goods, rather than in services. This is what a person would expect if an energy problem is giving rise to the problems we are currently experiencing.
The organization S&P Global Market Intelligence puts out an index called the Purchasing Managers Index, for 15 countries, including a global average. The manufacturing portion of this index is in contraction on a worldwide basis, as of the latest data available. The extent of this manufacturing contraction is especially significant for the US, the European countries included, for Japan, and for Australia. The countries that are not in contraction are India, Russia, and China.
If manufacturing is in contraction, we would expect more broken supply lines in the months and years ahead.
[6] How will all this turn out, in 2024 and long term?
I don’t think we know. Things are likely to get worse economically, but we don’t know how much worse. We know that an elderly person can easily succumb to some illness. In the same way, we know that if the economy has enough weak points, a major collapse might occur, even without a huge decline in energy availability.
At the same time, the economy seems to have a lot of resilience. Leaders of the US, and perhaps of other countries, as well, seem likely to take the route of adding increasing amounts of debt, to bail themselves out of whatever problems arise. If banks get into trouble, some new funding facility will be developed. If Social Security or private pensions need more funding, it will likely be provided by more government debt. This leads me to suspect that in the US, at least, there is likely to be a higher risk of hyperinflation (lots of money but very little to buy) rather than deflation (very little money, but also very little to buy).
The Universe came into being, apparently out of nothing. The Universe has grown and continues to grow. Eric Chaisson, in his 2001 book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, shows that the trend in the Universe has been toward ever greater complexity.
Together, it appears that the Universe, itself, acts like a dissipative structure. Self-organization leads the Universe to grow and become more complex, as long as it has adequate energy. The question becomes, “Where is the expanding energy supply for the Universe as a whole coming from? Can the expanding energy supply continue indefinitely, or until whatever force started it, chooses to stop it?”
It seems to me that there is something from outside pushing the whole Universe along. Economists talk about “an invisible hand.” People from a religious background might say that there is a God who created the Universe, and is continuing to create it every day, through involvement in the things that take place on Earth, including the strange happenings in 2020.
If I am correct that there is an outside force influencing the economy today, perhaps Earth’s problems are temporary. One possibility is that eventually a new type of energy solution will be found. There is also the possibility that, at some point, whatever force started the Universe may cause the operation of the Universe to cease. A replacement (which we can think of as heaven) might be provided instead.
The popular narrative tends to see ourselves as having a great deal of power to manage problems with our current economy, but I don’t think that we have very much power to influence the system we find ourselves embedded in. The economic system behaves on its own, based on market forces, just a child grows up, matures, and eventually dies. The system within which we live is very much guided by what we call self-organization, which is outside our power to control.
> Russia will expand demilitarized zone – Putin
Speaking of damaged immune systems from multiple vaxxed…
Last year when I had the misfortune to visit Canada … a child in our extended family was experiencing an endless series of respiratory illnesses causing him to miss school… he’d have been 3x Rat Juiced…. maybe 4 (to stay SAFE)
I just heard the same child was off school for over a week with a severe flu — 40C (104F) temp .. two visits to the hospital.
Parents are completely clueless… and will not listen to warnings… so without a doubt they continue to inject the poor child with the Rat Juice… slowly killing him.
The Horror. The Horror.
But it’s all for a good cause — the child is assisting with creating Pathogen X…
last day Eddy.
go hang out at Sasha’s.
copy and paste!
Oh dear, that had become like my favourite war website.
Can anyone point to any similar news/ analysis resources?
https://warnews247.gr/warnews247-to-telos-mias-epochis-einai-panta-i-archi-mias-neas/
> WarNews247 with a sense of responsibility to its thousands of readers announces that it is terminating its operation.
New business activities have made it impossible for some time now to provide continuous/complete and systematic information from the battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Thank you very much for the dozens of e-mails and messages.
it’s the last day, k.
no Type 1 civ ever.
dark chocolate will have to do as a substitute.
The Core had to endure a January full with bAU.
oh well, somehow we survived despite all the prosperity.
less than 2 weeks remain in the yr of the rabbit…
and 5+ years until 2030 so it’s all good.
My old hippy neighbor, that has the farm next to mine, is a top level conspiracy theorist.
He likes to come over and run his latest ideas by me. I don’t mind as he always brings me something out of his garden. He brings beautiful greens in the winter and all kinds of veggies in summer.
His latest tale was about Tom Clancy novels.
It seems that Tom had planes flying into buildings in his 1994 novel, DEBT OF HONOR. Seven years before 9/11/2001
His 1998 novel, RAINBOW SIX, had a group of elite techies try to kill of the world population with a deadly virus they had developed. Over 20 years before Covid.
My buddie was all excited with the big game coming up next week. Tom’s 1991 novel, THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, has a group of Islamic terrorists set off an atomic bomb at the Super Bowl. The bomb kinda fizzles and doesn’t blow up the whole city but it does kill everyone at the game.
That would sure make some new healdlines.
We will hope that his Super Bowl forecast doesn’t come true.
the Big Game is in Las Vegas this year.
if Vegas is vaporized, would the world be better off?
NO ,NO, not TayTay!
it will be a CT if Taylor can’t make it from Tokyo to Vegas.
Wasn’t there a currency “war” before the Great Depression?
Iraq bans 8 local banks from US dollar transactions
By Timour Azhari
February 4, 202410:42 AM ESTUpdated 5 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/iraq-bans-8-local-banks-us-dollar-transactions-2024-02-04/
BAGHDAD, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Iraq has banned eight local commercial banks from engaging in U.S. dollar transactions, taking action to reduce fraud, money laundering and other illegal uses of U.S. currency days after a visit by a top U.S. Treasury official.
The banks are banned from accessing the Iraqi central bank’s daily dollar auction, a main source of hard currency in the import-dependent country that has become a focal point of a U.S. crackdown on currency smuggling to neighbouring Iran.
A rare ally of both the United States and Iran with more than $100 billion in reserves held in the U.S., Iraq relies heavily on Washington’s goodwill to ensure that its access to oil revenues and finances are not blocked.
A central bank document verified by an official at the bank listed the banned banks.
They are: Ahsur International Bank for Investment; Investment Bank of Iraq; Union Bank of Iraq; Kurdistan International Islamic Bank for Investment and Development; Al Huda Bank; Al Janoob Islamic Bank for Investment and Finance; Arabia Islamic Bank and Hammurabi Commercial Bank.
The head of Iraq’s private bank association, which represents the banks involved, and Ashur and Hammurabi did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters is contacting the other banks.
A Treasury spokesman said: “We commend the continued steps taken by the Central Bank of Iraq to protect the Iraqi financial system from abuse, which has led to legitimate Iraqi banks achieving international connectivity through corespondent banking relationships.”
I wonder how much this has to do with the “real” value of the Iraq currency, relative to the US$. It also seems to have to do with the evasion of US sanction against Iran.
Back in October 2023, Reuters published this article:
Exclusive: Iraq to end all dollar cash withdrawals by Jan. 1 2024, central-bank official says
By Timour Azhari
It also sounds like the US is subsidizing Iraq by $10 billion per year, and this is acting to benefit others besides the Iraqi people.
UK military….
“MPs found that basic staples of national security, such as the number of warships the Royal Navy can muster, are no longer being acknowledged because the situation is so bad.
“They also said it was ‘unacceptable’ that a lack of transparency had compromised their attempts to assess readiness.
“Previously the information they needed was in the public domain. Today it is either graded as classified or simply not recorded.”
Parliament has done a new report on the UK military. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5804/cmselect/cmdfence/26/report.html
UK has what the Telegraph calls a ‘Potemkin military’ (faked, imaginary) and top brass and government ministers have conspired to conceal that fact from parliament and from the public.
Britain cannot defend itself let alone anyone else as USA top brass pointed out in the media last year.
We already knew that UK has no ground-to-air (missile, drone) defence, like 40 working tanks, its personnel numbers and quality are in strategic collapse, its materiel stockpiles are emptied by UKR and it cannot restock them, and its ships, planes and other kit are literally falling apart as USA and European NATO top brass called them out in recent months.
Moreover UK has no serious military-industrial base, no serious military budget and no capacity for either.
UK basically does not have a military and it is not going to have one either.
The UK military relies on a strategy of stirring up wars abroad and getting other countries to actually fight them (eg. Ukraine, Poland, Baltics, Bulgaria, basically whoever is up for it) and it can contribute some training or direction but no real forces and now no materiel. And it can put out a boat (and crash it) against the Houthis.
And we now know that the conscription of ‘cannon fodder’ would be highly problematic.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13042629/Stretched-Armed-Forces-unable-fight-war-MPs-warn-fears-conscription.html
> Stretched Armed Forces may be unable to fight an all-out war, MPs warn
Britain’s overstretched Armed Forces may be unable to fight an all-out war, and chronic shortages of troops and equipment are being covered up in a ‘veil of secrecy’, MPs have warned.
In a damning report released today, the Defence Select Committee concluded the Army is the UK’s ‘weakest service’ due to ‘significant capability deficiencies’ – which included drastic shortages of vehicles, tanks and even ammunition.
After facing a wall of silence while compiling their Ready For War report, the MPs urged military top brass and Ministers to be more transparent about the shortcomings so they can be addressed urgently. The report further highlights war-readiness issues with the Royal Navy’s £3.5billion aircraft carriers, too.
…. In his first major speech as Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps said the West had moved from a post-war to a ‘pre-war’ world, raising the prospect of conflicts involving Russia, China and North Korea.
…. But MPs were most concerned by the military’s ‘war-fighting readiness’, saying its ability at a sustained high intensity was ‘in doubt’.
Witnesses told the inquiry that the Armed Forces would struggle in a major conflict, claiming the British Army does not have enough new infantry fighting vehicles, Challenger tanks or adequate missile defence capabilities. The Royal Navy is suffering from delays to a new frigate programme and an ‘over-tasked’ aircraft fleet, while the RAF has a shortfall of combat aircraft, delays to new Chinook helicopters and too few pilots.
The heads of the Forces also raised concerns about stockpiles used by Ukraine reducing the amount available to the UK.
The report warned of ‘capacity shortfalls’, with the MoD admitting to only recruiting five service personnel for every eight who leave.
MPs found that basic staples of national security, such as the number of warships the Royal Navy can muster, are no longer being acknowledged because the situation is so bad.
They also said it was ‘unacceptable’ that a lack of transparency had compromised their attempts to assess readiness.
Previously the information they needed was in the public domain. Today it is either graded as classified or simply not recorded.
…. An MoD spokesman said [sic]: ‘Our Armed Forces are always ready to protect and defend the UK.’
An MoD spokesman said [sic]: ‘Our Armed Forces are always ready to protect and defend the UK.’
Let’s hope that there is no true emergency that the Armed Forces are asked to protect and defend the UK against.
It’s even worse.
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/british-carrier-unable-to-deploy-due-to-mechnical-issue/
They built 2 multi billion carriers a couple of years ago and have never been able to put both out. Last time it got as far as the Isle of White(a few miles) before it broke down.
We’d probably get our arses kicked by Lichtenstein if they started a war.
But it is possible to take nice photographs of the carriers. Perhaps, these have a deterrent effect.
UK is struggling to even fake it now.
How do you know that any of this is true?
ask Sasha.
Wage increases without productivity increases = doom
https://mishtalk.com/economics/2024-inflation-outlook-how-much-inflation-is-baked-in-the-cake/
Giving huge increases in pay to minimum-pay workers will force inflation upward. California is doing this. Other states are doing a lesser version of this.
The super-rich are buying more ultra-customized Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis
By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN
Published 4:00 PM EST, Sat February 3, 2024
Life is sooo good..
Automakers like Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bentley and Rolls-Royce have been doing well as, regardless of whatever is happening in the wider world’s economy, the ranks of the ultra-wealthy grow and become richer. Lamborghini sold more than 10,000 vehicles last year for the first time ever and Ferrari had a more than 17% increase in revenue. But making money selling a relative handful of cars to a small group of people requires ever-increasing creativity.
We are limited in terms of [market] size and in terms of [market] segments,” said Lamborghini chief executive Stephan Winkelmann in an interview with CNN. “So we have to get the most out of every single car.”
Ferrari’s earnings boom announced Thursday was thanks in part to the company’s vehicle personalization program. Ferrari announced revenues of $6.46 billion and profit of $1.36 billion in 2023. The company is expecting more growth in 2024 with its recently launched Purosangue SUV as it continues catering to the wealthiest car enthusiasts. The company’s stock reached a 52-week high Thursday morning at $380 a share. (Seven-time champion Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton joining Ferrari’s racing team may also have contributed to the price run.)
Carmakers like these sell to a thin sliver of the global population, those with at least $30 million in potential spending money. That’s around 400,000 people globally, according to Altrata, a company that studies wealth trends. By 2028, Altrata expects 528,000 of the world’s 8 billion people to be in that wealth category.
….Global auto sales rose about 9% last year, according S&P. And the most expensive brands are, with some exceptions, growing, too. But, for brands like these, numbers that would be insignificant to a big automaker – like 10,000 Lamborghinis or 13,000 Ferraris – can mean cork-popping success.
With such small numbers of cars – and they don’t want to sell too many more or they won’t be “exclusive” anymore – these automakers are expanding the ways they can upsell features, options and extras to this wealthiest groups of buyers.
When Consumers Reports asks which cars people would buy again, it seems like a disproportionate number are high-priced cars that will get neighbors to look at them.
When Consumers Reports asks which cars people would not buy again, they tend to be bottom of the line cars. It notes that these cars often are skimpy on sound deadening material and other things that are hard to see. If these cars are from less than top manufacturers, it seems to push them down, too.
Inflation… https://mishtalk.com/economics/cost-of-running-a-mcdonalds-jumps-250000-in-ca-due-to-minimum-wage-hikes/
I am sure that McDonalds will use more automation to try to offset part of the mandatory wage increase.
As prices rise, I expect that some customers will eat at home more. This will tend to raise overhead costs for McDonalds. The same problem will hit other organizations offering discretionary goods and services, in the face of rising prices and wages that don’t keep up.
6 minute read . Separating the wheat from the chaff .
https://eand.co/no-spin-no-bs-no-hype-heres-how-the-economy-is-really-doing-9f904f8e1f1
Without the big drop in energy prices, I wonder how inflation would be doing.
Fast just picked up an email informing that his deer hunting mate has booked a flight from Hong Kong later today — arriving tomorrow — and that we are doing this on Thursday https://www.sharkexperience.co.nz/shark-cage-diving/
He is flying back to HK on Saturday.
Might have something to do with having read this on the weekend http://www.williamengdahl.com/gr16May2023.php
Thanks for linking to the Willam Engdahl article.
Engdahl makes good points about China, but he misses the energy problem (not enough cheap-to-produce coal) that is a big part of what punctured the Chinese debt bubble. Renewables do not do enough. Nuclear hasn’t been enough either.
Classic China bashing, was almost worth the read for the hypocritical hyperbole, from a best selling Amazon author – 38 books! Pseudo-intellectual Enid Blython of geopolitics. Reminds me kinda of someone we all know and love
A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest … Fully 25 to 30% of the total Chinese GDP is from real estate investment in homes, apartments, offices.
hahahaha He even calls it a PONZI!!!!!
Is not real estate “investment” excluded from GDP? Construction, yes, but not investment. They can let offshore bond holders flap in the wind. Who gives a gnat?
Main financing issues arise with local govt, but the govt can certainly manage to mollify that
References some rather spurious sources such as “Robert Pettis at Beijing University” whom one can only assume is Professor Michael Pettis at Peking University. Tabloid drivel in my view, sort of an economic equivalent of a WaPo piece on the evil Vlad’s lack of integrity.
No wonder he’s utterly ignorant of energy issues …
Someone commented here “China has collapsed”
Please provide some substantiation
I will admit I have run across some pretty bad articles from Engdahl in the past, because he doesn’t understand the energy situation.
How real estate “investment” is counted in GDP is tricky. When a new homes or buildings of any kind is sold, it is counted as GDP. Any goods that people buy to finish their new homes are counted as GDP. When existing homes are sold, it is only the real estate commission that is part of GDP, because that is a “service” that is sold now. The building of homes and office buildings has been an amazing part of GDP because China has been doing a huge amount of new construction. Adding new roads and stores to go with them would also tend to add to GDP.
I can believe that in the recent past, “Fully 25 to 30% of the total Chinese GDP is from real estate investment in homes, apartments, offices.” I have seen with my own eyes the forests of new buildings that have been rising there. These buildings, and the streets and roads and other things that go with them, account for a substantial share of the huge amount of commodities that China is using.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/high-rises-from-bus.jpg
This is a photo I took out of the tourbus window in Xian in 2011. Everywhere we went, we saw huge numbers of high rise buildings being built, or just recently built. When I went back in 2015, I saw many more buildings being built. I also saw many buildings sold as investments (not for living in), very lightly used multilane roads, and an airport that was built with far greater capacity than was needed, in an area that might provide high-priced coal in the future.
It’s my understanding that with expenditure on new construction, it’s counted as GDP on an ongoing basis as construction is paid for, not held in abeyance until a purchaser of the property comes along.
You’re suggesting that if a proposed property were to be bought off the plan it’s counted in GDP although it’s no more than x square metres of dirt and a debt agreement?
Sure, China has undergone a massive construction boom, undeniably, and it’s slowing down, but I don’t believe the situation now is anything like a state of unresolvable collapse. I spent some months in South Korea in 1998 just after the Asian contagion meltdown. The economy appeared in close to moribund. I even nearly bought a penthouse they were so cheap but the exchange rate didn’t fall quite enough to trigger my decision. Major department stores throughout the country were bankrupt and having receivers’ sales and I returned home with an extra suitcase of clothes I was wearing for many years …
There were forests of unfinished and abandoned apartment towers in many cities around the country. Twenty five years later it’s all only a blip in the memory of fossils
I do not know the details of precisely when GDP is counted.
Few people believe China’s reported GDP. I expect they make up their own rules as they go along.
Counting builds like these … in the GDP … is like digging holes filling them in they repeating that … and counting it as productive activity
Gail, GDP is all made up everywhere. We’ve all got fractional reserve banking systems, private debt, oligarchs and the plebs their lying eyes.
Does he have a clue what he’s writing about, or is Engdahl just selling a mythical agenda that they are worse?
China is in a world of its own, when it comes to deceit and bribery.
For example, the expectation is that young people will cheat on tests, unless it is specifically stopped.
When I went on the Viking Tour in China in 2011, one of the leaders from China would say things like, “Don’t worry about your airline luggage being overweight (for a flight from one part of China to another), I have ‘cousins’ everywhere.” We were told endlessly about the amount of bribery that goes on.
The smooth GDP numbers that China puts out look a whole lot like they are pulled out of thin air.
At least at one time (maybe still) the central government would hand out GDP growth targets to the various lower units of government. The pay of local officials would depend on how well they met their targets. Leaders would do whatever needed to get the results hoped for. I co-wrote several academic papers with Chinese writers, so heard about a lot of these things.
The article is about China… did he say that GDP numbers are not based on similar fraud in other countries?
If you re read The Big Short… China is where Burry was in 2005-6… it should collapse now .. but that’s not in the interest of anyone so it does a Wile E Coyote…
the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest
Engdahl
Is this a fact? Does China have a debt-based finance model? Is it massively concentrated on real estate speculation? And is what speculation there is beyond what the economy can digest?
Michael Hudson regards China as having a dual economy divided between state and private sectors. The state sector can involve debt but I consider it much more important factor of the private sector. The amount of productive capacity would seem to me to be very significant and infrastructure, too. To me, it doesn’t look like a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation.
Can the economy digest it? No One Knows the Future
It looks to me like a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation.
I don’t think that the actual resources of the country can support the continued real estate bubble. There is not enough coal, and it is too high-cost to produce and transport to its destination. Citizens are too poor to afford the homes built.
The state and private sectors both have permitted/encouraged this massive speculation.
I should add that the state sector is not monolithic in China. The central government may have started to rein in all of this speculative building a few years ago, but each of the more local government had its own agenda that it needed to fulfill. These local governments, and all of the shadow banking system, wanted to keep the system going as long as possible.
Assuming real estate “speculation” is an element in the economy of significance at all whose debts are they? Plebs have to front the bucks for property and what I’m reading is that the debt issues are developer loans and the solvency of wealth fund management products with private savings. Any CNY debts to banks which are largely state owned will be resolvable ctrlP. Offshore can flap in the wind.
Speculation means in my book to buy to flip. Investment is to buy for return of income and maybe capital if disposed of. Speculation does not include factories and enterprises and infrastructure.
Sure, the property construction bubble cannot continue. It consumes the resources, not any speculative activites.
But that doesn’t mean total collapse or things cannot be worked out.
Local govt is part of the state too. In total it’s very large and across many sectors of the economy.
As we can all see what’s been built already, as construction slows and then stops, growth will and probably GDP could, decline. Once it’s built there’s no further call on resources or addition to GDP but the asset can be used for other purposes than speculation.
If the financial debts can be sorted out, even à la Japan 1989 extend and pretend which their banks still operate and just look at the Nips’ debt:GDP, and resources being consumed by Chinese apartment construction reallocated, why no other conceivable outcome than collapse?
Michael Hudson is important to me in this topic because in my view he suggests a path by which China’s dilemma could be resolved: debt jubliee accompanied by land redistribution. He describes in his vol 1 how throughout bronze age mesopotamia social stability was maintained by periodic debt jubilee to fee plebs from accumulating debt and personal bondage. They did not “own” land so it was agricultural debt for seed grain or support during drought or warfare that were the debts wiped out. In his recent Vol 2 Collapse of Antiquity he describes how Solon promised to clean the slates of debt, but because there was no redistribution of private land acculated through collateral seizures, lands otherwise purchased with erased debt acted to increase wealth disparity and added to the social unrest.
China has a somewhat non-convertible CNY and a relatively small involvement in the Chinese banking system of private offshore banks I feel a complete restructure of the financial system could be undertaken, along with nationalisation of equity markets and collateral assets …
disclosure: No B Ec or higher
I am afraid that even in China, jubilees will not really work.
My understanding of ancient debt forgiveness is that the jubilees related to debt of individual farmers (perhaps because of poor crop results), but not to the debt of big businesses, with lots of employees and shares of stock. Such jubilees did not lead to a huge loss of complexity, through the closure of big businesses. The King, or whoever, extended the credit, would forgive the outstanding debt. The next year, farmers would again plant their crops, and things would go one as before.
Today, jubilees relating to debt owed to banks would put banks out of business because the repayment of loans with interest is the business model of banks. Businesses would not be able to obtain the loans needed for their operations, and there would be a lot of job loss. It is not possible today to forgive debt owed to banks, without a lot of problems arising.
In China, we have a problem with businesses that sold homes at a time when construction costs in China were rapidly rising because of peak coal in China. The basic issue is a “not enough inexpensive resources to go around” problem. Such a problem tends to lead to a lot of businesses operating unprofitably.
People have put down the full amount of the cost of a condominium home (which cannot really be built for this amount, with the inflation in coal prices and other commodity costs). How can this problem be resolved? The buyer can’t get his money back, likely because most of it has already been spent. Having a share of an uncompleted condominium building is not really a solution. It would still need a lot more resources put into it, which would take a lot more money (really resources). If the businesses completely wind up operations, no more homes will be built, and the uncompleted buildings won’t be completed.
How many are aware of this ? The drought in Spain .
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/02/a-new-climate-reality-spains-drought-stricken-villages-have-been-in-crisis-mode-for-months
A post
“I have been working like a black man to save the beach bar, and I barely have time to get in. There is also the ugly thing.
On this occasion it is not the associations that are moving that. That is the key. The animosity towards the unions is such , who have had to call mobilizations on their own on different days, because they are going to heat them up if they show up. People are very upset. Last Saturday they put me in a group with 40 farmers from a town where I have a farm, around 11 at night, and on Sunday at 9 at night I had to leave because there were 1,300 people from all over Andalusia and counting, and they were collapsing my reel. This is unstoppable.
In relation to the drought that you are talking about… only those who We have wells with water (of which we are 6-8% I estimate) we are holding on, and why not say it, earning a lot of money. A lot. A lot. There are crops that are paying very well because no one can plant them (watermelon for example has risen in three years from 0.08 to 1 euro per kilo). The rest… ruined. Absolutely ruined.
The perfect storm has coincided: the drop in cereal prices (the only thing that can be planted without water), the crazy increase in inputs (Salaries, fertilizers, electricity, diesel,…) the drought (Key element), the collapse of the PAC aid (they have taken 57,000 euros per year from me just because), obstinacy in green agriculture for European farmers and open bar for foreigners, absolute lack of labor (Today I have hired a group of 4 people from a town 37 minutes by car from the farm because there is no one else nearby),… it is incredible how we are. For all this, the shopping basket is skyrocketing as I predicted when it had not risen even half a euro 3 years ago. Now I’m sure more than 50% and more that it will rise if it continues without rain.
And regarding water… I’m going to tell you something. I am from Seville and I remember the drought of ’92. I remember meeting my friends to play soccer at 4:15 p.m. (In July in Seville at 40 degrees in the shade), because at 5:45 p.m. they drastically reduced the water pressure and at 6 p.m. they cut it off directly. Until the next day at 7. And if we wanted to shower, it had to be at that time or the game wasn’t played.
We spent two years like this. The possibility of evacuating the city was discussed. 1.5 million people (With its metropolitan area). Luckily in ’94 it started to rain in January and that was over. 1,000 liters fell that year, 1,000 in ’95 and 800 in ’96. And it was surpassed.
Since then it has been engraved on me because my family lived (And lives) in the countryside. The people in the city forgot it, but we put measures in place so as not to be on the ropes again. And we will still see if we overcome it.
And one last anecdote: 18 months ago I searched on the internet for a small drum of about 40 liters with a little motor and shower handle. Because there is no plan to lock yourself at home at 5:45 p.m. until the next day. It was about 65 euros. 3 months ago it exceeded 300, and there was barely any in stock.
This is serious. Really serious. And only politicians can fix it (with desalination plants and wastewater treatment). And we already know how they fix things.”
thanks ravi—i really appreciated your story—would like more detail like that— it tells us what going on at first hand.—instead of the usual fare on ofw about covid and conspiracy theories
just as forecast years ago, the sahara is moving north.
you were wrong about politiucians fixing it though
desalination requires energy–thats what we are running out of
Millions of electric cars, new desalination plants. There’s just no energy available for all this.
Sure, I’m aware of it,
https://www.france24.com/en/video/20240202-catalonia-cuts-water-use-by-80-in-agriculture-5-in-homes-amid-record-drought
Catalonia cuts water use by 80% in agriculture, 5% in homes amid record drought
Residents of the eastern Spanish region of Catalonia will be banned from washing their cars and filling up empty swimming pools under a raft of measures announced on Thursday to alleviate the region’s worst drought on record. FRANCE 24’s Sarah Morris reports from Madrid, Spain.
One on many extreme events happening across the planet in crisis.
And in other news … Pootie has begun rationing gas to the French and Germans… until they stop supporting the UKEYS.
Kinda like the dust bowl in the 30’s… but not as bad….
West’s ‘hot drought’ is unprecedented in more than 500 years
by Alan Halaly, Las Vegas Review-Journal
There’s no precedent in at least five centuries for how hot and dry the West has been in the last two decades, new research asserts using analysis of tree rings.
The study, published in late January, adds to an ever-growing slew of research that suggests human-caused climate change is warming the earth in ways never seen before. It furthers other research like one study, published last year, that showed the West’s conditions over the last 20 years are the driest in 1,200 years because of climate change.
Extreme heat and dry conditions amplify one another—a positive feedback loop climate scientists call “hot drought.”
Findings show, however, that hot drought has never been this severe, making future projections and mitigation measures more unclear, said Karen King, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville assistant professor and lead author of the study.
We assume that climate stays the same. It doesn’t.
Why do you assume that? If you’re referring to others by “we”, who has ever stated such a thing? The crucial issue is how fast it changes.
The people who give out long-term loans assume climate stays the same.
In general, models of the future assume the future will be like the recent past. No one looks very far, to seem how much situations have changed over time.
I know that there have been articles saying that the study of water availability in the US Southwest (that has been used to justify US water policy in that part of the country) considered a 50-year period that was significantly wetter than other periods, both before and after.
Sometimes it changes rapidly :
Publisher’s summary
The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-seventeenth century.
Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the “General Crisis” extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.
In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis.
Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Global-Crisis-Audiobook/B0BN2XKWXB
hey mike and others… if you believe we are changing the klimate…. what action are you taking to mitigate???
Other than insisting that ‘they’ do something!!!!
but they are deaf to your pleas because of the roar of the private jet engines hahahaahahahahhahahahaahahah
Insurance companies may think the climate stays roughly the same (though I’m pretty sure that they are now factoring in more frequent extreme weather and sea level rise) but you were responding to Mike Jones’s reply about how unprecedented the changes have been in the span of our species.
Scientist who look at these issues don’t assume that there is never any change, nor is such a notion implied by the supposed policies of governments (though their actions do imply that it never changes).
The climate is always changing … always …
unless its the climate of self obsession
then it never changes
I’d rather debate with Hoolio on this one..
Because it does not make a difference.. Without fossil fuels ..
Count all of us out regardless of the climate
What are you doing to combat ‘climate change’?
500 years? So when can we expect the exodus if it’s worse than the 30’s?
It sucks to not have the ability to use logic….. I wouldn’t know
The Dust Bowl was the result of a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of natural factors (severe drought) and human-made factors: a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion, most notably the destruction of the natural topsoil by settlers in the region.[1][2] The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as long as eight years.[3]
The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, including John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and Dorothea Lange’s photographs depicting the conditions of migrants, particularly Migrant Mother, taken in 1936.
In 1935, many families were forced to leave their farms and travel to other areas seeking work because of the drought, which had already lasted four years.[29] The abandonment of homesteads and financial ruin resulting from catastrophic topsoil loss led to widespread hunger and poverty.[30] Dust Bowl conditions fomented an exodus of the displaced from the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma Panhandle, and the surrounding Great Plains to adjacent regions. More than 500,000 Americans were left homeless.
More than 350 houses had to be torn down after one storm alone.[31] The severe drought and dust storms left many homeless; others had their mortgages foreclosed by banks, or felt they had no choice but to abandon their farms in search of work.[32] Many Americans migrated west, looking for work. Parents packed up “jalopies” with their families and a few personal belongings and headed west.[33] Some residents of the Plains, especially Kansas and Oklahoma, fell ill and died of dust pneumonia or malnutrition.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
That researcher didn’t get paid to make that stuff up… nah … no way….
And the helicopter can charge its batteries on Mars in -60C,,,
hahahahaha
Once catch is that politicians can’t really fix the problem. It takes a lot of energy-based materials to build desalination plants. Desalination tends to take too much minerals out of the water–that is another problem. I’m not sure whether it is a huge problem for water plants (it may be) but I know that humans should not be drinking water without the right minerals in them.
Also, operating the desalination plants takes energy. They can operate when the sun is out, so solar panels may work. But this still requires energy.
A third point is that Spain gets part of its electricity supply from hydroelectric. It has the same problem many countries with hydroelectric have: The amount of electricity it gets varies with the water supply. In 2021 and 2022, Spain got 10% and 6% of its water supply from hydroelectric. Neither of these were very good years for rainfall. In good years, hydro can be a major contributor to electricity supply.
God Bless America, Land of Freedom and Justice for All
Doctor Who Prescribed More Than 500,000 Opioid Doses Has Conviction Tossed
By Reuters Feb. 2, 2024, at 1:11 p.m.
Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) – A Virginia doctor who prescribed more than 500,000 opioid doses in less than two years had his conviction and 40-year prison sentence thrown out by a federal appeals court on Friday, because the jury instructions misstated the law.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia also ordered a new trial for Joel Smithers, 41, who has been serving his sentence in an Atlanta prison.
Overprescription of painkillers is one of the main causes of the nation’s opioid crisis. Nearly 645,000 people died in the United States from overdoses involving opioids from 1999 to 2021, including 80,411 in 2021 alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Prosecutors said Smithers prescribed controlled substances including fentanyl, hydromorphone, oxycodone and oxymorphone to every patient he saw at the Martinsville, Virginia office he opened in August 2015.
A majority of patients traveled hundreds of miles each way to see Smithers, who did not accept insurance and collected more than $700,000 in cash and credit card payments before law enforcement raided his office in March 2017, prosecutors said.
What’s unusual about that?
“Prescription” Tylox, Oxycontin, oxycodone, Norco, hydrocodone etc were the approved gateway drugs to pump prime the heroin and fentanyl addiction on a national scale. Yet another method of destabilizing US society.
“Why Defense Contractors Are Saying No to Their Biggest Customer: The Pentagon”?
“Falling profit margins have been one of the biggest concerns among defense investors, despite companies’ soaring sales. The sector has shed much of the stock-price gains that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, with the biggest U.S. companies down an average of 10% in 2023, underperforming the S&P 500. The sector is flat this year.”?
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/02/01/why-defense-contractors-are-saying-no-to-their-biggest-customer-the-pentagon/
Interesting! Governments contractors have been running into some of the same problems that auto insurers have. Costs of meeting contracts are soaring, but the government won’t cover cost over-runs. In such a situation, fewer companies will bid. The government can’t get the munitions it wants because there are sometimes no competent bidders.
Can tyranny and absolute totalitarianism be avoided in a Type I Civ or beyond?
No.
Everything will be absolutist. Done by the will of those who control the tech.
If something needs to be requisitioned to advanced civilization, there will not be lawsuits or such bullshit. It will simply be seized.
The so-called Great Taking is a theory to play into the fears who are not exactly today’s winners and will stand to lose as civilization progresses further. It is like a peasant rebellion, which will be crushed without mercy. The parents killed, children sold for slavery.
There will be no tech.
A Type 1 Civilisation sounds awful. Thank goodness Chucky saved us from it.
Life would be hard without Chucky and Sasha.
Kulm could surely only be a fan of such a society if he were going to be one of the merciless elite.
Which is a little disturbing, not gonna lie.
We could petition governments and the UN for world Chucky day.
After 1914, lower-middle and lower class people in English speaking countries enjoyed a standard of living they perhaps did NOT deserve, for the sole reason that they spoke English.
That is going to be rectified a hard time.
I am not a racist or anything. I detest any group of people who act as if they have a stake in civilization when they don’t. People who acted as if they were superior for the sole reason that they were born in an English speaking country, who tended to be those who are resisting the civilization changes the most, will probably be dealt severely with before the advance to Type I Civ takes places, because they are undermining it as much as possible.
The fact that English is spoken widely has definitely been an advantage to US citizens. Native-born Americans didn’t need to worry about learning a second or third language.
Are you aware that English does not have uniform writing rules for ‘sounds’? That leads to the consequence that students have to learn each word double: how it sounds and how it is written.
I suppose, it’s not a bug it’s a feature?
Yes, it is not phonetic. This is a major reason why it will be eventually replaced.
English developed from German. Before 1066, English people and Germans could converse freely and understand one another, much as some Slavs from different countries can nowadays.
Then came the Normans, part of whose language got overlaid on our essentially Germanic language. So you get mongrel words now like “stowage”. “Stow” is essentially a Germanic word, but the morpheme “-age” comes from French and is used at the end of many English words. So English is a mongrel language.
When we got the printing presses in the Middle Ages, we imported a lot of Dutch to operate them, since they were skilled in this. They changed some spellings to match the Dutch spelling: “gost” became “ghost”. There is an “oo” sound in shoe and canoe, but these are essentially Dutch spellings.
Then came Samuel Johnson with his dictionary. He took the word “det” and decided to add a silent “b”, to remind us that it came from the Latin “debitus”. So now “det” is spelt (“spelled”, in US spelling) “debt”. Silly decision. And there were more like that.
The English spelling system is not fit for purpose. It should have been reformed centuries ago. The words “bomb”, “comb” and “tomb” should rhyme. They do not.
As a result, around 10% of the population in English-speaking countries is functionally illiterate. And illiteracy is one of the major predictors of criminality and prison time. The English spelling system should have been reformed long ago. Just look at all the words that end in an “e” that isn’t pronounced: “have”, “definite”, etc.
Let’s start reforming… I propose we refer to Super Snatch as Souper Snach.
se x reflex eddy?
never fails
I’m surprised you always get away with writing that. Gail is probably too pure to realise what it means.
Likely true.
zemi
eddy can only write about it,
thats why he writes so much about it
You are Fast Eddy’s muse norm… it comes so easy …
I wonder how keith is doing after his heart attack
and everywhere else he gets kicked off for it
Gail is switched on enough to realize norm is a NOF… so she takes pleasure in the mockery….
norm likes it too — OFW is the only place where anyone acknowledges his existence… you know how it is when you encounter 90 yr olds…
Look at how many spellings we have of the “ee” sound.
See. Sea. Key. Happy. He, me, we. Siege. Weird. Foetus / fetus. Mediaeval / medieval.
Then there’s the “oo” sound. “You see that ewe by the yew tree?” And so on.
Masha Bell, originally of Lithuania, has written some fine books analysing the oddities of English. She’s well worth reading.
Want to code? Knowing English makes it easier.
“In the case of Python, it was developed in the Netherlands but used English to appeal to an international audience2. So, while the syntax and keywords of Python are in English, it can be used by people who speak different languages. They just need to understand the functionality of the Python keywords and syntax.”
From my trusty Copilot.
Dennis L.
I am not a racist or anything.
This is what people say in the pub before they say something racist.
I always thought that kulm is a SE Asian… have I got that wrong?
After 1914, lower-middle and lower class people in English speaking countries enjoyed a standard of living they perhaps did NOT deserve, for the sole reason that they spoke English.
We deserve it because learning to speak English proper isn’t easy.
When Vikfredo Pareto talked about the 80-20 principle it was the dawn of the industrial age where such distribution was possible.
But, with a few winners possessing the highest technology, it will be more like 999:1, 9999:1, a googol of 9s:1.
There will be nothing for most of today’s denizens who have no vallue for the future..
Dennis L. for whatever reason, seems to think that he will be one of the 20%. I don’t think he will be one of a million.
Today’s godlike technology will only be enjoyed by today’s winners, who will be eternal winners unless the Hordes win in a couple of years and destroy all basis for advancement of civilization.
The hordes always win because entropy always wins.
The American love affair of the Automobile 🚗 is about to end
From Car and Driver
In just three years, car insurance has risen to the point where it costs Americans 43 percent more than it did during the depths of the pandemic in December 2020. That’s according to the latest December 2023 consumer price index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. agency everyone now watches since inflation hit a 40-year record. But while inflation is finally cooling—December’s recorded 3.4 percent is down almost two-thirds from June 2022’s 9.1 percent—car insurance is still seeing double-digit surges.
Just in the past year, Americans spent an estimated 20 percent more on car insurance than they did in 2022—the largest such increase since 1976. Among the roughly 200 categories the BLS tracks, car insurance had the highest yearly increase of any expenditure. Only frozen noncarbonated juices and drinks, at 19 percent, came near. College tuition and rent increases were nowhere close to that of car insurance.
Purchase and Repair Costs Are Way Up Too
New-car prices are very much to blame. After reaching a 13-percent year-over-year increase in April 2022, spending increases on new cars were nearly flat in December at 1 percent. But fixing them isn’t getting cheaper. According to the BLS, vehicle maintenance and repair costs jumped 7 percent last year (and 27 percent since December 2020). Labor rates, due to a longtime shortage of skilled auto technicians, are a major factor. Newer cars with more expensive sensors and LED lighting in the bumpers mean even a minor bender can cost thousands.
Oh I miss the days of buying a cheap used dependable car that I could maintain and repair myself and fill up with leaded gasoline…
All love ends due to money problems.
Too much complexity is the problem, in my opinion.
Even very minor damage to a complex system requires a very costly fix. We like the fancy systems that assist in driving, but they are very easily damaged.
Yes, even taillights, headlights are now part of the body. Too damn much.
Dennis L.
Or this link
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=ed897b2776f2f88d&rlz=1C1PNBB_enNZ1056NZ1061&q=Nasa+futures+work+pdf+vitamins+pdf+free+download&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj_jdPzi5GEAxVi1zQHHUyGBpEQ1QJ6BAgyEAE&biw=1455&bih=672&dpr=1.1
Includes reference to vitamins…
Future Strategic Issues/ Future Strategic Warfare2025 incl use of airborne Ebola etc, and binary agents in vitamins, food and clothing
Bitchute video covers this.
You’ve been Served
A metaphor for the world is norm drunk and stumbling towards the Dumpster.
And Out Back that Dumpster is something so horrifying … that it would be best if norm dropped with vax heart attack before he makes it
https://greyenlightenment.com/2017/05/29/the-atomic-bomb-as-a-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project-hardly/
This guy is from Turkey so he wants to praise USA as much as possible, since Turkey is not really well known for its science.
But, some of the “American” names he cites are sons of immigrants, and American “Contribution” to the Manhattan Project was mostly managerial and technical.
When he wrote this I compared people like Leslie Groves as the production managers of Foxxcom, where the Iphones were actually built. The Americans were as relevant to the building of nuclear bombs as the production managers of Foxxcon were to designing and producing iphones.
I will wait till a new article to write about how the American education system does not produce people who will lead the world to the next dimension, but for now it suffices to say that Americans are not really good at advancing things, and since most Asian scientific education programs mimic USA’s, the Asians, never a people known for innovation, are unlikely to do better.
I see up close and personal some very impressive, high school age students. They are very, very talented and this in technical, math, science courses; entry level courses for engineering students at major universities.
Currently in class with a dyslexic, hard of hearing student in a microcomputer programming course. All I can see are his taillights.
This current class, one gets a box of parts and access to freenove . My project is essentially facial recognition with a robotic device following the face as it moves about a room. This stuff would have been impossible ten fifteen years ago for other than large corporations, etc. Knowledge of Linux would have been nice. The dyslexic fellow is fluent and in C to boot.
The top is really competitive. The one year I taught math in Bloomington, MN, we were at the cutting edge with a teletype machine(Dartmouth Basic) which didn’t have keys, it had hard to push buttons and a true tape drive, perforated tape that is. This was at the forefront of secondary education, it is a museum piece now.
The Asians I have been in class with are damn smart and work very hard.
Dennis L.
Dennis L said
“We are going extinct no matter what anyone does.”
Disagree, universe has too much work getting this far, they will think of something.
Kulm answers
Since by the time this posts it will be the last day so I don’t think there will be a rebuttal, but there is an empirical evidence that the Universe does NOT give a shit about humanity.
If the Universe gave a shit about humanity, it would not have made Leopold Lojka deliver the Archduke to Gabby Princip, or it would have made Brigadier Charles “Chucky”Fitzclarence hit with a stray bullet before he caused the greatest fuckup of the 20th century.
Was the existence of Czechoslovakia and Serbia worth it? In the grand scheme of things, probably not, since neither of them really matters in terms of civilization. It would have been better if both countries did not exist and the Belle Epoque continue so we would have gotten much further reaching a Type I Civ.
The Universe did NOT give a crap about all the creme of creme of Europe getting killed. Gene pool which took 5 centuries to make. All wiped out in the trenched, or put out of there like Lady Chatterley’s husband, replaced by the cockneys, forest rangers like the late Dr Robert Firth who would never have been in a position to utter the word “Oxford” if Chucky didn’t ‘do his duty’, and peoples who are not from the Western Tradition.
Did the Universe give a crap? No.
I don’t think the Universe will even notice if some two legged monkeys in some faraway rock go extinct.
I kind of agree with Dennis. The Universe has done a huge amount of work to get us this far. There is definitely an “upward” trajectory. Perhaps there will be solutions of kinds we would never think of.
Maybe at the last minute Scotty will beam up the chosen ones?
UPDATE – IMPORTANT
https://i.postimg.cc/ry7BCFdj/Teeth.png
https://i.postimg.cc/3N0ZxhYJ/Hoooooliooooo.png
Eddy vs Sasha has been the OFW highlight of 2024.
very disappointing that you are not updating your domination of Sasha.
or perhaps she is dominating?
so would that make her a dominatrix?
how about no more fake speculations about Sasha and instead give us real copy and paste of your latest exchanges?
She’s not posting much since FE caused her to make a fool of herself in front of the A-Vaxxers .. + the PR Team Director broke her jaw and skull
And to think he has hot material that everyone wants to read, but no, he chooses to post endless drivel about Van Den Bossche, mutations and meaningless telegram links no one clicks on. And the work is the exact same for sasha and for the drivel, copy-paste-post.
Yes but you remain on OFW… on not on sasha’s SS… cuz The GOAT is here….
You could start your own wordpress and spend all your time posting there. I will follow you there, I promise.
only been half-following the eddy-sasha thing—just come across it scrolling through sometimes.
sufficient to sayshe invokes terror—she’s female after all—and females terrify eddy, which explains why they must always be denigrated.
tell us again eddy—how you dealt with the 18yr old receptionist down your local med centre a while ago–love that bs story
another back of the dumpster fixations eddy?
She humiliated him. He failed completely. It was glorious.
he fails at everything in that department
which explains the anger at women, the constant four number swearwords, the se x fixations. (no one else on OFW does that)
the attention seeking
the constant obsession with self.
the one thing you cannot be, if you want women to be happy in your company, (in whatever context) is obsessed with self.
If you want a prime example of that, look at the Don—but the rule applies just as well on OFW.
its a good as the confessional.
Yes it was referring to Fast as a homo that tipped the scale in her favour… it’s not often a gutter who re bests Fast .. but that was magnificent
keep trying to score eddy
one day some female might be desperate
I can ping Doris to see if she might be interested norm….
It went something like this bs … but Fast was not as harsh because HE might need a doctor if HE breaks HIS leg https://www.mixcloud.com/fasteddynz/chemist/
you should know the rules by now eddy
eddylinks are beyond the pale
That one goes into the OFW hall of fame
still on the third personage eddy??
btw—how’s old tommy these days?—and the grooming business?
https://funeral-notices.co.uk/notice/hanson/5117627
KeithHANSON
Died peacefully on 25th January, after a sudden illness, aged 78 years. Beloved husband of Anne, brother to Beryl, father to Nick and the late Carl, step-father to Chris and Mike, proud grandad of Jessica, Kathryn, Chloe, Archie, Gideon, Olivia and Phineas and great grandad of Elliot and Arlo. Keith will be sadly missed by Family and friends. The funeral service will be held on the 29th January at Rochdale Crematorium at 1pm. Family flowers only please, or donations if desired, to The DelusiSTANI Society. All further enquiries to Rochdale Funeralcare, Co-op. Tel: 01706 653622
Wrong Keith, wrong country, unless you just enjoy posting random funeral notices.
It’s like the Mars helicopter.. if you know what i mean
doesnt matter
eddy only posts his own version of reality
truth has nothing to do with it
This is even worse… keith is vax injured an ashamed to tell us… he’d be better of dead
The OFW Keith is “Henson”, I believe, not “Hanson”.
Our Keith is “Keith Henson,” not Keith Hanson.
He was born in 1942, so he is older than 78.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson
That’s impressive. I’m surprised on how long he tolerated the bashing here by Hoolio and Company. It’s a credit to you Gail and your articles
How the United States RIGGED the Global Economy
Globalization, in theory, means the free flow of goods, money, and ideas around the world.
In practice, its rules are set to benefit powerful nations like the United States.
Over the last 75 years, the United States has rigged the global economy to guarantee its dominance. In a secret conversation recorded in the Oval Office in 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described this project in striking detail: “The trick is to use economics to build a world political structure.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7AFY2ifZ5C4
How come it took so long for the rest of the world to wake up to this?
Answer is… STOOPID
Why is Kissinger not a hero in America?
He was able to convince the Saudis to basically sell them their oil for peanuts (or else!) … so that Americans could have some of the cheapest prices at the pumps in the entire world!
And it appears that he convinced the world to globalize to the benefit of America and Americans
Henry left at the perfect time…
The petro dollar was first and foremost a stealth subsidy to the US MIC, as the US military was the guarantor of protectio for the Saudis for which they agreed to price oil in dollars, and to take the dollar receipts and buy US Treasuries. What deal. But back then, the US MIC could make crappy weapons that didn’t work very well, but were still good enough against Iraqi and Afghani goat herders with AK-47s and RPGs.
But as we can see in Ukraine, that has all changed. The rest of the world now realizes that the US weapons are crap- including F-35s, Patriot Missiles, M1 Abrams tanks, Javelin /TOW missiles etc when up against an ascendent Russia whose military industry makes weapons that work -because they have to for protection, not for their oligarchs’ grift.
In the past, when there was trouble in the world, the question was always,”where are the US carriers?” Now the question is the same, but due to a different concern: Are the carriers in a location where they are sitting ducks?
So I guess The Elders days are numbered… the DOD sucks
BTW – the UKE war is fake
Getting the US dollar to be the world’s reserve currency was brilliant. Getting a disproportionate share of profits through copyright rules helped the US, too, and as did tying the US dollar to oil prices.
But we may be reaching limits.
Did anyone get invited to keith’s funeral? norm did you go?
I am sure that Keith is fine.
Keith’s gone to a far far better place than OFW…..
a place where FE’s putdowns can’t reach him.
I wonder if … just after taking that booster shot and SADSing … he said to himself … Fast Eddy was right — took a final breath.. and died
Attention doomies… https://t.me/leaklive/18000
I suppose that fights happen at high schools everywhere.
Lakeville, Minnesota, is near where my extended family has had get togethers. It is about 20 miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The population includes a lot of people with Norwegian ancestry, plus newcomers from Somalia.
MN is a wreck these days.
I get that impression.
I have a sister and my only brother living in Central/Southern Minnesota. I received a save the date card for the wedding of one of my brother’s daughters in late June, in that area, so I expect to be visiting the area then. My father’s family settled in Northfield, Minnesota, after they returned from being missionaries in Madagascar, so I have family connections there. I graduated from St. Olaf, College, in Northfield, which is a little south of Lakeville.
If you think Minnesota is a wreck drive straight north for a few hours……Manitoba is a communist crap hole
Recently, I have heard a story in my area where the son of the owner of a company bought a trendy dog to be kept in the office. This was rejected by the cleaning personnel, which is in short supply, so the dog had to be removed.
The people go crazy…
Let me guess, the son’s wife or partner didn’t want to keep the dog at home because it was dirty.
No, he behaves like an immature child, he simply bought it for EUR 1.000 to be kept in the office. That is an example of the young generation that went completely crazy. The love for animals has become a brainwashing business.
Weird! And sad for the dog…
The dog was taken by the employee in that office, who brought it to his mother, a 75-year old hairdresser, I have visited last week. Now she has got 2 dogs.
I have no pity for the irresponsible people who turn the area created for the humans into a loud zoo: I have simply submitted a complaint to the local municipality because my neighbours have loud dogs that howl and bark. The situation improved.
My distant relative in the USA adopted a girl from the family with the bad socioeconomic conditions, which seems to be a better thing for the society than keeping useless pet animals.
I much prefer a dog over a child.
The next generation will be free of Eddy’spamming. Who said UEP is all bad?
Dog Friendly is a big thing nowadays. All the hip cafes and bars round here are.
The groundbreaking study found direct links between the injections and cases of vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (VAIDS), various types of cancer, heart failure, and brain disorders.
https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/safe-and-effective-covid-injections/
Tim is fine … so far
Did Tim have the vaccine? I don’t think so.
Not that Tim … the tim who insists they are safe and effective.
He surely has taken all that are on offer… just like keith did… and look at what happened to keith.. RIP keith…
It’s a numbers game – just Russian ROOlet…. you play enough times – the house will win
This Tim last had a jab about 25 years ago. It was a tetanus shot I was given after having an accident with a straw cutting machine in which I lost the skin off of two fingers and some blood. I was damn stupid to have done that,, but I consider myself damn lucky not to have lost an arm.
Since then, I’ve broken the program. I will not willingly submit to any more so-called “vaccines”. If they try to force me, I’ll do this…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXiZHXkG-ac
In other news this week, my younger brother has reported that he’s been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, although— being British—he spelt esophageal with an “oe”. I feel rotten about this, because it means years of suffering for him with not very good odds on long-term survival.
On the one hand, he did get a bad case of the ‘Rona in 2020 and followed that up with three jabs. But on the other hand, he has been a smoker for most of the last fifty years including a fair amount of rolling his own. So I guess the doctors will point to that as the main cause.
This news came just two months after losing one of my closest Japanese friends to a lymphoma and coincided with hearing that the five-times-jabbed sister of the wife of my closest American friend in Japan has cervical cancer and one of my business associates getting hit with pancreatic cancer shortly after taking their second COVID shot.
It certainly feels like there is a covert war going on — but maybe I’ve just reached THAT age where I can expect to attend a lot more sickbeds and funerals than weddings, christenings and the like.
Most experts believe the ice will come again … It will crush cities, freeze great stretches of northern lands and suck up so much of the world’s water that global sea levels will drop by hundreds of feet.”
That’s from electroverse.info. A few days ago.
You now have to pay.
Seems like a gross exaggeration but the upcoming grand solar min. Is the real thing to worry about. We’re not going to have to wait either like we do for peak oil, etc…
Of course when it’s cold what do you want to burn?
We know that the temperature of the Earth goes through quite wide fluctuations.
What do I want to burn?
Let’s start with all those ecological books with titles like 101 Ways to Save the Planet“, or Greta’s autobiography I Want to Be A Loon*
B the way, that’s a pun on the well-known Garbo line.
Yeah, all is just dandy, guys
Western Australia’s severe summer heatwave breaks weather records as parts of Perth hit 45C
By Herlyn Kaur and David Weber
Posted Thu 1 Feb 2024 at 1:37amThursday 1 Feb 2024 at 1:37am, updated Thu 1 Feb 2024 at 5:52am
Eddy bring an ac with you to Perth…
I read recently that the majority of weather stations are in urban heat islands or next to airport runways.
No surprise we keep ‘breaking records’ if this is true. The data would be basically worthless.
Really now…it’s all heat island …suppose that applies also to the Artic, where it’s heating up much faster and pronounced than anywhere on the planet.
Watts Up with That better update his page
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00498-3
I also read that past temperature records have been altered to make them fit the latest models.
If that’s also true then the data would appear to be largely fictional.
it’s possible to ”read” anything you want, to fit any theory you have, on any subject you choose.—and find the exact opposite to all of it.
Meanwhile we are still waiting for summer her in Queenstown… and we are half way through ‘summer’…
But nobody is suggesting … well you know…
Looks quite pleasant actually … very low humidity …
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/au/weather/western-australia/perth
I first went to Australia in 1989… and it was very hot at times then too… Australia is a hot place… at least the west coast is dry and there is a breeze inbound from Fremantle that cools things down
Its the middle of summer here in NZ. We have just had snow on the nearby mountains; North Island.
This after warnings about a prolonged droughts, wildfires etc etc at beginning of summer.
Almost had to light a fire last night.
I put my money on global cooling being the issue.
We had the heater on … a couple of weeks ago.
Anyone?
Without ‘values’ everything is just facts rather than ‘meaning’?
In particular, we might say that if anything is ‘meaningful’ only to someone then that ‘meaning’ places no constraints on anyone else if ‘meaning’ is entirely perspectival – and indeed ‘immoralist’ theory is often associated with ‘immoral’ projects.
So the survival of person X, their future, ‘liberty’ and the means thereto might be ‘meaningful’ to them but their death or subjugation might be ‘meaningful’ to person Y – eg. in competition for land, resources or labour.
Animals also have their perspectives that often conflict with each other, as in predation, exploitation or habitation, and they are not really given to ‘debate’ perspectives, they just get on with the assertion of their own perspective.
But the ‘immoralist’ interpretation itself is not dependent on ‘immoral’ projects, it just removes any basis for ‘moralist’ objections and ‘opens’ the way for ‘immoral’ projects. What people actually do is simply up to them.
Is that the nature of reality anyway even if people think that it is not?
Is it right to kill people randomly (or perhaps those who are old or sickly) to get the population down, so that others might live? Opinions will differ.
I have an uncomfortable inkling that when it comes to social, moral and aesthetic values and meanings, it’s tautologies all the way down.
What is the value of meaning, or the meaning of value? Does “I say what I mean” mean “I mean what I say”?
Individuals, in order to function in society (a stage for collective enterprises and interactions) without bumping into each other like billiard balls every time they come into contact, need to hold and employ shared values, meanings, interpretations, and understandings about all sorts of things.
But ultimately, it’s all meaningless and valueless except for in the eye of the beholder. Even the Great Pyramid of Giza is nothing but a high perch to a buzzard or a crow. It takes a human being programmed with cultural and historical knowledge and a working imagination to attach mystical, religious, archaeological, or symbolic meaning or value to the thing.
The analogy with animals falters as most of them are incapable of projections into the future. They merely subside in the moment with little regard for the consequences. See Lotka-Volterra predator-prey nonlinear dynamics.
As individuals we can (but rarely do) behave responsibly, but as a herd, no way. The psychosocial dynamics of the collective unconscious (of primates) is overwhelming, thus sending it from one dynamic attractor to the next as mankind are forever stuck in a super cycle of devolution-evolution-devolution, minor cycles within larger “Yugas” or whatever.
People simply do what is expected of them given their natural tendencies and instincts. Rationalizations and other coping mechanisms only enters the conscious processes after the fact.
One cannot attribute (non)morality into unconscious/subconscious processes. However, one can reprogram the subconscious consciously, but that is an effort, and in many cases quite uncomfortable, perhaps a painful Power to Will.
What Nietzsche is saying is that there is no reasoning with automatic processes ex post facto, it is merely a rationalization, a Will to Power.
Interesting view:
“What Nietzsche is saying is that there is no reasoning with automatic processes ex post facto, it is merely a rationalization, a Will to Power.”
Nietzsche obviously accounts for foresight.
The human brain evolved that capacity to allow us to better optimise the expression of our organic drives.
That is how evolution ‘works’.
No one today really doubts that and mythological or moralistic accounts of human genesis are basically over.
So we have eg. the capacity to hoard for the winter, manage resources (liberal democratic capitalism is not doing a great job of that) or even to focus resource use, where necessary, on the persons (eg. youngsters) who promise most for the future.
It is easy to miss the ontological association of ‘being’ with ‘power’ and to think that Nietzsche is talking only this or that expression in a cliched ‘political’ or economic sense.
‘Morality’ like ‘meaning’ is entirely resolvable to ‘power’.
People tend to either ‘get it’ or they do not. Some cannot get beyond moralistic cliches and that is just how it goes.
A reality check . As members here are aware that there is a farmers agitation on in Belgium and they have blockaded the main distribution centers of the food stores . Saturday is grocery buying day and 25-30% of the shelves were empty . No fresh vegetables specially . As I stood at the checkout I heard the people grumbling and complaining and I said to myself ” wait when there is nothing on the shelves . Mankind is 9 meals away from anarchy — Chris Pike .
That doesn’t sound good for folks in Europe.
You live in the UK, right?
drb , Belgium not UK .
Tractors won’t work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHvCo7AH0M&t=7s
(BTW, this jovial guy is ex-military)
And on the flip side:
https://alt-market.us/globalists-will-use-carbon-controls-to-stop-you-from-growing-your-own-food/
Notice how they say they are gonna do a lot of absurd things… and they never happen
The same thing happened in France. But it all seems orchestrated, since only a few farmers helped by the police were able to block almost all the country’s freeways. Yes, the police helped block all the traffic, which is worrying. They claim it was to avoid violence. I’m not sure what this means at the moment, but other equally unspontaneous movements seem to be in the offing.
Latest news .
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/france-caves-farmers-ireland-solidarity-protests-kick
The fact that it’s allowed to happen means they want it to happen
Anyone remember way back in the dims mists of histrory, maybe May 2023, Erdogan was re-elected after a runoff poll? With inflation having dropped over 2023 from 58%pa in January to 38%pa at the time of the runoff poll, Erdogan had been vowing to cut the Central Bank rate further. Immediately after, however, in June a major reshuffle of cabinet and senior posts saw a new Central Bank chief installed, Hafize Gaye Erkan, Turkey’s first woman central Bank chief. With the Central Bank rate under 10%pa, she began huge giant steps of increases to 45%pa.
idsb.tmgrup.com.tr/ly/uploads/images/2024/02/02/thumbs/800×531/313168.jpg
Lo and behold, about seven months later, having raised the base rate to 45%pa, and inflation having doubled and the currency down 50%, she resigns, dragging up all the usual whingeing victimhood nonsense, blaming a defamation campaign launched against her on social media. Oh no! But worse, in order to prevent my family and my innocent child, who is not even one-and-a-half years old, from being further affected by this process Quick Recep, give her a HRC skin suit
The screaming funny thing about it all though is that monetary policy shocks are not expected to impact the economy until some twelve to eighteen months pass, so despite being a former Goldman MD it appears she may have jumped too soon to enjoy the accolades of a successfully engineered soft landing. Time will tell
Meanwhile, yet another major global economy suspended by a silk thread awaits the tsunami wave of monetary tighening
dailysabah.com/business/economy/turkish-central-bank-chief-hafize-gaye-erkan-steps-down
This reminds me of the situation in Argentina with Javier Milei taking over, and trying to fix the situation.
It can’t end well.
trying to fix the situation …
what, really and truly, like Blinken’s efforts to fix the situation?
pollies credibility vs our lying eyes
Often seems to me what happens is what was intended
The putative evil intent of the great satan doesn’t only exist on Sundays
“Richard Werner
@scientificecon
·
1h
I thought Milei was happy to allow different currencies – wait, only if it’s the US dollar!
The governor of that Argentinian province is onto something: if he does it right, he could engineer a “miracle of Wörgl” whose mayor lifted the Austrian town out of the Great Depression.” X
The Ugly truth . The US did not cross 13 mbpd . The empire of lies .
https://www.oilystuff.com/single-post/the-ugly-truth?postId=8409824e-0dfa-473f-ab32-1bcbb320daed&utm_campaign=83d895bb-3d64-461a-bca1-d13e0ba9d496&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=6b84e87a-70c1-48c4-8825-01e67e0e261b&cid=fa335351-37bb-44a6-9899-f8c34b4a0f81
This is a difficult post to understand. It is about erroneous adjustment factors giving misleading indications. The author says,
Is production of oil from shale formations going quickly or not? It depends on the adjustments made.
yes the USA is indeed the Empire of Lies.
the Empire of Lies refines over 17 mbpd of black goo crude.
It’s only so you can enjoy your dark chocolate. Those numbers are partially made up and the economy is showing it everywhere.
A comment on the above post . Intriguing .
” I’ve done some research on how the banksters rig the oil price below the marginal cost of production in the shales. Why else have the rigs and frac counts headed lower. The banksters use the derivative market to suppress oil prices just as they have suppressed the gold price in the past. How do they do it:
The Fed will just print more paper oil to suppress oil prices. They have only “printed” $2 trillion so far:
https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/d5.2 The big capital $$$ use their $2 trillion in commodity derivatives to short oil at will, frequently these days at 10 am.
Oil companies are hedging less, so why have commodity derivatives doubled to $2 trillion in 1.5 years? Why do the big banks need so much derivative exposure to oil when ESG constraints are shifting capital from fossil fuels to green energy?
Both Mike Rothman and Eric Nuttall have noted that the paper market in oil is at least 30 times the size of the real oil market.
The oil market is being gamed by fiat currencies to keep the debt bubble from popping. But the bubble popped the last few weeks when the Fed raised interest rates to lower inflation and oil prices. The Fed ignored all the $2 trillion in underwater CRE debt and the massive trillions in debt underwritten for years at near-zero interest rates. With 400 PhD’s on their staff, they had to know what they would do, but they did it anyway. So, they KNEW what would happen, but did it anyway. Why? To usher in CBDC to control us? They had to know the system would crash. “
Gold should be 50k per ounce… at least
The best soldiers in the Russia – Ukraine war would be the Russian pensioners that support this war as the pensioners are one od the main burdens od the states.
MG
If the old are thrown on the scrap heap, the young will see what happens to people who work hard for the good of the group. Extremes are problematic.
Dennis L.
Interesting point. I have seen older people taking care of their great grand children.
Now we have a different generation of the pensioners: the consumerists.
The food turned the people into pigs:
https://youtu.be/O2D5LfsndIk?si=CEBMW5a4wWWoyE7a
The people live with the trendy animals in their homes like the pigs in the pigsty. The productive animals were kept outside of the homes during the era of the fight for a better hygiene. Now the hygienic standards go down with the animals in the homes: the cheap energy made it easier to keep the hygiene. The people have accustomed to the abundance of the energy. Keeping the hygiene with the declining availability of the cheap energy becomes a problem.
About that Vitamin D supplement you may be taking; endocrine disruptor anyone?
https://robynopenshaw.substack.com/p/vitamin-d-supplements-are-rat-poison
https://bartoll.se/2023/04/vitamin-d-supplement-scam/
Vitamin scam.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/zW3mEgkNNDPw/
So much Fakery, its hard to keep up.
In other words, what the scientist-shills originally isolated as the major form of circulating vitamin D (serum 25(OH)D) is our body’s indicator of sun exposure, a proxy marker that tell our cells that we have been exposed to the sun. ……………
And that is why more and more research has shown zero benefits from vitamin D supplementation, when compared to benefits recorded by sun exposure. And this also raises the most important question of all, what will happen long-term if we take this proxy marker of vitamin D, as in fooling our body into believing that it has been in the sun, yet has not been exposed to it and the benefits it yields.
For more information and evidence of this fact, all you need to do is to search for studies and papers on ‘sun exposure’ and ‘vitamin D’ and the indicator ‘serum 25(OH)D,’ and you will find tons of new evidence.
And meanwhile this vitamin D fallacy has been exposed, although it’s yet to gain momentum, several countries within the EU have in secret drafted new decrees in which the main form of Vitamin D, cholecalciferol, has been included in the list substances of very high concern (SVHC) as an endocrine disruptor. This is not at all surprising, as they want total deniability when the shit hits the fan. And the fact that vitamin D as a supplement is being labeled as an endocrine disruptor is logical, as it’s a proxy marker and trick the body into believing it has received sun exposure.’
Low levels of “activated” vitamin d (“1,25D”) correlate with chronic pain, but serum 25D (what we test) didn’t matter.
Aside, the body responds to high serum 25D by increasing serum levels of calcium, which can increase atherosclerosis and, if dietary calcium is low, osteoporosis as the required calcium is taken from bones.
https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/70/3/387/571933?login=false
>> Results.
>> The prevalence of intrusive pain was 22.9% and of chronic pain was 29.7%. Low serum 25D concentrations were associated with intrusive and chronic pain in unadjusted analysis, but after adjustment, the associations were no longer significant. Low 1,25D levels (> Conclusions.
>> Low serum 1,25D concentrations are associated with chronic pain in older men. This raises the question whether vitamin D metabolites may influence pain states, mediated through different biological mechanisms and pathways.
Look up Vitamin D with K2 and Calcium. Work around for concerns about “atherosclerosis and, if dietary calcium is low, osteoporosis.”
If anyone knows about this, please chime in, particularly about the “vitamin d / cholciferol is literally the active ingredient in rat poison” claim. I just started taking a vitamin d supplement … now I need to look into this crap and maybe buy a UV lamp instead. Sheesh, can’t trust anything these days.
oops, I guess it’s called “cholecalciferol”
vitamin d in massive doses is used for rat poison. it is toxic to humans if you take 1,000,000s IU daily for months; anything up to around 10,000 IU daily. there’s a good medcram youtube showing that vit d as we measure it is indeed not beneficial to health, and blood levels are reflecting sunshine exposure. it is being outside, even in cloudy weather, that is beneficial to health. i’d post some links but my computer is kaput.
medcram: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eEyWlbToI4
The video suggests that near-IR light (not UV which activates vitamin d) is regulating intracellular melatonin levels and that this is the mechanism by which vitamin d levels correlate with health outcomes. In other words, vitamin d levels are correlated with melatonin levels, and people are erroneously zeroing in on vitamin d as the important factor.
Another thing I found interesting was at 16:30 in that video. ACE2 converts an oxidant to an anti-oxidant. ACE2 is also the COVID spike-protein receptor. If you make a lot of spike, you make a lot of binders to the ACE2 receptor, which (I’m guessing) will inactivate or degrade it. So COVID vaccination could reduce systemic anti-oxidant levels and accelerate aging.
Also, apparently incandescent lightbulbs provided near-IR light, which regulates melatonin. Now, with LED lightbulbs, that source no longer exists.
https://youtu.be/9eEyWlbToI4?t=1306
modern windows reduce ir, too. i think this vid is where i found the 10,000 IU info:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v0=B9SNfrE7P1s
One of the better sources of near IR is wood stoves, such as I practice (we will have gas in 2025 here, but for now heating is wood).
anything up to around 10,000 IU daily is ok, that should have read.
I take 5 to 6,000 IU of Vitamin D3 with K2 every day, get lots of sunshine on my skin when it’s available, and sit in front of a blazing wood stove most evenings for five months of the year.
It is impossible to know for certain whether those supplements are good or bad for a person. Some of the worst poisons can very enjoyable to taste and swallow.
But at the same time, our bodies can “tell” us when they feel good or bad. You can “feel the force” (as Yoda or Obiwan might put it) to listen to your body. It will tell you what it likes and doesn’t like and how much it likes.
My body “tells” me it “likes” 5 to 6,000 IU of Vitamin D3 in the winter. It “likes 20 minutes of sunbathing when the sun is strong. It “likes” an hour or two in front of the wood stove on winter evenings. At least, that’s how my conscious mind interprets how my body feels.
For breakfast, my body “likes” two cups of strong breakfast tea with milk and no sugar, two boiled eggs, two slices of toasted homemade bread with butter, two slices of hardish cheese, and an unpeeled apple. Occasionally, it also “likes” a little bit of homemade orange marmalade on the toast.
Over the years, I have trained my body to “like” this breakfast. Add milk to the tea, substitute the butter with margarine, or the homemade bread with bread from the supermarket, or the Twinning’s with PG Tips, and my body will respond by “being disgusted” with me for consuming it.
Erratum: that should read “Add sugar to the tea”.
It is interesting the use of the term ‘rat poison’, which is a term that has been actually attributed to mRNA (so called) vaccines.
It is a sort of Orwellian way of counter fight what by now is clear.
What is funny is that Vitamin D is NORMALLY prescribed by Doctors who work ‘in the system’, so who says that Vitamin D is ‘rat poison’ says that a normal prescription of Doctors ‘in the system’ is introduced to poison people.
But if a normal Vitamin prescribed by ‘the system’ is a poison, one can imagine all the others prescriptions how dangerous can be, including the top: mRNA.
So, an argument introduced to fight what ‘no vax’ people use to treat Covid-19 is actually an argument which destroys ‘the system’.
They are stupid, they should find some better discussion to fight who treat Covid-19 with medicines and not vaccines…
I started taking a range of supplements about a year ago — and I have not had as much as a sniffle since then
I am not buying this
I never took vitamins in the past because of stories (lies) I read telling me there were useless… the lies came from the same entity that continues to tell us that high carb foods should be the foundation of our food pyramid
The reality is they don’t want us living till 100 cuz that’s bad for the farm
I also call bullshit on this. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, as well as my own experience. Cod liver oil has been known as a health food for millennia. Probably the claims of those who push mega-doses (5000IU+ per day) are wrong but something in the 1000-2000 range is appropriate and helpful. And I only supplement vitamin D, so there is no confounding variable. Obviously I would not take it if I lived 2000 km to the South, but as things stand I don’t think I have a choice.
Cod liver oil I’ll go along with, but don’t take any supplements personally and would only advise vitamin d to old people that don’t get out much.
Spend as much time as possible outside, eat a healthy and varied diet and avoid anything in a pill form. Also trust your body and take note of what it tells you. I sometimes get a hankering for various foods(bananas, broccoli and such) and I accept that my body is lacking in something and letting me know. Call it a lesser version of how a pregnant woman’s body makes her have the strangest cravings.
Personally, I trust supplements as little as I trust every other thing, that particular branch of the chemical death industry tries to sell us. Even if the base idea is sound, they’ll add god knows what if there’s profit involved.
fitz, you’re not foolish at all, i agree with all of that. eat lots of different plants and plenty of fermented foods for good health, look up tim spectre/zoe project for the details.
Thanks and I’ll have a look at that later.
Concerning diet, variety and as important, I make everything myself, including all sauces. One of the things that i believe is great for health, is that I use lots of herbs and spices. As much as possible in everything I can possibly put them in. Gives a dish so much more flavour and a fair few are known to be beneficial in many ways.
Some people moan about the time it takes, but I’d rather cook a vegetable, than sit Infront of the TV and become one.
If you are ok with olive oil, then no need to give up mayo. It makes the best mayo imaginable and you can pick whichever one has your personal favourite flavour.
Here’s a recipe(can change the vinegar for lemon juice if vinegar is an issue).
https://everydaycooks.co.uk/homemade-mayonnaise/
Try saurkraut ( fermented cabbage ) , Kimchi , Kefir and Greek yoghurt as fermented foods . Assure you will have never a digestion problem . Been at it for 15 years .
fitz, thanks for the mayo recipe. i find the flavor from olive oil a but overpowering compared to mayo from more neutrally flavored seed oils, but i’ll look at the recipe you recommend.
regarding herbs and spices, agreed again. a major conclusion from the zoe studies was that eating 30+ plants per week is very good for the gut microbiome and thus health generally; sounds like a lot of plants but spices count too, so you can easily get to 10 plants in 1 meal. we cook cook mostly from scratch, too, and it’s not unusual that we count 20 plants per meal.
and ravi, yes indeed, i make all of those at home. been trying salt fermented fruits recently, plums are especially good. sandor katz’s books on fermentation are excellent; 2 birds with 1 stone, here’s katz and tim spector from zoe discussing the benefits of fermented foods:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-rwOqJmMZH4
There is no vitamin D in winter, period. Even if you spend the day outside. The sun is too low and the UV gets absorbed by the longer path in the atmosphere. Carbs interfere with vit. D recycling in the liver, and no one today practices a fully carnivore diet (with reason, some carbs help). You can mitigate vit. D depletion with a low carb diet, but modest supplementation helps a lot. My worse vit. D days were as a youth, working all day and only stepping out for lunch.
Everything we could see with respect to Covid deaths was that low vitamin D levels (as measured in a standard way) correlated with high death rates. Black individuals tend to have especially high death rates, when living in areas away from the equator because they tend to have low vitamin D levels–their black skin blocks the absorption of what little vitamin D generating capacity is available.
I do have a problem with osteoporosis. So anything that reduces bone density is an issue.
Doctors in today’s medical system are not at all helpful in dealing with this issue. It is hard to know what to do.
According to the video:
This is because people who get outside have higher baseline melatonin levels because they absorb visible and near-IR light. The vitamin D is an incidental correlate, which is why supplementing with vitamin D didn’t help COVID prognosis.
I will continue with the supplements no sugar no processed foods regular exercise regime… the VIP room dancers think I am in my early 40’s and that’s what matters most
https://www.mankindpharma.com/blog/what-are-capsule-covers-made-up-of-are-they-safe
Chrome, safari are not allowing me to post right now.
I was having difficulty “copying” material from this site, but took a screenshot first.
I wonder if this article was written by the makers of the vegetarian capsules. We certainly don’t have any long-term follow-up of the effects of HPMC. Just because the material is “completely natural” doesn’t quite let the product off the hook, to my way of thinking.
https://vigilantnews.com/post/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling-you-about-food-is-wrong/
https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c46266d-eef9-4ca4-8e07-520bf4dfd14b_852x776.png
in the United States, there’s a remarkably exact negative correlation between obesity and altitude. On average, the higher you are above sea level, the thinner you are.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2020/1946723/
pollutants run downhill so end up in drinking water, is the short version.
People up high have to do more hill climbing, and wear off more energy that way?
Of course, the higher you go, the lower the gravity. So you will weigh (slightly) less up in the Rockies than down by the Mississippi.
A few thoughts:
The very high meat diet that this author recommends is at odds with what a person sees that correlates with good health and long life. People in Blue Zones tend to eat little meat.
There is no way that today’s world population could be fed on a high-meat diet. Producing meat is terribly inefficient.
There is probably some truth to the “Seed oils aren’t really good for you,” statement.
The author overlooks the fact that eating all of the processed carbohydrates is also a huge problem. Years ago, soft drink consumption of all kinds was very low. Chips of various kinds were not yet popular. Servings of every kind are absurdly large in the US.
stopping seed oils cured a lifelong, chronic gut condition for me. olive oil, coconut oil and butter are lots better. i miss mayo, but it’s a small price to pay to have gotten rid of a problem i’ve had since childhood.
Surely coconuts are seeds. Palm trees grow from them.
I wonder if it is the Omega 6 fatty acids in the nut oils that are too inflammatory, especially when not balanced with Omega 3s.
as far as i understand, it’s the massive amount of processing seed oils go through that makes them so bad. hexane washes, for example. originally they were used as industrial lubricants. useful info at https://drcate.com/the-hateful-eight-enemy-fats-that-destroy-your-health/
The kinds of oils this fellow is campaigning against are
Canola
Corn
Cottonseed
Soy
Sunflower
Safflower
Grapeseed
Ricebran
He doesn’t give complete reasons why. I see avocado oil is not on the list, nor is olive oil.
Gail, coconut and avocado are not in the list because they have low amounts of polyunsaturated fats. Same for olive oil, at least the good quality ones. also the cleaning process for these oils (sunflower oil is black right off the press) generates large amounts of oxidation. It is the most important item to remove from diet, more so than sugar or gluten.
Gail, the Blue Zone was and is a psyop. I actually read the book, and in Sardinia, they go visit the ultra-vigorous 70+ man. They find him inside a cow he just butchered. It is in the book! He also has a flock of sheep he drives in the hills to get sheep milk and lambs. I know that region intimately and I assure you they are more carnivore than anyone else in Italy. In the old days their rich people did not consume olive oil, that was for the poor! Not having enough butter, they consumed mostly lard for fat.
Okinawans eat very large amounts of pork.
And don’t forget the Okinawan purple sweet potato, which is not a nightshade vegetable but a member of the morning glory family.
Yes. I love those particular sweet potatoes, they are so light compared to regular. Also, I forgot, but those Sardinians eat fly maggots (casu marzu) in rotten cheese. Blended and spread over paper thin bread is quite delicious.
I’ve been doing carnivore again for the last ten months, and this time I’ve been doing it right. I restarted due to anxiety I’d been suffering from for two months. Within three days of restarting carnivore, the anxiety was totally gone. But the new diet has had more benefit than just the anxiety: the arthritis I had in two knuckles is gone, toenail fungus has cleared up, blackheads on my nose have disappeared, my hair is thicker and, at 58, I am stronger and more ripped than I have ever been.
Try it for a month. By the end of that time, you’ll be beating Hoolio to the rabbits.
hey norm… this is you https://t.me/downtherabbitholewegofolks/91672
I see the future and it’s standing on two legs..
Consumers faced with car insurance rate increases in California
One woman’s car insurance monthly payment more than doubled.
Habib’s monthly payment increased from $136 to nearly $360 for car insurance through GEICO.
“I contacted them right away and the woman’s explanation, which was on a virtual chat, was that it was inflation, that the auto rates were going up,” Habib said.
The new rate would increase her insurance by more than $2,600 for the year.
“It is very hard. I depend on my car quite a bit,” Habib said.
And she is not alone.
“We’re seeing most, if not all, companies requesting rate increases,” said Harold Newbill, owner of McClatchy Insurance Agency.
Newbill said some companies have decided to cancel customers or reduce insurance offerings in California.
ABC10 asked Newbill what is contributing to this change in recent years, and he said, for one, inflation.
“Along with that has come the cost to repair vehicles, the cost for parts to do that and the rise in higher payments in claims for car accidents and that’s related to the cost of healthcare,” he said.
BullShoot…just a plan to get people out of cars and using gasoline…
Only rich folk worried about climate change will have cars to them around
I understand that regulators in California had been holding down insurance rates for a while and have recently been allowing increases, built up over a period of years, through.
There were few accidents, when almost everyone was at home in 2020 and 2021. This temporarily distorted rates on the down-side. Once people started to drive more, the number of accidents went up. There were also broken supply lines, making it difficult to get replacement parts. Insurers found that they needed to pay for loaner rental cars until the replacement parts could be obtained. This tended to add to costs for auto insurers.
the cost of repairing EVs is a huge contributor – we are all subsidizing the MOREONS
Jim Rogers gives the timeline for when the worst crash of his lifetime hits, ‘the signs are all there
https://www.kitco.com/news/article/2024-02-02/jim-rogers-gives-timeline-when-worst-crash-his-lifetime-hits-signs-are-all
By Anna Golubova and Michelle Makori
(Kitco News) – It has been the longest time in American history without a recession, and all the signs point to the worst crash of our lifetimes coming, according to Jim Rogers, Chairman of Rogers Holdings.
“It’s been the longest [period] in American history that we’ve gone without a recession,” Rogers told Michelle Makori, Lead Anchor and Editor-in-Chief at Kitco News. “It doesn’t mean there will have to be a recession, but we always have. And I see the various signs that something is going to go wrong soon.”
Rogers is a best-selling author who is best known for co-founding the Quantum Fund and launching the Soros Fund Management with George Soros, which averaged an annual return of 20% from 1970 to 2011.
There are signs that a bear market is coming, Rogers said. If it happens, it will be the worst in our lifetime, Rogers pointed out, giving his forecast for the timeline in this interview with Michelle Makori.
“In 2008, we had a big problem, but the debt everywhere has skyrocketed since then. So the next recession has to be the worst in my lifetime because the debt is so much higher now than it has ever been before in my lifetime. Even China has a lot of debt now.”
The U.S. began 2024 with its national debt surpassing $34 trillion. The number of Wall Street experts highlighting this issue has also been growing. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned that the U.S. economy is heading towards a financial crisis due to escalating national debt. Dimon projected a looming “hockey stick” surge in debt and noted that the crisis could be ten years out as he spoke at the Bipartisan Policy Center last week. “It is a cliff, we see the cliff. It’s about ten years out, we’re going 60 miles an hour [toward it],” he said.
However, Rogers’ timeline is much more pressing as he sees the worst crash of his lifetime happening much sooner. Watch the video above to get Rogers’ timeline on when to expect this crash.
Given that it is an election year, things might get complicated, but there comes a point when things get out of control, Rogers added. “I’m afraid I see the signs.”
How to prepare for the coming crisis
Aside from boosting individual gold and silver stashes, there are some concrete assets Rogers suggests looking at in this environment.
Rogers sees a potential opportunity shorting the Magnificent 7 — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla, which he sees as overvalued, but hasn’t established when he would execute a short trade. “Those are on my list to short because those are the ones that are being exploited and have very high valuations,” he said adding that he is not shorting yet.
Rogers is also sitting on “a lot of cash,” mainly in U.S. dollars, as he looks for opportunities. “The U.S. dollar is not a sound currency anymore. We’re the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. But everybody thinks it’s a sound currency, and they think it’s a safe haven. So when problems come, people race to a safe haven,” he clarified.
The Chinese market and the agriculture sector are other investment options Rogers is highly interested in. For insights on what sectors he is exploring, watch the video above.
Are we on the brink of WW3?
Rogers admitted that he fears regional conflicts escalating into a major global war.
“We have small wars now, and historically, small wars somehow or another wind up turning into big wars. We would think that people would learn the lessons of history, but they never do,” he warned. “I don’t like the signs that I see. I would like to think that we’re smart enough to stay away from war. But, mankind has never been smart enough to avoid wars.”
When asked whether the world is on the precipice of escalating into a global war, he said he sees “the signs moving in that direction.”
And even though Rogers did rule out an end-of-the-world type scenario, he cautioned that the younger generation will have a lot of problems on their hands. “I promise you that we’re going to have 2025. But it’s a good time to be an old American because of all of these problems that America’s going to have in the future. I’m not going to be around. It’s not a good time to be a young American,” he said.
Some people will do well in the next several decades while others suffer, Rogers added. Watch the video above for the legendary investor’s insights on how to succeed.
China to take back Taiwan
There are several potential triggers for a wider conflict, including the Israel-Hamas war spilling over, escalation in the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the China-Taiwan tensions.
Looking ahead, Rogers believes Taiwan is going to be part of China. “I can look at the globe, and I know that Taiwan’s going to be part of China again someday. Will it be by war? I hope not. China seems to be smart enough to just wait because they know it’s going to be theirs again someday, and I hope they will just wait,” he said.
On how this all could play out and for other global situations Rogers is watching, watch the video above.
Rogers is still bullish on China’s economy, which is facing many challenges, such as slower-than-expected growth, the real estate crisis, deflation, export declines, and high youth unemployment.
This week, the Hong Kong court ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande, the world’s most heavily indebted real estate developer. This decision impacts China’s real estate sector, but the outcome hinges on the Chinese mainland’s response to the Hong Kong court’s decision.
Rogers highlighted that he is looking for opportunities in the Chinese market. To get his specific sector picks, watch the video above.
Jim is unaware of the cause… therefore he believes there will be opportunities.
Rogers sees a potential opportunity shorting the Magnificent 7 — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla, which he sees as overvalued, but hasn’t established when he would execute a short trade. “Those are on my list to short because those are the ones that are being exploited and have very high valuations,” he said adding that he is not shorting yet.
Rogers is also sitting on “a lot of cash,” mainly in U.S. dollars, as he looks for opportunities. “The U.S. dollar is not a sound currency anymore. We’re the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. But everybody thinks it’s a sound currency, and they think it’s a safe haven. So when problems come, people race to a safe haven,” he clarified.
Rogers agrees with Fast Eddy,the end is near…best to be OLD and we are near a World War that will destroy us all.
To be young is a curse .
Other than that he’s wrong..does be that make Eddy feel better
Mike , ” To be young is a curse . ”
I like that . Going to be using this .
Jim made the mistake of breeding at an advanced age — then he moved to Singapore because he wanted to be part of the China thing but didn’t want to live in China…
No mistake…the outcome is the same regardless at this point..
Think a couple more will make a material difference?
He’s essentially doing the Fast Eddy Tour by positioning oneself ..what’s wrong with that?
I do hope we get a full launch of the nukes as part of UEP… to complement the ponds
That plus the pathogen and starvation should Extinct these humans real good
Doug Noland, a regular at Chinabashi, on Friday night considers financial bubbles:
Today’s systemic propensity for loose conditions ensures a highly elevated “neutral rate.” Further confounding analysts, this rate will also prove highly unstable and non-linear. Tightened financial conditions and deflating speculative Bubbles will profoundly impact the stimulative effects of lower policy rates. I point to the “pushing on a string” dynamic that is laying bare Beijing’s waning control over China’s faltering Bubble economy.
creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com
The pushing he is describing refers to China’s waaay low interest rates. So far out of China, I haven’t heard groans and tales of abject misery we see every day happening in what’s probably the majority of other countries, including parts of the west. Perhaps other commenters here who’ve been to say SEAsian countries and to China as well can reflect on relative conditions of life there. Maybe as one recently suggested, China has priced itself higher than Hanoi resulting in a Vietnamese or Philippine paradise rather than Xinjiang prison camp, assuming they exist.
The implication of the slur to me seems to be that the tiny little insignificant sector of financial markets called the Nasdaq falsely accused of being in a bubble is perfectly under control by USD market institutions while at the same time China is about to implode, putting the world’s financial architecture in jeopardy.
prophetic blaming indeed
Our office manager reports that her mother lost a couple of hundred grand USD on one of those apartments that are not getting built… she was told by the lawyer involved not to bother trying to recover because ‘and.. it’s gone’ They are all bankrupt it’s just good money after bad on legal fees.
China is already collapsed – there is no way out of this.
Far worse than the US subprime
back of the couch change, no?
you posted this yesterday also
The video mentioned can be seen at this link.
https://youtu.be/1DW2xigEY2w
Can Fed tame inflation?
Jim Rogers doesn’t think so. Expects more inflation later this year. Central banks can only print money to solve problems.
Jim Rogers sees opportunities in farming. But commodity prices are down. He can’t explain why. Do as Bill Gates does.
I was going to post the solution … but would have to pay https://www.eugyppius.com/p/is-there-nothing-to-be-done-are-there
See my comment I made in response to a different comment. There seems to be a huge influx of immigrants, and all the new jobs are going to immigrants.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/01/15/2024-too-many-things-going-wrong/comment-page-10/#comment-452409
Employment taxes? Running a business some years back was hell due to employment taxes including unemployment and workman’s comp. Suspect all are higher now.
We eliminated jobs for the “deplorables” many years ago; the irony now is the elite policy makers may need to learn to code.
Upon reflection, that remark about coding was probably a very condescending by supposedly superior people with all the answers.
Those walking/swimming across the border appear more fit than what I am seeing in Rochester, even at Mayo obesity is obvious.
Dennis L.
I came across this theory on X/Twitter, from a poster called “CulturalHusbandry”:
—–
The reason behind open borders and mass migration in the West is a hard pill to swallow but here it is. I sugar coat nothing:
Richard Hoskins author of “War Cycles, Peace Cycles.” maintains that every instance of slavery abolition in recorded history can be traced to the influence of a banking systems which must keep the money system circulating at all costs. Hence, slaves are abolished whenever the economy begins to contract and fresh new borrowers are needed to get the wheels of commerce rolling again. Writes Hoskins, “I have never encountered a case in history where slaves were freed en masse for humanitarian reasons. First usury causes high prices (inflation), then heavy debts, a landless people, lower birth rates and declining population, and finally immigration of new peoples needed to borrow money into existence and pay taxes, or slaves are emancipated to achieve the same object.” As Hoskins relates, a debt-free potential borrower is of far greater value than a heavily indebted native citizen. Western nations don’t have slaves to free but they do have millions upon millions of migrants that can be imported so that they and their offspring may constitute a new generation of debt-free borrowers.
This is it. This is why native populations all over the Western world are being replaced.
And besides of being debt free, migrants feel less entitled and therefore are willing to work for even lower wages, they are younger and fitter than the native population and, last but not least, most of them are death jab free. So it’s a win-win-win-win situation.