Category Inflation

Jul 20 2022

Here it Comes, Joe Biden Set to Declare “National Climate Emergency” as Soon as Tomorrow


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 19, 2022 | sundance 

CTH cannot overestimate what is more likely than not, as the Biden administration is now reportedly going to declare a national climate emergency in order to take their Green New Deal policy to the next level via executive fiat.  [The Hill Story Here]

Any possibility of the Biden administration creating an even deeper economic collapse under the auspices of climate change regulation, has essentially been stalled by congressional opposition to further Green New Deal (Build Back Better) spending and regulatory legislation.

Some, albeit not enough, congressional representatives, can see what lies at the end of this fundamental energy change, a significant collapse of the United States economy.  However, the committed ideologues behind Joe Biden are not going to let the legislative branch interfere in their climate change agenda.

What we are about to see is most reasonably predictable against the backdrop of how Biden’s administration exploited the “national COVID emergency,” that backstopped and justified their eventual use of OSHA to mandate vaccinations, and regulatory control over the private sector, under the guise of a pandemic emergency.  We predicted that administration approach in December of 2020, and that is exactly what they did {GO DEEP}.

When CTH shared that OSHA would be the institutional regulatory vector for forced vaccinations, many said we were conspiracy theorists.  Ten months later that is exactly what the people behind Joe Biden did (link). Now we can expect that same health emergency approach (massive regulations) to repeat with the declaration of a national climate emergency.

Pause and think about the ramifications to all domestic economic and business interests if the federal government starts using all agencies to regulate a new climate emergency policy.  Think about the regulations, the scale of potential regulations, from the dept of transportation, the dept of labor (including OSHA), the dept of the interior, the dept of energy, the dept of housing and urban development, the dept of education, the dept of health and human services, and many more.

Joe Biden is an avatar; a political pawn; a cognitively declining guy who has no idea what is happening around him.

The people behind the Biden campaign, those in real control of what this is about, have not hidden their goals and aspirations.

These are not stupid people.

They are scheming, conniving, ideological, ever-planning, ever-manipulating & Machiavellian types within the political system, lusting for power, influence and affluence.

WASHINGTON DC – The Biden administration is considering the declaration of a climate change emergency in response to congressional inaction on the issue.

It’s unclear when and if such an announcement will come, though the White House had been considering a move as early as Wednesday.

Two sources familiar with the discussion on Tuesday morning told The Hill that the announcement could come Wednesday — the same day that Biden is expected to discuss climate during a trip to Massachusetts.

A third source also told The Hill that a climate emergency was under White House consideration.

By Tuesday afternoon, one of The Hill’s sources said that while the White House had planned to declare the emergency as soon as Wednesday, it has since advised that it will not do so on that day.

The Associated Press separately reported Tuesday afternoon that the White House would hold off from a declaration on Wednesday.

The Washington Post first reported late Monday that the White House was considering declaring the emergency as soon as this week. The White House announced Tuesday that Biden will travel on Wednesday to Somerset, Mass., to deliver remarks on tackling climate change.

A White House official declined to directly comment on whether Biden will pursue a climate emergency declaration, saying only that many options are under consideration.

“The President made clear that if the Senate doesn’t act to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, he will. We are considering all options and no decision has been made,” the official said in an email.

The move comes as hopes for climate action on Capitol Hill have stalled, as swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) backed away from talks last week following months of negotiations. The potential climate legislation, as part of Biden’s broader economic agenda, was expected to include major investments in clean energy. (read more)

Think about those types of business and energy regulations applied on a national level, and then, as seen in prior Democrat administrations with IRS etc, think about those energy regulations also being enforced through the prism of political affiliation.

Think about how states that refuse to participate will be cut off from federal grants and funding for college tuition, Medicare and/or Medicaid reimbursement, etc. etc.

Think about what happens to Main Street USA?

Think about companies on the NASDAQ or national companies on the stock-market?

Think about how those USA-specific federal energy compliance regulations apply when considering U.S. business operations -vs- just taking operations overseas without those worries.

Think about who in Washington DC then takes control of what types of business interests are allowed to operation…. who determines the winning and losing?

Think about how Federal emergency climate regulations can be used to put the multinational corporate world back (the globalists) on their former financial pathways, even without TPP and TTIP trade deals.  [Every domestic regulation weaponized against Main Street USA is a win for the Wall Street multinationals.]

Think about how much China and southeast Asia would benefit love to see our economy knee-capped in a Biden regulatory stranglehold; essentially achieving the same objectives as the Paris Climate Treaty.

Think long and hard about how far the tentacles of achieving the Green New Deal can extend under the auspices of federal emergency climate mitigation.

Remember, those who are working on this don’t care about the middle-class and they have not for decades. The visibility of the ‘rust belt’ is the reference. This is about government bureaucrats using their DC powerbase to control trillions in economic value and sell their ability to influence the winners and losers to the highest foreign bidder.

Look at what blue states have already done to seize power and control under the auspices of a national health emergency. Now think about that same manipulative intent spread throughout the entire country by weaponizing federal agencies with advanced regulation toward a national climate emergency.  The entire country turned into a California style-controlled energy economy.

Now, think carefully about how that approach aligns with a political change in personnel at the White House.  Joe Biden’s usefulness now exhausted.

Jul 18 2022

Estonia Forms New Government


Armstrong Economics Blog/European Union Re-Posted Jul 18, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Yet another shake-up among Schwab’s leaders. Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas stepped down from her role on a technicality before being reappointed a day later. Kallas’ Reform Party reached an agreement with the Social Democrats and Isamaa Party to form a new three-party coalition.

Estonia shares a 180-mile border with Russia and has strongly supported Ukraine before the war began. Estonia is a small nation with a population of around 31 million and a GDP of $36.29 billion USD. Their inflation rate is among the highest in Europe after spiking to 22% in June.

Estonia has a large Russian population but has the comfort of being a NATO nation. The new government is aiming to eliminate their Russian ties by banning Russian from being spoken in school. Russians and Belarusians now have a more difficult time immigrating to Estonia or even traveling there without a visa.

Estonia is cracking down on potential spies or intelligence agencies at the border. The poster above has appeared around the border, with the government encouraging people to turn in anyone who they suspect is involved with Russian intelligence agencies. Kallas also has the epigenetic fear of her neighbor as her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were once deported to Siberia. The small nation will use its strategic position to help the West’s proxy war, and Kallas herself said that negotiating a peace deal with Putin is off the table.

“For us, it is important to not make that mistake again like we did in Crimea, Donbas, Georgia,” she said. “We have done the same mistake already three times saying that, you know, negotiations, negotiated peace is the goal. … The only thing that Putin hears from this is that ‘I can do this because no punishment will follow.’”

Jul 15 2022

The Biden Economy is So Bad, Even His Gatekeepers Now Admit Biden Has Broken All Records for Bad Economic Outlooks


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 14, 2022 | sundance

CNBC is the Biden defense team for media broadcasts of anything related to the economy.  As a result, you know things are bad when CNBC broadcasts that Joe Biden’s economy has the highest level of dissatisfaction in the history of their surveys.

Steve Liesman was given the task again to share the horrible results. WATCH:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RQBYrZxmGL4%3Ffeature%3Doembed
Jul 14 2022

70% of 10-Year-Olds Cannot Read After Lockdowns


Armstrong Economics Blog/Corruption Re-Posted Jul 14, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Children suffered the worst long-term consequences of the lockdowns. “The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update,” found that an alarming 70% of middle and lower-class 10-year-olds across the globe cannot read. There is no greater freedom than knowledge, and reading comprehension is essential to our modern-day existence. “Only the richer segments of the population—those with broadband connectivity, access to devices for the use of each family member, a place to study, availability of books and learning material, and a conducive home environment, among other conditions—were able to maintain a reasonable level of education engagement,” the study cited. We are now in the midst of an education crisis where children have fallen perhaps too far behind to catch up with their peers.

Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia saw the most notable declines in learning as schools there completely closed and many did not have access to online education. Sadly, many of the organizations that pushed for the lockdowns and school closures, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, would like to step in to help re-educate these children. They will try to reshape an entire generation of vulnerable children as they see fit. “Fighting this learning crisis is the challenge of our times if we do not want to lose this generation of children and youth,” the report said.

“COVID-19 has devastated learning around the world, dramatically increasing the number of children living in Learning Poverty,” said Jaime Saavedra, Global Director for Education at the World Bank. “With 7 in 10 of today’s 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries now unable to read a simple text, political leaders and society must swiftly move to recover this generation’s future by ensuring learning recovery strategies and investments.” They are calling this phenomenon “learning poverty,” but the issue was not based on class. This drastic decline in reading comprehension is a direct result of lockdowns and school closures.

The report tries to claim that “learning poverty” was prevalent before the lockdown, but there is no denying that allowing children to miss 273 days of school in certain areas of the world caused this problem. The report says learning poverty violates children’s right to education, but the lockdowns and tyrannical crackdown on a largely unlethal virus harmed ALL children across the globe.

So now, children risk losing $21 trillion in lifetime earnings, equivalent to 17% of global GDP. Our model has been targeting 2030 for many years as a major turning point. Unsurprisingly, this report claims that if we follow the guidance of the same agencies who forced school closures, we can attain a newly indoctrinated, I mean educated, population by 2030.

Jul 11 2022

The Disease Cycle


Armstrong Economics Blog/Disease Re-Posted Jul 11, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Marty, You have forecasted that your disease model turned up here in 2022. COVID was exploited, but it was no worse than the flu. Then there is monkeypox. But the latest is the much more lethal Marburg virus in Africa. Is this going to be the real one?

DC

ANSWER: The model did not target a specific virus. There are serious outbreaks throughout history but they are not always the same virus or bacteria. The history of this particular virus only goes back to 1967. This particular virus has a base cycle of 5-year intervals. The major outbreak was 2004-2005 which lasted into 2008. Ideally, our model projected that would reappear in 2013 and it showed up in 2012 a little ahead of schedule.

A major outbreak should come in the 2027-2028 time period. But keep in mind that this has not turned into a pandemic and has been confined to Africa. It is spread through bodily fluids so which usually involves sex or touching an open sore. So I would not be concerned that this will spread to your neighborhood without human intervention. The most devastating disease cycle will be from 2027 into 2050.

Jul 11 2022

UN Human Rights Report Shows Ukraine Military Used Nursing Home Residents as Human Shields


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 10, 2022 | Sundance 

A quietly released study from the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner [See Here pdf] looking into allegations of war crimes conducted during the Ukraine -vs- Russia conflict, specifically looked into allegations of Russian military targeting a nursing home facility in the eastern region of Luhansk.

What the UN investigation revealed was that Ukraine military soldiers had intentionally used the nursing home as an active base to launch military strikes against Russian forces. The Associated Press was forced to reveal, “Ukraine’s armed forces bear a large, and perhaps equal, share of the blame for what happened in Stara Krasnyanka, which is about 580 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of Kyiv. A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside the nursing home, effectively making the building a target.”

The issue of the Ukraine military, intentionally and with purposeful forethought, using civilian locations to embed their military units, highlights the inherent dangers associated with western propaganda during the conflict.  In fact, the effort to create civilian casualties seems more purposeful as a strategy to gain western media support and create stories that can be used to advance sympathy toward Ukraine, even if it means putting their own civilians in harm’s way.

(Via AP) […]  The report by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights doesn’t conclude the Ukrainian soldiers or the Russian troops committed a war crime. But it said the battle at the Stara Krasnyanka nursing home is emblematic of the human rights office’s concerns over the potential use of “human shields” to prevent military operations in certain areas.

The aftermath of the attack on the Stara Krasnyanka home also provides a window into how both Russia and Ukraine move quickly to set the narrative for how events are unfolding on the ground — even when those events may still be shrouded by the fog of war.

For Ukraine, maintaining the upper hand in the fight for hearts and minds helps to ensure the continued flow of billions of dollars in Western military and humanitarian aid.

[…] David Crane, a former Defense Department official and a veteran of numerous international war crime investigations, said the Ukrainian forces may have violated the laws of armed conflict by not evacuating the nursing home’s residents and staff.

“The bottom-line rule is that civilians cannot intentionally be targeted. Period. For whatever reason,” Crane said. “The Ukrainians placed those people in a situation which was a killing zone. And you can’t do that.” (read more)

Keep in mind, the United States is funding Ukraine to fight this war.  Without U.S. funding, including the shipments of weapons, the training of military units and the embedding of U.S. special forces to assist the Ukraine military, Ukraine and Russian governments would have likely entered into peace negotiations.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WH1-Ir_6Ve0%3Ffeature%3Doembed

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Jul 11 2022

Used Car Repossession Rates Double for Both Sub-Prime and Prime Borrowers, Indicates Trouble on Main Street


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 10, 2022 | Sundance

Barrons has an interesting article on an increase in bank auto repossession rates connected to defaults [see here].  Essentially, used car prices have surged significantly and the timeline seems to indicate the temporary covid-19 stimulus spending had a lot to do with the increase in demand.

According to data assembled by CoPilot, used cars are currently priced approximately 10,000 higher than they would be without any pandemic related influence, supply side or demand side.  Banks and financial institutions loaned money into the climbing market price.  However, the artificially inflated car prices now create a bubble where the liability on the books is significantly higher than the repossessed asset is worth.

A higher rate of auto loans are now defaulting for both sub-prime and prime borrowers (double for both), indicating the former buyers are under financial pressure and can no longer make their car payments.  The loan to value ratio was as high as 140% when the banks made the loans, a more traditional or normal ratio is 80%.

The banks have a vested financial interest in limiting the number of repossessed vehicles they allow into the used car auction market in order to keep the book value of the cars as high as possible.  Those banks and financial institutions have recently rented more storage space for the vehicles being repossessed.

Barrons – […] Lucky Lopez is a car dealer who has been in the business for about 20 years. In recent meetings with bankers, where he bids on repossessed vehicles before they go to auction, he has noticed some common characteristics of the defaulted loans. Most of the loans on recently repossessed cars originated during 2020 and 2021, whereas origination dates are normally scattered because people fall on hard times at different times; loan-to-value ratios, or the amount financed relative to the value of the vehicle, are around 140%, versus a more normal 80%; and many of the loans were extended to buyers who had temporary pops in income during the pandemic. Those monthly incomes fell—sometimes by half—as pandemic stimulus programs stopped, and now they look even worse on an inflation-adjusted basis and as the prices of basics in particular are climbing. (read more)

Somehow, I would hazzard a guess, if we are to follow recent precedent, that taxpayers are going to end up backstopping the financial institutions when the bubble in this asset class pops.  However, that said… the scale of these loan defaults could also foretell a significant slipping in the housing market.

…”There will not be a recession”…

Jul 11 2022

Sunday Talks, Stunningly Disconnected Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo: “We Have Inflation Now Because of a Lack of Supply”


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 10, 2022 | Sundance 

Unfortunately, (a) she’s not talking about energy or oil production/supply; and (b) she believes it.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a comprehensively incompetent and unqualified person selected to run the commerce department, blames, without hesitation, a “fundamental lack of supply” for the cause of U.S. inflation [04:38].  She’s not pretending, Raimondo genuinely believes this.

I have struggled with the question of whether it’s incompetence or intentional ideology that drives some of these cabinet members to say stupid stuff.  In the case of Commerce Secretary Raimondo, it is clearly incompetence.  In order to believe that a lack of supply is driving inflation; which is not coincidentally the same demand-cause opinion held by the federal reserve; a person has to ignore the dozens of key economic indicators that show consumer demand has contracted, inventories are climbing, and orders to manufacturers have dropped.

Even Samsung, one of the largest producers of electronics sold in the United States, has told all their suppliers to stop sending the component goods used to manufacture their products because orders for finished goods have plummeted.  Hell, consider this…. THE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT, yes, that’s right, the Department that Raimondo is in charge of, has collected the data showing RETAIL SALES have DROPPED.  Yet here she is blaming a lack of supply for inflation.  WATCH:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvvI_SAlXQQ%3Fstart%3D276%26feature%3Doembed

It is not a lack of supply driving supply side and producer inflation. It is the massive increase in material, processing and transportation costs associated with Biden’s energy policy that are impacting supply-side inflation.   Demand has contracted, inventories are climbing, manager orders have plummeted, and consumers are squeezed.  Yet this knucklehead thinks recession is unlikely.

Gina Raimondo was also on Meet The Press, with another knucklehead, Chuck Todd.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2rKyWJdlCC4%3Ffeature%3Doembed

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Jul 9 2022

Interview: Prepare for War, Higher Energy Prices & Significant Civil Unrest


Armstrong Economics Blog/Armstrong in the Media Re-Posted Jul 9, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Click here to read Greg Hunter’s summary of the interview and view other content on USAWatchdog.

Jul 9 2022

Former PM of Japan Assassinated


Armstrong Economics Blog/Japan Re-Posted Jul 8, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been assassinated in a rare violent attack in Japan. He was shot while delivering a speech in Nara. He was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m. local time at the hospital. The assassin was captured, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, who may have served in the Maritime Self-Defense Force back in the 2000s. He apparently used a homemade gun, which shows that in a country with some of the strictest gun laws in the entire world, it still does not prevent such acts.

Violent crime in the United States peaked in 1991 and bottomed in 2014 with our model on civil unrest and the war cycle. It appears that because of the lockdowns, this may have pushed many on-the-edge people over the edge for we are witnessing mass shootings and senseless violent crimes like people killing someone over a parking spot. This appears to be unfolding worldwide. In this case, the guy made his own gun. This is a trend that is starting to appear in the United States where guns are not traceable.