Tag Archives: David Pristash

Feb 8 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reveals Ridiculous “Green New Deal” – Multiple Immediate Backfires…


Re-Posted from The Conservation Tree House on February 7, 2019 by 

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, aka “Occasional Cortex“, revealed an energy and social justice plan today called “The Green New Deal“, promising a massive transformation of American society.  However, the substance (full pdf below) is so ridiculous, there are many people now wondering if she and her allies were set-up by political opponents to make themselves look like fools.

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/399147612/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-7tqtGTfJDP5zTDj6Qgi9

.The goal is to have all Americans eating sustainable algae cakes and sitting around campfires, barefoot, picking parasites off each other…. or something.

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

 · 

1) By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard I nearly cried. If a bunch of GOPers plotted to forge a fake Democratic bill showing how bonkers the party is, they could not have done a better job. It is beautiful.

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

2) See Ron Bailey for look at sheer number of turbines, solar panels, facilities necessary just for the “renewable electricity” bit. Wud need 500k square km, bigger than California. Also note, govt will pay for these–not private sector. https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-democratic-socialism-by-o …

3,649

Twitter Ads info and privacy

How Much Will the Green New Deal Cost?

Climate change is the excuse; radically remaking the American economy is the aim.

reason.com

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

 · 
Replying to @KimStrassel

3) Also, AOC would put charging stations “everywhere,” upgrade or tear down “every building” in the country (homes and businesses), install high-speed rail across every state, upgrade all our infrastructure. (Maybe once Ds allow permitting reform? LOL. LOL. LOL.)

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

4)Somehow, government-run healthcare, “family sustainable” wages, paid leave, and “affordable” housing are also “required” for a clean economy. I would love to understand this logic. (And imagine what wages will need to be to pay for billion-dollar-per-kilowatt electricity)

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

 · 
Replying to @KimStrassel

5) Key part though people is bit in fact sheet that explains why resolution is not immediately banning fossil fuels or demanding zero-emissions across economy. Because “we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Note “fully.”

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

6) Planes run on fossil fuel. No fossil fuel, no visits to granny. Cows produce methane, why alarmists want to get rid of livestock. She can’t do it “fully” in 10 years, but AOC is coming after ur air miles and bacon. This is honesty about how Ds wud micromanage private life.

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

 · 
Replying to @KimStrassel

7)And how to pay for mass trillions in cost? Don’t worry! Federal Reserve will just “extend credit” And “new public banks can be created to extend credit too.” Because, you know, like, money is just paper, and how hard can it be to make some more of the stuff, right? Right?

Kimberley Strassel

✔@KimStrassel

8) Ok. Back to laughing.

Twitter Ads info and privacy
View image on Twitter

Ryan Maue

✔@RyanMaue

2,715

Twitter Ads info and privacy

 

Feb 8 2019

Did Aborigines Create Global Warming In Australia? Hello, Coming Ice Age?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Climate

Posted Feb 8, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

By cross-referencing tree-ring data and coral core samples, a team of researchers have revealed that Australia suffered the worst drought in history before the whites settled there from Britain.  There was virtually no rainfall and rivers simply ran dry. Much of the wildlife died and massive bushfires ravaged the landscape, as we see in California these days. The total devastation lasted for one cycle of a 23-year mega-drought that crippled Australia between 1500 and 1522. Since the global warming crowd insists that everything that takes place on the planet is caused by human activity, the only possible explanation means we have to blame the aborigines.

When we correlate that into our computer models, we come up with the mega-drought cycle as what takes place during an Ice Age. The winters are sharply colder and the summers are dry as well as shorter. This is also why we tend to be witnessing larger fires in California. We have to step back and look at it from a global perspective. There was also a clear volcanic origin for The Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age was caused by the cooling effect of massive volcanic eruptions and sustained by changes in Arctic ice cover. There were a series of volcanic eruptions just before the year 1300 that lowered Arctic temperatures enough for ice sheets to expand.

During this Little Ice Age, glaciers advanced in mountain valleys and actually destroyed many European settlements. Paintings from the 1600s depict people ice skating on the Thames River in London like this one from showing the Frozen Thames in a painting by Abraham Hondius from 1677. Even the canals in Amsterdam were frozen. It remained cold for nearly 200 years. There were ice fairs into late 1600 as shown in this painting from 1683. However, the winters were brutal even into the late 17oos and early 1800s, although gradually warmer from the depths of the 1600 period.

Thank God, global warming began from about 1600 onward.  Places as far away as South America and China also saw much cooler temperatures. There are records that show it was cold even into northern Florida. On December 19, 1765, there was a historical report of a “white frost” that fell in the northern part of the British colony of East Florida “of short duration, and of no material detriment to the agricultural interests.” Then in 1774, there was a snowstorm that extended across much of the northern territory of Florida that they called an “extraordinary white rain” which corresponded to the severe winters that killed many soldiers during the American Revolution. I have also written about how the cold defeated Napoleon.

I have warned that volcanic activity correlates with solar minimum, in which we are headed since 2015. In fact, this has been the sharpest decline in the energy of the sun that we know of. It has been exceptionally declining since 2015, which was the peak of the Economic Confidence Model (ECM). Since the ECM was constructed from economic data, it is interesting how the cyclical nature of the economy aligns with Mother Nature herself.

When we correlate everything, our findings of what actually took place are most interesting. There appears to have been a cycle of Solar Minimum which set off an unusual 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions, which perhaps triggered the Little Ice Age between 1275 and 1300 AD. There is evidence of volcanic eruptions during this period that appear to have set in motion a chain reaction that created a trend of lowering temperatures in the oceans and atmosphere for centuries. There are different competing theories behind the Little Ice Age: (1) a volcanic winter, noted by author Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado Boulder, (2) a decreased radiation from the sun noted in a January 2012 scientific study that was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

When both of these are correlated, I do not see them as mutually exclusive. It appears that we enter Solar Minimum, which correlates to a rise in volcanic activity. The volcanoes throw up ash and block the sun which cools the oceans. Recent studies have shown that the process does take hundreds of years. In fact, Harvard has recently published that deep regions of the oceans are STILL getting colder to this day from The Little Ice Age.

The bottom line simply implies that we will see drier summers, bigger droughts, and colder winters. The temperature rise post-Little Ice Age did NOT exceed the peak of the medieval warming period and it never came close to the peak in temperatures that aided the rise of the Roman Empire or the rise of Egypt. This strongly suggests that we are heading toward much colder years ahead, but it does not appear that we will make lower lows than The Little Ice Age. It appears that we will retest those lows and then finally begin to warm AFTER the 2032 cycle ends.

Categories: Climate
Feb 6 2019

Student Loans – The Economic Time Bomb


Armstrong Economics Blog/Education

Re-Posted Feb 6, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

Trump should reverse what the Clintons did to student loans. He should RESTORE the right to go bankrupt. This huge problem was created by the Democrats who exempted student loans from normal protection for consumers. In addition, the bankers then exploited the entire issue by getting parents to co-sign. The entire argument for eliminating the right to go bankrupt was that they had no collateral. The FRAUD here is the bankers managed to get the Democrats to hand students to them on a silver platter. Then they then pulled a fast one by demanding parents co-sign. That way, they can take their parents’ house.

The scary thing is that the generation of Americans over 60 years of age is on the hook for worthless degrees, owing $86 billion in student loan debt. True, some of these people owe for degrees they themselves obtained in hope of getting a better job. They have discovered that the degrees mean nothing and their age tends to scare companies because of pensions. The bulk of these people in the 60+ group had their kids late in life and co-signed for their children of which 40% are still living at home. Interest rates are not cheap and run from 5.05% to 7% annually. Compound that out and you will nearly double the cost of a degree by interest in 10 years.

A number of major companies NO LONGER require a degree. Here are just a few. BTW – neither do we.

  • Google
  • Ernst and Young (EY)
  • Penguin Random House
  • Costco Wholesale
  • Whole Foods
  • Hilton
  • Publix
  • Apple

 

Feb 6 2019

LIBOR v SOFR Interest Rates


Armstrong Economics Blog/Interest Rates

Re-Posted Feb 6, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION:Dear Martin:

Do you have any concerns for the equity markets from the upcoming conversion from Libor to SOFR (the secured overnight financing rate). A recent article from Business Insider highlighted the following:

“Libor, linked to about $350 trillion worth of financial products, will be replaced by an alternate pricing benchmark for everything from mortgages to credit cards.”
“Replacing Libor will be lengthy and problematic, and is one of the key themes to look out for in 2019 as financial services and asset managers start transferring to new systems.”
“Thousands of existing contracts will need to be renegotiated causing a huge operational and financial burden that will consume legal teams for months.”
“Market structure experts cite the need to amend existing contracts to include “fallback” clauses which which specify what happens when Libor disappears. This is comparatively easy for loans, but for derivatives, swaps, and options, amending existing contracts could potentially lead to legal battles.”
This conversion seems like it could get awful messy.

Regards,

ML

ANSWER: Ever since the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) scandal, there has been one faction that has sought to eliminate the powers of banks to manipulate the LIBOR rate. This is similar to ending floor tradings in financial markets. Yes, LIBOR has been used to price trillions of dollars’ worth of loans, derivatives, and a lot more. The Federal Reserve moved to actually intervene and prevent a handful of banks to fix the interest rates. The Fed created a group in response, known as the Alternative Rate Reference Committee (ARRC), which has created a new benchmark dollar interest rate. This new rate is known as the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR). Actually, since April 2018, SOFR has been used for a growing number of bond offerings by large institutions including the World Bank, MetLife, and Fannie Mae. Europe is also moving to create a new benchmark rate that includes the Bank of England, Central banks in Europe with the ECB, Japan, and even Switzerland. This new group is also constructing new benchmark rates. However, there is another reason the Eurozone is taking this giant step. This is a major effort to take the dominance of trading away from Britain in light of BREXIT.

Now as for a crisis, no, that is about as likely as Y2K Millennium bug. Borrowing will take place under SOFR without a problem. The issue will be more with past contracts. That will tend to be a court issue if rates rise under SOFR or old contracts are converted involuntarily. The real issue will be concerning the manipulation of SOFR by governments as they have done with Quantitative Easing. The banks were never able to manipulate LIBOR to the extent of changing the trend. Front-running to elect stops etc. were the “manipulation” tactics. With governments involved, then we can see false trends and real manipulation. The banks could never manipulate LIBOR, suppress the rate, or increase it out of competition.