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.
Housing availability dropped by nearly 50% from December 2021 to March 2022. The situation worsened once borders reopened as visa holders and tourists re-entered the nation. The vacancy rate, according to the CBD, has declined to 1.5% after peaking at 5.7% during the pandemic.
Some estimate that the “economic time bomb” of under-investment in affordable housing will cost taxpayers A$25 billion per year by 2051. Housing All Australians founder Rob Pradolin believes this figure is closer to A$110 billion, and believes a $55 billion investment could deliver a 2:1 cost-benefit ratio. At least 2 million Australian low-income households will be under “housing stress” by 2051. That is an optimistic forecast.
Similar to America, the UK, and many other nations, shelter inflation has caused housing costs to become one of the biggest budget expenses.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been accused of being out of touch by suggesting Australians simply buy a house. That is simply not possible for many, especially after the government-imposed lockdowns and shuttered countless businesses during COVID. Morrison has suggested allowing people to access their super (similar to pensions) early in order to purchase a home. Superannuation Minister Jane Hume said that this would result in rising home prices. Labor leader Anthony Albanese also criticized the plan by calling it a desperate “attack on future savings” and future generations. “If you take super away from people, then you’ll have higher deficits and bills from the government in the future,” he told reporters.
Oddly enough, Mr. Morrison vacated his own home, branded “Squat Morrison,” after losing the election to Albanese and taking his time leaving the property.
Unfortunately, Albanese has a worse plan in mind. Low-income residents will have the opportunity to buy a home, with the help of Big Brother government. The government will pay between 30% to 40% of total housing costs for 10,000 buyers annually. Instead of paying back the banks, the people must pay the government back if they can afford to do so.
COMMENT: I thought you were just a Trumper warning what would happen if Biden won. I have come back to your site because I can see inflation approaching 10% as you said and the dollar is rising which made no sense as gold stalled. I think you also said that real estate will decline perhaps into 2023. Has there ever been such a wild combination of events?
Thanks
Pete
ANSWER: It gives me no pleasure to deliver such forecasts. They are NEVER my personal opinion. In all honesty, it truly takes a computer to sort out all the global trends. Personal opinions will not cut it when you enter a period that has not unfolded in a very long time.
I have told the story before that back in 1985 when we were going to open our first office in Europe, I went to lunch with one of the heads of a Swiss bank when I was there. I had a list of names we came up with like European Advisers or something like that because I knew there was a lot of anti-Americanism in Europe. He asked me to name one European analyst. I could not. I was embarrassed but he said there were none.
He then explained that everyone was using our firm on currency because “You do not give a shit if the dollar goes up or down.” He elaborated that in Europe if any analyst ever said their currency would decline it would have been seen as treason since the politicians had used currency to prove they did a good job rebuilding Europe after the war.
I learned many years ago, that the only way to operate was to call the shots as they unfold. My personal opinion means nothing. I cannot make a market rise when its trend is down. I am here to simply deliver what the computer projects. No matter how loud I could scream, it does not matter. What will be – will be.
Real Estate is undergoing three separate trends. First, there has been mass evacuation from cities and high-taxed states thanks also to draconian COVID laws. Secondly, we have the flight of capital to flee banks, etc which is part of just getting capital off the grid. Then thirdly, there has been a flight of international capital fleeing to the United States because of geopolitical instability in Europe.
The standard claim is that real estate will drop by 50% all because of interest rates pointing to some cities declining by 4% in June alone. This is merely confusing the people for they are looking at only the big cities that are already in decline for a separate reason from interest rates.
The claim that interest rate hikes imply that real estate will decline is very old school and once more it presumes everyone is buying on leverage. In 2021, cash sales represented 25% of existing home sales in the key markets that were a level unmatched since 2016. Nationally, buyers paid cash for almost 15% of the homes in 2021 in markets that were booming from migration from other states.
Florida, the Tampa market was even hotter. Single-family homes saw 45.5% more buyers paid cash than in 2020. The number of condo buyers paying cash went up 33.2%. While more people paid cash, the inventory dropped, with 29.2% fewer active listings of single-family homes in the 2021 third quarter than in 2020. Condo listings dropped even more, at 52.2% fewer available. Speaking to a local realtor, houses in excess of $1 million in the Tampa area were 95% cash deals.
This market has been LESS impacted by interest rate hikes than any previous booming market all because of the migration from interstate within the US and the flood of European buyers looking for assets outside of Europe as war keeps getting closer and closer. I have warned that real estate will decline in those states where people are fleeing. It has boomed in places they have been migrating to such as Texas and Florida. Obviously, you can no longer make a blanket forecast in real estate. Then there has been Blackrock which has bought over 20,000 homes in Florida in the lower-end of the market for cash.
I have warned many times that the standard nonsense that gold rises with inflation has been a sales pitch as trustworthy as a used car salesman. Gold rises during the collapse in the confidence of the government. Everyone will respond based on their own currency. As the dollar rises, gold has declined in US$, but the pattern will be different for every other currency.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 17, 2022 | Sundance
If I had to hazard a guess about what this was, I’d say it is most likely: (a) part of the massive Ukrainian stores of mortars and landmines in eastern Ukraine that were moved in order to keep the Russians from capturing them; or (b) the actual arms that were captured by Russian and then sold on the world arms market. Either way, somehow, they end up as part of an arms deal from Serbia to Bangladesh.
With the new and improved western weapons provided by the United States, Ukraine is likely upgrading and selling their old weapons to various nefarious arms dealers.
This shipment happened to crash, and that’s the only reason we are hearing about it.
(Via Daily Mail) – Soldiers in hazmat suits searched for signs of nuclear and chemical substances at the crash site of a Ukrainian cargo plane transporting nearly a dozen tons of mortar shells and land mines.
The Antonov An-12 light aircraft, which was transporting the weapons from Serbia to Bangladesh, had eight Ukrainian crew members onboard. They were all killed.
An official at Kyiv cargo operator Meridian told Reuters: ‘Of course they didn’t survive this.’ Eyewitnesses filmed the fireball crash in the early hours today, with explosions continuing for two hours and the charred wreckage burning until morning.
Drone images from the scene showed debris from the bulking aircraft strewn in fields. Serbia’s defense minister said the plane was carrying 11.5 tonnes of products made by its defense industry and the buyer was Bangladesh defense ministry. Greek authorities could not provide any more information on the aircraft’s cargo. (more)
Previously Russia was reporting to have captured a massive Ukranian military weapons cache near Kharkov (northeastern Ukraine). I wrote about it HERE. However, the video (partial screengrab below) was quickly removed by the internet police.
The doomed weapons shipment supposedly originated from Serbia, so the original source could be either Ukraine or Russia. Who knows? Amid all of the propaganda, Ukraine corruption and furious U.S. arms shipments into Ukraine, there are multiple sketchy participants likely involved in selling the arms on the global black market.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 16, 2022 | Sundance
While Neil Oliver is describing the insufferable lack of political leadership amid the conservative party in the U.K, almost every point of his weekly monologue could just as easily apply to the United States or any other “western democracy.” The current candidates to replace Boris Johnson are just an extension of the high-minded political class who are pretending to be different, yet they are identical in their globalist outlooks.
….”always the same lines from one leader after another – great reset, build back better, rules based liberal order. The theatrical parallels just keep coming – soap opera, pantomime, now a chorus line of high kicking dancers in perfect time.”…
Oliver asks simple, albeit frustratingly and brutally obvious, questions about what is missing in the candidates who are asking to become the next British Prime Minister. Where is the candidate who represents the issues that matter, the one who isn’t playing a role in a never-ending soap opera that generates nothing except more drama to keep everyone distracted.
Neil Oliver’s points could just as easily be talking about the United States republican party, where almost every elected official is quite happily playing their acting role in the political soap opera, yet no one is doing anything to stop the insane policies that are destroying the foundation of life, liberty and the free pursuit of happiness. WATCH:
[Transcript] – The race for the leadership of the Conservative Party is a farce. Like a soap opera, it is no more than another distraction, something to take our minds off what’s really important in the world. It’s not just a Conservative Party problem, of course.
Across the political spectrum it is the same – a wholesale absence of truth – not their truth, the good old fashioned truth. They might be describing themselves as rival camps – Tory, Labour, Liberal – but where it matters, they’re all on the same page of the same script, written by someone else and delivered to them one page at a time.
Whoever ends up with the leading role, in Number 10 Downing Street this time, they intend for the show to go on, week after week and year after year. Old characters will be written out and new characters will fill in the gaps.
It seemed like madness to me – encouraging belief in a fiction. Anyway, for that reason among others, but mostly because I had more to do, I stopped watching. That was the soaps, of course. More recently I’ve realized the drama of Westminster is even less believable. Westminster is a pantomime. I turned off the soaps and more recently I have turned off Westminster.
Now we’ve reached that recurrent moment of whipped up and confected high drama in any soap, that the writers, journalists among them, evidently really enjoy – like a fire, or a plane crash, or a murder. It’s the leadership race.
I watched as much as I could bear of the televised debate the other night, which was about five minutes. God help us all, they’re not even good actors. I’m prepared to accept that one or two might have their hearts in the right place, or near enough – might honestly still genuinely be labouring under the misapprehension that parliament is a place where important decisions are made. There are therefore moments of apparent sincerity now and again. For the most part, the rest of them just phoned in their performances.
In the manner of a soap opera, or a panto, the plot moves on so fast you could break your neck keeping up with it. Most alarming and dispiriting for those of us with any kind of memory of plot lines just past, is the way the disaster of the last two years has been dismissed as though it never happened. Already we’re being offered a re-run, a repeat of an old series, all about five pence cuts on fuel duty and no mention at all of self-inflicted financial Armageddon.
Where, I want to know, is the candidate who will stand up and take some responsibility for the collective decision and disaster that was lockdown? Where is the candidate who will stand up and admit what we all know – what has been acknowledged across the board by economists, medics and a slew of other professionals – that lockdown was the most disastrous public policy decision of modern times? Most importantly of all, where is the candidate who will stand up and promise that while he or she is in Number 10, on no account will lockdown or anything remotely like lockdown be inflicted upon the people of these islands?
Where is the candidate who will speak out about what matters to the lives of people who live not on a stage or on a set, but in the real world? Where is the candidate who will declare that while she or he is in Downing Street, there will be no compulsory Digital IDs or vaccine passports or anything of the sort? Where is the candidate who will vow to protect the existence of real cash as the vital off ramp and alternative to any Digital Currency, programmable or otherwise?
Where is the candidate who will admit that the injections foisted upon billions of people around the world did not and do not work as advertised – cannot reasonably be described as vaccines because they do not prevent getting or transmitting the illness in question, getting sick with or dying from the illness in question? Where is the candidate who will declare that honest truth?
Where is the candidate who will say that while he or she is in office, there will be no mandated medical procedures for any man, woman or child?
Where is the candidate who will say that a woman is an adult human female, born that way? Where is the candidate who said that all along?
Where is the candidate who will say what we all know to be true – that the Green Agenda, Agenda 2030, Net Zero and the rest are the products of crippling stupidity that are already causing misery, and that can only cause much, much more misery in the months and years ahead if someone doesn’t find the brakes on this runaway train?
Where is the candidate who will stand up say it’s summer – and that for as long as there have been summers on this planet Earth, there have been some days, even here in these islands, that are uncomfortably hot? Where is the candidate who remembers when the TV weather maps used to have little celebratory suns dotted around them, instead of the islands coloured dark red as though on the point of bursting into flames at the same temperatures holiday makers jump on jet planes and head south in hope of finding and enjoying?
People’s lives and livelihoods are being destroyed – or shortly will be destroyed – unless someone is brave enough to admit that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. For as long as all the candidates just clap along with the rest of the wilfully blind – those that see the obvious and yet refuse to say so – then the cost of lockdown crisis will only deepen until none but the self-defined elite are clear of the rising floodwater.
I say that’s the least we might hope for, because it is my heartfelt belief that calling out the fiction of our present parliament is as much as any candidate might do for now. The meaningful decisions are taken elsewhere – by The City of London, by bankers, by the CEOs of planet-spanning corporate entities like Vanguard and Black Rock, by the place men fronting transnational NGOs – Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, the WHO, the UN.
You don’t even have to subscribe to the idea of a one world government to acknowledge that our elected representatives are trumped by the agendas of big business and bigger banks in control of the world’s money supply. That our small fry are swimming in water dominated by whales and sharks who tell them what’s what is made plain by their use of language – always the same lines from one leader after another – great reset, build back better, rules based liberal order. The theatrical parallels just keep coming – soap opera, pantomime, now a chorus line of high kicking dancers in perfect time.
In the real world – the world we are discouraged from watching – farmers are rising in rebellion all across Europe – in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland and many other places besides. Others are rising in support – the people of those countries, the truckers, the firemen.
These are real lives, real fightbacks against real imminent disasters, but we are supposed to look away and to be satisfied instead by watching to see who next warms her or his behind on the seat at the desk in Number 10 – anxiously opening the email every day that delivers the latest script – will he or she be written out next?
On the other side of the Atlantic is a soap opera that couldn’t be broadcast over here until after the watershed. President Joe Biden has to carry a cheat sheet to remind him of the script he can’t even remember from moment to moment. He has Ron Burgundy moments – Ron Burgundy, the legendary fictional news reader from the movie Anchor Man – who will read whatever is on the autocue, including his minders’ instructions about which lines to repeat for emphasis.
And then there’s the utterly compelling car crash role in the soap opera currently being performed by Biden’ own son, Hunter, not that we’re meant to tune in to that particular drama. Every day social media carries clips – apparently culled from that laptop of his, the one we’re still not supposed to know about, far less talk about – of a naked Hunter Biden, handgun in hand, or with prostitutes, or counting and weighing rocks of crack cocaine. Every time a clip is circulated, the social media platforms take them down. And then another crops up. And all the while Hunter is still at large, at events in plain view, at which the US media sees him and simply leaves him be, no questions asked either about his dodgy deals in China, Russia and Ukraine.
If we’ve got Downing Street, or The Only Way is Westminster, our cousins stateside seem to have Breaking Baddest.
I ask again – where is the candidate who will say that the sickness we need to talk about is the ideology that has infected all of our institutions, our politics, our schools, our universities, our civil service, our judiciary – the whole damned lot? Where is the candidate who will concede that we need to start again with fresh alternatives to those institutions that are beyond fixing, terminal cases?
Here is what’s needed. Here is the truth as I see it: the truckers who rose in Canada … the farmers rising in the Netherlands and across Europe … the people of Sri Lanka casting out their president … all of those are simply real people, flesh and blood with real lives, livelihoods, families, hopes and dreams, a sense of their own dignity and sovereignty.
Power belongs with the people, with us. What is wrong – and what more and more people are understanding is wrong – is control imposed upon people by corrupt institutions that long ago seized control of the creation of money.
The beginning and end of all that’s wrong now depends upon the people, the real people, regaining that control. This means remembering that governments exist to do what we tell them, not the other way around. We need a government that understands as much and that furthermore takes back control of money. Not the fantasy money banks create from nowhere and that doesn’t exist, anyway, until we pay it back with interest. I am talking about money that represents and is made real by its connection to the real wealth of the nation – its natural assets and, most of all, the creative potential of the people. Here in sovereign Britain that might be hundreds of trillions of pounds of debt-free money, unsullied by bankers’ hands.
What we’re being told and shown now … we’ve seen and heard it all before – delivered by better actors and dancers. Surely it’s time for the unalloyed truth – no fiction and no pretense. The honest truth delivered from the heart by someone real who properly cares about the people. Surely there are better songs to sing. (link)
The West is determined to invade Russia and they believe that they can destroy it despite the fact that they are no longer a communist nation or a threat. That does not seem to matter for they want war because Russia and China will not surrender their sovereignty to the United Nations under this Great Reset all for Climate Change & the WEF.
Indeed, many practical Western military strategists are starting to agree that Henry Kissinger’s advice must be taken and that peace negotiations should begin – NOW. There is a growing number of military strategists that realize that Russia and Belarus along with China and North Korea will all join to defeat the West and NATO which they see as the greatest threat now to humanity.
The West needs war because it can no longer maintain this Marxist socialism system borrowing endlessly with no intention to repay anything back. This is coming to an end. Our computer has warned 40 years ago that the target for the collapse of socialism was due in 2023. Communism fell in 1989 and now it is our turn in 2023. Marx’s theories will be remembered throughout history. I find it interesting that it is forbidden even in the Ten Commandments warning that this idea of rob from one class to hand to another has never worked. We must now pay the price for this theory. When it was first imposed, over 200 million people died resisting communism in Russia and China. It is ironic that now we are the Marxism trying to impose our will upon Russia and China. What goes around, comes around.
Russia has been unable to use its air power because NATO is providing Ukraine with all the tactical information needed so they only need to turn on their radar minutes before launching and as such Russia cannot destroy those systems which have been supplanted by NATO. Either Russia takes out the AWACs providing that information which then is an act against NATO. The West thinks it is very clever in this arrangement but they really have entered the war and it is just a matter of time that this escalates out of control.
The danger here is that the West is pushing Russia into a very dangerous position. Russia can terminate the entire supply of arms to Ukraine by destroying dams that also form key bridges over the Dnepr. However, they can score a complete defeat of Ukraine by launching several dozen tactical nuclear weapons. What will NATO do then? These clever tactics of NATO being in the war but pretending they are not is a very risky game.
It is not likely that the West will ever take the advice of Kissinger and apply pressure to Kyiv to come to the table and face this unpleasant reality that they must relinquish their claim to territory occupied by Russians who they absolutely hate.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 15, 2022 | Sundance
During his press conference from Saudi Arabia, the installed occupant of the White House was asked about the possibility that congress will not pass the $500 billion spending proposal to continue the radical transformation of the American energy sector. [Transcript]
Q On the issue of climate, Joe Manchin obviously made significant news right now, which appears to be torpedoing what was one of your biggest priorities as it relates to energy and to climate back at home. Your message to those Americans right now who are looking for that relief that would have a wide impact as it affects the climate and energy specifically?
Joe Biden: “I am not going away. I’m going to use every power I have as President to continue to fulfill my pledge to move toward dealing with global warming.” Thank you very much.” [link]
Put another way, “you will eventually eat the bugs.”
As previously noted, regardless of how much chaos, crisis and hardship they create, the collective western government leaders are not going to stop pushing their Build Back Better climate change agenda. These are committed ideologues. They are united in their objective and not a single politician is willing to see the catastrophic damage they are creating.
We the citizens of the ‘western democracies’ are in an abusive relationship with our own governments’. The yellow vests in France, the MAGA movement in the U.S., the Australian labor unions, the Canadian Truckers and now the Dutch farmers are the unstable tremors for global political shifts.
They all followed the same pandemic spending instructions from the World Economic Forum, and western leaders have shown absolutely no desire to pull back and listen to the people as they move forward with their Build Back Better energy programs. Quite the opposite is happening.
Collectively those same leaders are charging head strong into their Build Back Better agenda, regardless of what that does to the global economy.
The collective sanctions placed against Russia are being used as a shield for the inflation created by their energy policy. Everyone is feeling the supply-side inflation from Europe to the United States. Additionally, their “climate change’ agenda and energy policies are creating economic turmoil, and now food insecurity
Their energy programs are creating massive global inflation. That inflation is building up frustration like a pressure cooker. People are growing increasingly desperate, and now the absence of food stability, a direct result of their collective attack on oil, coal and natural gas, could seriously change things. They are standing atop a powder keg they call “the great reset.”
The looming shortage of food could be the pressure point that fractures the tectonic political plates.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced his resignation on Thursday after he fell out of favor with the Five Star Movement. Similar to Boris Johnson, once your own people turn their backs on you, it is time to bow out. “I want to announce that this evening I will present my resignation to the President of the Republic,” Draghi said to the pleasure of many. “Today’s votes in Parliament are very significant from a political point of view. The majority of national unity that has supported this government since its creation is no longer there.”
I know people who worked on trading desks years ago with Mario Draghi before he was head of the ECB, and even then he was incompetent. His policy of perpetual low to negative interest rates was a barbaric ancient theory based on the assumption that if you make it insanely cheap to borrow, people will run out and buy everything. Despite his policy failing, he kept it going and accumulated the bulk of European sovereign debt. The ECB made its first rate hike in December 2015, as our models predicted.
I summed it up in 2017: “To make this as plain as possible, the ECB is the largest individual creditor of the euro countries, and is thus a bank that is undermined completely by the poor creditworthiness of the debtors. If the ECB were to apply its own rules to the banks in Europe that say bail-in, not bail-out, then by its own supervision rules, the ECB is insolvent and should be shut down.”
Draghi is responsible for putting Europe on a path from which there is no escape. I noted that Draghi had no way out, and now he has personally upset his own people. He steps down the same week that the euro broke parity. The people are finally seeing that this man is a danger to all of Europe, but unfortunately, the damage has already been done.
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America