Trifecta: Money, Covid, Ukraine
As more or less usual, we hope to look at the long term consequences.
Karl Denninger today deals with the big issue of what looks to be coming fairly soon—dethroning of King Dollar, or de-dollarization of the world economy. An unforeseen consequence of “sanctions” against Russia for defending its sovereignty against an imperialist Woke West. Except that this consequence should never have been unforeseen—the unforeseen part of this is sheer hubris.
So, KD starts out with the stuff that we and a lot of others have been discussing, and he puts it in nice simple terms:
All the great globalist plans, and those of so-called "mavens" in America who have thought for years that putting labor and material supply overseas as a means to avoid paying market wages in the US, along with evading environmental laws by putting the pollution somewhere else, are now up against the law of unintended consequences.
Russia has announced that it will soon require payment for its natural gas (and, presumably, all other exports) in Rubles. This is of course quite reasonable, since the resource depleted is theirs, and thus payment should be in their currency.
...
The first lessons in economics all deal with supply and demand, and how that impacts price. What do you think happens when you have to obtain Rubles and there aren't many available? Uh...... yeah, Russia not only evades the sanctions they make a monstrous profit as a direct consequence of the stupidity of Western Nations in implementing them and since you can't replace said Russian energy the only way to stop it is to drop the sanctions!
That sounds a lot like Russia having the West over a barrel and taking full advantage of the situation. Which amounts to, Turnabout is fair play—and Putin has said that pretty explicitly: You make the rules up to suit yourselves as you go along, well, we can do that, too. We’ve been abusing King Dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency to pay for ‘stuff’ with inflated dollars—a nice racket as long as you can get away with it. It’s what has given us a nice standard of living, despite outsourcing, but has led to increasing social disruption as well, because: Greed and Wokeness, which go hand in hand.
KD moves on to explain why the dollar became King. He likens it to a three legged stool:
The US dollar, over time, has been a more stable currency than others;
The US also has a stable exchange and transaction system; and
The US possesses 6,000 nuclear weapons.
Here’s the thing about three legged stools—they’re quite stable as long as all three legs are sound. I think you get the picture. The first leg—as stable currency—is no longer reasonably stable, or at least not to the extent that alternative reserve currencies are unthinkable. This is due to inflation, which has accelerated due to our greed and hubris, which translates into our wokeness. KD has been maintaining that something has to give—the Fed will be forced to stomp on inflation, and the consequences will be very ugly. It’s not clear from my reading whether KD thinks it’s still possible to prevent King Dollar from being dethroned. I tend to side with those who believe that that fate is pretty much inevitable at this point, but what do I know? The fundamentals of American geography suggest that a return to that status is certainly possible, but that depends on human factors.
So here are some human factors, primarily greed and hubris. Here are our masters speaking to us, through the mouth of Larry Fink:
How do you like having your behavior “forced”? Me neither. Home of the free? We know that has, in many ways, ceased to be true. What does Larry get from “forcing the behavior” of others? Wealth and power, which are largely indistinguishable in the Woke West, although the Russia sanctions mess does suggest the importance of 6,000 nukes in reserve. However, that’s on the global scale. They don’t think they face an existential threat from the little people, who can be buffaloed and lied to. That’s the hubris angle.
E-correspondent Mark sent me an interesting piece that also addresses the greed and hubris we see on full display in the Woke West, and specifically in New York City.
These 3 Charts Strongly Suggest the U.S. Stock Market Has an Invisible Hand Propping It Up
Normally I like pictures, but I’ll let readers follow the link for the three charts and confine myself to the words, excerpted:
As someone who has watched trading screens for the past 36 years, it’s pretty easy to spot a fake market. As the charts below indicate, there is an invisible hand (or hands) pushing this stock market up when it should be plunging. The likely suspects are U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s Plunge Protection Team, known as the Exchange Stabilization Fund; foreign central banks that are aligned with the U.S. position on Ukraine and want to help stabilize financial markets in the West; hedge funds and Wall Street’s Dark Pools owned by megabanks that are net long the market; or a combination of all of the above.
One thing’s for sure, the stock market is not responding in a normal fashion to soaring inflation, a hawkish Fed, spiking interest rates, and military aggression ...
Consider the chart below: since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note has skyrocketed by 20 percent, currently reaching 2.38 percent. That was a correct and normal reaction since inflation is already soaring in the U.S. and the military aggression is going to disrupt oil and gas supplies from Russia via sanctions, thus likely pushing commodity prices even higher. In a normally functioning stock market, an increase in yield of that magnitude on the 10-year Treasury note would have caused the stock market to plunge. Instead, per the chart below, the S&P 500 stock index has actually risen 5 percent since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The stock market’s bizarre behavior is further evidenced by the chart below. It shows how the S&P 500 stock index has performed in relation to the S&P GSCI commodity index since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Notice particularly how the dramatic spike in commodity prices between February 24 and March 8 was not met with a dramatic plunge in stock prices during that same period. It should have been. ...
And, finally, there is the disparate reaction of the stock market versus the correct share price reaction of the global banks that will be impacted by the Russian invasion. ... The global banks shown on the chart below are those with significant exposure to Russia. The worst performing of these, Austria’s Raiffeisenbank, has lost 50 percent of its value while the S&P 500 is down less than one percent from February 1 as of yesterday’s market close.
The final paragraph is—or should be—the kicker. How long can the rulers continue to fool almost all of the people all of the time?
The stock market is supposed to be an efficient pricing mechanism. When it stops efficiently pricing risk, it loses the public’s confidence. Those invisible hands should think long and hard about that reality.
This is very disturbing for what remains of social stability in the US. There remain various scenarios for how this could play out, but none of them are comforting in an unstable world. So far our rulers refuse to point out that neither King Dollar nor King/Queen Woke have any clothes on:
On to Covid. E-correspondent Mark also sent me this next piece. It basically covers a lot of what others have also discussed, but I found the presentation unusually lucid. And especially so at the end, where the author points out the long term consequences:
First Principles | The Problem with Gene-based Injections - Part 1
The cellular environment is incredibly complex and dynamic. To understand the concerns with gene-based injections, we need to go back to basics.
As you can see, the author discusses the mechanics of the gene-based injections, including the mechanics of why these injections are so risky. Here are excerpts from his conclusions, and what he says probably explains why even the most rabid injection enthusiast rulers (New Zealand, Austria, etc.) are now seeming to back off from the madness, while still trying to hide the bean in the shell game they’re engaged in:
Implications
The above is probably a lot to take in.
It implies that the global population is being injected with a drug that can generate an autoimmune response against any cell in the body. Some people will develop more severe complications than others.
It is consistent with the observation that those who suffer the worst complications from the injection, tend to be young & healthy - AKA with healthy & robust immune systems.
Strong immune system → Strong autoimmune response
These are serious implications. Do we have evidence to suggest this is happening?
Yes we do. In fact, we have two lines of evidence.
On the one hand there is population-level data that is sufficiently alarming to influence international vaccination strategies:
Rates of complications such as thrombosis, myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes and other end-organ damage are high in some demographics
High enough that some countries have not vaccinated children, and in some cases have forbidden the use of some of these vaccines in other subpopulations
At this point, most are aware of the population-level data.
Alarmed yet?
I think you get the point.
Believe me, this was not an easy realization to digest. I’m still blown-away that this is actually happening.
But, as attention is being shifted away from COVID to other geopolitical tensions, we must remain vigilant.
If these injections are causing short-term complications by a severe immune-mediated response…then what are the long-term complications? Easy to imagine in the case of myocarditis…
Myocarditis → Chronic scarring → Arrythmia → Stroke or Heart attack
What about long-term complications of the immune system?
Lymphoma?
Immune deficiency syndromes?
And the brain?
Disability from stroke?
Neurodegenerative changes?
The above, and more, have already been reported in the literature.
The long-term consequences are unknown & uncertain.
And then there’s the insurance data on excess mortality—as usual, with wokeness goes hubris and greed:
Hubris. Remember George Soros?
Finally, Ukraine. Ukraine is a NATO proxy, with a military trained by NATO to operate in a NATO fashion. NATO is now and has been for a good decade the military arm of the Woke West. That’s not my civilization, and I hope it’s not yours:
I like Scott Ritter’s honesty—more below. Unlike our MSM with their usual suspect ex-military advisors, Ritter admits that he doesn’t have a copy of Russia’s plans or their playbook, that these media critters claim to know all about:
Consortium News has linked in one place two articles that appear to be based on deliberate leaks from the US military establishment. Consortium News speculates that these leaks result from alarm on the part of the US military that Western propaganda may be too effective—it may be placing the US in a false position, that of being forced to actually get militarily involved, beyond providing war material to Ukraine. This would fall in line with Col. Douglas Macgregor’s view that the US military is in no position to get involved in a conventional war, rather than glorified police actions in the Third World or unilateral bombing expeditions against basically defenseless targets:
Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia
Two leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed the lies of mainstream media about how Russia is conducting the Ukraine war in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict, writes Joe Lauria.
The entire article is worthwhile, but I’ll focus on identifying the links that appear to show the US military attempting to provide an exit strategy from the position their propaganda landed them in:
Meanwhile, Western corporate media, depending almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources, report that Russia is losing the war, with its military offensive “stalled,” and in frustration has deliberately targeted civilians and flattened cities.
Biden has bought into this part of the story, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” He has also said that Russia is planning a “false flag” chemical attack to pin on Ukraine.
But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”
The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”
A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”
…
These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible.
Until these Pentagon leaks it was difficult to confirm that Russia was entirely telling the truth and that corporate media were publishing fables cooked up by Ukraine’s publicity machine.
No Evidence of Chemicals
The second article directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defense official said.”
It quoted the Pentagon official as saying, “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published the Reuters article, which appeared in the more obscure U.S. News and World Report.
Finally, Scott Ritter—this is nearly three hours, but there’s no dead spaces; I’m half an hour in and Ritter is on fire. Well informed, articulate:
So far Ritter is saying: It’s game over. The emergency NATO meeting Zhou is going to isn’t about a united NATO—that horse is out of the barn. There is no united NATO. This is a panic meeting because Putin called the US bluff and the US has no Plan B.
Lastly, Monica Showalter senses the Russian attitude toward our military:
… the matter of contempt and how much of that the Russians have for Milley (and his wokester U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin).
After all, Milley's signature achievement has been the botched, chaotic, mal-planned, militarily disastrous U.S. pullout of Afghanistan, ... Milley is still on the job, of course, un-fired and un–drummed out of the service, ... Russia's military establishment had warned that the U.S. pullout plan would lead to disaster back in April 2021, and sure enough, it did. ...
How could the Russians respect a guy like that, or, more importantly, fear him? Much easier to just dismiss his phone calls.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/meanwhile_americas_troubles_continue.html
Do Republicans, now spoiling for a fight with Putin, wonder what election chicanery Democrats have in store for November? Democrats got away with thievery in 2020. Why aren’t they emboldened to try again? What’s the GOP’s plan to prevent election theft this time?
VDH--I'd like to believe it:
In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.
...
The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.
The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.