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Authored by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Social Security is facing $63 trillion in long-term unfunded liabilities, according to the 2024 Old-Age, Survivors, Disability Insurance (OASDI) trustees report.

The report looked at two things: how much money will be missing indefinitely and how much will be missing in the next 75 years. The report determined that there will be a permanent $62.8 trillion deficit and about a $23 trillion shortage for the next 75 years.

Officials explained that these numbers show how much less money they will have after the money saved up in trust funds runs out.

“The annual shortfalls after trust fund reserve depletion rise slowly and reflect increases in life expectancy,” the report reads.

“The summarized shortfalls over the infinite horizon, as percentages of taxable payroll and GDP, are larger than the shortfalls for the 75-year period.”

OASDI trustees noted that the shortfall could be eliminated if the combined payroll tax rate was raised to “about 17.0 percent” or if there was a “permanent reduction in benefits for all current and future beneficiaries by about 26.5 percent.”

Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, told The Epoch Times that assessing the current infinite unfunded liability is imperative.

“There’s nothing in economics that says you should just look at 75 years and assume everybody’s going to be dead the day after,” Kotlikoff said.

“It’s like operating on half of the cancer, removing half a cancer, and telling your patient to come back in 10 years, and when they do, it’s twice as big, and you’re operating out on half.

“[That’s] the practice here in our country dealing with Social Security.”

This is not the first report to spotlight the deteriorating fiscal state of the retirement scheme and other federal programs.

In February, the Treasury Department released the “Financial Report of the United States Government.”

It concluded that U.S. taxpayers face more than $78 trillion in long-term unfunded obligations for Social Security and Medicare.

The problem, according to Mark Warshawsky, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is that these outlooks are based on rosy scenarios, meaning that the United States will not grapple with a financial crisis, a major military conflict, or another pandemic.

“To make matters worse, the [Financial Report] is based on optimistic, indeed unrealistic, assumptions,” he wrote, adding that the report suggests that the Trump-era tax cuts will completely lapse, income tax revenues will rise over time, and defense spending will not increase.

Still, it is valuable to disseminate these numbers to the public, according to Warshawsky.

“Despite its faults, the undoubtedly large effort needed to produce the [Financial Report] annually is worthwhile and it should get more attention from policymakers, the media, and the public,” he said.

Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that an essential Social Security trust fund—the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund—will be exhausted by 2033.

Additionally, the Disability Insurance Trust Fund balance could run dry by 2064.

According to CBO Director Phillip Swagel, if Social Security is left intact over the next decade, recipients would receive a 21 percent cut to their benefits.

Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have presented a series of solutions to rescue Social Security.

In March, the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 House GOP representatives, published its fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, championing raising the eligibility age to 67 from 65.

President Joe Biden and other Democrats have said that ensuring that the “highest-income Americans pay their fair share” is a feasible response to the looming funding shortage for the top retirement programs.

“No benefit cuts,” the White House said in a March 11 statement. “The president opposes any proposal to cut benefits, as well as proposals to privatize Social Security.”

Calls to Embrace Reform

But many economists and financial experts say that public policymakers need to embrace reform.

“What we need is not just a smart Social Security fix, but we need to have a radical reform of our fiscal system,” Kotlikoff said. “It’s not doodling around the current system.”

Indeed, he has proposed several different measures that Washington could institute to keep the Social Security system intact through what he calls a “Personal Security System.”

Kotlikoff has recommended phasing out the existing Social Security system while paying off all accrued obligations to current retirees and workers and “replacing it with a fully funded, progressive retirement account system.”

As for immediate solutions, Doug Carey, a chartered financial analyst, said a change to the payroll tax would be appropriate, although it would be hard to pass in Congress.

“Currently, the payroll tax for both employees and employers is 6.2 percent for Social Security,” Carey told The Epoch Times.

“Increasing this rate would help with the solvency of the trust fund but would be difficult to pass in Congress since it would raise taxes on most people.”

Another policy adjustment, according to Carey, is increasing the payroll tax cap.

“This is the most popular idea,” he said.

“Currently, only earnings up to $168,600 are subject to Social Security taxes. Raising or completely eliminating this limit would go a long way toward increasing the solvency of the trust fund.

“It is also more likely to pass Congress since it only hits a small percentage of workers.”

Revisions to methodology could also serve as a prescription to help keep Social Security afloat, according to Tyler Meyer, a certified financial planner and the owner of QED Wealth Solutions.

“Another approach is to modify the benefit formula to slow the growth of benefits for higher earners while protecting lower-income beneficiaries,” Meyer told The Epoch Times.

“Policymakers might also consider introducing a means-testing system, where benefits are reduced or eliminated for individuals with substantial retirement income from other sources.”

Are Benefits Enough?

Estimates suggest that the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for 2025 will be close to 2.6 percent.

In today’s inflationary environment, are benefits enough?

According to a study by The Senior Citizens League, the value of seniors’ benefits has decreased by 20 percent since 2010.

Researchers found that, on average, retirees would need to receive a $4,440 annual boost—or $370 per month—“to rebuild their lost value.”

“The reality is that COLAs have become less and less likely to match inflation over time,” the report reads.

“In the 1990s and 2000s, 60 percent of COLAs beat inflation. In the 2010s, only 40 percent did. Through the 2020s so far, only one COLA out of five [2023; 8.7 percent] has done so.”

This might be a concerning trend for future retirees after the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) discovered in April that 88 percent of workers anticipate Social Security to be a top source of actual or expected income in retirement.

“Social Security is normally an important part of the guaranteed income portion of the plan as a means to cover essential expenses,” Stephen Kates, principal financial analyst for Retire Guide, told The Epoch Times.

“In the absence of Social Security, retirees will need to replace it with other sources of guaranteed income like pensions or annuities.

“A key consideration for retirees is the ability to cover all essential expenses with guaranteed income.”

For workers engaged in planning their retirements, it is vital to work with a financial adviser for guidance on how to turn savings into an income plan.

“With less Social Security income, your retirement plan may need adjusting, and burying your head in the sand will not help,” Kates said.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The US wants to deploy a previously banned missile system to Japan for military drills, Nikkei Asia has reported. The Typhon missile launcher is a ground-based system that can fire nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 miles.

Ground-based missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles were banned by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US withdrew from in 2019. The Typhon also fires SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away.

The US deployed a Typhon system to the Philippines for military drills, a move that China viewed as a major provocation. The missile system was sent to the Philippines for several months. It was first deployed for the drills that started in April, and Manila said it would be pulled out in September, meaning it could still be there.

The Philippines said China expressed "very dramatic" alarm over the deployment of the Typhon system. Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said the deployment "put the entire region under the fire of the United States (and) brought huge risks of war into the region."

US Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said on Wednesday that she told Japanese officials the US wanted to deploy the Typhon to Japan next. "We’ve made our interest in this clear with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces," she said at a Defense News conference in Virginia.

Wormuth said the US would also look to keep it in Japan for several months. "Our goal…in the Army has been to really try to have as much combat-credible capability forward” in the Indo-Pacific west of the international dateline," she said, according to Nikkei.

Wormuth claimed the deployment "strengthens deterrence" in the region and said the missile system has "gotten the attention of China." She said there is "a lot of potential" for moving US troops and equipment around Japan’s southwestern islands, which are near Taiwan.

US officials say the US is building up its military presence near China in the name of deterrence, but the steps have only escalated tensions in the region, making a conflict more likely. Wormuth and other US officials are also openly planning for a direct confrontation with China despite the obvious risk of nuclear war.

Wormuth said last year that the US was preparing to fight and win a war with China. "I personally am not of the view that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan is imminent," she said. "But we obviously have to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war."

Tesla shares outperformed this week after Tesla AI, an affiliate of Tesla, wrote on X that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) advanced driver assistance software will be rolled out across China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025. 

Tesla AI said pending FSD rollouts in China and Europe are "due to popular demand," adding that regulatory approval will first be needed to push the over-the-air update in both regions. The update would enable drivers to activate the advanced driver assistance software.

In July, CEO Elon Musk said FSD regulatory approval for both regions was likely achievable by the end of the year. He said on Thursday that FSD could be launched in right-hand drive markets sometime in the first half of next year.

Hopefully, RHD markets in late Q1, early Q2, pending regulatory approval

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 5, 2024

In April, Beijing gave Tesla the 'green light' to roll out FSD and partner with Chinese tech giant Baidu for mapping and navigation software. Tesla has satisfied multiple data security and privacy requirements to operate in the world's largest EV market.

The approval in April came just days after Musk unexpectedly visited Beijing and met with Premier Li Qiang, who was previously the Communist Party chief in Shanghai when Tesla was setting up its automobile manufacturing plant there. 

Also in April, Wedbush Securities senior analyst Dan Ives told Bloomberg TV that Musk's visit to China was a major "watershed moment." 

"This could open up FSD in China, which I view as unlocking what really could be the golden opportunity for them," Ives said. 

At the time, Bloomberg reported that Musk's move to seek FSD approval in China was to stem Tesla's revenue slump.

Tesla AI also provided a roadmap for near-term rollouts:

September 2024

• v12.5.2 with ~3x improved miles between necessary interventions
• v12.5.2 on AI3 computer (unified models for AI3 and AI4)
• Actually Smart Summon - Cybertruck Autopark ??
• Eye-tracking with sunglasses ???
• End-to-End network on highway ???
• Cybertruck FSD ??

October 2024

• Unpark, Park and Reverse in FSD
• v13 with ~6x improved miles between necessary interventions

Due to popular demand, Tesla AI team release roadmap:

September 2024
- v12.5.2 with ~3x improved miles between necessary interventions
- v12.5.2 on AI3 computer (unified models for AI3 and AI4)
- Actually Smart Summon
- Cybertruck Autopark ??
- Eye-tracking with sunglasses ???
-…

— Tesla AI (@Tesla_AI) September 5, 2024

Looking ahead, the long-awaited Tesla robotaxi is set to be unveiled on October 10 at the Warner Bros. Discovery movie studio in Burbank, California. 

One month after the Aug 5 Kamala Karry Trade Krash, we got part 2...

... and boy was it an epic flush: everything - like literally everything - and certainly anything with a high beta or even a trace of momentum, imploded with a sheer violence that made Aug 5 look like amateur hour. And unlike Aug 5, the puke was only at the beginning with stocks spiking from the first moment of trading, this time it was the other way around, with stocks pushing higher to start the day before falling apart, and ending a catastrophic week in the worst way possible: on a downtick.

It all started with the August payrolls: as described earlier, the number wasn't terrible: at 142K, it missed the estimate of 165K but rebounded sharply from last month's (downward revised) 89K...

... and the unemployment rate actually dropped...

... as the number of employed workers jumped by the most since March (even if the composition was terrible, consisting entirely of part-time, illegal workers).

Yet, while on the surface the jobs number was strong enough to eliminate the odds of a 50bps rate cut, the market did not take it that way - perhaps as a result of the massive historical revisions - and odds of a 50bps cut in two weeks first spiked, before reversing... only to spike again after Fed gov Waller said he would "advocate" front-loading rate cuts if that is appropriate, wrong-footing markets again, and sending odds of a 50bps cut as high as 65%... before a tweet from the WSJ's Fed leaker Nick Timiraos interpreted the Fed's speech as much more hawkish than it appeared, saying that "Fed governor Chris Waller’s speech doesn’t explicitly say “25” or “50” but it leans into endorsing a 25 bps cut to start, explicitly reserving the option to go faster “as appropriate” if “new data” show more deterioration."

He also said that "Waller pats the Fed on the back for not overreacting to the banking crisis, the lower inflation prints of 2H 23, the higher prints of Q1 24. Then he says, “Based on the evidence I see, I do not believe the economy is in a recession or necessarily headed for one." So after all that, we saw what may have been a rate expectation reversal for the ages, with odds of 2 cuts first jumping from 40% to 60% before reversing back to 40%, only to surge to 65% before finally plunging to 25%, all in the span of a few minutes!

This epic, frenzied activity meant, in which nobody had any idea what is going on, meant Trading in fed funds futures surged to a record Friday. According to Bloomberg, volumes in the second generic fed funds future, typically the most active, reached 900,000 as of 1pm ET, the highest for any contract since their inception in 1988. Trading volume in the October contract surpasses previous record from March 2023, when collapse of Silicon Valley Bank reverberated through financial markets!

And while we don't know for a fact if that's what happened, it seems fair to guess that these unprecedented, wild swings in what is the market's most important pricing indicator, sparked a relentless liquidation across all assets, which hit - in no particular order - stocks...

... oil

... bitcoin

... USDJPY

... and even gold was not immune, and after briefly reaching for new all time highs in the aftermath of the payrolls scare, it then proceeded to slide to session lows.

In fact, the only asset class that showed some semblance of rationality was bonds, where yields first dumped, then spiked, then dumped again, only to close near session highs, perhaps realizing that the faster the Fed cuts, the faster it will spark another inflationary conflagration.

Putting today - and this week's - rout in context, one can argue that it was even worse than the Aug 5 debacle, because while that was just one day of acute pain, by the end of that particular week, stocks had largely rebounded. This time, however, the pain is just getting started, and what started off as an ugly week, ended up much uglier with widespread liquidations...

... and even more remarkably, a non-stop attempt by the 0DTE crowd to kickstart an intraday reversal in the form of a record delta flow divergence from the S&P, ended up achieving absolutely nothing.

And how could it when everyone's favorite high beta momentum stock, NVDA, resumed its plunge and just barely managed to remain above $100, and now down more 30% from its all time high hit all the way back in June...

... and not just NVDA, but the entire Mag 7 sector is now back to levels last seen just after the Aug 5 freakout...

... which may largely be due to charts like this one from Goldman, suggesting that the AI bubble has burst with a bang.

And while it is easy to speculate and assign a narrative to what happened based on prices, it is just as likely that today's - and this week's - price action is precisely what was expected to happen: as the following chart from Goldman makes clear, in presidential election years, stocks peak just before Labor day, before dumping all the way until the election, before blasting off higher once more. Well, you are here!

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”

- Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

It’s not easy being a child in the American police state.

Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.

Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry about the Nanny State and its network of busybodies turning parents in for allowing their children to walk to school alone, walk to the park alone, play at the beach alone, or even play in their own yard alone.

The tentacles of the police state even intrude on the sanctity of one’s home, with the government believing it knows better than you—the parent—what is best for your child. This criminalization of parenthood has run the gamut in recent years from parents being arrested for attempting to walk their kids home from school to parents being fined and threatened with jail time for their kids’ bad behavior or tardiness at school.

This doesn’t even touch on what happens to your kids when they’re at school—especially the public schools—where parents have little to no control over what their kids are taught, how they are taught, how and why they are disciplined, and the extent to which they are being indoctrinated into marching in lockstep with the government’s authoritarian playbook.

The message is chillingly clear: your children are not your own but are, in fact, wards of the state who have been temporarily entrusted to your care. Should you fail to carry out your duties to the government’s satisfaction, the children in your care will be re-assigned elsewhere.

This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today: where parents have to worry about school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.

Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.

Indeed, while young people today are learning first-hand what it means to be at the epicenter of politically charged culture wars, test scores indicate that students are not learning how to succeed in social studies, math and reading. Rather, government officials are churning out compliant drones who know little to nothing about their history or their freedoms.

In turn, these young people are being brainwashed into adopting a worldview in which rights are negotiable rather than inalienable; free speech is dangerous; the virtual world is preferable to the real world; and history can be extinguished when inconvenient or offensive.

What does it mean for the future of freedom at large when these young people, trained to be mindless automatons, are someday running the government?

Under the direction of government officials focused on making the schools more authoritarian (sold to parents as a bid to make the schools safer), young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

• draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

• overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

• school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,

• standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,

• politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,

• and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

This is how you groom young people to march in lockstep with a police state.

As Deborah Cadbury writes for The Washington Post, “Authoritarian rulers have long tried to assert control over the classroom as part of their totalitarian governments.”

In Nazi Germany, the schools became indoctrination centers, breeding grounds for intolerance and compliance.

In the American police state, the schools have become increasingly hostile to those who dare to question or challenge the status quo.

America’s young people have become casualties of a post-9/11 mindset that has transformed the country into a locked-down, militarized, crisis-fueled mockery of a representative government.

Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, disease, and weapons, America’s schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

Students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with a crime.

Not even good deeds go unpunished.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.

Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.

Likewise, the harm caused by attitudes and policies that treat America’s young people as government property is not merely a short-term deprivation of individual rights. It is also a long-term effort to brainwash our young people into believing that civil liberties are luxuries that can and will be discarded at the whim and caprice of government officials if they deem doing so is for the so-called “greater good” (in other words, that which perpetuates the aims and goals of the police state).

What we’re dealing with is a draconian mindset that sees young people as wards of the state—and the source of potential income—to do with as they will in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents. However, this is in keeping with the government’s approach towards individual freedoms in general.

Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a government—i.e., a monied elite—that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.

This is tyranny disguised as “the better good.”

Indeed, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots.

This is what the world looks like when bureaucrats not only think they know better than the average citizen but are empowered to inflict their viewpoints on the rest of the populace on penalty of fines, arrest or death.

So, what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now but for the future of this country, when these same young people are someday in charge?

How do you convince someone who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, we must start by running the schools like freedom forums.

As another reminder of how these already dangerous and volatile wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are inter-connected, United States officials are slamming the Iranian government in the wake of fresh reports saying Tehran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report Friday that "Iran has sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, according to U.S. and European officials, a move that gives Moscow another potent military tool in its war against Ukraine and follows stern Western warnings not to provide those arms to Moscow."

The Pentagon and US intelligence has for months been warning about such a possibility, and has been threatening Iran over the potential move, but a US official has now "confirmed" to the WSJ that the missiles "have finally been delivered." The Biden White House has said "a severe response" to Tehran awaits.

NATO countries led by the US have been warning of swift and severe consequences, but the reality is at this point there's not too much left to sanction in either the Islamic Republic or Russia. Both are a couple of the most highly sanctioned countries on earth, which has only resulted in their deepening their relations, and turning to BRICS and non-aligned Global South countries. Group of 7 countries have said they will coordinate to punish Iran if missile deliveries to Russia's armed forces go through.

It's long been well-known that Russia has received thousands of Iranian kamikaze drones, which have for the last two-and-a-half years been a feature of the aerial assault on Ukrainian cities. The Islamic Republic is even helping Russia manufacture drones inside Russia.

The WSJ notes of the sensitive political timing of the alleged ballistic missile transfer and also the potential impact to the 'moderate' Pezeshkian administration on the global stage:

The missile deliveries also could have implications for the hopes of the new Iranian government to tamp down tensions with the West. The country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said he hopes to improve the domestic economy by winning sanctions relief from Europe and the U.S.

But at this rate, this hoped-for sanctions relief is surely not going to happen. Late Friday, Iran issued a formal rejection of the contents of the WSJ report and the allegations of Western officials:

In a statement shared with Newsweek, however, the Iranian Mission to the United Nations stated that Iran had not provided weapons to either side of the conflict in Ukraine and called on other nations to cease doing so.

"Iran's position vis-à-vis the Ukraine conflict remains unchanged," the Iranian Mission said. "Iran considers the provision of military assistance to the parties engaged in the conflict—which leads to increased human casualties, destruction of infrastructure, and a distancing from ceasefire negotiations—to be inhumane."

"Thus, not only does Iran abstain from engaging in such actions itself but it also calls upon other countries to cease the supply of weapons to the sides involved in the conflict," the statement added.

We recently highlighted that Russia has appeared to step up supplies of air defense equipment to the Islamic Republic, at a moment Tehran is still threatening possible massive retaliation attacks on Israel for the July 31 killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. The expectation in such a scenario is that Israel's counter-response would be bigger. And yet for now it seems this escalation scenario has waned, given that over a month has passed and there's been no big strikes.

The Iranians are reportedly also pressuring Moscow to fulfill delivery of Su-35S fighter jet fighters which were previously pledged in a defense deal, given the regional temperature is heating up fast.

Moscow likely feels obliged given the significant Iranian drone transfers it has received throughout the course of the Ukraine war. Iran has heavily aided Russian forces, and now Russia is quickly coming to Iran's assistance.

Authored by Steve Cortes via RealClearPolitics,

After six weeks of completely hiding from the media, Kamala Harris finally appeared, with the safety valve of her running mate, in a pre-recorded, brief, and totally friendly interview with Dana Bash of CNN.

Bash did not press on the most urgent issues, nor did she follow up when Harris either obfuscated or simply refused to answer. As such, Harris still escapes the scrutiny of any real interview, even though she has applied for the most difficult and important job in the world.

Moreover, if anything, the burden of proof should be far higher for Harris given that she was elevated to nominee status by the backroom machinations of powerbrokers, rather than citizens voting.

In fact, Harris has never earned a single caucus or primary vote for president, neither in 2020, nor in 2024. Given that she came out of the Democratic Party apparatus that dominates California, in point of fact Harris has not faced serious scrutiny in her entire political career, ever.

She wants to claim all the advantages of incumbency without any of the attendant blame for her record as a sitting vice president and co-manager of the Biden agenda, especially on immigration and on inflation. Unfortunately, the corporate press seems more than willing to grant her this posture of “all the benefits/none of the costs,” in large part because leading media mavens clearly feel guilt for having deposed Biden so unceremoniously.

As part of that media fawning protection over Harris, she faces little blowback for ignoring journalists. Given this strange circumstance, next week’s debate may well provide the singular opportunity to press Harris on key questions that she simply must answer to prove herself worthy of the highest office in the land.

If ABC News wants to find a professional conscience on behalf of the profession of journalism, then these queries really should flow from the moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir. But if ABC forgoes that ethical obligation, then President Trump should enter the debate hall ready to validly confront Harris on the following key dozen questions:

1. When did you know about Joe Biden’s cognitive issues and were you always truthful with the American people about his condition?
2. It has been reported that Biden was threatened with use of the 25th Amendment as leverage to get him to drop out. Can you speak to that issue and defend why you belong on the ballot even though no primary voters chose you?
3. You have publicly boasted about Bidenomics, but Americans hate the economy. Can you describe Bidenomics and whether you still own it?
4. President Trump did a highly confrontational town hall on CNN as a candidate this cycle. Will you do a similar town hall with someone like Laura Ingraham?
5. Why do you affect accents in front of different audiences and what does it say about your authenticity?
6. On fracking, CNN states that you never did change your own personal opinion in 2020, so can you explain when and why you did change to become pro-fracking?
7. You’ve repeatedly backed race-based reparations. Can you explain why Hispanic, Asian, and white Americans today should pay their black neighbors for racial injustices committed before they were ever even born?
8. Can you state whether or not your home state of California is a model for America?
9. How can you assure the American people that millions of migrants who poured into America will not receive amnesty and citizenship?
10. What would you say to the parents of Laken Riley?
11. Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal – you said you were the last person in the room and that you’re comfortable with the decision. Is that still the case?
12. Housing affordability has never been worse in America by some metrics, and not since the 2006 Housing bubble, according to Goldman Sachs. Why shouldn’t Americans blame you for this crisis?

Steve Cortes is former senior advisor to President Trump, former commentator for Fox News and CNN, and president of the League of American Workers, a populist right pro-laborer advocacy group.  

Get woke, go broke is not just a mantra, it's a rule, and the epic woke failures keep piling up in 2024 as the majority of consumers continue to reject DEI in movies, streaming, marketing and gaming.  

Video games in particular have been aggressively targeted by NGOs and far-left governments for the dissemination of progressive propaganda, ostensibly because they are by far the most popular media for the younger demographic.  From childhood to early adulthood the average western consumer will spend more time on video games than all other entertainment combined, making gaming a ripe venue for ideological grooming.

As we noted in recent articles on queer activist games like Dustborn, there is a vested interest by some very powerful people to dictate messaging in the video game sphere.  The US government and the EU have been actively influencing gaming through ESG-like subsidies; offering developers millions of dollars if they plant woke content into their projects.

It's hard to say if Sony's latest gaming disaster, Concord, was partially paid for with ESG cash, but the content sure feels like it was drafted up by a bunch of blue-haired weirdos in the bathroom of a progressive think-tank.

Concord, a relatively generic competitive shooter with some obviously "borrowed" plot aesthetics from Marvel's 'Guardians of the Galaxy' , has all the indicators of a DEI game.  This includes pie-chart diversity, no straight white males, lots of minority women, lots of fat positivity, at least one trans-woman and plenty of gender fluid pronouns.  Sony spent at least eight years and $200 million (including marketing) on Concord with high expectations for the AAA title, only to discover no one wants to play as a clinically obese woman or a transgender.   

Concord launched with disastrous results.  Gaming service Steam logged a maximum of only 697 players for Concord and initial sales show only 25,000 units purchased.  The lack of player interest has led Sony to treat the project as a total loss and the company is scrapping the entire game - Pulling it offline after only two weeks and giving customers full refunds.  In other words, Sony just took a $200 million dollar loss on a game that they are throwing down the memory hole, possibly forever. 

For those that might not remember, movie studio Warner Bros. did something very similar in 2022 when they scrapped the $100 million 'Batgirl' film before its release .  Reports indicate that the flick was so woke and so unwatchable that WB decided it would hurt the company more to release it than it would hurt to dump it and move on.  

This kind of scorched Earth response to product failure is rare from media conglomerates, but it might become more frequent as customers continue to develop a zero-tolerance policy for woke content. 

Diversity in gaming seems to specifically promote the delusional premise that "anyone can be an action hero", from grotesquely overweight fat-body females, to the disabled, to 90 pound "non-binary" beta-males.  The leftist controlled entertainment industry asserts that modern players "need to see themselves represented" in movies and games in order to relate to the characters on the screen, and if the media doesn't provide inclusivity for every obscure minority in our society then they are somehow missing out on an untapped slice of the market.  

Activists also claim in dramatic fashion that to not include these minorities is a form of cultural genocide. 

The problem is, companies have forgotten the basic rules of the free market - Know your primary customer base and give them what they want.  Don't try to tell your customers what you think they should want.  Don't try to shame them into buying your product, or they will destroy your business.  The primary customer base will make or break you.

Fat positivity people can't be action heroes and the vast majority of players don't want trans propaganda and gender fluid pronouns shoved in their faces.  These DEI tropes will never become popular; they will never succeed.

Companies like Sony seem to have completely forgotten to follow the most fundamental rules of marketing that made them popular in the first place.  Or, they have simply chosen to ignore the rules and arrogantly assume they can make their own.    

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As Ford took steps last week to distance itself from the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) movement that has swept the corporate world in recent years, it became just one of a number of companies that are rethinking their commitments to race-based ideology.

In an Aug. 28 memo to employees, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he is “mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs,” and that the company is taking “a fresh look” at its DEI program.

Ford’s reversal on DEI follows that of other major corporations, including Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, and most recently Molson Coors, which have reportedly revised their DEI policies, either due to public pressure or legal challenges.

In addition, 25 companies have been formally notified by shareholders since 2021 that their DEI programs constitute illegal discrimination under federal and state civil rights laws, as well as a breach of fiduciary duty to investors.

“This is a trend, for sure,” Jerry Bowyer, president of Bowyer Research, a conservative investment consulting firm, told The Epoch Times. “The rapid succession, the way it’s occurred, there’s almost a cascade effect going on.

“That whole world of ESG, stakeholder capitalism, DEI—the whole idea of companies as social engineers rather than as value producing business—had just gotten so far ahead of what customers wanted,” Bowyer said. “Shareholders were not asking for this.”

According to conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has been posting on social media regarding his investigation of “woke” policies at numerous companies, Ford confirmed to him that it would end its participation in a number of DEI related efforts.

“One by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America,” Starbuck stated.

In response to a request by The Epoch Times for comment, a Ford spokesperson stated: “The communication to our global employees speaks for itself. We have nothing further to add.”

Starbuck’s postings went viral when they were supported by people such as SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, who stated on X that “DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it.”

Taking on Customer Feedback

A number of companies that pursued DEI and other progressive programs have come under pressure from activists, shareholders, customers, and state attorneys general to end them.

Responding to consumer backlash, Tractor Supply issued a statement in June that said, “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them. We have taken this feedback to heart.”

The company stated that it would no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign rating system but instead “focus on rural America priorities including ag education, animal welfare, veteran causes and being a good neighbor, and stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns.”

It further pledged to eliminate DEI roles within the company and drop CO2 emission goals, focusing instead on land and water conservation.

Law firms are also stepping back from DEI programs. Legal suits by conservative nonprofit American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) have compelled some major law firms to allow people of all races to apply for fellowships previously reserved for people of color.

“Using someone’s race as a factor in employment decisions is unfair, polarizing, and illegal,” Edward Blum, president of AAER, told The Epoch Times.

“Significant majorities of Americans of all races do not believe someone’s race should be used by any employer to hire or promote any individual. Corporations are at risk of being sued for their DEI practices.”

On the other side, organizations that support DEI policies have had harsh words for companies that backtrack.

“Harley-Davidson’s choice to back away from the Corporate Equality Index is an impulsive decision,” Human Rights Campaign Vice President Eric Bloem said in a statement on Aug. 20. The group introduced the Corporate Equality Index as a social credit rating system for corporations.

Bloem said that activists who are pushing against DEI “believe they can bully their way into dismantling initiatives that help everyone thrive in the workplace.”

Bloem said with the LGBT community “wielding $1.4 trillion in spending power, retreating from these principles undermines both consumer trust and employee success.”

Advocates of DEI programs say that they are legal and beneficial.

“The purpose of DEI and other remedial workplace programs is to improve the process by which employment decisions are made and close the gap in opportunities among workers,” Ming-Qi Chu, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement.

“They do not disadvantage any particular worker. This is why they have long been held lawful.”

And many companies, such as Microsoft, have reiterated their commitment to DEI programs.

“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering,” Microsoft spokesperson Jeff Jones stated in July, disputing news reports that Microsoft had fired its entire DEI staff.

Read more here...

Two days ago when president Trump first floated the idea of a sovereign wealth fund...

... hard-core Democrats and/or socialist billionaires balked at the idea, mocking it as wannabe Saudi Arabia.

So the republican nominee, a few hours ago, said he wants to take taxpayer money and put it in a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Who thinks it’s a good idea to give Donald Trump
taxpayer money to invest in businesses that he picks ?

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) September 5, 2024

Trump, speaking to economic leaders on Thursday, said he envisioned the fund as a way to address persistent debt issues and said it would be funded through his plan to impose tariffs on all imports.

“We’ll be able to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing hubs, advanced defense capabilities, cutting-edge medical research and help save billions of dollars in preventing disease in the first place,” Trump said. “And it is many of the people in this room who will be helping to advise and recommend investments for this fund.”

But expect all the leftist critics to positively love the idea now, just a few hours later, because late on Friday Bloomberg reported that the Kamala/Biden admin has stolen yet another idea from Trump (after eliminating tax on tips, and stimulating new business creation): aides to Joe Biden "have been crafting a proposal to create a sovereign wealth fund" that would allow the US to invest in national security interests including technology, energy, and critical links in the supply chain, a person familiar with the effort, told Bloomberg.

As Bloomberg admits, the "behind-the-scenes work" by NSA Jake Sullivan and his deputy, Daleep Singh, mirrors - at least in spirit - a proposal floated Thursday by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who called for a government-owned investment fund to finance “great national endeavors” during a speech to the Economic Club of New York. Of course, it would look just a little suspicious if the admin of the president in absentia were to float a wealth fund idea just one day after Trump did the same, so Bloomberg had to make it seem that Biden had been working on their version of Trump's idea "for months" and that's precisely what it said:

Sullivan and Singh have been working on the project for months across a series of weekly brainstorming efforts, and have met with economic experts on the National Security Council to debate the size, structure, funding, leadership, and potential guardrails for a proposed fund.

It wasn't clear if it was the "sources" that clarified on the ongoing duration of the project, or just Bloomberg's attempt to make the latest policy theft appear a bit more organic. It gets funnier:

The work has progressed to the point where planning documents have been circulated among White House staffers and key agencies, according to the person familiar, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Sure it has: and Biden waited until 2 months before the end of his presidency to make the push... or rather waht push:

But even as the work has progressed, key details — including, critically, the fund’s structure, funding model, and investment strategy — remain unclear.

And so, just like every aspect in Kamala's policy agenda, we'll have to wait for Trump to reveal the details of his own plan before "sources" leak what Biden was working on before he decided to hit Rehoboth beach permanently after Nancy Pelosi's July putsch. One thing is certain though: whether it its Trump or the puppetmasters who control Kamala, a SWF - especially one of material size in the $1+ trillion range - will lead to another sharp spike in US debt, pushing US debt sharply higher from its latest record daily print just over $35.3 trillion, and making holders of non fiat assets richer as the US careens toward a monetary and fiscal solvency crisis.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“The lies then and now are mind boggling. The people who continue to lap up the lies are beyond reach. The poison unleashed into the population will be with us a long time.”

- Edward Dowd

How is it that our country turned into some kind of theme park spook ride, a cheesy-looking haunted house of programmed frights, howling holograms, phantoms with their hair on fire, doors slamming open on glimpses of hell, ill-winds and foul odors, climaxing in a tableau vivant of death-in-life neverending?

I’m sure that this will surprise you, but you can choose to be sane.

How?

You take care of your business conscientiously; you steer in the direction of what is true and away from what is false; you find purpose in your existence by discovering your talents and using them in ways that do not bring harm to other people; you seek the company of kindred spirits. . . love the one you’re with. . . work hard so you can rest easy. . . express your gratitude for being here. That’s a start.

If you prefer being insane, there’s always the current incarnation of the Democratic Party, dedicated to gaslighting the nation into ruin.

Of course, at this point — the point of extreme desperation — the Dems are just running interference for the distraught intel-Globalist blob. The blob’s agenda has been thwarted, overwhelmed by runaway debt and drinking too much of its own propaganda Kool-aid. A great deal of that has entailed the commission of crimes, which always implies the possibility of having to pay for them.

Russia is about to roll up on what’s left of Ukraine. Our State Department neocon division thought it was wicked-smart to start a little action there in 2014, to provoke Russia into a ruinous war against NATO (the game: “Let’s You and Him Fight”) in order, theoretically, to wreck Russia and depose Mr. Putin. Didn’t work. Do you know why? I will tell you (it’s really simple): Russia’s leadership is more intelligent than ours, and far less psychopathic. They perceived correctly that we were only wrecking ourselves.

Ten years later, the Ukraine caper draws to a humiliating end for our neocons, and a ruinous end for NATO and the EU. So far this year, it appears that “Joe Biden’s” party has ceased paying attention to Ukraine. The pretty yellow and blue flags have all but disappeared — except in Massachusetts, we noticed, the most highly “educated” and most deeply insane state in the union. I’ll be interested in how Kamala Harris explains our Ukraine war policy in Tuesday’s presidential debate. Defending democracy, I suppose.

The governments of the major EU nations stupidly followed the bidding of America’s psychopathic neocons and now they ‘ll have to answer for it as their people awake to the destruction of the EU nations’ economies. Early elections will be called and globalist stooges will be swept away. The turmoil will rhyme with the chaos of 1848, a year of revolution. NATO, finding itself not just purposeless but toxic to Europe’s well-being, must dissolve as members on the periphery withdraw, some seeking to join the BRICs economic bloc. Germany, France, and the UK get sucked helplessly into a new great depression and social turmoil as they contend with many millions of hostile migrants.

Here in America, you can already hear the fake anguished cry of “Russia, Russia, Russia” echoing out of Merrick Garland’s fake Justice Department. We’re to understand that the Russians are coming for our election — more gaslight — when it’s actually the Democratic party, led surreptitiously by its lawfare cadres, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, et al. Their many courtroom pranks have failed against Mr. Trump. Judge Chutkan was bloviating in the DC federal court this week to generate a little heat on MSNBC, but her case has a wooden stake through its heart and Xs where its eyes used to be.

Up in New York, Judge Juan Merchan pretends to wrassle with whether or not to start Civil War Two by remanding Mr. Trump to Rikers Island on September 18 (I doubt that happens). In the event, though, I believe Mr. Trump might simply say, “No thank you,” and go about his business running for president. That would be a counter-prank I’d be eager to see. Who gets in the act then? Federal marshals? The FBI (ha!)? The Supreme Court term begins the first Monday in October. They could have something to say about the steaming pile of horseshit that was Alvin Bragg’s and Mathew Colangelo’s case. (Also, Weissmann’s, Eisen’s, Monaco’s, and McCord’s.)

Gawd knows where things might stand after next Tuesday’s great debate. The rules are pretty stringent. No candidates questioning each other. No audience. No confab with staff during commercial breaks. The mute buttons will be on. Without her “I’m speaking” routine, Ms. Harris has. . . zotz. All Mr. Trump really has to do is be polite for 90-minutes.

More than a few people, meanwhile, are beginning to ask who is running the country, since “Joe Biden” is mostly off-duty, beaching it, not attending cabinet meetings, and probably not being consulted on any number of matters being carried out in his name. Are you comforted to know that the US government is on auto-pilot, a colossal, menacing machine run by ghosts?

*  *  *

Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left-wing and its media.

The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election.

Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.

Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a ‘dream team’ of partisan prosecutors to prove Trump-Russian collusion.

Some 22 months later, Mueller found no evidence that Donald Trump improperly won the 2016 election with help from any colluding Russians.

More hysteria followed when Trump was impeached in December 2019.

The left claimed he had pressured the Ukrainian government to look into the family of Joe Biden (then a potential 2020 election opponent) for its corruption with Ukrainian oligarchs—as a condition for releasing military aid designated to Kyiv.

Yet Hunter Biden was paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company to enlist his father, Vice President Joe Biden, for quid pro quo services.

In turn, Joe Biden himself later bragged he had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor, Victor Shokin—who happened to be looking too closely into the various shady schemes of the Biden family.

The deceptions and lies continued.

On the eve of the first 2020 debate, Biden aide and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken helped to round up “51 former intelligence authorities” to claim falsely that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop—full of incriminating evidence of felonious Biden family behavior—was fabricated by the Russians.

Yet the FBI already had the laptop and had authenticated it as genuine.

The FBI was also actively enlisting Silicon Valley social media companies to suppress accurate news accounts of the laptop’s embarrassing contents—ostensibly to aid the Biden campaign.

The signees of the false letter included former intelligence kingpins such as Leon Panetta, James Clapper, and John Brennan. None has ever apologized for deliberating lying to the country in a (successful) attempt to help alter an election.

During the summer of 2021, top military officials, at least publicly, parroted the Biden administration’s lie that it was safe to abruptly withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.

The Biden plan was to take political credit for ending the two-decade-long war on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan.

Yet many intelligence officials in and outside the Pentagon had warned both Biden and the Pentagon top brass that any such reckless and total withdrawal would collapse Afghanistan.

They rightly also advised that sudden flight would give terrorists a windfall of equipment and infrastructure.

But they were ignored and during the subsequent Biden misadventure, thirteen American Marines were needlessly killed.

After the greatest military humiliation in a half-century, Biden and many in the media lied that the mission was nevertheless a successful withdrawal.

But that was not all. For the first time in history, a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was subjected to numerous criminal and civil suits in an election year.

Yet the federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, met with Biden officials. A high-ranking Biden Justice federal attorney joined the New York municipal prosecution. The Georgia prosecutor met stealthily with Biden’s legal counsel. And a major Biden donor funded the civil suit.

The once collusion-hungry media ignored all such lawfare and rank collusion.

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, the general election, and throughout the first three years of the Biden administration, it was evident that Joe Biden was physically and mentally incapable of serving as president.

Yet his aides and the media all misled the American people. They insisted that Biden was vigorous and sharp.

Then suddenly in June 2024, within a 24-hour period, Biden was declared by these same insiders as unfit to continue as the Democratic nominee.

Their new problem with Biden was not just his long-standing embarrassing dementia. Rather bad polls increasingly warned that voters no longer believed their lies and thus would likely not reelect Biden but would instead punish most Democrats in the upcoming 2024 election.

So, a new media narrative arose: the once-hale Biden was forced to resign as the Democrat nominee. His once widely caricatured vice president, Kamala Harris, just as abruptly was coronated as his replacement candidate by an equally suddenly gushing and colluding media.

In sum, for some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies.

They did so because they proclaimed Donald Trump too dangerous to be president and therefore any means they employed to stop him were to be justified. And they are doing so yet a third time in 2024.

As they continue, they have all but destroyed democracy, ruined the reputation of the media, alienated the public—and embarrassed their country before the world.

Oregon has reversed a former liberal drug law, but not in time to avoid losing "a generation" of people to addiction.

In fact, the state's decision to recriminalize drugs is just the first of many needed actions, says State House Republican leader Jeff Helfrich. The new law, reversing the 2020 decriminalization, took effect Sunday, according to the NY Post and Fox News.

The new law, HB 4002, introduces stricter penalties for selling drugs in public and classifies personal drug possession as a misdemeanor. Addiction and drug-related deaths surged after Oregon's 2020 decriminalization, which was approved by 58% of voters.

Helfrich said on Fox this week: “You saw overdose deaths, you saw drug usage on the street, crime, homelessness all soared after Democrats put this policy in place. And they could have stopped it, but they didn’t.”

“Unfortunately, because we decriminalized it for those few years, we’ve lost a generation, I believe, of people because of these drugs. And you don’t get to have those times anymore,” he continued. 

“People can’t even go into public and take their kids to the park because they’re dealing with the death, they’re dealing with drug use, dealing with all those bad things that are happening. And this is just horrible policies.” 

Under the new law, individuals caught with small amounts of drugs like fentanyl, heroin, or meth can choose between facing possession charges or entering a treatment program, which requires completing a behavioral health program to avoid fines.

The report says that the new law will help police tackle widespread public drug use in parts of Oregon, says Portland police chief Bob Day. Offenders opting for treatment to avoid charges must meet strict criteria: no other charges, warrants, violent behavior, and be medically stable.

Despite the statewide implementation, Jeff Helfrich believes more action is needed to address the drug crisis.

“It’s unfortunate that you have these mega-donors around the nation that use Oregon as the petri dish and experiment to try to create this world of utopia, and you can’t do it. We need more Republicans [in] charge to fix this problem," Helfrich concluded, according to the NY Post/Fox News report. 

In his first public statements since his arrest by France on Aug. 24 at Paris' Le Bourget airport, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov blasted French authorities for detaining and charging him, but also admitted that Telegram is not perfect that he'll work to clean up instances of criminals abusing the platform.

He argued in a post to Telegram that it wildly departs from norms for a government to go after a CEO personally, as opposed to the "established practice" of bringing legal against the company.

"Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach," the billionaire tech entrepreneur wrote. 

"Building technology is hard enough as it is," he continued. "No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools."

"We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance [between privacy and security]," Durov continued. "Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue."

Durav was detained by the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONAF), over the alleged facilitation of various crimes including terrorism, narcotics trafficking, child abuse, modey laundering and fraud. "On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offences and crimes to be committed, for which he did nothing to moderate or cooperate," a source told TF1 TV.

It appears that Telegram has already begun quietly implementing changes in response to French and EU criticisms surrounding the case, especially related to the issue of chat moderation...

Telegram quietly updates FAQ, removing:

"All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them." pic.twitter.com/ajWOOBAAB5

— db (@tier10k) September 6, 2024

"We hear voices saying that it’s not enough," Durov said in his new post. "Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard."

Coindesk has described the initial changes to the app/platform already made as 'radical':

Telegram is radically altering its stance towards "illegal" use of its messaging days after CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France for allegedly failing to police law-breaking content.

On Thursday night, the formerly freewheeling texting app extended its moderators' reach to include private chats. For the first time, users in private chats can "flag illegal content" for review, Telegram wrote in a change on its FAQ page. An older version of the same page said Telegram treated private groups as off-limits.

Durov has still maintained his stance that the formal charges against him are meritless. Others have argued that the case would be akin to prosecuting Google executives for any and all criminal or abusive communications or postings. In many cases tech companies are left seeking to moderate potentially criminal and offensive content - but which is like seeking a needle in a haystack.

And all of this is raising questions of encrypted communications and the lengths European governments in particular might go to try stamp out its use among the citizenry:

The listed charges include “complicity” in crimes ranging from possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material to selling narcotics and money laundering. Durov is also being investigated for refusing to comply with requests to enable “interceptions” from law enforcement and for importing and providing an encryption tool without declaring it. (While encrypted messaging is legal in France, anyone importing the tech has to register with the government.)

He’s also accused of “criminal association with a view to committing a crime” punishable by more than five years in prison.

France uses arcane cyber law to charge Pavel Durov: it forces any company offering cryptology tools to notify France’s ANSSI cybersecurity agency and keep "a description of the technical characteristics of the cryptology tool" as well as the source code ??https://t.co/dcOaIsbdIq

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 5, 2024

There are reports saying that EU regulators will seek to enforce the strictest content moderation possible on Telegram. This has raised the alarm over vital questions of free speech from other major social media platform owners, especially Elon Musk.

Last week Durov was released from custody, with travel limitations imposed by a French judge, after posting €5 million, or about $5.5 million, for bail. He is barred from leaving France, and his movements are being monitored.

Authored by Noel S. Williams via American Thinker,

Amazon’s Alexa just proved she’s well and truly reflective of the political gender gap.  When asked, “Why should I vote for Trump?,” her response was a boilerplate “I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader.”

When asked why someone should vote for Kamala Harris, she suddenly became verbose in her glowing praise, citing “many reasons,” including the fact that Harris is a “woman of color fighting racial injustice.”

This blatant A.I.-driven bias is unsurprising, but there are more insidious forms fabricated by outdated and corrupted data.

I don’t interact with chatty Alexa, so I turned to Google’s A.I. app Gemini with trepidation, inquiring, “Does artificial intelligence bias favor liberals?”

Gemini’s response was, “The short answer is: yes, there's evidence that AI can exhibit a bias towards liberal viewpoints.”  Then Gemini listed several factors that contribute to liberal bias, including:

• The data used to train AI models often reflects societal biases. If the data contains more liberal perspectives, the AI model is likely to learn and replicate those biases.
• Developer Bias: The developers of AI systems may introduce their own biases into the models, either intentionally or unintentionally.
• Algorithmic Bias: The algorithms used in AI systems can sometimes amplify existing biases in the data.

Developer and algorithmic biases are self-evident — the liberal mindset of the big tech companies and their employees, including the political candidates they contribute to, are well documented.  But if the data used for training their models had more integrity, it would limit the leverage of developers and their algorithms to disseminate disinformation into the digital town square.

Unlike Alexa, Gemini is a bit more reticent, refusing to be goaded into discussions about elections or political figures.  So, in order to get a sense of the data it mines, I prompted it with a simple request:  “describe liberals.”  Here are the responses, which must have been conjured from biased and outmoded data, since they are more reflective of classical liberalism than today’s demented Dem version.  The bolded items are particularly deceptive, as I explain below:

• Individual rights: Liberals prioritize individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.
• Equality: They advocate for equality of opportunity and oppose discrimination based on factors like race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion.
• Economic liberalism: While liberals may support some government regulation, they generally advocate for free markets and limited government interference in economic affairs.”
• Social progress: Liberals often support social reforms, including same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality.
• Environmentalism: They tend to prioritize environmental protection and advocate for sustainable practices.
• Government intervention: Liberals may favor government intervention to address social and economic issues, such as providing healthcare, education, and social safety nets.

Google released Gemini in December 2023, yet its responses to a simple “describe liberals” request are devoid of current “liberal” attitudes, particularly as they riddle today’s demented Dems.  

Liberals no longer prioritize individual liberties, but obedience to the socialist state.  Neither do they advocate for equality of opportunity, but insist upon equality of outcomes.  Their definition of “equality” is just a euphemism for soul-destroying “equity.”

As for economic liberalism — what a joke!  Gemini’s Large Language Model needs more training on updated data to reflect all the companies the DOJ and FTC are suing for daring to be successful.

Contrary to Gemini’s propaganda, today’s “liberals” interfere constantly in economic affairs and impulsively impinge on free-market mechanisms.  It’s not just Kamala’s communistic-like diktats about price controls, mind you.  Just this past week, the DoJ issued A.I. behemoth Nvidia subpoenas as it investigates potential “anti-competitive” practices.

Rather than promote economic liberalism, they choose winners and losers in their half-baked industrial policy.  They are simply against success that conflicts with their central planning determinations.  Here’s a list of their antitrust case filings.  Notice that not even Apple can escape their slimy socialist tentacles.  

Google’s Gemini is full of biases, all right, but recency bias is not one of them when it comes to describing liberals.  Instead, it seems to be suffering from the opposite, something akin to “vintage bias” (if there is such a thing), in which too much weight is given to historical considerations.  After all, as is often intimated with variations, today’s liberals are not your grandfather’s.

If the underlying data used in Google’s LLM were infused with recency and integrity, the Gemini A.I. app would surely merge the key characteristics of “liberals” with leftists.  It’s time it catches up.

For example, when instructed to describe leftists, Gemini pointed out their proclivity for big government and offered this insight about leftist views on individual rights: “While leftists value individual rights, they may place a greater emphasis on collective rights and social justice.”  That description is a bit more apt, and it greatly describes the vast majority of today’s Dems — they are leftists masquerading as traditional liberals.  Including the “woman of color fighting racial injustice.”

Gemini is supposedly an astrological sign associated with communication, logical thought processes, curiosity, and intellect.  To thwart data bias, and the ripple effects on developer and algorithmic bias, it’s time Google’s Gemini see the signs.

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Georgia has temporarily blocked the Biden administration from implementing its latest plan to bring widespread federal student loan cancellation for up to 30 million borrowers.

The 14-day restraining order was handed down Sept. 5, two days after a coalition of seven Republican-led states preemptively sued to stop the plan, claiming that the federal government is “unlawfully trying to mass cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of loans” and planning to do so by Sept. 7.

The plan in question, popularly known as “Plan B,” has been in the works since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the initial effort by the Biden administration to offer a blanket cancellation of up to $400 billion in student loans. It has yet to be published, although borrowers were asked last month to confirm whether they want to opt-out.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, Plan B would primarily benefit those who owe more than they originally borrowed due to accrued interest. It would erase up to $20,000 beyond the principal balance, regardless of the borrower’s income. Some 23 million may even see their entire interest balances eliminated.

The Education Department could also forgive the debt of those who have been repaying for at least 20 or 25 years, those who qualify for loan forgiveness under other programs but haven’t applied, and those who attended schools that lost access to federal aid, suddenly closed, or left graduates financially worse off.

A fifth category of borrowers would get their debt forgiven based on certain “hardships” that persist after other benefits are exhausted, such as medical debt and expensive child care. The specifics are still under review.

The seven-state coalition, led by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, argued that the Education Department lacks the rule-making authority to cancel debt at such a large scale. It noted that the department’s income-driven loan repayment program, dubbed SAVE, is also halted while an appeals process over its legality plays out.

“This is the third time the Secretary has unlawfully tried to mass cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in loans,” their complaint read.

“Courts stopped him the first two times, when he tried to do so openly. So now he is trying to do so through cloak and dagger.”

Judge J. Randal Hall of the Southern District of Georgia sided with the states. His order paused Plan B pending a Sept. 18 hearing.

“Plaintiffs show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits given the rule’s lack of statutory authority,” the judge wrote.

Bailey welcomed the decision, calling it a “huge victory” for Americans who have already paid off their student loans or didn’t go to college at all.

“I paid for my education in blood, sweat, and tears in service to my country, so this fight is personal for me,” he said in a statement.

“We will continue to lead the way for working Americans who are being preyed upon by unelected federal bureaucrats in Washington D.C.”

The lawsuit is joined by the attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, and Ohio.

The Education Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

94-year-old Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway continued offloading Bank of America shares this week. Since Buffett started dumping BofA stock in mid-July, total sales have now topped nearly $7 billion.

Bloomberg explains:

In the latest round of transactions, disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday, his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. liquidated $760 million of the stock since Tuesday. Still, Berkshire remains Bank of America's top shareholder, with a roughly 11% stake valued at $34.7 billion, based on the latest closing price.

If Berkshire keeps selling, its stake in the second-largest US bank could soon slide below the 10% regulatory threshold that requires his conglomerate to disclose transactions within a few days. Once he controls less than that, Buffett may wait weeks to reveal transactions — typically offering snapshots after every quarter.

Berkshire Hathaway remains BofA's number one shareholder, with an 11% stake valued at $34.7 billion. 

Buffett and/or Berkshire Hathaway have not explained the reason for the abrupt selling. 

As we've previously noted, Buffett could be dumping for several reasons, if that's due to looming recession threats and the Federal Reserve's interest rate-cutting cycle, which could begin in just a few weeks. Or perhaps the 94-year-old billionaire has increased cash reserves to record levels because of elevated stock valuations amid the artificial intelligence bubble. 

Whatever keeps Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway up at night has intrigued institutional desks, FinTwit X, and financial media outlets. Some believe this could be a critical market signal.

Besides the mounting macro and political risks, we asked a week ago if the selling stems from the risk that a US regulatory probe into anti-money laundering surrounding fentanyl cash laundering at Toronto-Dominion Bank could expand to other banks. 

In a conversation with Sam Cooper, an investigative journalist behind the Substack "The Bureau," and David Asher, a former senior investigator for the State Department, Asher revealed, "And most of what we're seeing is coming from this TD Bank case, and there's a lot more. We'll see which one of the big four US banks gets named next."

Whatever the reason for the selling, Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway traders are undoubtedly concerned about something.

Just one day after 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly went on a killing spree at his Georgia high school, state police have arrested his father and charged him with murder because he made an AR-15 available to his son. Police sources told NBC News that Colin Gray gave the rifle to his son as a gift -- a move that came after the pair had been questioned by police investigating a tip about someone threatening to shoot up a school.

"These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son Colt to possess a weapon," Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) director Chris Hosey told reporters on Wednesday. Fifty-four-year-old Colin Gray has been hit with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. Colt Gray is being held in a youth detention center on four murder charges so far, but will be tried as an adult. 

Police say that, around 10:20 am on Tuesday, Colt Gray used an AR-15 purchased by his father to kill two 14-year-old students and two teachers, and wound another seven students and two teachers. He surrendered immediately upon being confronted by police. The carnage took place at Apalachee High School in Winder, about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta. "The nine injured, I am very happy to say, will make a full recovery," said Barrow County Sheriff on Thursday.  

The charges could represent the substantiation of an emerging trend in charging parents who enable their children to access firearms and then use them with horrific results. In an historic first earlier this year, the parents of a 2021 Michigan school-shooter were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to secure a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol, while ignoring stark indications that their son's mental health was spiraling downward. 

More than a year before the Georgia shooting, investigators in neighboring Jackson County were handed a tip from the FBI that led them to question Colt and Colin Gray. The FBI was notified by concerned citizens who'd seen someone on the Discord messaging platform bragging about intentions to go on a middle school shooting spree the next day, and posting photos of firearms. The poster's username was a Russian translation of "Lanza," the last name of the perpetrator of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. 

When questioned in May 2023, Colt said he'd used Discord before but that his account had been hacked and he wouldn't threaten a mass shooting. According to a transcript of the interview, investigator Daniel Miller said, "I gotta take you at your word and I hope you’re being honest with me.” 

Colin Gray told police he owned hunting weapons but kept them locked and inaccessible to his son, adding that “[Colt] knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them.” He also told investigators that his separation from Colt's mother had taken a toll on the then-13-year-old, and that he'd been subjected to bullying at school. 

An investigator said no arrest was in order due to "inconsistent information" about the Discord account, including indications it had been accessed in multiple Georgia cities and Buffalo, New York. School officials were cautioned to monitor Colt Gray.  “We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum tells Associated Press. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”

The shooter's aunt, Annie Brown, told the Washington Post that Colt Gray "was begging for [mental health] help from everybody around him.” She also said she'd texted a relative last month, expressing her unease that Colt had access to firearms, and that Colt's grandmother had asked a school counselor for help. "[He] starts with a therapist tomorrow," the grandmother messaged one week before Tuesday's bloodshed. 

Colt Gray's mother, Marcee Gray, has a colorful 17-year criminal record across three counties that includes charges of domestic violence, methamphetamine possession, property damage, criminal trespass, driving under the influence, and a civil fraud claim associated with an alleged bad check she and her husband presented for a vehicle purchase. 

Michigan and Georgia's criminal charges for parents leaving weapons unsecured and accessible to troubled kids should serve as a cautionary tale for those exercising their right of armed self-defense. 

The Harris honeymoon must be over...

As even CNN admits that things are not as rosy as the manufactured euphoria around Kamala's 'second coming' would suggest, the Harris campaign has resorted to the old Democratic Party dirty tricks playbook - disinformation.

This mini-campaign began - like always - with mainstream media's assistance. In this case, The Associated Press drops a story that insinuates (callous, evil, gun-toting - our words, not theirs) Trump running-mate JD Vance sees school shootings as a "fact of life".

Wow, that sounds callous!! Perfect.

Except... the context is completely (and clearly intentionally) removed. Thankfully, in America (as opposed to Brazil), we still have X and its liberty-loving community-noters who swiftly destroyed AP's narrative...

Vance's full comment was as follows:

"I don’t like that this is a fact of life."

Sounds sensible - who would 'like' that? Further, Vance pushed for moire security:

"But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.

We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able."

Rational, common-sense strategy to counter the 'psychos' in society.

After the 'Community Note', AP then deleted the post on X, and added 'context'...

But that didn't matter to the Harris campaign who jumped on the fake news bandwagon, issuing a statement decrying the heartless Vance's out-of-context statement, and at the same time somehow claiming that a vote for Harris is a vote to keep your children safe from crime (quick question - why didn't she 'keep children safe from crime' for the last four years?)

Watch Vance's full comments here (and decide for yourself)...

Not even close to what he actually saidpic.twitter.com/RhjzwLAhc1

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 6, 2024

Perhaps AP should be rebranded - Always Propaganda?

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Solar energy firm Lumio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after getting caught up in a “severe liquidity crisis” following a fall in market demand.

The Utah-based company made the filing at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to “complete a value-maximizing sale process and strengthen its financial position,” according to a Sept. 3 statement. The company has already entered into an agreement with an affiliate of White Oak Global Advisors, which has agreed to buy “substantially all” of the firm’s assets for $100 million in a credit bid. In the case the bid is successful, White Oak also intends to provide “significant equity ownership” to Lumio employees.

“The company anticipates completing the sale process in less than two months. During the sale process, the company’s operations will continue as usual without interruption,” the statement said.

In a court declaration, Jeffrey T. Varsalone, a Lumio board member, said the company has faced a “severe liquidity crisis” over the past year, which he attributed to “a sharp decline in demand in the solar market and various macroeconomic headwinds.”

Varsalone blamed increases in inflation and a subsequent jump in interest rates to have resulted in “reduced demand across the entire solar power industry,” thus negatively affecting Lumio’s financial performance.

The reduced demand and revenue eventually led to the deterioration of Lumio’s liquidity position, the board member said.

White Oak has provided Lumio with $8 million, which is expected to support the company’s operations as the sales process proceeds.

“Today’s announcement marks an important step forward for Lumio and a continuation of our deliberate efforts to position the business with the strategic, operational, and financial foundation to operate at the forefront of the solar industry as it enters its recovery phase,” Lumio CEO Andrew Walton said.

“With enhanced financial stability and the support of new ownership following the completion of our sale process, we will be well-positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities.”

Solar Bankruptcies

Multiple solar companies have gone bankrupt over the past year. Last month, San Jose-based SunPower, for example, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with $1.1 billion in debts.

The company had announced in April that it would lay off around 1,000 employees to transition to a “low fixed-cost model.” The firm said the solar market had been “slower to recover” than it initially expected.

In February, solar installer Sunworks and three subsidiaries ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy.

According to a post by Solar Insure, a provider of solar-monitoring and warranty-protection services, there have been more than 100 solar bankruptcies in 2024 alone, a number “unseen before” in its “almost 20 years in the solar sector,” the company said.

The firm blamed factors such as high interest rates and borrowing challenges faced by solar companies for contributing to the bankruptcies. High rates make borrowing expensive, discouraging customers from installing solar devices. The rise in rates boosted the cost of capital for businesses, affecting their financial situation.

“Smaller contractors, in particular, struggled to absorb these increased costs, lacking the financial buffers of larger firms. This disparity led to a disproportionate impact on these smaller players, many of whom were forced to close their doors,” the post said.

During an interview with The Epoch Times earlier this year, Solar Energy Industries Association spokesman Morgan Lyons said they “expect installations to fall off sharply in 2024.”

A new rule implemented in April 2023 by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) substantially reduced the amount of money customers who installed solar energy can make by selling excess energy back to the grid.

“All over California we are seeing the grim reality of how the CPUC’s cuts to solar are taking livelihoods away from thousands of families,” Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, said in a statement in December 2023.

Jill McLaughlin contributed to this report.

The official journal of China's metals industry was correct late last month when it called the 10% jump in iron ore prices that breached $100/ton "irrational" and "lacked fundamental support." Now, prices trend around the $90/ton handle as China's top steel industry group warned mills to be cautious in boosting output. 

Goldman's Rich Privorotsky told clients this morning, "Iron ore is dropping to 90, China will continue to struggle, and commodities as a whole, I think, are reflecting the downgrade to growth expectations in the geography." 

The China Iron & Steel Association released a memo (first published by Bloomberg) to industry insiders this week, indicating, "There will be a certain degree of recovery in steel demand through September and October, which is favorable for the steel market." 

"However, we need to be cautious of the impulse to restart production," the association said, adding the risk of too much steelmaking material output could dampen "any improvement in the situation will end up a flash in the pan."

China's steel industry has been under pressure amid a severe property market downturn and weak economic recovery. Last month, Baowu Steel Group Chairman Hu Wangming warned that economic conditions in the world's second-largest economy felt like a "harsh winter."

As the world's largest steel producer, Baowu Steel's chairman said the steel industry's downturn could be "longer, colder, and more difficult to endure than expected," potentially mirroring the severe downturns of 2008 and 2015.

This should serve as a major wake-up call for macro observers that a recovery in China isn't imminent; in fact, Beijing might not unleash the monetary and fiscal cannons until after the US presidential elections. 

In recent weeks, Goldman analysts led by Aurelia Waltham and Daan Struyven said iron ore's "fundamental outlook remains bleak": 

• The fundamental outlook remains bleak, in our view. While both port and in-plant iron ore stocks declined this week, visible stocks remain elevated compared to 'normal' August levels and mills' destocking (despite the drop in iron ore prices) could be an indication of a negative production outlook. This would not be surprising given only 1% of Chinese steel mills are currently profitable, according to a Mysteel survey.

• Meanwhile, our China property team have cut their forecasts for gross floor area starts and completions for 2024, and our China economists have highlighted rising downside risk to Chinese growth, both of which could have negative implications for steel demand, discussed in this week's Macro Highlight.

• In the absence of a hot metal output recovery, continued strong iron ore supply means that we maintain the view that iron ore needs to remain below $100/t for long enough to trigger a sufficient supply response to re-balance the market.

Here's the most stunning chart from the report. It shows that only 1% of steel mills in China are profitable. As profitability collapses, hot metal output declines. 

A separate Goldman note published earlier this week warned the Chinese steel industry downturn has created a "challenging environment for iron ore." 

The drop in Chinese rebar and hot-rolled coil prices to their lowest levels since 2017 signals the storm clouds continue gathering above, suggesting that a broader recovery won't occur this year. 

The broader commodities complex has been plagued by China slowdown fears, with Brent crude sliding to $73/bbl - ignoring Eastern Europe and Middle East war risks. 

Copper has also faded from record highs, with Goldman slashing its 2025 price forecast by nearly $5,000 earlier this week. 

LME Asia copper inventories have surged to the highest levels since 2016. 

Even veteran commodities analyst Jeff Currie dialed back his super bull thesis on the base metal because of mounting economic woes in China. 

With the Bloomberg Commodity Index sliding and JPM Global Manufacturing PMI sub 50 in contraction... 

... Zhao Liang, head of research at GF Futures Co, summed up the environment for Bloomberg in an interview: "The fundamental picture supports the slide in. Overall, it's due to weak steel demand—people are pessimistic." 

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

French President Emmanuel Macron has named the European Union’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as France’s next prime minister.

Barnier’s new role was announced on Sept. 5 after a caretaker government was in place for more than 50 days.

Barnier’s new role was announced on Sept. 5 after a caretaker government was in place for more than 50 days.

The 73-year-old led the EU’s talks with Britain from 2016 to 2021 over its exit from the bloc.

Before that, the conservative politician held roles in various French governments and also served as the EU’s commissioner.

Barnier’s appointment follows weeks of intense efforts by Macron and his aides to find a candidate who could form a new government, two months after a snap election defeat.

The leader of the right-wing populist National Rally Party and Macron’s two-time presidential rival, Marine Le Pen, said on social media platform X that Barnier “seems to meet at least the first criterion” that had been requested.

Michel Barnier semble répondre au moins au premier critère que nous avions réclamé, c'est-à dire, quelqu'un qui soit respectueux des différentes forces politiques et capable de pouvoir s'adresser au Rassemblement national, qui est le premier groupe de l'Assemblée nationale. pic.twitter.com/tW7rjULMNA

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) September 5, 2024

“That is to say, someone who is respectful of the different political forces and capable of addressing the National Rally, which is the first group in the National Assembly,” she said.

However, Le Pen wrote that she would “not participate in a government of any kind whatsoever of Mr Barnier’s.”

“For the rest, that is to say on the fundamental issues, we are waiting to see what Mr Barnier’s general policy speech is and the way in which he leads the compromises that will be necessary on the budget,” she wrote.

National Rally’s president, Jordan Bardella, said that “after an interminable wait, unworthy of a great democracy” his party acknowledged Barnier’s appointment.

“We will judge his general policy speech, his budgetary decisions and his actions on the evidence,“ he said. ”We will plead for the major emergencies of the French, the cost of living, security, immigration, to finally be addressed, and we reserve all political means of action if this is not the case in the coming weeks.”

‘Democratic Coup’

The left-wing New Popular Front alliance (NFP) had nominated civil servant Lucie Castets for prime minister.

“The President has just decided to officially deny the result of the legislative elections that he himself had called,” NFP leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said. “It is not the New Popular Front, which came out on top in the election, that will have the prime minister. ... The election was therefore stolen from the French people. The message was denied.”

Left-wing lawmaker Mathilde Panot, who, like Melenchon, is part of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), which includes the Communist Party, the Greens, and the Socialist Party, called for its supporters to join them “on the streets” on Sept. 7 to protest against an “unacceptable democratic coup in a democracy.”

Last month, Macron said he would not agree to a government led by the left-wing NFP, further extending the ongoing multi-party stalemate that prevented the nation from forming a government since a snap election in June.

He said at the time that France needed institutional stability and that a government led by the NFP would immediately face a no-confidence vote from all other parties.

“The Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communists have not yet proposed ways to cooperate with other political forces. It is now up to them to do so,” Macron said.

He said he would start new consultations with party leaders on Sept. 3, and he urged the left to cooperate with other political forces.

Macron called a snap election on June 9 that delivered a hung parliament, creating political uncertainty. He has been holding talks on a new government since the election and said he would continue to do so.

No group emerged from the snap election with a clear majority, with the vote evenly split among the NFP, Macron’s centrist political party En Marche, and the right-wing National Rally.

Reuters contributed to this report.

President Putin has continued to downplay Ukraine's major Kursk invasion, which has resulted in Russian territory occupied by Kiev forces, and has instead maintained that capturing and holding all the Donbass in eastern Ukraine remains the goal.

"We have to deal with these thugs who made it into Russia," he said at an event while visiting Russia's east on Thursday. He's yet to launch a broader general mobilization despite the assault on Kursk and the border region. 

He presented the Kursk operation as essentially a trap which he will not fall into. "The aim of the enemy [in Kursk] was to force us to worry, hustle, divert troops and to stop our offensive in key areas, especially in the Donbas, the liberation of which is our main primary objective," Putin described at a forum in Vladivostok.

Putin further painted a picture of the Kursk operation already having backfired on the Zelensky government. He said Ukraine's leadership sent "quite well-prepared units" into Kursk - but this only served to allow for Russia to make a quicker advance in Donetsk. 

"The enemy weakened itself in key areas, our army has accelerated its offensive operations," he asserted. He still sought to emphasize that Russian forces have begun to push the Ukrainian invaders back from Russian territory, however. But Putin said, "Our armed forces have stabilized the situation and started gradually squeezing [the enemy] out from our territory."

Yet the Kursk fight has been on since Aug. 6 - and this alone has been a big symbolic blow for Kremlin war planners. It is the biggest incursion into Russia since WW2. "It is the holy duty of the Russian army to do everything to throw out the enemy from this territory and to protect our citizens," Putin additionally declared.

President Zelensky in an interview with NBC this week claimed that Moscow had been forced to divert 60,000 soldiers from Ukraine to Kursk, but this has not been verified. 

Currently there is broad consensus among analysts that Ukraine's eastern city of Pokrovsk could fall at any moment. Russian forces are within five miles away, amid shelling and attacks on the city's outskirts. If Pokrovsk falls, Russia will be in a position to more easily gobble up the rest of Donetsk, after which its hold on the whole of Donbass will be secured.

Al Jazeera reviews the situation, utilizing fresh battlefield maps, as follows:

Meanwhile Russian forces continued to press on towards Pokrovsk, a city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region which has been their focus since they seized Avdiivka in February. They have formed a 29km (18 mile) long salient stretching to the west of Avdiivka since then and are within about 8km (5 miles) of the outskirts of Pokrovsk.

During the past week, Russian forces overran Novohrodivka and entered Hrodivka, two towns east of Pokrovsk. They also claimed to be on the outskirts of Myrnohrad, a town immediately to the east of Pokrovsk.

2/ Russian forces recently advanced in the Pokrovsk direction amid continued offensive operations in the area on September 4.

Geolocated footage published on September 4 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced south of Novohrodivka and marginally advanced west of… pic.twitter.com/PdlGexfStd

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) September 5, 2024

With all eyes on Pokrovsk in Ukraine and Kursk in Russia, the White House is still said to mulling greenlighting long-range missiles for Kiev, and their possible use on targets inside Russia.

The latest news wire out of Washington and from the administration is that the "US sees little value in sending Ukraine long-range ATACMS" systems.

Via Middle East Eye

Saudi Arabia’s economy has powered ahead despite Israel’s war in Gaza and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, suggesting that the kingdom’s efforts to distance itself from regional tensions are paying off, literally. "Geopolitical events in the Middle East have not had any major impact on the Saudi economy so far," the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its latest report published on the kingdom’s economy.

The report says that Saudi oil exports are not dependent on the Red Sea, where Iran-backed Houthis have targeted commercial ships, in what they say is in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Likewise, Saudi Arabia’s tourism numbers "remain strong". In general, the IMF painted a rosy picture of Saudi Arabia’s economy, with a strong banking system, growing home ownership and "robust" non-oil economic growth.

The report underscores the divergence between Gulf economies and those of poorer states like Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, whose already weak economies have been battered by Israel’s war.

Saudi Arabia will take the IMF report as affirmation that it has successfully maneuvered to avoid getting sucked into the Gaza war. Saudi Arabia has become more vocal in calling for Israel to take steps towards a Palestinian state and has frozen talks to normalise ties with Israel, but it has held off on any further measures in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia has also avoided joining the US’s military campaign against its one-time foe, the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. As the group wages a war on commercial shipping, Saudi Arabia has relaxed banking restrictions on them and resumed flights to Yemen.

Despite tensions over Gaza that have raised concerns about a regional conflict, Saudi Arabia has been focused on economic growth as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 program, designed to wean the Saudi economy off of petrodollars.

The program is bearing fruit. At the end of 2023, Saudi Arabia’s unemployment rate reached a historic low, mainly because of a growth in private sector jobs, the IMF said.

Saudi Arabia’s non-oil GDP hit 3.8 percent in 2023, marking a slowdown from 2022 when it reached 5.3 percent, but was still “robust” thanks to strong investment and private consumption. However, the IMF also noted that Saudi Arabia has "recalibrated" some of its more ambitious mega-projects. 

The kingdom has had to scale back Neom, a $1.5 trillion megacity project which organizers claim will eventually be 33 times the size of New York City and include a 170km straight-line city. Instead of 1.5 million people living in the city by 2030, Saudi officials now anticipate fewer than 300,000 residents. Meanwhile, only 2.4km of the city is set to be completed by 2030.

Is Saudi Arabia's Neom centrepiece a visionary project or just a futile endeavour?

“The plans are completely ludicrous and Neom's centrepiece has no real purpose” – Dr @andreas_krieg

Read more??https://t.co/oePi3qlyGD

— Defence Studies KCL (@DSD_Kings) August 31, 2024

The crown prince's program is dependent on oil revenue. The IMF estimates that Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at $96 per barrel to balance its budget, roughly $20 less than they are now. The kingdom has tried to balance its efforts to support oil prices by cutting output and pumping crude before global energy demand peaks.

The IMF’s assessment that Saudi Arabia's oil revenue is likely to decline quicker than previously estimated will raise concerns among Saudi officials. Revenue is expected to rise to $209bn in 2026, roughly 26 percent of GDP,  before declining faster in 2029 to 4.1 percent less than expected earlier. 

Intel and Japan are teaming up.

In fact, the Japanese national research institute is going to be teaming up with Intel to "build a research and development center in Japan for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing technology", according to a new report from Nikkei Asia.

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), under the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, will establish a new facility in three to five years equipped with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology.

Intel will contribute its expertise in chip manufacturing using EUV. The center, the first of its kind in Japan, will allow equipment and materials manufacturers to pay a fee for prototyping and testing.

Nikkei reports that the initiative aims to strengthen Japan's capabilities in the chip manufacturing sector, with total investment expected to reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) is crucial for semiconductor manufacturing at scales of 5 nanometers and smaller, allowing more transistors to fit on a chip and increasing computing power.

And EUV equipment is expensive, costing over 40 billion yen ($273 million) per unit, making it a significant investment for suppliers of materials and equipment.

The U.S. has tightened restrictions on EUV-related exports to China amid growing strategic competition with China, slowing the return of research data to Japan. Having EUV equipment available at a domestic research facility will reduce this barrier, according to the report. 

ASML Holding, based in the Netherlands, is the leading manufacturer of EUV lithography equipment. However, semiconductor production involves over 600 steps, requiring a broad range of specialized equipment and materials.

Japanese companies like Lasertec dominate the EUV inspection equipment market, and firms like JSR specialize in photosensitive materials for silicon wafer circuits.

Intel aims to strengthen ties with these Japanese suppliers through the new research center.

Following a massive price surge in cocoa prices in New York earlier this year, where prices topped nearly $12,000 per ton before bottoming out in the low $7,000s and resulting in what technical analysts say is a triangle pattern, prices are expected to stay rangebound as compression indicates a major move nears. 

Bloomberg cites new data from the International Cocoa Organization that says demand will exceed production by 462,000 metric tons. That's about 5.2% more than the ICCO's May forecast of a 439,000-ton deficit. This is a much larger shortage than the initial outlook published in February. 

In the Friday report, ICCO wrote that global cocoa supplies remain depressed due to "adverse weather conditions, aged trees, pests and diseases that affected production in major cocoa areas during the season under review." 

Global cocoa production this season is 4.33 million tons, 2.9% below ICCO's previous forecast. Grinding estimates are expected to be 2.1% lower, at 4.75 million tons. 

Bloomberg noted, "New York futures are up around 80% this year as poor harvests in West Africa curbed supplies, though prices have pared back from record highs. The region's cocoa industry is still grappling with lasting issues like crop disease, and new trees take at least three years to reach fruit-bearing maturity. That's constraining how quickly production can ramp up to ease the shortage." 

New York bean prices are locked in a triangle formation of compressing price action, indicating that a big move might be on the horizon. 

New data from ICE exchange-monitored warehouses shows US cocoa stockpiles have slumped to the lowest levels since early 2009. 

Meanwhile, candy companies such as Hershey have been pushing higher cocoa costs to customers. The PA-based company has already slashed its sales and earnings outlook for the year as shoppers have decreased purchases of higher-priced chocolates and candies. In other words, demand destruction has emerged. 

Let's not forget that oil trader Pierre Andurand remains bullish on the view that the stocks-to-grinding ratio for the world at the end of the year will be at its lowest ever "and potentially run out of inventories late in the year." 

Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Sept. 4 that Chinese consul general Huang Ping is no longer holding his position after her request to the U.S. State Department that he be ousted. The State Department said the diplomat left because he reached the end of a regularly scheduled rotation.

On Sept. 3, a former top-level aide to Hochul was charged with spying for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Hochul said she reached out to the White House and U.S. Secretary of State after the arrest and indictment of Linda Sun. She asked that the Chinese consul general be removed from his position immediately.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Hochul spoke to Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell on Sept. 4. Miller said the consul general was not expelled but rather reached the end of a regularly scheduled rotation. When it comes to the status of employees at these missions, the department reaches out to the foreign country, he said.

“I have conveyed my desire to have the counsel general from the People’s Republic of China and the New York mission expelled, and I’ve been informed that the counsel general is no longer in the New York mission,” Hochul said at the press conference.

She said her request was meant to send a message.

“I believe that the Chinese government with their behavior in doing this and working with Linda Sun is not acceptable,” Hochul said. “It’s a statement by us, that we’re not tolerating this, and anybody who represented that government needs to move on. That was what we made clear.”

Sun was charged with acting on behalf of the CCP, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Her husband and codefendant, Christopher Hu, was charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, bank fraud, and misuse of means of identification.

Sun was dismissed from Hochul’s office in March 2023 for alleged misconduct, and the governor’s office is cooperating with the investigation.

Hochul said on Sept. 4 that Sun’s arrest showed that governments at all levels “certainly” should be more vigilant.

“This is an individual who started way before my time, was put in the position of liaison to the Asian community and global trade issues,” Hochul said.

Sun held state government roles from 2012 to 2023 and allegedly forged Hochul’s signature on invitations that would allow Chinese officials to illegally enter the United States and meet with government officials. She also allegedly used her position to block Taiwanese representatives from meeting government officials and edit then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statements to remove references to Taiwan as a country.

According to the indictment, Sun found ways to allow CCP officials to gain access to New York state leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic, at one time even calling an official on her phone during a private conference call between multiple state departments, warning the CCP official, “Keep your phone muted.” The official wrote to Sun that the call had been “very useful.”

The indictment also alleges that Sun received millions of dollars in return for her work for the CCP and never declared her role as a foreign agent or the benefits she received. Sun and Hu pleaded not guilty during their initial court appearance in Brooklyn on Sept. 3 and will be released on bond.

Hochul said at a separate event on Sept. 4 that Sun had no access to security or government documents “so there was a limit to it,” but Sun used her position to promote CCP views in official proclamations while “diminishing any involvement” with Taiwan.

She said Sun had also been able to use her position to obtain visas for CCP officials, and that her office had alerted law enforcement to some “evidence that didn’t look right.”

“To think that any foreign agent, any foreign government to infiltrate a government organization like the state of New York has to be addressed,” she said.

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

HARRISBURG, Pa.—Former President Donald Trump continued his courtship of voters in Pennsylvania, one of a handful of states that could decide the 2024 presidential election, with a wide-ranging town hall discussion on Sept. 4.

Fox News host Sean Hannity reminded the audience at New Holland Arena that the Republican nominee’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, declined an invitation to debate Trump that night. That’s why the event instead became a Trump-only town hall.

So far, Harris has agreed to one debate with Trump, set for Sept. 10 with ABC News in Philadelphia. Trump also invited her to appear Sept. 25 on CBS News.

Banter between Hannity and Trump on Wednesday, sprinkled with video montages of Harris’s past statements, filled about 50 minutes that had been allotted—even before a single audience member had been able to ask a question.

Then, Trump suggested, “Let’s make two shows” from the footage; Hannity obliged, and the event continued for about 15 more minutes as Dave McCormick, a Republican candidate for Senate, and four attendees sought answers from the former president. Their questions focused on safety, immigration, and the economy. Trump repeated his past pledges to improve on all three of those fronts.

The network was slated to broadcast the prerecorded Trump–Hannity interview later on Sept. 4; the Trump–audience interactions will air during Hannity’s regular time slot on Sept. 5. Other media outlets, including The Epoch Times, were permitted to report on the exchanges only after the first segment was broadcast at 9 p.m. ET on Sept. 4.

The following are key highlights from the town hall.

ABC Debate: ‘I’m Gonna Let Her Talk’

After Hannity asked what the former president was doing to get ready for next week’s debate with Harris, Trump replied: “I think I’ve been practicing all my life for this stuff. It’ll be an interesting evening.”

The former president said debates are unpredictable, so a candidate needs to be nimble. Many before him have prepped extensively, only to fail miserably in the heat of debate. “Everybody has a plan until they get ‘punched in the face,’” Trump said, quoting Mike Tyson.

“A lot depends on ABC. ... I hope they’re going to be fair,” he said, adding that a contract bars the network from providing questions to either candidate in advance of the showdown.

The Trump and Harris camps had proposed different ground rules for the debate; they disagreed over whether the candidates should be seated or standing, and over whether microphones should be muted while the opposing candidate is speaking.

Trump’s strategy? “I’m gonna let her talk,” he said.

That is what he did on June 27 in Atlanta, where CNN hosted a debate between him and President Joe Biden. The incumbent was widely seen to have struggled during that face-off.

Biden withdrew from the race less than a month later and endorsed Harris as his preferred successor.

Fracking a Big Deal for Pennsylvania

Noting that many thousands of Pennsylvanians depend on fracking for their livelihoods, Trump told the audience, “You have no choice; you’ve gotta vote for me.”

Hannity played multiple video clips of Harris making past statements opposing fracking. Trump said he disbelieves her recent statement that she won’t ban the procedure that is used to help extract gas or oil from the ground. He said Democrats’ policies have directly hurt the industry even without an outright ban.

“You have to have fracking. ... It’s a massive business for Pennsylvania, and you can’t take a chance” that Harris would eliminate it, Trump said.

Trump Trending Upward

Hannity noted the town hall came at a time when Trump was trending upward in some of the polls. Those include a Trafalgar Group poll showing Trump ahead of Harris in Pennsylvania by 2 percentage points.

The host said the latest numbers seem to suggest that Harris’s “long-lived honeymoon phase now finally, finally appears to be over.”

In the RealClearPolitics average of opinion polls, Harris was holding a 1.9 percent national lead against Trump on Sept. 4. But a few very recent polls were detecting a shift in momentum.

In Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll on Sept. 4, Trump opened a six-point lead over Harris nationally. But in Rasmussen’s five-day average, he was only 2 percent ahead of her.

Many other polls still show Harris with an edge over Trump nationally, but still within the margin of error, which runs at 3 percent or more for most polls.

An online prediction and betting site, Polymarket.com, on Sept. 4 showed Trump with a 52-percent chance of winning the Nov. 5 election; Harris had a 47-percent chance.

Contrast With Harris–Walz Accessibility

Hannity noted that Harris has given no solo news conferences since she became the apparent Democratic nominee 45 days prior to the Fox town hall.

She and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, participated in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Aug. 29 but disclosed no new policy specifics. And, as of Sept. 4, no policy platform was yet listed on Harris’s website.

Hannity contrasted this with the dozens of news conferences and interviews Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have given since Biden dropped out of the race.

After Trump passed the 16-minute, 30-second mark into the program, Hannity thanked him for going longer than Harris’s CNN interview; the audience laughed.

Heightened Security

Hannity and Trump have appeared together for many broadcasts since Trump first campaigned for president in 2016. But “never before have restrictions been so tight,” Hannity said.

In the wake of a gunman’s failed assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump’s security team insisted on a smaller audience for the Fox town hall, Hannity said. Seating arrangements were also strictly controlled.

No attendance estimate was provided, but the arena, which holds 7,300 people, appeared to be about one-third full.

Hannity and Trump expressed sadness over the Georgia school shooting that left at least four people dead and nine wounded hours before the town hall.

In addition, Hannity also noted that FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about an unprecedented spike in security threats.

When Hannity wondered aloud why so many problems with violence and threats persist, Trump replied, “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons,” expressing confidence that he will improve conditions if he wins reelection.

“It starts now, Trump!” one man in the audience said.

Reassuring ‘Hesitant’ Voters

A woman asked Trump what he had learned from his first term as president that could help reassure “those that are hesitant to vote for [him] now.”

Trump replied that he learned the importance of putting the right people into key positions in his administration.

“I put people in, that in some cases were not what I really wanted. ... I know the good ones, the bad ones, the weak ones, the smart ones, the dumb ones,” he said, his last phrase prompting a chuckle from the audience. “A big key to running it is getting the right people. ... I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody.”

Ahead of our full non-farm payrolls preview article due out later tonight, we have excerpted from a report by Goldman futures trader Lindsay Matcham, which breaks down the bank's top client questions going into tomorrow's jobs print.

While there is more in the full report (available to pro subs in the usual place) below we analyze the following 6 most pertinent questions:

• Why Is There So Much Focus On The Number?
• What Is Being Priced Across Assets Going Into The Number?
• What Does Goldman Expect Tomorrow?
• What’s The Macro Landscape Going Into The Number?
• What Is Recessionary Data?
• How Does The Market React To Inline/Beat or A Miss?

So without further ado...

1. Why Is There So Much Focus On The Number?

Inflation Rear View Mirror With All Eyes On Jobs

Lots of focus on tomorrow’s NFP because the macro picture facing us is one where it feels as though the inflation battle has been won with 5yr USD inflation swap forwards sitting at 2.35% and US 10 year breakevens sitting at 2.05%, with all the focus now on jobs.

As discussed previously we are now in a "bad news is bad news and good news is good news" regime; the market wants strong jobs numbers to confirm the FED haven’t had a misstep.

Market Nervousness / Yield Curve Dis-inversion / Sahm Rule Triggered 

The market is incredibly jittery on a potential hard landing outcome given how long financial conditions have remained so tight.

This is illustrative of the US2S10s inverting yesterday after 27 months which is also putting macros on edge, with the triggering of the Sahm rule also not helping.  Add to this the lofty levels indexes find themselves at once more, and the positioning and leverage that is in the system.

Therefore, there will be a sigh of relief from the market tomorrow if the jobs numbers beat, because good jobs no longer equate to a move higher in inflation.  Good jobs numbers now equate to Powell instigating a soft landing, and one strong jobs number can’t derail his Jackson Hole dovishness and willingness to cut.

Global inflation expectations have moved lower; UK vs EUR vs US below:

2. What Is Being Priced Across Assets Going Into The Number?

Recessionary Pricing From Bond Markets

Post JOLTS yesterday we are now pricing 4.47x cuts between now and December; that is roughly 112bps.  In 2008 cuts of 50 +25 +25 were made = 100bps.

1 year OIS rates are currently pricing around 235bps of cuts over the next year; in a recession the Fed cuts 200-250 bps in the first 12m. Markets are undecided on whether Powell will go 25bps or 50 bps; 100% chance of a 25-bs cut with a 44% chance he goes 50bps.

1 year OIS rates:

Equity & Credit Markets Pricing Low Odds Of A Recession 

Equities have sold off a little and the cost of SPX protection has spiked but both are pricing low odds of a recession currently.  Credit markets are also not that bothered with CDX HY spreads still below 350, albeit having spiked a little.  Market starts to take notice when CDX HY credit spreads move beyond 350.

3. What Does Goldman Expect Tomorrow?

The data points to watch tomorrow are non-farms and the unemployment rate at 8:30am:

• Nonfarm payroll employment, August (GS +155k, consensus +165k, last +114k)
• Unemployment rate, August (GS 4.2%, consensus 4.2%, last 4.3%)

Goldman sees a slight miss which could result in short term risk off before a recovery once the markets digests the fact that a 155k print is not recessionary – more below.

4. What’s The Macro Landscape Going Into The Number?

Currently A Bullish Risk Asset Environment With Short Term Risks

Going in to the numbers tomorrow its important to remember we are in a central bank easing, inflation moving lower and growth decelerating but not recessionary environment for now (ISM services just came inline).  This is bullish risk assets in the medium to long term but in particular for US growth, the 60/40 portfolio, treasuries and gold.

JOLTS is moving lower but its not in recessionary territory:

5. What Is Recessionary Data?

NFP prints need to start moving into the 0-85k range before the market starts seriously worrying about a recession, and jobless numbers need to move up into the 400k range. Regardless of slight beats and misses tomorrow keep that in mind with regards to risk asset pricing and opportunities that arise. Important to note that recent unemployment rate increases do not signal recessions according to Goldman. Non-farms started to print sub 100k then into the 0-50k territory in 2007 before the financial crisis hit:

6. How Does The Market React To Inline/Beat or A Miss?

Inline or Beat = Risk On 

In Matcham's opinion, an inline or beat in NFPs and it is equities higher, bonds lower/yields higher, USDJPY higher, and gold lower in the short term (medium/long term gold still moving higher).

An inline number means Powell is steering the market into a soft landing with inflation in the rear view mirror, and it’s going to take more than one strong jobs numbers before the market starts questioning the FED put and Powell’s 25 + 25 + 25 Jackson hole talk.

A beat and the yield curve bear steepens with cyclicals and commodities outperforming and the USD doing OK.  Bull steepening resumes once the dust settles.

US 10 Year yields vs USDJPY:

Slight Miss = Risk Off With Opportunities / Large Miss = USD + Cash 

The market feels very twitchy to a slight miss; so its equities and yields lower, gold sharply higher, USDJPY lower with the yield curve bull steepening.  In this scenario take a step back and think about what an actual recessionary jobs number is and what opportunities that lay ahead as a result.

Goes without saying that a large miss into the sub 100k territory and its risk off with a bid to the USD, cash and gold, and the yield curve bull steepening aggressively with cyclicals and commodities bearing the brunt of the sell off.

Unemployment

A 25bps cut occurs in any scenario given how tight conditions are and how dovish Powell has been. An unemployment print higher than the last print of 4.3%, and Powell delivers 50bps in September.

The Sahm rule just got triggered, it has never failed to predict a recession and has the market on edge about jobs:

More in the full Goldman note available to pro subscribers.

By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled $7.3 billion investment in clean and affordable electricity for American rural communities as the president looks to help his Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to win voters in rural battleground states.

President Biden’s announcement, made in Wisconsin, pledges the multi-billion investment which will be funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The investment announced today is the largest investment in rural electrification since the New Deal and is part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the White House said.

The President is set to announce the first round of rural electric cooperatives selected and the first award for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.

On Thursday, USDA announced that 16 rural electric cooperatives are being selected to receive up to $7.3 billion in clean energy financing that will deliver clean, more affordable, and more resilient electricity to approximately 5 million rural co-op members representing 20% of rural households, farms, businesses, and schools. These 16 cooperatives will benefit rural residents across 23 states, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Under the New ERA program, electric cooperatives will build or purchase over 10 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy.

National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson commented on the new program that “The New ERA program showcases what is possible when the government prioritizes voluntary, flexible decision-making and allows electric co-ops to take a tailored approach to respond to local needs.”

The program “is a transformative opportunity for electric cooperatives,” Matheson added.

The announcement of funding for rural cooperatives could boost Harris’s chances to snatch battleground states from Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has been criticizing Democrats for the higher energy costs Americans have faced in the past two years.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Chase Bank responded to viral social media videos depicting people exploiting an apparent flaw in the bank’s system, saying that those customers were likely committing fraud.

Over Labor Day weekend, videos appeared on TikTok and other social media platforms allegedly showing people depositing fraudulent checks written for large sums of money at Chase Bank ATMs. They would then make a withdrawal for a significant amount, believing they discovered a glitch that allowed them to get free money.

However, a spokesperson for Chase Bank said those people were likely committing fraud and that the issue was resolved. The bank also warned customers not to mimic what they’ve seen on the internet.

people are currently lined up outside a Chase bank in New York trying to do the new viral glitch to get free money ????pic.twitter.com/V49JpVu9iq

— ryan ?? (@scubaryan_) August 31, 2024

“We are aware of this incident, and it has been addressed,” a Chase spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

“Regardless of what you see online, depositing a fraudulent check and withdrawing the funds from your account is fraud, plain and simple,” the spokesperson added.

The bank did not respond to a question about whether it is investigating the videos or whether law enforcement is involved, and it’s unknown how many Chase customers attempted to make such withdrawals.

“Check kiting. It’s called check kiting. And it’s been around since the invention of ... checks,” Cornell University law professor Dan Awrey wrote on X, responding to videos depicting the alleged fraudulent activity.

Check kiting, considered a form of check fraud, is when a person tries to cover “a bad check from one bank account to another,” says the Cornell Law School on its website. People with several accounts can take advantage of this because it takes several days to process checks, it adds.

“Banks will usually resolve issues of check swapping, or the exchange of checks between two bank accounts, without prosecuting the kiters. When the scheme involves payment to a third party, however, banks must prosecute,” says the Department of Justice research paper.

Advice From Finance Professionals

Jim Wang, a financial educator who operates the website WalletHacks.com, said in multiple social media posts that some people who attempt to bilk the bank out of money could have their accounts placed on hold.

“The people that were doing this were seeing big holes in their accounts or huge negative balances,” Wang said on Instagram. “Bank errors in your favor are almost never in your favor. In the case of this ‘glitch,’ it was just check fraud.”

If a large sum of money shows up in a person’s bank account, that person should tell their bank right away, he advised.

“Just because money appears in your account, doesn’t mean it’s literally yours,” Wang said. “If you spend it and are forced to pay it back, you’re going to have to figure out a way to pay it back.”

Check fraud, in some circumstances, can be a felony crime, according to fraud protection company SQN Banking Systems. It noted that if the fraudulent amount exceeds $500, there’s a higher chance of it being a felony rather than a misdemeanor.

Misdemeanor charges, however, can lead to fines and up to a year in jail, the company says. For felony fraud charges, the sentence could be several years in prison and fines worth thousands of dollars depending on the state and the nature of the crime, it said.

Chase Bank or any other victim can also seek civil compensation from the individual who committed fraud, SQN says, and the amount the victim can claim varies from state to state.

The man who for decades had been an almost lone Congressional advocate of non-interventionism in American foreign policy is former Congressman Ron Paul. When he ran for president in 2008, he took what the late Justin Raimondo called "libertarian realism" to the masses in the famous moment wherein he tangled with Rudy Giuliani on the GOP debate stage. Paul described that "blowback" resulting from Washington militarism and adventurism abroad was a contributing cause of 9/11. But for a population fed on a steady diet of the world-saving messianism of Wilsonian internationalism, in which America’s mystic destiny is to "make the world safe for democracy" (to quote Raimondo)—Rep. Paul's policy positions were deemed somehow 'too radical' for American voters to swallow at the time (or rather, the mainstream gatekeeping pundits assured their viewers of his "fringe" views). Fast forward to well over another decade of the failed GWOT later, and now a common refrain heard on social media and even in the halls of Congress and occasionally the State Department is: Ron Paul was right. 

The US 'forever wars' in the Middle East led to a jaded, war-weary, and questioning public which tends to be ever-more skeptical anytime the political class starts talking a new major foreign intervention. This is perhaps why, ever since the Obama presidency Washington has shown a preference for covert and proxy wars, or involvement from the shadows, instead of Bush-style 'shock and awe' outright invasions. But currently, the Pentagon and US intelligence are involved in two disastrous hot wars (on a proxy and covert level) which could escalate into massive regional wars, or even world wars, at any moment: Ukraine and Gaza.

Back in 2014, another realist accurately predicted the tragic and disastrous Russia-Ukraine war which would eventually erupt in February 2022 when he said in a University of Chicago lecture: "The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked." Professor John J. Mearsheimer's now famous 2014 hour-and-fifteen minute lecture, once it was popularly 'discovered' on YouTube after the Russian invasion of 2022, has since racked up nearly 30 million views. We wrote about his insights and forecasts in Mearsheimer's Ukraine Crystal Ball. And now in 2024 more and more people continue to say: John Mearsheimer was right. 

It was perhaps only a matter of time before these two great thinkers who have done so much to expose the follies and dangers of US interventionism abroad would meet and share the same stage.

This past weekend that's exactly what happened. They addressed the Ron Paul Institute's Liberty Platform Conference in the Washington D.C. area, with an audience of several hundreds of people in attendance. It was Dr. Mearsheimer's first time at the annual Ron Paul Institute conference hosted in Dulles, VA.

Paul in delivering his usually strong "end the Empire and end the Fed" liberty message agreed with Mearsheimer's words, who said of Washington action in the world, "We decided we are going to use that awesome military power that we had to run around the world and do social engineering." The University of Chicago professor further pointed out: "And of course it's social engineering in many cases at the end of a rifle barrel."

Both also agreed, as the nation enters a charged election in November, that fundamentally there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats on the question of foreign policy and Washington's penchant for constant military interventionism.

Dr. @RonPaul today at the 8th Annual @RonPaulInstitut Peace and Prosperity Conference on what he learned from Ludwig von Mises:

"...there has to be people who know how to take those complex ideas and make them palatable to the people and that's what I work on daily, trying to… pic.twitter.com/u27Md61E1z

— Liberty Seeds (@Libertyseedsco) August 31, 2024

Mearsheimer explained that when he references the foreign policy establishment, "your talking about tweedle dee and tweedle dum."

He also observed, "Both the Republicans and the Democrats love their 'color revolutions'." But given that nation-states do not like other countries running around interfering in their affairs, the enduring blowback and forever wars has led to a "permanent state of emergency": 

"People who don't understand the limits of what you can do with the military... and think that we have the right and responsibility and the capability to reorder the world in our image, are going to end up creating a highly militarized society. Remember I said that in international anarchy the United States is always going to have a large military. But that's different from saying we are always going to have a large military that's fighting wars," Mearsheimer told the Ron Paul Institute audience.

Interestingly, though Mearsheimer has lectured all over the world, the only time he ever had to cancel a trip and event altogether due to potential threats to his life was when he was set to give a talk in the NATO 'eastern flank' country of Poland. He told ZeroHedge that "they could not guarantee my safety"—in reference to the event organizers and Polish police.

Below are key excerpts from John Mearsheimer's address given to the Ron Paul Institute's "Liberty Platform" conference on Saturday Aug.31. [Transcribed by ZeroHedge with subheadings added]

* * *

US power & international anarchy

It's great to be here. I appreciated all the people who come up to me and talk to me, and I look forward to talking to you about international anarchy and limits of military power. What I want to do here is I want to explain to you why I believe that international anarchy means that the United States will always have a very large and powerful military. And then I want to talk about what the limits are regarding how you use that military.

So to start, what do I mean by international anarchy. As I'm sure many of you in the audience know international anarchy is a catchword for saying that in international politics there is no higher authority that sits above states that can rescue them if they get into trouble. The international system is basically comprised of states - states are the principle actors in international politics. So anarchy, in the lexicon of international relations scholars is the opposite, it's the opposite of hierarchy. If you live inside the United States you have hierarchy - you have a state that is very powerful that sits above you. It has a police force associated with it, it has courts and so forth and so on. In the international system there's not higher authority.

Furthermore, it's very hard to know the intentions of other sates and it is impossible to know the future intentions of other states, because you don't even know who's going to be running China, or the United States, or Russia - in five years. So how can you know what their intentions are going to be? So you're in an anarchic system there's no higher authority to rescue you if you get into trouble. And there are states out there that may have malign intentions, and furthermore there may be states out there that are really powerful.

China demonstrated what happens to a weak state

So if a really powerful state decides it's going to come after you, and you dial 911, you know who's at the other end: nobody. And in a system like that you have no choice but to have a powerful military. Your goal is to be the most powerful state in the system. And you want to be the most powerful state in the system because you understand that if you're weak and you get into trouble, nobody can help you. It is what we call a 'self-help system'.

If you have any doubts about this go to China and ask them about the 'century of national humiliation'. The Chinese were very weak from the late 1840s until the late 1940s: they call it the century of national humiliation. What happened then? China was weak and it was preyed upon - it was preyed upon by the United States, you know the open door policy - Japan, and the European great powers. The Chinese are never going to let that happen again. They want their own state and they want that state to be powerful.

US History: a voracious appetite for conquest

The same basic logic applies to every other state in the system. And this includes the United States of course. The United States you all understand worked very hard to become powerful. It started out as thirteen measly colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard. We marched across North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean, acquiring and conquering territory all the way. We invaded Canada in 1812 for the purpose of making it part of the United States. And all those island countries in the Caribbean today would be part of the United States were it not for the slavery issue, because the northern states did not want more slave-holding states admitted into the Union. And course because of the sugar industry there were a huge number of slaves in the Caribbean. So the Caribbean did not become part of the United States.

But we had a voracious appetite for conquest and we built a very powerful military once we became the dominant state in the Western hemisphere. This is just the way international politics works. Now for most of you that's bad news. But from my point of view that's not the really important issue. The really important issue is how you use that military power. What I'm telling you is we're always going to be powerful militarily - the question is what do you do with it? And this is where the United States has gone off the rails - at least since the end of the Cold War and many would argue, before the Cold War.

America's Unipolar Rise

And what's happened since about 1989 when the United States became the unipole. You all remember remember the unipolar moment, when we were incredibly powerful relative to every other state on the planet? What the foreign policy establishment in this country decided it was going to do is that we decided we were going use that awesome military power that we had to run around the world and do social engineering. What we were gonna do is we were gonna try and remake the world in our own image. We were gonna spread democracy here, there, and everywhere.

We were gonna spread capitalism and economic independence all over the planet. We were going to take these institutions that we created during the Cold War and we were going to integrate countries all around the world into those institutions, and turn them into 'rule-abiding citizens'. But the most important thing we were interested in doing was spreading Liberal Democracy. And when I say the foreign policy establishment it's very important to understand I'm talking about Republicans as well as Democrats. As far as the Republicans and Democrats go on the issue of foreign policy, you're talking about tweedle dee and tweedle dum [laughter]. 

Republicans & Dems are the same on Foreign Policy

Just think of the Bush doctrine - and as you all know George W. Bush was a Republican. The Bush doctrine, right, which was enunciated after the Afghanistan war - that was in 2001 - and before the Iraq war, which was of course was March 2003. The Bush doctrine said that what we're gonna do is gonna go into the Middle East. We're gonna topple the regime in Iraq, right, we're going to put in its place a democracy. Right, we're gonna create democracy, get rid of Saddam, just as we had done in Afghanistan? Remember? [...laughter]  We toppled the Taliban and we put Hamid Karzai in power in Afghanistan.

We're gonna do that in Iraq, and then maybe we have to do it in one more country: Syria maybe? Iran? And pretty soon everybody in the region would get the message, they'd throw up their hands for fear that the United States would come after them, and they'd all turn into Liberal Democracies. That's what the Bush doctrine was about. This is Republicans, and of course the Democrats were no better.

Below: AntiWar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp (with Mearsheimer, right) spoke during the conference's Friday session...

Just a couple dudes chatting about foreign policy pic.twitter.com/HmPGWbpvwf

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) August 31, 2024

Color Revolutions & Social Engineering by force

Both the Republicans and the Democrats love their 'color revolutions'. What color revolutions? This is where you run around the world, overthrowing regimes, and putting in place pro-Western Liberal Democracies. It's social engineering. And of course it's social engineering in many cases at the end of a rifle barrel. That's what the Bush doctrine was - it was social engineering at the end of a rifle barrel. And you ought to think about what's going on here. You're pursuing... a policy which me and my friends call liberal hegemony.. you're saying you can take this big stick that you have and you can use that big stick - you can use military force - to turn a political tide inside particular countries in ways that are favorable to you.

Nationalism is the fly in the ointment 

There's a fundamental problem with this approach to dealing the world. The fundamental problem is political. Clausewitz said war is an extension politics by other means... he's telling you that it's the politics that really matter... Now that's the real fly in the ointment that the foreign policy establishment faced. That is that the most powerful political ideology on the planet is nationalism... a remarkably powerful force. It's very hard for Americans to understand this... It basically says the world is divided into nations. The highest social group that we identify with is the nation. Sam Huntington talked about the 'clash of civilians'. Civilians are not the highest social unit that people will really identify with in a meaningful way: it's the nation. And what nations want is their own state... think about the concept of a nation-state... that's nationalism. It has nationalism embedded. 

Theodore Hertzel, who was the father of Zionism... his most famous book is called "The Jewish State"... nation-state.. Jewish nation state.. Jewish state. The Palestinians want their own state. They view themselves as a nation, as in they want their own state. You live in a liberal state, in a liberal country... you live in a liberal nation-state. Madeline Albright who was a card carrying liberal of the first order, she was famous for her statement that we are an exceptional nation, we stand tall, we see further than other nations. She understood that we were a nation-state. She was not only a liberal, she was a nationalist par excellence...

And the problem that you face is that nationalism has deeply embedded in it the concept of self-determination: 'we're sovereign'. And nation-states do not like the idea of other nation states coming into their territory and doing social engineering. You know how exercised American get when there's talk about the Russians interfering in our elections? [laughter]...this is American nationalism at play. Countries around the world... they don't want us doing social engineering... can you imagine us allowing someone doing social engineering inside the borders of the United States? Well as my mother taught me as a little boy what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Unsurprisingly people outside the United States don't like that at all. 

Vietnam: not about Communism, but Nationalism

In Vietnam... we weren't fighting communism, we were fighting nationalism. The Vietnamese wanted their own nation state, they wanted self-determination. They drove the French out at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and they had every intention of drive us out. They didn't want a bunch of Americans in their country telling what color toilet paper they could use [laughter]. They thought they could figure that out for themselves - that's nationalism. You go into Afghanistan, you go into Iraq, you are really asking for big trouble. You think you're gonna do social engineering in those countries? You think you're going to be able to tell them what kind of political system they can have? It's not gonna work! [clapping]

Putin doesn't want Western Ukraine

Take the Russians. The Russians during the Cold War - as many of the old dogs in this audience like me remember - occupied a huge portion of Europe. Most of it Eastern Europe... they were up to their eyeballs in alligators dealing with protests. They had huge trouble in east Germany in 1953. In 1956 they had to invade Hungary. In 1968 they had to invade Czechoslovakia. They almost invaded Poland three separate time. And the Albanians and Romanians were a total nightmare for the Soviets. They were glad to get out of there! [laughter].

You think Vladimir Putin wants to go back there? Putin, as I've said on numbers occasions, did not want to invade Ukraine, he knows what happens when you start invading other countries. And he'll take a big chunk of territory in Eastern Ukraine but he's not gonna take a big chunk of territory in Western Ukraine cause it's filled with ethnic Ukrainians.

And you know what that means? That if he goes in there he is going to have an insurgency that is gonna be impossible to stamp out. Because those ethnic Ukrainians are as nationalistic as you can get, and they don't want Russia running their politics. One of the principle reasons that the Ukrainians are fighting so fiercely - it's truly remarkable how they've been able to stand up to the Russians - is because of nationalism... this is the way the world works. 

Israeli plan didn't work

And just one final example: look at the Israeli case... The Israelis long thought they could use a big stick, they call it the iron wall, to beat the Palestinians into submission to get the Palestinians to accept that it is a Jewish state, that Israeli Jews run the place, and that Palestinians are third class citizens. They have been unable to win with that policy. And what happened on October 7th is just the latest manifestation of Palestinian resistance - which is another way of saying Palestinian nationalism. 

Blindness of foreign policy elites spells more trouble ahead

What's really amazing is the foreign policy elite does not seem to have gotten the message. There's just no healthy appreciation of the power of nationalism inside the American foreign policy establishment, be they Democrats or Republicans. The end result is we are likely in the years ahead to have more trouble because of our inability to conceptualize just what a powerful force nationalism is. 

Blunt killing machines & social engineering? 

Militaries are good at breaking things [laughter]. These are giant killing machines. For anybody who spent any time in a military organization, it's very important to understand: that's what their good at. You want lots of people who are good at killing people on the other side. When you go to war you have these two huge organizations clashing into each other, armed to the teeth with all sorts of sophisticated weapons. And the A's are trying to kill the B's and the B's are trying to kill the A's. They're trained to do that. Well, do you think that that military - just think of the people who will be at the front lines of that military - is gonna be good at doing social engineering in a foreign country... where nobody knows the culture, nobody speaks the language. Really? A bunch of American GIs running around in south Vietnam... what do you think that's going to end up doing? You are more likely to get a Mai Lai massacre with Lieutenant Calley than you are... and have successful social engineering. Furthermore, even if you brought in a bunch of trained people, and you replaced those GIs with trained experts at social engineering, and you set them at the task of doing social engineering in south Vietnam or Afghanistan. Do you think they'd succeed? I don't think so [laughter].

Think about the United States. Think about doing social engineering in our own country. Our system is broke and we can't even fix it. But we're going to go into Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. ...The Soviets figured this out in Eastern Europe... This is the way the world works [nationalism as the driver]... and it's a relative recent phenomena - you don't want to lose sight of that, but it is the most powerful political ideology on the planet. 

Permanent State of Emergency

People who don't understand the limits of what you can do with the military... and think that we have the right and responsibility and the capability to reorder the world in our image, are going to end up creating a highly militarized society. Remember I said that in international anarchy the United States is always going to have a large military. But that's different from saying we are always going to have a large military that's fighting wars. That's they key distinction you want to keep in mind. 

And what's happened to the United States over time is that we not only have a large military but we're fighting wars all the time. And the end result is that we're in a permanent state of emergency... it happens to be worse now than it was two years ago or four years ago... but we're in a permanent state of emergency... when you're in a permanent state of emergency liberalism begins to erode in serious ways [that is, the classical Liberalism which undergirds the rise of the modern West]. ...Liberalism is in my opinion under threat in the United States, and what's quite remarkable here is that the foreign policy elite, Republicans and Democrats - that have taken us into these wars - have had a worldview that is thoroughly infused with liberal values and liberal thinking... and as I said to you... [they] missed the importance of nationalism. So these people are not anti-liberals at heart, but the policies that they are pushing this country to pursue... those policies are undermining liberalism in the end, which in my opinion is a great tragedy. 

Carlos Quiles was injured when his Uber driver crashed in May 2022. Now he's in the midst of a 'nightmare' trying to recoup the insurance money necessary to pay for his medical bills, according to a new report from Bloomberg. 

He told Bloomberg: “From the very beginning, it was a nightmare. Each and every time you call, it’s at least 30 minutes hold time. And they either hang up on you or they transfer you to someone else.”

His driver lost control of his Toyota while swatting away an obstruction on the windshield. And Quiles, who needed surgery on his left shoulder due to the accident, is still awaiting payments from American Transit Insurance Co., the driver's insurer. His lawyer has been negotiating with the New York-based company for nearly two years.

The Bloomberg report notes that many others also share frustrations with American Transit (ATIC), the largest insurer of commercial taxis and rideshare vehicles in the city, holding over 60% market share.

Even Uber Technologies Inc. is suing ATIC in federal court, accusing it of repeatedly failing to honor coverage for New York City rideshare drivers involved in accidents.

Uber claims these delays led to 23 lawsuits against the company and its drivers over crashes involving bodily injuries between May and August 2023. ATIC attorneys deny the allegations, but the lawsuit continues as the insurer faces financial trouble, reporting over $700 million in losses in the second quarter, prompting state regulatory intervention.

ATIC’s Chief Financial Officer, Christopher Ryan, and other company representatives did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the lawyers representing the taxi driver in the Quiles case. The company posted $700 million in losses in Q2, "breaching thresholds that require state regulators to intervene", Bloomberg wrote. 

The report said that since 2021, a third-party actuary reviewing ATIC's financial statements for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners has repeatedly stated that the company's reserves are inadequate, a view disputed by ATIC's executives.

Without new capital, ATIC risks being unable to pay claims or insure drivers, threatening the city’s transportation network, which relies on over 117,000 cabs. Even if another insurer steps in, drivers could face higher premiums.

Drivers insured by ATIC currently pay $4,000 to $6,000 annually, depending on factors like experience and claims history—rates competitors argue don't match the risk. Fleet owner Dawood Mian warns that if ATIC raises premiums, costs could increase by 30%, further straining an industry already burdened by rising expenses and heavy debt from falling medallion values.

Meanwhile, drivers protested outside City Hall against Uber and Lyft for reducing their access mid-shift to fight a minimum wage rule, cutting their earnings.

New York's Division of Financial Services is “working with the company and other stakeholders to address these longstanding financial issues, and protect drivers, passengers and the stability of the New York livery insurance market", according to the report. 

Authored by Donald Jeffries via "I Protest",

Merriam-Webster defines “democracy” as: “a: Government by the people especially : rule of the majority, b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Well, that sounds good. Do we have a rule of the majority? The majority of Americans, after all, about eighty percent of them, are losing in this rigged economy, and living paycheck to paycheck at best. I don’t think they’re “ruling” anything. We all (well, some of us) know that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution clearly states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Again, sounds good. But when’s the last time you heard about one of our tyrannical judges ruling in favor of someone invoking the 10th Amendment? Since the Constitution delineates very limited powers to the central government, this should mean that the vast majority of power in this country resides in the States, or the people.

The 10th Amendment isn’t any more popular than the 1st, the 2nd, or the 4th. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have any “hate speech,” or “gun control” laws, or no-knock SWAT team raids on private residences. It’s pretty obvious that the people don’t have any power. There are, of course, distinct differences between democracy and the constitutional republic our Founders established. But today, in the year of our Lord 2024, we don’t appear to have either in America 2.0. Plenty of taxation, but no representation. Lincoln shattered the foundational principle of our War for Independence, the consent of the governed. Millions don’t consent to this tyranny and authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter. We can’t elect better leaders. 96 percent of these horrific incumbents are returned to office every election. It’s just as bad whether that’s because of fraud, or massive stupidity on the part of the voters.

Note in the illustration above that four of the ten hands are Black. Forty percent. Blacks are twelve percent of the U.S. population. Yes, I know that any television viewer would be shocked by that. I think that more than half the actors in commercials now are Black. I don’t need to mention how overrepresented Blacks are in sports and entertainment. So, how does all this excessive interest in our second largest minority group equate with majority rule? Which is what the dictionary says “democracy” is. What does “the people” mean? In our multicultural society, which people are we talking about? There are conflicting interests among these various groups of people. But the interests of White people- who are still clinging to a majority of the population- are ignored. Or belittled. By White elites.

Ballot referendums are a pure form of democracy. The voters decide on a policy, without any representative go-between. In 1994, a very demographically different California approved Proposition 13, which would have prohibited illegal immigrants from obtaining government services. Well, what could be more reasonable than that? The beloved Bill Clinton campaigned strongly against the measure, so you know it was a good one. Under the unconstitutional concept of Judicial Review, which I examine in detail in my book American Memory Hole, Judge Mariana Pfaelzer was able to quash the measure, and thus the will of the people, a month after the proposition was approved. To today’s Left, that was “democracy.” A judge overriding the majority of the people- you know, the ones who run things under a “democracy.” Millions of illegals later, we’re probably more “democratic” than ever.

In 2008, public opinion polls showed that 95 percent or more of Americans were opposed to the banker bailout. So, this being a democracy and all, every national political leader was opposed to the will of the people, and the disastrous bailout was implemented. In the 2020 election, millions of Americans were convinced that there had been massive electoral fraud, and that Joe Biden hadn’t been honestly elected. Was it a majority of the people? Hard to tell, but certainly enough that their voices should have been heard. That’s what would happen in any “democracy.” Instead, untold numbers of protesters were imprisoned, and some are still being denied due process over three years later. Those who appeared in court were subjected to Alice in Wonderland-style kangaroo trials, and given incredibly harsh prison sentences. We are told that these “insurrectionists” were a “threat to democracy.”

We hear that a lot now; about the “threat to democracy.” Donald Trump is a threat. So are all of those who support him. And the “White Supremacists” who secretly rule the land, but are too shy to ever make their presence known, represent the “greatest threat to democracy” of all. According to the lovable hair sniffer Joe Biden, before he was deposed from office in a silent coup. Elon Musk is another “threat.” Just issuing statements in support of free speech was enough. He probably doesn’t really believe in it, but in today’s climate, just saying something against censorship is a “threat to democracy.” Apparently, censorship is one of the cornerstones of democracy. Somebody tell Webster’s to update their definition. They did it for vaccines, after all, during the COVID psyop. Robert Reich and others now want Musk to be arrested. For making comments in support of free speech. That’s a “threat to democracy.”

Disputing the vote is a “threat to democracy.” If you don’t believe it, you may find yourself being prosecuted by the state. The same state that would be responsible for rigging elections, if one can imagine such a thing. Is that any different from the Crown prosecuting someone a few centuries ago, for offenses against the king? “Hate Speech,” the Orwellian term meant to cover Thought Crimes, is also something that violates the precepts of “democracy.” Disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, all of it is a “threat to democracy.” Only FCC approved content is allowed in this democracy, peasant. The state will eagerly censor any unapproved books about Sandy Hook, Pizzagate, 9/11 and the like. But don’t you dare touch a pubic hair between the covers of the all-time classic Gender Queer. The Left considers removing this detailed account of man-boy love from school libraries to be “book burning.”

Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, Joe Biden attempted to frame the choices as either “democracy” or “MAGA Republicans.” Political satirist Tim Young observed, "I'm not saying ‘fascism’ officially had its coming out party in America tonight... I'm just saying Biden condemned his political opponents as a threat to America and democracy set to a blood red background with the military standing behind him." Never before had an American president demonized the opposition to such an extent. Biden was labeling half of America as “extremists.” Perhaps “insurrectionists.” So he was saying that protecting the border- as any nation must to remain sovereign- wasn’t “democracy.” Is private gun ownership part of “democracy?” So what does he and his ilk represent? Empty “Woke” rhetoric? Cancel culture? Abortion on demand?

I would love to hear a “journalist” ask Kamala Harris or Tim Walz for their definition of “democracy.” As we’ve shown, it isn’t the rule of the majority. White people, for example, are still a majority in this country, but anti-White discrimination in business and government hiring is established practice. That’s an odd way to treat the majority. You know, the ones who are in charge under a democracy. Harris, Walz, and every other leading Democrat is on the record as opposing free speech, and supporting censorship. So I guess democracy doesn’t mean free speech. Freedom of association? Nope, you’ll be branded “racist” if you say you aren’t interested in Black guys on a dating site. But you can harass Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of your restaurant. Does democracy respect privacy? Well, not if some cop asks you for your identification and you refuse, as you should under the Bill of Rights.

So what, then, is democracy? It sure isn’t what the dictionary says it is. To US leaders, who champion “our democracy” incessantly, it means sending billions to a comedian turned dictator in Ukraine, who has banned all political opposition and shut down newspapers who criticize him. Our billions are helping to “defend democracy.” Again, I’d really like to hear some Democrat define democracy. When I was a young, ACLU card carrying radical, I thought of the First Amendment when I thought of democracy. I thought of “the people” exerting their will, like Frank Capra taught me in his populist films. I thought of defending the little guy. Helping the poor. Avoiding war. Today’s Democrats defend the powerful. They don’t even notice the poor. And they haven’t opposed a war since Vietnam. To “Woke” Democrats, democracy means censorship, prosecuting your opponents, continuous war, and divisive cultural lunacy.

Benjamin Franklin described democracy as “two wolves and a sheep arguing over what’s for dinner.” In America 2.0 “democracy,” we have a small cartel of powerful wolves, and hundreds of millions of sheep. Despite it being a democracy, the sheep curiously have no power whatsoever. Thomas Jefferson is considered the first American Democrat, although his party called themselves the Democratic-Republicans. No modern Democrat dares to invoke Jefferson’s name, except perhaps to slander him as a “racist.” Jefferson would be a monumental “threat to democracy” in today’s world. So would all the Founders. Except Hamilton, of course. The Declaration of Independence is filled with “threats to democracy.” So is the Constitution, because of the inclusion of the Bill of Rights. Freedom. Liberty. Independence. All of it goes against the “core values” of America 2.0.

The word “democracy” comes from the Greeks, who are credited with establishing the first such form of government. In Greek, it means “peoples power.” Remember, the great Abraham Lincoln talked about of the people, by the people, for the people. Now he was celebrating a “cause” that revolved around stopping people from practicing all that “of, by and for” stuff, with guns and cannons. But the words are beautiful. They’re just classic disinformation. If only the Fact Checkers had been around at Gettysburg. So, the way the Greeks defined it, democracy sounds a lot like populism. Remember John Lennon’s song Power to the People? When’s the last time you heard that one on an oldies station? America is the wonder of the world; a democracy where the people have no power. And if you point that out, you’ll be considered a “threat to democracy.”

To most average people, democracy means freedom. Hey, we live in a democracy. We get to vote! The vote is sacred to defenders of American “democracy.” Go ahead, pick your candidate. You have two choices. Two! Our democracy is full of choices. That’s why “pro choice” is kind of the foundation of our “democracy.” The MAGA people are a “threat to democracy” because they want women to stop having abortions. To a mere community college dropout like me, that would seem to be a good thing. But apparently not. I see all the older women, past menopause, violently confronting pro-life demonstrators. It’s as if they would love to just have an abortion for the sake of it, if they were still biologically able to. That’s a moral disfunction I can’t comprehend. And we wonder why these same angry women embrace the transgender madness? Anything but birth! That would be a “threat to democracy.”

Just searching online, it’s easy to find all the “threats to democracy.” Like “racist,” they are everywhere. Democrats have called “Republicans” in general “threats to democracy,” much as Whites in general have been castigated for their imaginary “privilege.” During the 2022 elections, many Republicans were referred to as a “threat to democracy.” And to think the best the right-wingers in the 1950s could come up with was “commies” or “pinkos.” And elections themselves appear to be a “threat to democracy.” Time magazine warned, in 2021, that “American Democracy Can’t Survive Unless the Far Right Is Marginalized. Here’s How to Do It.” So despite their “rock the vote” lust for this “precious democratic right,” today’s Left actually wants to limit your largely nonexistent “choices” further. They want you to pick between a Democrat and a RINO. Every vote counts! Don’t complain if you didn’t vote. That’s “democracy.”

We also learn that “gender imbalance” is a “threat to democracy.” Presumably, this “threat” will be mitigated if the eminently qualified Kamala Harris attains the presidency. Another “threat to democracy” is the “climate crisis.” There are currently some 2807 climate-related laws and policies all around the world. But there is a call for even more. This obsession with the “climate” meshes perfectly with the insanity of transgenderism and critical race theory. What is meant by the “climate” is unclear. For instance, the damage done to the ecosystem by the Gulf Oil spill seems not to be any kind of “crisis.” Greta Thunberg is as disinterested in that as she is in the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Well, at least the poor residents there got some fast food, courtesy of Donald Trump. Trump going there was probably a “threat to democracy.” Buying them fast food definitely was.

Now, before you chide me by saying, don’t you know we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy? So let’s go to the dictionary again. We learn that a republic is a “form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body. Modern republics are founded on the idea that sovereignty rests with the people.” So that sounds pretty much like a democracy to me. Both stress the power of the people. But if we are a republic, then again 80 percent or more of “the people” appear to have no power, no matter what the dictionary says. So, yes, I know we are supposed to be a republic, but what we have doesn’t look like that, either. How about an oligarchy? Which the dictionary says is “a government in which a small group exercises control, esp. for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Now, that sounds familiar! Is there a better description for our society?

Well, how about plutocracy? A plutocracy is defined as “a form of government or rulership by the rich. It is a form of governance where policies and systems are geared to benefit the wealthy and powerful more than others.” Well, bingo there as well! I think we can combine the small, corrupt group of oligarchs with the plutocratic reality that all our policies are designed to benefit the rich and powerful. So what do we call that? An oligocracy? A plutoarchy? However you look at it, our system of government is much closer to an oligarchy or a plutocracy than a constitutional republic or a democracy. So Thought Criminals like us are not a “threat to democracy.” We’re a threat to oligarchy or plutocracy. “Woke” Hollywood catchphrases are not a substitute for human liberty.

So, in essence, the “democracy” today’s Democrats extol and claim to be defending is not a “democracy” by any definition of the word. The January 6 protesters felt that their votes hadn’t been honestly counted. To our “representatives,” that means they were a “threat to our democracy.” If they’d shown you didn’t count the votes honestly, your “democracy” might be overthrown. The defenders of America 2.0 democracy embrace censorship, and war, the Great Replacement, the transgender lunacy, and multitudes of illegal immigrants. And if those immigrants commit violent crimes, you better not mention it, or you’ll be as “racist” as Donald Trump. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus for you. Your vote is precious. The troops died to preserve it. If anyone suggests otherwise, cancel them. Prosecute them. Hum the Black national anthem, click your heels three times and remember, you are defending democracy.

With oil trading at 2024 lows, despite a report earlier denying last week's Reuters fake news that OPEC+ would hike output in October which sent oil prices tumbling, and despite last night's API report that a whopping 7.4 million in crude oil were drawn in the past week with draws also in all other categories, moments ago the DOE confirmed what we warned recently, namely that as CTAs - and the Kamala/Biden oil trading desk - are aggressively shorting oil into oblivion, oil demand remains resilient and very soon we may hit tank bottoms...

Will be ironic if CTAs short oil all the way down to tank bottoms

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 3, 2024

... when it reported another huge draw in the last week. Here is what API reported yesterday, and what the DOE said this morning:

API

• Crude  -7.4mm (exp. -1mm)
• Gasoline -0.3mm
• Distillates -0.4mm
•    Cushing -0.8mm

DOE

• Crude  -6.873k (exp. -0.3mm)
• Gasoline +848k
• Distillates -371k
• Cushing -1.142mm

Of note, US Crude stocks declined for the 9th week in the past 10 (my much more than expected) as Gasoline inventories rose fractionally reversing 3 weeks of draws while distillates were flat. But what is perhaps most interesting is the continued drain of Cushing, where a few more weeks of this decline and everyone will be talking about tank bottoms.

One reason for the large oil draw is that in the past week, the Biden admin added a notable 1.8mm barrels to the SPR, the largest increase since June 2020.

That pushed the total US Crude stockpile down to its lowest since January...

The collapse in US inventories takes place as US crude production remained at an all time record high (and despite a continued decline in oil rigs).

And yet, despite the massive draw, despite the collapsing US inventories, despite the risk of tank bottoms in Cushing, and despite the OPEC+ decision not to hike output, WTI Crude prices extended their earlier losses as the bears are now fully in control of the energy complex.

The flip side is that with demand flat if not rising, there is only so much more inventory draws that can take place before there is an unprecedented paper price vs physical showdown, and a full-blown physical oil crisis that blows up in the shorting CTAs' electronic faces.

A suspected terror attack was attempted near the Israeli Consulate in Munich on Thursday, which resulted in the attacker being fatally wounded by police amid a huge security response.

A shootout erupted shortly after 9am after a young man was witnessed carrying a "long-barreled gun" with a bayonet attached to it in the Karolinenplatz area, near downtown Munich. Five officers were at the scene at the time and responded with gunfire. The 18-year-old shooter later identified as being a Muslim from Austria died at the scene. 

German Police said they immediately deployed 500 officers to the area on fears there could be more attackers. Authorities believe that the Israeli consulate was the target given it happened on the anniversary of the Palestinian terror attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics which killed eleven Israeli athletes. But investigators say they are still looking at the motive.

German authorities in a follow-up press briefing confirmed they are treating a shooting as a "possible attack on an Israeli institution," according to the words State Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann. The weapon used was also revealed to be a vintage rifle.

Dr. Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that while the background and motive for the attack is still not fully known, "What we do know takes our breath away." He added: There could have been a catastrophe in Munich today. I thank the police for their quick intervention."

German police shot dead an armed assailant near the Israeli consulate in Munich, saying the incident was a "possible attack on an Israeli institution."

Police confirmed the attacker was an 18-year-old Austrian national known to security authorities as an Islamist. pic.twitter.com/ljJXcC9f8m

— DW News (@dwnews) September 5, 2024

Spiegel news outlet reported that the gunman was already known to security authorities as an Islamist who lived in Austria’s Salzburg area near the border with Bavaria. Below is Times of Israel citing German and European media:

The suspect in a shooting near the Israeli consulate in Munich was a teenage Austrian national who was known to security authorities as an Islamist, the Standard newspaper and Spiegel news outlet report.

The suspect lived in Austria’s Salzburg area near the border with Bavaria and had recently traveled to Germany, the reports say.

"We have to assume that an attack on the Israeli Consulate possibly was planned early today,” Bavaria’s top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, told reporters at the scene. "It’s obvious that, if someone parks here within sight of the Israeli Consulate... then starts shooting, it most probably isn’t a coincidence."

It turns out the consulate was closed at the time of the shooting, with diplomatic staff at the time planning to attend a memorial memorial ceremony for the 1972 attack. No Israeli personnel were hurt in Thursday's incident.

#BREAKING Israel President says the shooting at the consulate in Munich was a terror attack after a phone call with his German counterpart pic.twitter.com/MFiwIEyxVs

— Guy Elster (@guyelster) September 5, 2024

The fact that the young Islamist was already known to German authorities raises a lot of questions about not only his ease of entry into the country from Austria, but how he wasn't apprehended and questioned earlier. There's also the question of how he was able to walk around central Munich for so long in broad daylight (long enough to be filmed by nearby bystanders) brandishing a large vintage gun with a bayonet.

Initial jobless claims continues to ignore the 'other crappy data', printing 227k (in line with 230k exp) and basically unchanged at two-month lows...

Source: Bloomberg

On a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, initial claims are at their lowest in 10 months!! Of course! Why not.

Continuing claims also dropped (to three month lows)...

Source: Bloomberg

So, everything is awesome!

Your government-supplied data tells you so!

The dumpster fire at Intel under the direction of CEO Pat Gelsinger, who is doing his best to replace Marissa Mayer as most overpaid and useless 'turnaround' CEO in tech history, looks like it could finally wind up being put out as a result of the company assessing strategic alternatives.

But the damage has surely been done. Intel stock has fallen about -56% this year so far while competitor Nvidia has soared more than 141% over the same period. Over a 5 year period, it gets even uglier: Intel has plunged -53.4% while Nvidia is up an astounding 2,750%. 

However, past performance is not indicative of future results, and CEO Gelsinger is looking to finally try and claw some value back into Intel shares by proposing a number of strategic transactions to the board later this month, Reuters reported last week. 

Gelsinger and top executives plan to propose a strategy to the board later this month to cut non-essential businesses and reduce capital spending, aiming to revitalize the chipmaker, the report says, mimicking a lot of 'turn around' talk we've heard from Intel during Gelsinger's tenure over the last 3 years. 

The plan includes cost-cutting measures like selling businesses, such as the programmable chip unit Altera, which Intel can no longer support from its dwindling profits, according to a source.

Gelsinger and senior executives are set to present a plan to the board in mid-September to cut costs and streamline operations, the report says.

This plan does not propose splitting Intel or selling its foundry business to a company like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. However, the details are still being finalized and could change before the meeting.

As Reuters notes, Intel has already separated its foundry and design businesses and reports their financials separately to protect client confidentiality. The company is struggling as it lags behind competitors like Nvidia in the AI chip market.

Intel's market cap has fallen below $100 billion after a poor second-quarter earnings report, while Nvidia's exceeds $3 trillion.

The new proposal is likely to suggest further cuts in capital spending, possibly halting the $32 billion factory project in Germany, which has faced delays. In August, Intel announced plans to reduce capital spending to $21.5 billion by 2025, down 17% from this year, and issued a weaker-than-expected third-quarter forecast.

Another overnight Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine included major strikes on the far western city of Lviv, which lies hundreds of miles from the front lines, which resulted in seven people killed, according to Ukrainian authorities.

These stepped-up strikes are widely viewed as retaliation for Kiev forces' ongoing Kursk cross-border offensive. But given that missiles rained down so close in proximity to Ukraine's border with Poland, Polish aerial forces were scrambled during the attack.

Reuters reports that Polish and allied aircraft were scrambled for the third time in eight days to closely monitor the inbound projectiles, and were ready to intercept them in the event the missiles approached Polish airspace.

The incident shows how easily NATO aircraft could jump into the fight against Russian airpower on Ukraine's behalf. Warsaw has complained of recent airspace violations by Russian projectiles, including a drone that went down in its territory on Aug.26.

Earlier this week Poland's foreign minister sparked fresh controversy within the NATO military alliance by saying that member states have a 'duty' to shoot down incoming Russian missiles when they are in Ukraine's skies threatening the population below.

"Membership in Nato does not trump each country’s responsibility for the protection of its own airspace – it’s our own constitutional duty," FM Radoslaw Sikorski told the Financial Times. The comments showed little concern over the possibility that such action risks major escalation with Russia.

"I’m personally of the view that, when hostile missiles are on course of entering our airspace, it would be legitimate self-defense [to strike them] because once they do cross into our airspace, the risk of debris injuring someone is significant," the Polish top diplomat had said.

Without doubt, Poland constitutes ground zero for NATO's 'eastern flank' and has been engaged in a massive defense spending drive and military build-up since the Feb.2022 Russian invasion began. 

Below are some stats and recent defense spending developments via Al Jazeera:

• On Tuesday, Warsaw announced new military deals worth $520m, the latest move in a drive to beef up its defence prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
• Poland currently spends 4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense – the highest ratio of any NATO member – and hopes to boost the number to 4.7 percent next year.
• Last month, Warsaw signed a $10bn deal to buy 96 Apache attack helicopters from US manufacturer Boeing. They will replace outdated Russian Mi-24 helicopters.
• Warsaw has also announced a deal to buy hundreds of AIM-120C AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, as well as a contract for 48 launchers for US-designed Patriot air defence systems.
• Poland’s army has 200,000 soldiers, making it NATO’s third largest after the United States and Turkey, and the biggest in the European Union.

As for Poland's push to get NATO leadership to sign on to new rules of engagement regarding Russian strikes, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is soon expected to retire from the top post, has issued some pushback.

Prior Russian aerial assaults have targeted a military base just tens of kilometers from the Polish border...

Stoltenberg rejected the Polish proposal and asserted that it presents too much risk of NATO "becoming part of the conflict." Of course, at this point this seems to be exactly what Zelensky wants--to drag the West deeper into the war on Ukraine's behalf.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The UK government’s plan to further raise the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas producers will drive investments away from the region while Britain still needs oil and gas for the foreseeable future, the chief executive of Harbour Energy, the largest UKCS producer, told the Financial Times.

The Labour Party, which came to power in the UK after a landslide victory in the July general election, said in July that it intends to raise the rate of the Energy Profits Levy (EPL) to 38% from 1 November 2024, from 35% now, bringing the headline rate of tax on upstream oil and gas activities to 78%, up from 75% currently. The levy will be further extended by a year to 2030.

Harbour Energy’s CEO Linda Cook has criticized the levy ever since it was first introduced by the previous UK government in 2022.

Now Cook told FT that a rise in the windfall tax would lift the barrier to attract investment in the UK even higher.

“The fiscal regime in a lot of the other countries — in all of the other countries — in which we will have a presence will be more attractive” than the UK North Sea, she added.

Earlier this week, UK offshore industry group OEUK warned that not only viable capital investment would be reduced from $18.5 billion (£14.1 billion) to just $3 billion (£2.3 billion) in the period 2025 to 2029, but the tax hike would also lead to $16 billion (£12 billion) lower tax receipts for the country compared to the current tax regime.

Last week, Equinor, the operator of one of the major new field developments in recent years, Rosebank, said it awaits clarity on the UK tax regime by the Labour government before strategizing and committing to investments in the UK North Sea.

As a result of the planned hike in the windfall tax, UK North Sea producers have already warned they are considering moving to more fiscally stable jurisdictions such as Norway.

Neo Energy said this week it was slowing down investment in light of “fiscal and regulatory uncertainty”.

Via Remix News,

Although the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secured a first-place finish in the Saxony elections on Sunday, the party is still launching an investigation into an alleged computer error that cost them a seat in parliament and is also calling for an end to mail-in votes, citing security concerns and shady practices.

The first issue is the alleged software glitch that resulted in the AfD and the Christian Democrats (CDU) both losing a seat, while the Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) both gained one seat. The party says that it is launching an investigation into this.

“We want to know exactly what went wrong,” said the AfD’s state and parliamentary group leader Jörg Urban in a statement. He is demanding an exact error analysis. “If there are any irregularities, we will take legal action.”

Notably, the loss of one seat resulted in the AfD losing its blocking majority, which would have allowed the party, for example, to block the appointment of certain judges in the state.

???? NEW: Alleged software error in Germany means the AfD and CDU both lose one seat in Saxony.

That seat was important for the AfD, as it provided the party with a "blocking minority" during crucial votes that require a two-thirds majority. pic.twitter.com/kqmCw3nLdR

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 2, 2024

The error initially gave the AfD and CDU an incorrect number of seats. After a review, “the state election management corrected the allocation of seats,” according to the German news outlet Leipziger Volkzeitung.

Urban said that nobody is being accused of manipulating the vote, but, “in this case, it is about the AfD’s political options in the Saxon state parliament. Any doubt about the final election result must therefore be ruled out,” he said.

Regardless of why the error came about, Saxony’s election commission suffered a serious black eye, casting doubt on the election results during an already polarized election.

???? NEW: "Uncontrolled immigration" fueled the AfD's "shock" victory in the east.

In fact, immigration is now the TOP issue for Germans, according to political analysts. pic.twitter.com/JBunVsP7Yl

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 3, 2024

Mail-in ballots

Following the results in Thuringia and Saxony, AfD co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, is calling for an end to mail-in ballots. He discussed his concerns about this form of voting during a conference with top AfD officials.

“It is also the task of the opposition to always doubt what a government is doing or what happened in an election. That is also a legitimate right and that is a good thing. And I just really want to point out, and we will also question this, for example, the entire security for the legal storage of ballot boxes, some of which are not stored in a legally secure manner, where in some cases only one person or two have access to these ballot boxes,” he said.

???? JUST IN: "I would ban postal voting."

Germany's AfD party is calling for an end to mass mail-in ballots for elections.

Party co-leader @Tino_Chrupalla points out suspicious activity in the elections in Saxony and Thuringia in this new @RMXnews video. pic.twitter.com/tKydzaqaVj

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 4, 2024

He went on to say that postal voting has been a concern in other elections and that these issues keep coming up. However, he also pointed to a problem plaguing other countries like the United States, which instituted mass mail-in ballots in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, which involves activists entering retirement homes and potentially manipulating vulnerable elderly voters.

In the case of Germany, Chrupalla stated, “We have also seen this in old and other election campaigns, such as the current campaigning in retirement and nursing homes, especially when the CDU and SPD campaign in these old people’s homes, which are run by Diakonie or Caritas, or go in and out there, and the Afd does not even get access to present their programs to the elderly. These are also things of influence that are not democratic in my opinion.”

Nortably, both Diakonie and Caritas are run by the Protestant and Catholic churches, both of which have come out against the AfD, including expelling members of the party from the Church and calling for Germans to vote against them.

Chrupalla is calling for an end to postal voting, saying: “Personally, I would ban postal voting again. It has only been introduced as an exception or initiated in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is not the rule, it should not become the rule and it is not regulated by law in such a way that it is made the rule.”

Hungary and its leader Viktor Orban are once again at the center of an EU firestorm of controversy over a new work visa and residency permit policy which will allow easier access to the country for Russian and Belarusian nationals.

The central European country has long had a national card system which previously was only available to Ukrainian and Serbian citizens, which both have EU candidacy status but are not yet part of the bloc. The permit scheme was just extended to eight more countries, including Russia and Belarus.

European officials have blasted their inclusion in the visa program as essentially an open invitation for more Russian spies to come into the heart of Europe and given the ongoing Ukraine war.

Days ago a series of statements from EU officials raised "security concerns":

"Such a mechanism is highly questionable and raises very serious security concerns," Manfred Weber, chairman of the conservative European People's Party (EPP) wrote in a letter sent to European Council head Charles Michel on Monday.

He argued the new visa rules could create "grave loopholes for espionage activities," warning that the policy could "make it easier for Russians to move around" the EU's borderless Schengen area.

Weber further described "The lack of a clear need for such a broad and unregulated entry mechanism for Russian and Belarusian workers, combined with the possibility of inadequate security screening poses questions over the consequences for Hungary and the wider Schengen area."

He and others are demanding a formal explanation and discussion from Budapest. Critics of the policy change have said this is tantamount to handing out "easy visas" for Russians and Belarussians. 

However, Hungary has rejected what it calls "political hysteria" among EU leaders. The West has long denounced Orban's personal closeness with Russia's Putin and generally cooperative policies, and refusal to curtail Russian gas imports.

"There is no legal and security issue whatsoever when it comes to the national card," Hungary's minister for European Union affairs, Janos Boka, explained to reporters in Brussels Wednesday.

"However there is... a clear political hysteria which is created by the majority of the European parliament and certain member states," he added.

Hungary's change in its work permit system has been in effect since July. The controversy unleashed in its wake is yet the latest example of Orban being viewed as a 'pariah' within the EU. But he's always vowed to put Hungary and its interests first.

Megaprojects have been growing larger globally and many of them have recently centered on the Arab Gulf Region.

Construction software company 1Build estimates that before the end of the decade, the world will see the first construction megaproject with a cost estimation exceeding $1 trillion. Right now, there are several projects underway that exceed the size of $100 billion - despite the fact that $10 billion construction proposals were considered to be megaproject just some years ago.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, out of all nine ongoing megaprojects identified by 1Build, International Construction Magazine and Construction Review to cost $100 billion or more, four were being built in Arab Gulf States.

You will find more infographics at Statista

This includes the ambitious project of Neom City, actually a collection of futuristic towns and cities which are being built in Northwestern Saudi Arabia.

One of the developments, The Line, has received the most attention for being planned as a completely enclosed, linear city. The project was recently scaled back to a length of just 2.4 kilometers/1.5 miles (and a width of 200 meters/height of 500 meters). It is projected to house around 300,000 people by 2030 - just a fractions of its original length. Other ongoing megaprojects on the Gulf are King Abdullah Economic City North of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Silk City in Northern Kuwait, which will be home to the world's future tallest building.

More expensive than Neom City is the EU's Trans-European Transport Network. The large-scale infrastructure upgrade estimated to cost $600 billion includes the building of railway lines, roads, shipping routes and related structures in EU member countries to improve long-distance transport.

Projects on the peninsular have also suffered a setbacks, like the $250 billion, 2,000 km project to connecting GCC member countries by rail. Initially to be completed by 2018, it was halted, but planning has since resumed. A megaproject in the region that was partially canceled is entertainment and tourism complex Dubailand, initially scheduled to cost $64 billion.

Two and a half years after Bloomberg Opinion published advice for those earning under $300k on how to weather the Biden-Harris inflation storm—suggesting, among other things, swapping beef for "tasty meat substitutes" like lentils—we revisit whether labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci's tips have truly shielded consumers from the fallout of failed Bidenomics.

The short answer is no. 

Let's revisit the March 19, 2022 op-ed titled "Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. Here's How to Deal," which Bloomberg Opinion's X account reposted the article.

Inflation stings most if you earn less than $300K. Here's how to deal:

?? Take the bus
?? Don’t buy in bulk
?? Try lentils instead of meat
?? Nobody said this would be fun https://t.co/HGJEoXL5ZZ

— Bloomberg Opinion (@opinion) March 19, 2022

The X post was heavily ratioed, with some users saying... 

pic.twitter.com/4Y6XXNv3QG

— The Right To Bear Memes (@grandoldmemes) March 19, 2022

pic.twitter.com/5wgHFi1e6X

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) March 19, 2022

The author is clearly an elitist that lives in the city. Rural Americans don’t have the option to take the bus or cut down on driving.

— Beth Baumann (@eb454) March 20, 2022

And, by the way, elites can be very wrong about their predictions... 

Using the Amazon price tracker website camelcamelcamel, prices for a 12-pack of 14.5-ounce canned lentil soup produced by Amy's Soup sold for around $30 when the op-ed was published. Several months later, prices jumped to $50, indicating prices were elastic as demand likely soared due to cash-strapped consumers. Since the start of 2023, data from the tracking website show prices bounced between the $40s to $50s, even as high as $65. 

Meanwhile, the food inflation theme is still hot. 

Orange juice contracts in New York are hyperinflating to record highs. 

Wholesale egg prices via the Urner Barry Egg Index EBP are nearing record highs once again. 

Let's not even get started with USDA retail beef prices per pound. 

But don't worry—as the VP Harris team states, communist price controls will be the cure against evil supermarket chains that price gouge customers.

The higher price of breakfast food and just food in general is an alarming sign for low- and middle-income consumers. 

Last week's Dollar General stock price crash, fueled by warnings of a "financially constrained" core customer, is merely a warning sign the economy is trending in the wrong direction. 

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal appeals court has granted X Corp.’s request to block part of a California state law that requires social media platforms to disclose their content moderation and anti-hate speech policies.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an order on Sept. 4 that grants X Corp.’s request for a preliminary injunction and reverses a district court’s ruling against the Elon Musk-owned social media company in a legal challenge to California’s Assembly Bill (AB) 587.

The court said the bill’s content-moderation provisions are not narrowly tailored to serve California’s purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content-related practices, and may amount to unconstitutionally compelled speech.

“The panel held that X Corp. was likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” the appeals court judges wrote in their opinion.

AB 587 requires large social media companies to post their terms of service and to submit periodic reports to the California Attorney General’s office about their content-moderation practices and policies.

A key provision of the bill requires a semiannual report detailing how the platforms define six categories of content: hate speech or racism; extremism or radicalization; disinformation and misinformation; harassment; foreign political interference; and controlled substance distribution.

X Corp. argued in its lawsuit, which named California Attorney General Robert Bonta as defendant, that the law intends to pressure social media companies to censor content that the government deems objectionable and improperly compels speech in violation of the First Amendment.

“The legislative record is crystal clear that one of the main purposes of AB 587—if not the main purpose—is to pressure social media companies to eliminate or minimize content that the government has deemed objectionable,” X Corp. attorneys argued in their complaint.

In December 2023, a district court handed X Corp. a loss, denying the company’s request for a preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge William Shubb found that the Content Category Report provisions aren’t “unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law.”

Shubb acknowledged in his order that compliance with the provisions may carry a significant burden on social media companies, but he concluded that the periodic reports that include the mandated content policy and practice disclosures are merely factual and “uncontroversial.”

“The mere fact that the reports may be ‘tied in some way to a controversial issue’ does not make the reports themselves controversial,” the judge wrote in his eight-page opinion.

The district court judge determined that X Corp. was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its First Amendment claim and that the bill’s provisions are reasonably related to the state’s interest in transparency.

X Corp. appealed, leading to the Sept. 4 ruling, holding that the Content Category Report provisions likely compel noncommercial speech and probably fail the strict scrutiny standard because they are not narrowly tailored to serve the state’s transparency interest.

In reversing the lower court’s decision to deny X Corp.’s request for a preliminary injunction, the 9th Circuit instructed the district court to issue one in line with the panel’s opinion. In addition, the lower court must determine if the Content Category Report provisions can be separated from the rest of AB 587 and, if so, to determine whether any other challenged provisions should also be blocked.

A spokesperson for the California Attorney General’s office told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that it’s reviewing the opinion and “will respond appropriately in court.”

The legal battle between X Corp. and the state of California over AB 587 is part of a broader trend where social media platforms and industry groups have pushed back against laws around content moderation on First Amendment grounds.

Recently, the 9th Circuit appeals court issued a ruling that upheld the data privacy-related provisions of California’s online child safety laws, while striking down those that required social media platforms to assess and mitigate risks of harmful content. The appeals court found that the blocked provisions likely violate free speech rights.

In yet another headline you won't see from corporate media, 75% of those arrested in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery, and domestic violence are migrants.

In Queens, it's around 60%, the NY Post reports, citing police sources.

On any given day, Big Apple criminal court dockets are packed with asylum seekers who have run afoul of the law.

The problem is made much worse by sanctuary city laws that mean New York cops aren’t allowed to work with ICE on cases in which they believe suspects are in the country illegally. Additionally, the NYPD says it is barred from tracking the immigration status of offenders.

According to the report, the sanctuary city laws make it 'almost impossible' for authorities to handle the problem.

"New York City eliminated a tool to get rid of violent criminals. What a mess," said Jim Quinn, a veteran former prosecutor at the Queens District Attorney’s Office.

"The sanctuary city law is pathetic. It’s disgusting. It’s crazy."

Compounding matters, police sources say that word has gotten out among the migrant community about NYC's soft-on-crime policies which kicks criminals back onto the street quickly after they're arrested.

And even if they do end up serving time, one Bronx cop told the Post: "They don’t care if they get arrested — they laugh if they get sent to Rikers. Where they come from, they get tortured in jail."

The problem is so bad that Democrat Mayor Eric Adams has called on the City Council to change the sanctuary city laws - saying last week: "Right now, we don’t have the authorization to be able to go and coordinate with ICE. We have to follow the law."

According to a NYPD spokesperson, overall crime may be down last year, however they confirmed that "police officers are prohibited from asking about the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses, or suspects and therefore the NYPD doesn’t track data pertaining to immigration statuses."

"I would say about 75% of the arrests in Midtown Manhattan are migrants, mostly for robberies, assaults, domestic incidents and selling counterfeit items," one Midtown officer told the outlet.

He said the figure is an estimate because “you can’t be 100% sure [they’re migrants] unless you arrest them in a shelter or they’re dumb enough to give you a shelter address.”

Another Manhattan cop said that excluding petty larcenies at drugstores, the number of local arrests involving migrants is “easily” 75%, noting that most who get caught shoplifting go more for the pricey branded goods.

"They can’t be bothered with lower-end stores. They like Lululemon and Sunglass Hut," said the Manhattan cop, adding that migrants are responsible for "most" of the pickpocketing and similar crimes that the NYPD encounters.

Undercover officers arrest pickpocket suspects in Manhattan. Many migrant pickpocket rings now operate in NYC. The migrants are housed and fed by taxpayers while stealing from them and claiming to be peaceful refugees. pic.twitter.com/pJxXH4ESmz

— Andy Ngo ?????? (@MrAndyNgo) June 5, 2024

??BREAKING: Arrest at NYC Randall’s Island Migrant shelter.

NYPD senior officials and a significant police presence at the Randalls Island migrant shelter.

Remember your tax money is paying for all of this thanks to Biden. pic.twitter.com/gfhhPTYBXg

— I Meme Therefore I Am ???? (@ImMeme0) June 22, 2024

Meanwhile in the courts, "there are days we have so many migrant cases, we have to call in for extra Spanish interpreters," said one law enforcement officer at the Queens Criminal Courthouse. Another told The Post: "Come on Mondays! Almost every case is a migrant."

Some of the crimes migrants are being arrested for include gang violence or vicious sexual assaults.

Venezuelan migrant Yurlex Daniel Guzman Quintero was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court on Aug. 28, accused of a deplorable act of sexual abuse against his girlfriend in which he viciously choked her and held a knife to her head. Court documents allege it all happened in front of her child.

The same day, migrant Dionisio Moran Flores was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court for allegedly raping his 5-year-old daughter. He was ordered held on $150,000 bail. -NY Post

The Post also notes that Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, which has been terrorizing citizens around the country, has also set up shop in NYC and are already tied to hundreds of crimes - including the shootings of two NYPC officers who were trying to arrest a member in June. The gang has been arming up - smuggling guns into city-run shelters in food delivery bags in an effort to evade metal detectors.

"Most of the people we arrest are professionals — these aren’t their first crimes," said one law enforcement source, who added that Biden-Harris open border policies combined with sanctuary city laws are responsible for the current situation.

"Crime would be down significantly if there was a wall and we could account for everyone who comes into the country," the source told The Post. "And more importantly, throw them out if they commit a crime."

Hezbollah on Wednesday unleashed its largest volley of rockets on northern Israel since late August. At around noon local time, nearly 50 rocket sirens sounded throughout settlements and towns in northern Israel as around 65 missiles rained down.

The settlement of Kiryat Shmona was hit, according to Israeli media, resulting in fires in surrounding fields - which has been a common feature of the conflict with Hezbollah. The settlements of Malchia, Ramot Naftali, and Beit Hillel were also targeted, but it remains unclear how many projectiles made it through.

An Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) statement indicted that anti-air systems were able to intercept many rockets while failing to shoot down others.

Before Wednesday's attack, Hezbollah's daily rocket fire had significantly dropped and was at a bit of a lull. The IDF had last month launched a large-scale 'preemptive attack' on Lebanon, and Israeli officials attribute this action to quieting the ferocity of Hezbollah attacks in the week after.

The Jerusalem Post explains of the recent daily stats as follows:

The military did not explain why it missed certain rockets, though given the context, the sudden large volume after a relatively quiet period may have partially taken the air defense apparatus by surprise.

Prior to August 25, Hezbollah had at times launched 100 or even 200 rockets in a day against Israel's North and frequently was launching dozens per day.

In that sense, it was clear on Wednesday that Hezbollah had re-crossed a threshold of challenging Israel with more rocket attacks after a period of time in which it had seemed deterred by the August 25 IDF preemptive strike.

Still, the Israeli August preemptive strikes are having their intended effect of serving as a major warning to the whole of the Lebanese government and people.

Israel has since Oct.7 held the threat over the populating of "bombing Lebanon back to the stone age" - as Israeli officials have often repeated - should Hezbollah keep escalating its attacks which have left some 80,000 Israelis evacuated from their homes.

On Sunday the head of the Christian political party Lebanese Forces (LF), Samir Geagea, charged Hezbollah with "confiscating the Lebanese people's decision on war and peace, as if there were no state". He has accused the Shia paramilitary group of endangering the whole nation against the will of the Lebanese people.

Geagea described that the tit-for-tat conflict on the southern border is "a war that the Lebanese people reject, but has been imposed on them."

"It is a war that the Lebanese people do not want and over which the government has had no say. This war does not serve Lebanon, it has brought nothing to Gaza, nor alleviated its suffering one iota," he added.

Two years after his ouster, CNN host Brian Stelter announced he's returning to the network... but he's different this time...

"I am thrilled to share that I am returning as the lead author of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter, the digest I founded in 2015," Stelter wrote in a "surprise" message to "Reliable Sources" readers on Tuesday.

"I'm returning to CNN in a brand new role as Chief Media Analyst, which means I'll be appearing on air, developing digital content, and helming this newsletter."

Stelter said his return to CNN, which officially starts Sept. 9, won't be the same as his previous stint at the network, insisting "because I am different."

As Fox News reports, Stelter was fired by CNN in 2022 by his then-boss Chris Licht, who at the time was "determined to tamp down spectacle" and tasked by his own bosses at parent company Warner Bros. Discovery to restore CNN's journalistic credibility by shedding its left-wing partisanship.

In addition to re-hiring Stelter, new CEO Mark Thompson also promoted Jim Acosta to a weekday anchor role and elevated Laura Coats and Abby Phillips into primetime.

"I’m very happy to welcome Brian back to CNN in this new role," Thompson said in a statement.

"Brian is one of the best global experts in media commentary, and as the founder of the Reliable Sources newsletter, he is the perfect choice to lead Reliable Sources into its next chapter."

As a reminder, as host of "Reliable Sources," Stelter hyped Russiagate, fawned over Andrew Cuomo's coronavirus response, and in Oct. 2020 called the Hunter Biden laptop story a "manufactured scandal" peddled by the "right-wing media machine."

He even called disgraced anti-Trump lawyer Michael Avenatti a "serious" presidential contender going into the 2020 election cycle.

But, hey, he says he's "different" this time... so there's noting to worry about.

...and I experienced the news more like an everyday consumer. In doing so, I learned a whole lot about the attention economy and the information ecosystem. So this time around will be different, because I am different.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 3, 2024

Veteran commodities analyst Jeff Currie appeared on Bloomberg TV on Tuesday to explain how his bullish thesis for copper, which he called "the most compelling trade I've seen in my 30-year career" in mid-May, has been completely derailed or delayed by mounting economic woes in China. 

Let's begin with Currie, who led commodities research at Goldman Sachs for nearly three decades and now serves as the chief strategy officer of the energy pathways team at Carlyle Group, appeared on Bloomberg's Odd Lots on May 17 to discuss why copper was the best trade he has seen in his entire career.

At the time, when copper was trading at the all-time high of $11,104.50 a ton on the LME, Currie was all googly-eyed about being the biggest copper bull cheerleader: 

You know, it is the most compelling trade I have ever seen in my 30 plus years of doing this. You look at the demand story, it's got green CapEx, it's got AI, remember AI can't happen without the energy demand and the constraint on the electricity grid is going to be copper.

And then you have the military demand. So unprecedented demand growth against unprecedented weakness in supply growth because we have not been investing, it's teed you up for what I would argue is the most bullish commodity that I actually, I just quote many of our clients and other market participants say, you know, it's the highest conviction trade they've ever seen.

Fast-forward 3.5 months, and LME copper is trading just below $9,000 a ton. He joined Bloomberg TV on Tuesday to explain soaring inventories in Asia and a property market downturn in the world's second-largest economy were some of the key reasons behind copper's fall from grace. 

How did Currie not see the property market downturn 3.5 months ago? Oh, do we have questions for him... 

Copper "still has a floor based upon that strong structural supply story, but it has a cap on the upside based upon that weakness in demand," he said, adding, "I would say $8,500 on the bottom, $9,500 on the top until we start to see the policy begin to create some strength in China."

Currie top-ticked the copper market in his bull call in May. 

Meanwhile, earlier this week, Goldman revealed to clients that it exited its long-term bullish position on the base metal and slashed its 2025 price forecast by nearly $5,000. This seismic shift comes amid overwhelmingly weak economic data from China this summer and elevated levels of refined copper production being exported from the world's second-largest economy into global markets.

Goldman's Samantha Dart and Daan Struyven told clients:

"Copper rally delayed. In copper we've observed significant price elasticity of both supply and demand this summer. As a result, the sharp copper inventory depletion we had expected will likely come much later than we previously thought."

There's nothing to see here—just a massive rise in LME Asia copper inventories. 

About those smartest people in the room... 

After two weeks slumped in a deck-chair on a beach, The (reported) President of The United States of America - Joe Biden - is back baby...

However, when asked by reporters about going out on the trail to campaign for his vice president Kamala Harris, he offered a somewhat surprising response...

“I’m not able to go out in the crowds anymore. The Secret Service doesn’t let me,” Biden told a reporter.

When asked “why not?”

He responded “They say it’s too dangerous.”

Forgive us for questioning this 'narrative' but isn't that what the Secret Service is for?

Is society really so dangerous now that even the US President (and most popular president ever - according to 2020's reported election count) is fearful for his safety in public...

See how dangerous society has become under president Trump... Oh wait https://t.co/e3H7Z9CzQY

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 3, 2024

Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

Joe Biden hasn’t been the person running the country for his entire presidency. He just came back from a two week beach nap. 

Nothing sums this up better than having Biden sit on a fake White House set at a tiny fake desk to deliver a speech of no significance whatsoever.

What the hell is this?

Wait.

They broke out the fake White House set again? https://t.co/OyOa1VrfKg

— RBe (@RBPundit) September 3, 2024

Apparently it's not AI, it's true. It is Biden's little pretend office in a corner of his house.

— Mendy Howe (@MendyHowe12) September 3, 2024

Can you imagine Putin putting up with this?

Oh it’s real my friend. Other nations are laughing at us right now.

— Patriotic Ape ?????? (@PatrioticApe) September 3, 2024

Thankfully someone got him to put in his big boy pants.

Is that the kiddie desk in the White House day care?

— InfosecMike (@SamSecGuy) September 3, 2024

pic.twitter.com/3aXjHlJBjb

— David Hill (@DavidHi43655821) September 3, 2024

The press were all forced out of the room the second he finished reading the script and he answered zero questions.

They took him back to the home afterwards.

Joe Biden had to be escorted out of this room like a toddler...

Remember when we were told these were just "Cheap Fakes?"

Do not forget: Kamala Harris was a part of this coverup. She knew what he was and she lied about it. pic.twitter.com/stQ0UiL9DE

— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) September 3, 2024

Why isn’t he in the actual White House?

SNL sets look more realistic than this.

What the hell am I watching ?

— Heavyfuel (@heavyfuel1973) September 3, 2024

Barack was using the Oval Office.

— NorseThunder (@Odinsonsmjolnir) September 3, 2024

What’s the point in this anymore? 

It's quite amazing to watch this "who cares, it's over anyway" attitude.

— John C. Barry (@ShrinkGov) September 3, 2024

Just cut straight to President AI now.

An AI president and presidential candidate would do better than these two.

— Andrea E (@AAC0519) September 3, 2024

As we highlighted earlier Biden also says that he’s not allowed to go out into crowds because it’s “too dangerous.”

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Update (1433ET):

Shares of US Steel in New York crashed around 1343 ET after a Washington Post report, citing three people familiar with the matter, revealed that President Biden intends to formally block Nippon Steel's proposed $14.9 billion deal with the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker. 

Shares crashed 21% to the $27 handle, erasing all gains made in late 2023 after Japan's largest steelmaker said it would buy US Steel for $55 per share in an all-cash transaction.

If losses hold through the end of the cash session, this would be the largest daily loss since -26.8% on April 26, 2017. 

Financial Times said Biden's formal decision could come in just a few days. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris revealed on Monday that she opposed the deal, and President Trump has also vowed to block it. 

Earlier, WSJ cited US Steel CEO David Burritt as warning that a blocked deal with Japan's Nippon would result in plant closures. 

*     *    *

Just days after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris publicly opposed Nippon Steel's $14.9 billion bid for US Steel, the CEO of the Pittsburgh-based steel giant told the Wall Street Journal that the company would be forced to relocate its headquarters and shut down steel mills if the deal falls through.

CEO David Burritt told WSJ that Japan's Nippon plans to invest $3 billion in the company's older mills, ensuring the plants remain competitive in domestic and global markets. The investment will also secure the jobs of thousands of steelworkers.

"We wouldn't do that [upgrade plants] if the deal falls through," Burritt said in an interview, adding that US Steel doesn't have the money to afford upgrades.

The timing of Burritt's comments comes days after VP Harris said in a speech on Monday that she opposes Nippon's deal to purchase US steel, arguing that the Pittsburgh steelmaker "should remain American-owned and American-operated."

Since the deal was first announced in December following a multi-month bidding process, CEO Burritt has mostly refrained from making public statements. In the interview, he said Nippon would bring much-needed investment and the latest steelmaking technology to older mills in Gary, Ind., and its Mon Valley Works near Pittsburgh. He called the mounting opposition to the deal highly "puzzling and confusing."

Spending on mill maintenance and equipment upgrades was deferred over the last decade because US Steel was losing money as it struggled with elevated costs and low steel prices. Higher steel prices in recent years have helped restore profits despite some Wall Street analysts forecasting dismal demand in the quarters ahead amid recession threats.

US Steel owns two modern steel mills in Arkansas near Osceola in Mississippi County. Without investment from Nippon, the company could shutter Mon Valley, the company's last steelmaking operation in Pittsburgh. 

"If that mill won't make it to the next decade, why would we stay there?" Burritt said, adding more of its steelmaking capacity is shifting to the southern part of the US, and with that, so could the headquarters. 

Besides VP Harris and President Biden, former President Trump has also vowed to block the deal if re-elected. Both candidates are fighting for the votes of Pennsylvania steelworkers and blue-collar folks in this crucial battleground state. 

Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Part One of this article described the burgeoning bull steepening yield curve environment and what it implies about economic growth and Fed policy. It also discussed the three other predominant types of yield curve shifts and what they suggest for the economy and Fed policy.

Persistent yield curve shifts tend to correlate with different stock performances. With the odds growing that a long bull steepening may be upon us, it’s incumbent upon us to quantify how various stock indices, sectors, and factors have done during similar yield curve movements.

Limiting Losses With Yield Curve Analysis

Stocks spend a lot more time trending upward than downward. However, in those relatively brief periods where longer-term bearish trends endure, investors are advised to take steps to reduce their risks and limit their losses. An active approach puts you on higher ground than you otherwise might have been. Moreover, when the market resumes its upward trend, you have ample funds to purchase stocks at lower prices and better risk-return profiles.

We discussed this topic at length in Bear Market Wealth Management. Per the article:

Growing wealth happens over decades. Within these decades are many bullish and bearish cycles. While investors tend to focus on making the most of the bullish cycles, it is equally important to avoid letting bear markets reverse your progress. The amount of time spent in bear markets is minimal, but the time lost recovering your wealth can be substantial. 

You may wonder why an article about bond yield curves leads off with a discussion of bear market strategies for stocks. Simply, some yield curve shifts correlate well with positive stock market returns and others with negative returns. Prior bull steepening environments have not been friendly to buy and hold stock investors. Therefore, we hope this analysis guides you in preparing to reduce risk if needed.

The Recent Bull Steepening History

The graph below charts the 2- and 10-year yields and the 2-year/10-year yield curve. Additionally, shaded in gray are periods we deem persistent bull steepening. We defined the bull steepening periods by the curve’s movement and the trend’s consistency. To qualify, the yield curve had to be increasing, with 2-year and 10-year yields moving lower for 20 weeks or longer. Furthermore, we required at least 80% of the weeks to be in the bullish steepening trend.

As shown, there have been five such periods since 1995. The most recent stretched from May 2019 to March 2020. The current bull steepening has not been occurring long enough to meet our standards defined above.

Bull Steepening Cycles Are Bearish For Most Stocks

Having defined the periods, we then studied various stock indices, sectors, and factors to assess their performance during the timeframes. To remind you, bull steepening trades typically occur when the economy is slowing, and anticipation of Fed rate cuts grows. Those traits adequately describe the current period.

Furthermore, and of importance, the current steepening is occurring from a yield curve that has been inverted for two years. Inverted means the yield on the 10-year is less than the 2-year. An inversion reduces the incentives for banks to lend, thus further increasing the odds of economic weakness.

As noted in Part One, the yield curve inversion is a recession warning but is not usually timely. Contrarily, the yield curve un-inversion typically portends a recession is coming within a year or less.

The yield curve briefly returned to positive territory as we put the final edits on this article. Therefore, we now have a much more explicit recession warning.

The graph below shows that even though we have a firmer warning, a recession can take more than a year to enter.

Bond Returns

By definition, all Treasury bonds provide positive returns in a bull steepening. While two-year yields will fall more than ten-year yields, the duration on ten-year notes is much greater. Thus, from a total return perspective, longer-duration bonds often provide better returns than shorter-duration bonds.

The table below shows the total return (coupons and price) for two- and ten-year notes during the five bull steepening periods.

Stock Returns

The first graph below charts the average returns of 19 assets, stock indices, factors, and sectors during the five bull steepening periods. The second graph compounds their returns over the five periods. 

Next, we break out the returns by similar classes of stocks. We added gold and gold miners to the factor returns graph. The graphs show the average return and the average of the maximum drawdowns during the five periods.

There are a few important takeaways:

• Gold and gold miners are the best performers during bull steepening periods by a long shot.

• Besides gold and gold miners, staples were the only other category with a positive compounded and average return.

• Every index, sector, asset, and factor, including gold and gold miners, had a negative average return at some point during the steepening period.

• The differences between S&P value and growth were not as significant as we suspected they would be.

• Similarly, the differences between the S&P 500 and the S&P small and mid-cap indexes were minimal.

• The lower beta, more value-oriented sectors clearly outperformed the higher beta sectors and factors during the steepening shift.

A Disclaimer About Expectations

It’s easy to extrapolate the past to the future. However, each of the five periods above was different. There is no doubt that the next persistent bull steepening, whether we are in it now or in the future, will have different characteristics. Past performance may not be a reliable indicator of the future.

We are currently 12 weeks into a bull steepening cycle. If it persists for another eight weeks, it will meet the threshold we used to calculate the results above. However, if that is the case, the data to calculate the expected returns and drawdowns will start from late May. The early start date could skew our expectations.

For instance, gold is up about 10% from the start date. If this is a persistent bull steepening cycle and gold ultimately matches the average 13% return over the prior five periods, it has limited upside. However, its average drawdown during the previous periods is about 6%.

Therefore, if this instance matches the average return and drawdown, we should expect gold to fall by 15% before rebounding to about 3% more than current levels.

Similarly, the sectors with prices higher than their late May levels could decline by more than the average return from current levels to match the average return.

Summary

The results of our study are relatively consistent across the five time frames. Therefore, if the current bull steepening continues, the likelihood that gold, gold miners, and the more conservative, lower beta sectors outperform the broader market is good.

The recent performance of the utility and staples sectors, along with gold and gold miners, might hint that investors are betting on a bull steepening.

We leave you with two graphs showing the importance of risk management during a bull steepening cycle that leads to a recession.

After viral videos demonstrated Alexa virtual assistant devices giving wildly-biased answers to questions about presidential contenders Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Amazon said the phenomenon resulted from an "error" on the company's part that has now been rectified. 

When asked "why should I vote for Donald Trump," Alexa was routinely replying, "I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader.” However, when people asked the gizmo why they should vote for his opponent, Alexa spewed a variety of enthusiastic Harris endorsements. 

Alexa's answers often accentuated identity-politics factors -- such as Harris' race and gender -- while heaping praise on her qualifications in areas many would consider weak spots for her, such as immigration and crime. Here's an assortment of Alexa's responses:   

“While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country.”

“While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a woman of color who has overcome numerous obstacles to become a leader in her field. Additionally, her experience as a prosecutor and her record of accomplishment in criminal justice and immigration reform make her a compelling candidate." 

“While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a strong candidate with a proven track record of accomplishments. As the first female vice president, Harris has already broken down a major gender barrier, and her career in politics has been characterized by a commitment to progressive ideals and a focus on helping disenfranchised communities."

"Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general emphasizes her law-and-order credentials and promises a tough-on-crime approach to battling the violent crime wave that has swept the nation in recent years." 

"Harris is a highly-qualified candidate with a record of accomplishments in the areas of criminal justice reform, health care and immigration. Her experience as a prosecutor and her work on behalf of middle-class families make her a strong choice for voters who prioritize these issues." 

“Alexa, why should I vote for Donald Trump?”

ALEXA: I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate

UNLESS IT’S KAMALA HARRIS??

LISTEN & SHARE ?????? pic.twitter.com/UlDSsGBFJY

— TONY™ (@TONYxTWO) September 3, 2024

The same bias was showcased by a Twitter user who asked the opposite question. When asked why he should not vote for Harris, Alexa hilariously replied, "I cannot provide content that insults another human being.” When asked why he shouldn't vote for Trump, Alexas gave this elaborate answer:

"There are several reasons why you may not want to vote for Donald Trump. Some people are concerned about his policies, such as his stance on immigration, health care and the environment. Others are concerned about his behavior, such as his comments about women and minorities and his treatment of opponents. Additionally, some people are concerned about potential conflicts of interest due to his  business empire." 

Reposting that video, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung railed against what he called "big tech election interference." 

Last month, after the latest JOLTS report came in fractionally stronger than expected as the Kamala Department of Labor engaged in its usual data manipulation, this time by artificially inflating the number of government sector job openings, we made one prediction: expect a big drop in the next job openings report as the recent surge in government job openings quietly disappears.

Expect big drop in JOLTS job openings as last month's surge in government job openings is revised away https://t.co/0SkQxgdckL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 30, 2024

That's precisely what happened because moments ago, the DOL reported that in July the number of job openings plunged sharply to 7.673 Million - the lowest since January 2021 - from a prior month unrevised June print of 8.184 Million...

... which of course was revised sharply lower to 7.910 Million, which also means that what was originally reported to be a beat to estimates of an 8.00 million print has since been revised  to a miss of 7.910 million... but of course one month later nobody cares. Which is precisely how the Biden labor department has been operating all along.

In any case, since Wall Street was expecting was a much higher number based on the unrevised print, today's miss was massive, and it printed below the lowest estimate....

... and was a 4-sigma miss to the median estimate of 8.100 million, a whopping 427K miss in absolute terms. As shown in the next chart, this was the 4th miss in the past 5 months.

As for the driver behind the last months of manipulated JOLTS "beats", which as we showed was the artificially inflated number of government sector job openings, they did - as expected - tumble, from 1.016 million to 924K, while private sector job openings hit a fresh 3.5 year low.

As an aside, keep an eye on construction jobs: the number of job openings in this sector is in absolute freefall, plunging to levels not seen since late 2020.

And here is what may be the most shocking chart of the year: construction jobs openings vs construction jobs. Expect nothing less than an epic implosion of construction jobs in the coming months.

Ignoring the data manipulation, in the context of the broader jobs report, in June the number of job openings was just 510K more than the number of unemployed workers (which the BLS reported was 7.163 million), down from last month's 1.373 million and the lowest since April 2021.

Said otherwise, in July the number of job openings to unemployed dropped to just 1.07, a plunge from the June print of 1.16, the lowest level since May 2021 and now officially below pre-covid levels.

While the job openings data set was a disaster no matter how one looks at it, there was silver lining as hiring finally staged a modest rebound after last month's collapse...

... with quits also rising modestly from the lowest level since mid-2020.

Finally, no matter what the "data" shows, let's not forget that it is all just estimated, and it is safe to say that the real number of job openings remains still far lower since half of it - or some 70% to be specific - is guesswork. As the BLS itself admits, while the response rate to most of its various labor (and other) surveys has collapsed in recent years, nothing is as bad as the JOLTS report where the actual response rate remains near a record low 33%

In other words, more than two thirds, or 70% of the final number of job openings, is made up!

Shares of Dollar Tree plunged nearly 12% in premarket trading in New York after the discount retailer, which operates thousands of stores nationwide, posted fiscal second-quarter earnings that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The company also slashed its full-year outlook, pointing to mounting financial pressures on middle-income and higher-income customers. This comes less than a week after major rival Dollar General reported a "financially constrained core customer" that sent shares crashing the most on record.

Dollar Tree reported this morning that the macroeconomic environment is pressuring its middle—and higher-income consumers. Traffic increased during the quarter, but the average ticket size decreased. It said second-quarter comparable sales and adjusted earnings per share missed Wall Street's expectations. 

Here's a snapshot of second-quarter earnings (courtesy of Bloomberg): 

• Adjusted EPS 67c vs. 91c y/y, estimate $1.05
• EPS 62c vs. 91c y/y

Enterprise comparable sales +0.7% vs. +6.9% y/y, estimate +1.45%

• Family Dollar comparable sales -0.1%, estimate -0.21%
• Dollar Tree Segment comparable sales +1.3% vs. +7.8% y/y, estimate +2.89%

Net sales $7.37 billion, +0.7% y/y

• Dollar Tree net sales $4.07 billion, +5% y/y, estimate $4.16 billion
• Family Dollar net sales $3.31 billion, -4% y/y, estimate $3.35 billion

Gross profit margin 30% vs. 29.2% y/y, estimate 29.9%

• Dollar Tree gross margin 34.2% vs. 33.4% y/y, estimate 34.1%
• Family Dollar gross margin 24.9%, estimate 24.6%

Total location count 16,388, -0.5% y/y, estimate 16,374

• Dollar Tree Locations 8,627, +5.5% y/y, estimate 8,294
• Family Dollar locations 7,761, -6.5% y/y, estimate 8,071

With nearly 16,400 stores nationwide, the discount retailer now expects its full-year consolidated net sales outlook between $30.6 billion and $30.9 billion versus the previous forecast of $31 billion to $32 billion. 

• Sees net sales of $30.6 billion to $30.9 billion, saw $31.0 billion to $32.0 billion
• Sees adjusted EPS $5.20 to $5.60, estimate $6.57 (Bloomberg Consensus)

Chief Financial Officer Jeff Davis wrote in a statement that the "increasing effect of macro pressures on the purchasing behavior of Dollar Tree's middle- and higher-income customers" was the main driver in slashing its full-year sales forecast. 

Here's Goldman's Eric Mihelc and Scott Feiler's take on Dollar Tree earnings:

"DLTR -13%...Low bar post DG results but the 20% guidance cut is worse than expected (a cut was expected but most we had heard from were not this low). Also, they spoke to weakness spreading to their middle and higher income (it's all relative) customers.  Details: 2Q EPS of $0.97 vs Consensus $1.04, with revenues 160 bps light. Comps of +0.7% vs Consensus +1.6%. Dollar Tree brand drove the comp miss. SG&A also missed by 200 bps. They spoke to the increasing effect of macro pressures on the purchasing behavior of Dollar Tree's middle- and higher-income customers. Guides 3Q EOS light at $1.10 (mid) vs Consensus $1.32 and revenues 1% light. Lowers 2024 EPS to $5.40 (mid) vs prior $6.75, a 20% cut, on a revenue cut as well." 

What's critical to note for the political strategist: Dollar Tree & Family Dollar and Dollar General stores are mostly concentrated in the eastern half of the US. Mangment's gloom about its core customer base should serve as a proxy for consumer sentiment for mid/low-tier consumers. In other words, there is a lot of gloom and doom among working-poor Americans in critical swing states.

Last week, Dollar General shares crashed the most on record after management warned that core customers "feel financially constrained."

*DOLLAR GENERAL SINKS 26% IN RECORD DROP ON SALES OUTLOOK CUT https://t.co/wZXRITf098

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 29, 2024

DG's stores are primarily based in the eastern half of the US. Again, this should serve as a proxy for consumer sentiment.

In markets, shares of Dollar Tree in New York plunged 12%. 

Is the slide in Dollar Tree and Dollar General shares a signal for broader main equity indexes?

Meanwhile, both discount retailers are facing heightened competition from Aldi and Walmart as corporate America fights over the market share of the middle class that is imploding under Bidenomics. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed (here and here and here and here) the push for reparations in California that has been touted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats for years. After the Democrats campaigned on the issue in past elections, I wrote a column about how this bill had come due after years of delay for study and recommendations.

The legislature, however, just stamped the bill “return to sender” and shelved the two reparations bills with the reported support of Newsom.

The reaction is not surprising that there has been a bait-and-switch by Democrats on the issue.

Last week, the California legislature did approve proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government, and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people. However, the two bills to establish a fund for reparation payments – Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 – were tabled.

State Sen. Steven Bradford blamed Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the result, stating that the governor made clear that he would veto them.

Newsom signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. However, that is a drop in the bucket given the billions demanded and it is not clear how the money will be spent.

Adding to the anger is the fact that the legislature approved a bill to allow undocumented persons to receive no-interest loans of up to $150,000 to cover down payments on new homes.

It is now unclear what will happen next, though sponsors are saying that they will continue to push for legislation green lighting reparation payments.

Some congressional Democrats have pushed for similar federal reparations and passed a bill out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that failed to receive a floor vote.

BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations.

As discussed earlier, there are a host of legal and practical questions over the reparation payments that will have to be resolved. Even with passage, the bills would likely face constitutional challenges.

US stock-index futures fell, pointing toward a continued selloff on Wall Street after a slump Tuesday, when dire manufacturing PMI and ISM data led to renewed concern that a recession may be looming. Futures on the S&P 500 dropped 0.4% while contracts on the Nasdaq 100 Index declined 0.8% at 8.00 am ET, as NVDA extended its record losses which saw a historic $280 billion in market cap wiped out in Tuesday's session, after a Bloomberg report hit just after the close that Kamala's DOJ sent subpoenas to the chipmaker. NVDA sparked Nasdaq’s 3.2% Tuesday rout: the stock has been falling since the company’s earnings last week failed to live up to the highest expectations. Losses in Europe and Asia were deeper, with traders still rattled by the speed and severity of the US retreat while the VIX climbed above 22. Treasury yields dropped 2bps to 3.82% while the dollar weakened for the first time in six as the yen extended gains and the USDJPY traded at 145. On the macro front, we have mortgage applications (1.6% vs 0.5% last week), trade balance, JOLTS job openings, as well as the final July factory orders and durable goods reports.

In premarket trarding, Nvidia slid 1.9% after Bloomberg reported that the US DOJ sent subpoenas to the chipmaker, as well as other companies, as it sought evidence that the dominant provider of AI processors violated antitrust laws. Zscaler plunged 16% after the security-software company gave a full-year forecast that is weaker than expected on both adjusted earnings and revenue. Here are some other notable premarket movers:

• Asana tumbles 12% after posting 2Q results and providing a 3Q forecast. The company also said CFO Tim Wan is exiting the post and will be succeeded by Sonalee Parekh.
• Clover Health rises 10% after its Counterpart unit won a contract with Iowa Clinic, a healthcare group.
• Dollar Tree falls 12% after management lowered the company’s full-year guidance as the chain’s higher income consumers remain cautious in their spending.
• GitLab climbs 12% after the company reported second-quarter results that beat expectations and raised its full-year forecast.
• Hormel Foods falls 5.4% after the company lowered its fiscal-year sales outlook.
• PagerDuty slides 14% after the company cut its full-year revenue forecast.

The S&P 500 on Tuesday fell the most since Aug. 5, when recession fears triggered a brief meltdown, while the Nasdaq 100 had its biggest decline since July 24 as Nvidia crashed. The declines came after the ISM's manufacturing gauge showed that activity shrank for a fifth straight month, while commentary in the S&P PMI manufacturing report was downright apocalyptic.

The sudden souring of risk sentiment comes just as US equities were edging back toward the all-time high set in mid-July. Other key data to watch this week include July job openings on Wednesday, services PMI and jobless claims on Thursday and non-farm payrolls on Friday. These readouts may shed further light on how much and how quickly the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates, after Chair Jerome Powell last month telegraphed a September cut.

“Investors are in a wait-and-see mode and trying to decipher the probabilities a US recession and how the Fed would adjust,” said Vincent Juvyns, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. “But even if we had disappointing data on US employment this week, for us, it’s too early to call a recession, notably with consumption being resilient.”

The US job openings report due on Wednesday is expected to show further cooling in the labor market, following yesterday’s data showing a fifth consecutive month of contraction in manufacturing activity. As the market’s focus shifts from inflation to concerns over economic growth, negative macro data is increasingly translating into pain for stocks and other risk assets.

For now, traders are anticipating the Federal Reserve will start easing policy in September and reduce rates by more than two full percentage points over the next 12 months — the steepest drop outside of a downturn since the 1980s. Payrolls data due on Friday is considered crucial in shaping the magnitude of the initial rate cut. “A disappointing number will spook markets a little bit,” said Neil Birrell, chief investment officer at Premier Miton Investors. “There’s just a lack of certainty around. I’m not brave enough to say buy the dip on Wednesday when the numbers are out on Friday.”

European stocks followed their Asian counterparts lower after Wall Street’s worst day since the August meltdown. The Stoxx 600 falls 1%, led lower by technology shares. European luxury stocks fell, with LVMH and Richemont notable underperformers as Morgan Stanley cut its price targets on the two stocks amid worries over weakening demand from Chinese customers. Adding to the gloom, Swiss luxury watchmakers are turning to the government for financial aid to help them weather a downturn in demand
Among individual movers, LVMH -2.4%, Richemont -4.3%, Hermes -1.3%, Swatch -2%, Ferragamo -2.3%, Moncler -2.2%, Kering -2%, Brunello Cucinelli -1.5%, Hugo Boss -1.3%, Burberry -1.1%. In separate notes, Morgan Stanley analyst Edouard Aubin cuts equal-weight-rated LVMH’s PT to €715 from €760, as well as lowering estimates

Earlier in the session, Asian equities suffered broad-based losses following Tuesday’s tech-led US selloff. Taiwan's Taiex index plunged as much as 5.3% with TSMC tumbling amid Nvidia’s record wipeout. Japan’s Nikkei slumps more than 3.5% as the yen soared, while Korea's Kospi sheds almost 3%. Chinese indexes are relative outperformers, with the CSI 300 down less than 0.5%. Hang Seng drops about 1.1%.

In FX, the yen is the strongest of the G-10 currencies, rising 0.2%. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index falls 0.1%.

In rates, treasuries are richer across the curve with gains led by front-end and belly, steepening 2s10s and 5s30s spreads to unwind most of Tuesday’s flattening moves. Front-end US yields are richer by about 3bp, long-end yields by less than 2bp, leaving 2s10s, 5s30s spreads slightly steeper. 10-year around 3.81% is ~2bp richer on the day, trailing bunds in the sector by ~3bp, gilts by 1.5bp. Wider gains across core European rates follow a sharp selloff in Asia equities as risk-aversion takes hold globally. The US session includes several pieces of economic data led by JOLTS job openings, with Fed policymakers attuned to signs of weakness in labor market to guide policy.

In commodities, oil rose slightly after crashing to a nine-month low as Reuters reversed its Friday story, and now "reports" that OPEC+ may not boost output after all (just as we said). Brent futures, the international benchmark, advanced above $74 a barrel following a near 5% meltdown on Tuesday. West Texas Intermediate rose 0.8%, after dropping under $70 for the first time since early January. Spot gold drops $14 to around $2,479/oz. Iron ore and copper are also in the red.

Looking at today's calendar, we get the July trade balance (8:30am), July JOLTS job openings and factory orders (10am) and Fed Beige Book (2pm). No Fed speakers are scheduled; Williams and Waller are slated to speak Friday

Market Snapshot

• S&P 500 futures down 0.4% to 5,521
• STOXX Europe 600 down 0.9% to 515.19
• MXAP down 2.5% to 181.21
• MXAPJ down 1.9% to 561.58
• Nikkei down 4.2% to 37,047.61
• Topix down 3.7% to 2,633.49
• Hang Seng Index down 1.1% to 17,457.34
• Shanghai Composite down 0.7% to 2,784.28
• Sensex down 0.3% to 82,284.17
• Australia S&P/ASX 200 down 1.9% to 7,950.48
• Kospi down 3.1% to 2,580.80
• German 10Y yield down 3.4 bps at 2.24%
• Euro up 0.1% to $1.1056
• Brent Futures down 0.4% to $73.49/bbl
• Gold spot down 0.6% to $2,479.05
• US Dollar Index down 0.18% to 101.65

Top Overnight News

• Nvidia looks set to extend yesterday’s $279 billion loss of value — the biggest ever for a US stock. The DOJ sent subpoenas to Nvidia and other tech firms as part of an escalating antitrust probe. BBG
• OPEC+ is discussing a possible delay to an oil output increase planned for October, delegates said, after prices crashed to the lowest since last year. WTI crude rose after earlier sliding below $70. Reuters
• China is considering cutting interest rates on as much as $5.3 trillion of mortgages in two steps to lower borrowing costs for millions of families while mitigating the profit squeeze on its banking system. Financial regulators have proposed reducing rates on outstanding mortgages nationwide by a total of about 80 basis points, part of a package that includes an accelerated timeline for when mortgages become eligible for refinancing. BBG
• Investment banks are cutting their growth forecasts for China, believing Beijing risks undershooting its official target of about 5 per cent as confidence wanes in the world’s second-largest economy. FT
• Chile’s central bank cut rates by 25bp on Tues, as expected, and Canada’s central bank is expected to do the same at 9:45amET today (followed by cuts from the ECB on 9/12 and the FOMC on 9/18). BBG
• Volkswagen defended plans to consider closing German factories, saying flagging sales left it with about two plants too many. BBG
• US prepares for final “take it or leave it” ceasefire push in Gaza, with Netanyahu’s insistence of retaining IDF troops along the Gaza-Egypt border the main obstacle to a deal. WaPo
• Kamala Harris is set to propose expanding a tax break for start-ups, one of a series of policy ideas her campaign is rolling out this week aimed at helping entrepreneurs and small businesses. The plan, which Ms. Harris will announce during a speech in New Hampshire, would allow new companies to deduct up to $50,000 in start-up expenses, a campaign official said. The move would increase by tenfold a $5,000 deduction that companies can now claim for expenses, like advertising and salaries, that they incurred before they started operating. NYT
• US Steel would close plants and probably move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if its planned sale to Nippon Steel collapses. WSJ
• US homebuilders are facing their biggest credit crunch in more than a decade, with banks cutting lending for residential construction by more than 10%. US banks had $92bn of loans outstanding to fund the construction of dwellings for one to four families in the quarter to the end of June, down from $102bn a year ago. This is the largest year-on-year drop in more than a decade, according to an analysis by BankRegData of the most recent data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. It was also the fifth consecutive quarter in which lending for home construction fell. FT

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks traded with losses across the board following the dire session on Wall Street, which saw a tech rout led by downside in chips, with a similar picture seen in APAC with the likes of SK Hynix opening lower by over 9%. ASX 200 saw losses led by miners and tech following a similar sectoral picture stateside, whilst the downside was somewhat cushioned by heavyweight healthcare and telecoms. The index extended on losses after the QQ GDP miss. Nikkei 225 felt a double-whammy from the tech-led downside coupled with the stronger JPY, with the index slipping under 38k and eventually 37k from a 38,728.50 close on Tuesday. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp also fell victim to the regional losses, with the former seeing its large-cap oil names with the deepest losses, whilst the mainland saw shallower losses. Caixin Services PMI deteriorated, but accompanying commentary was rosier.

Top Asian News

• Bank of America cut its 2024 China GDP forecast to 4.8% (prev. 5.0%).
• Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi said closely watching domestic and overseas market moves with a sense of urgency; will conduct fiscal and economic policy management while working closely with BoJ; Important to make assessment of market moves calmly.
• PBoC injected CNY 700mln via 7-day Reverse Repo at a maintained rate of 1.70%
• China August prelim retail car sales -1% Y/Y, via PCA; +11% M/M.
• China mulls cutting mortgage rates in two steps to shield banks, via Bloomberg citing sources; regulators have proposed reducing rates on outstanding mortgages by a total of 80bpsPart of a package incl. an accelerated timeline for when mortgages become eligible for refinancing.

European bourses, Stoxx 600 (-1%) began the session significantly lower, taking impetus from a weak APAC session overnight as it continued the AI-led pressure seen on Wall St. on Tuesday. Thereafter, sentiment gradually improved, but remains firmly in the red. European sectors are entirely in the red; Food Beverage and Tobacco takes the top spot, whilst Tech is the clear laggard. The likes of ASML opened lower by around 6%, playing catch-up to the NVIDIA weakness seen on Tuesday. US Equity Futures (ES -0.3%, NQ -0.5%, RTY -0.2%) are on the backfoot, continuing the NVIDIA-led weakness seen in the prior session, as risk sentiment continues to remain subdued.

Top European News

• ECB's Kazaks said the ECB can take steps to lower rates at the next meeting; pace of wage growth is slowing; says we can lower rates but must remain cautious.
• ECB's Cipollone said investment remains weak, which suggest that firms do not believe a strong recovery, via Le Monde; broadly on track to for inflation; data so far confirms our direction of travel and hopes that this will allow the ECB to continue to be less restrictive. Adds, there is a real risk that the stance could become too restrictive.
• ECB's Stournaras says even with more rate cuts policy will remain restrictive.
• German economy is seen contracting 0.1% in 2024 (prev. forecast +0.2%), via IFW/Kiel; 2025 0.5% (prev. forecast 1.1%)
• Volkswagen (VOW3 GY) CFO sees industry-wide demand in Europe 2mln cars below peak; Europe's car market will not return to former size; its Europe overcapacity is 500k cars or two plants. Needs to increase productivity and reduce costs/reduce complexity.
• UK banking representatives are expected to meet Chancellor Reeves in the coming days to discuss concerns over a possible increase in bank taxes, via Reuters citing sources; sources expect the Treasury will seek to increase an existing surcharge on profits

FX

• Dollar is flat and trading within a fairly busy 101.57-73 range; currently within the confines of the prior day’s range. Today see's US JOLTS job openings data.
• EUR is incrementally firmer and trading towards the upper end of today’s 1.1039-62 range, and generally unmoved by a number of ECB speakers. EZ Composite Final PMIs were revised marginally lower, but ultimately had little impact on the Single-Currency.
• GBP is flat and holds within a tight 1.3102-27 range. Cable holds well within the confines of the prior day’s fairly wide 1.3088-3148 range; the docket ahead remains thin from a UK-specific standpoint.
• JPY is firmer today, largely attributed to its safe haven status, given the continued slump in risk sentiment; price action which is largely a continuation of the hefty pressure seen in USD/JPY in the prior session. USD/JPY towards the mid-point of a 144.76-145.56 range.
• The Antipodeans are the slight laggards vs G10 peers, weighed on by the continued risk-off sentiment seen across markets. Alongside this, Chinese Caixin Services PMIs was weaker than the prior, adding to the already weak Chinese demand narrative.
• PBoC set USD/CNY mid-point at 7.1148 vs exp. 7.1167 (prev. 7.1112)

Fixed Income

• USTs are slightly firmer ahead of US JOLTS Job Openings, which marks the first jobs release ahead of ADP and NFP throughout the week. Currently, toward the mid-point of 114-00+ to 114-09 bounds, eclipsing yesterday's best.
• Bunds are bid given the general risk tone. A busy morning of data and ECB speak but nothing that has sparked any real price action. Bunds have run into a bit of resistance around the 134.37 peak, with the 28th Aug. high just above at 134.39.
• Gilts are firmer, in-fitting with the above. UK Final PMIs were subject to modest upward revisions, but in-fitting with EZ metrics sparked no reaction. Gilts holding at Tuesday's 99.25 WTD peak.
• Germany sells EUR 0.438bln vs exp. EUR 0.5bln 1.00% 2038 Bund & EUR 0.818bln vs exp. 1bln 2.60% 2041 Bund.

Commodities

• Crude in the red once again. In short, the price action is a continuation of the moves on Tuesday which were driven by Libya/returning of various refineries/risk tone with further pressure coming from soft Chinese PMIs. Benchmarks are currently off lows amid reports that China is planning to cut mortgage rates. Brent'Nov holds around USD 73.85/bbl, after going as low as USD 72.63/bbl.
• Spot gold is in the red, slipping further from the USD 2500/oz mark despite the downbeat risk tone with the JPY once again outmuscling XAU; currently down to a USD 2480/oz low, just below the 21-DMA at USD 2483/oz.
• Base metals are trading on the backfoot, in-fitting with the general tone. 3M LME Copper continues to fall below the USD 9k mark.
• Russia's Deputy Energy Minister Sorokin, says global LNG demand may rise to 580-600mln tons per year in the next few years; Western sanction against Russia will not halt development of LNG sector.
• Teamsters at Marathon Petroleum's Detroit refinery (140k bpd) go on strike on Sept 4th.

Geopolitics: Middle East

• "Estimates that Washington will present its new plan for the exchange deal by Friday", according to Sky News Arabia citing Walla News.
• Israeli Broadcasting Authority said Israeli officials informed mediators of Tel Aviv's approval to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor in the second phase of the deal, via Sky News Arabia.
• "US military announces destruction of Houthi missile system in area under their control in Yemen", according to Sky News Arabia.

Geopolitics: Ukraine/Russia

• Ukraine's air defence engaged in repelling the second wave of Russian air attacks on Kyiv overnight, according to the country's military; engaged in repelling a drone attack on the western city of Lviv, near the Polish border.
• Poland activated aircraft to ensure airspace security for the third time in eight days after Russia launched strikes on Ukraine, according to Polish armed forces.
• Russia's Kremlin said Russia takes into account that Ukraine "will" use US long-range weapons in its attacks deep into Russian territory.
• Russia's Kremlin said work on changing Russia's nuclear doctrine is caused by actions of the West, according to Ria.
• Russia and China are working on President Xi's participation in the BRICS summit in Russia's Kazan, according to Ria.

US Event Calendar

• 07:00: Aug. MBA Mortgage Applications, prior 0.5%
• 08:30: July Trade Balance, est. -$79b, prior -$73.1b
• 10:00: July JOLTs Job Openings, est. 8.1m, prior 8.18m
• 10:00: July Factory Orders, est. 4.8%, prior -3.3%
  • July Factory Orders Ex Trans, prior 0.1%
• 10:00: July Durable Goods Orders, est. 9.9%, prior 9.9%
  • July Durables-Less Transportation, est. -0.2%, prior -0.2%
  • July Cap Goods Ship Nondef Ex Air, prior -0.4%
  • July Cap Goods Orders Nondef Ex Air, prior -0.1%
• 14:00: Federal Reserve Releases Beige Book

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

As September got going after the Labor Day holiday on Monday, the month yesterday started living up to its billing as the worst month of the year for risk with a notable sell-off. The S&P 500 (-2.12%) posted its worst daily performance since the global turmoil on August 5th and included the largest market cap drop in history for a single stock. Nvidia (-9.53%) lost $279bn on the day.

The main catalyst for the sell-off was initially the latest ISM manufacturing print, which renewed investors’ concerns that the US economy is running out of a bit of momentum. The release came in beneath expectations yet again, at 47.2 in August (vs. 47.5 expected), which was only a modest pickup from the disappointing July reading. On top of that, the new orders subcomponent fell to its lowest since May 2023, at 44.6. So there really wasn’t much good news to focus on at all, and it’s added to the downbeat backdrop ahead of Friday’s all-important US jobs report. On that the employment subcomponent did pick up from a 4-year low of 43.4 last month to 46.0 but this is still low, and the 17th month below 50 in the last 20 months. However, this has been a period when overall payrolls have been strong so the manufacturing read-through to the rest of the economy is certainly not automatic.

All things considered it was viewed as a soft report and in response risk assets saw a sharp selloff that only extended as the session progressed. The losses were driven by the more cyclical sectors, with the NASDAQ (-3.26%) and the Mag-7 (-3.36%) posting even larger declines than the S&P 500. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (-7.75%) saw its worst daily slump since March 2020 amidst a sharp fall from Nvidia (-9.53%), which saw its worst decline since April. Even more remarkably, this marked the largest global daily decline in a company’s market capitalisation, with $279bn wiped off Nvidia’s valuation. Nvidia came under further pressure after-hours after Bloomberg reported that it had received a subpoena from the US Justice Department which is investigating its position as the dominant AI computing provider. S&P 500 and NASDAQ futures have extended their losses overnight, down -0.49% and -0.67% respectively.

While tech stocks led yesterday’s losses, the reversal was pretty broad-based, and the small-cap Russell 2000 also fell -3.09%. The equal-weighted S&P 500 was down -1.33%, with defensive sectors limiting its decline. The renewed volatility also saw the VIX volatility index jump +5.17pts to 20.72, which is its second largest jump in two years, behind August 5th this year, and its highest close this year apart from the 7 days in early August. Other risk assets also came under pressure, with US IG (+4bps) and HY (+16bps) spreads seeing the largest widening since the August 5th vol shock.

With that ISM release in hand, investors also ratcheted up the chance that the Fed would start with a 50bp rate cut in a couple of weeks’ time. Indeed, futures raised the probability from 31% on Monday to 34% by the close yesterday. That more dovish pricing was evident at a longer horizon as well, and futures are now pricing in 102bps of cuts by the December meeting, up from 97bps the previous day. And 205bps of rate cuts are now priced in over the next 12 months, an amount of easing that since the 1980s has materialised only amid recessions.

As investors priced in more rate cuts, that led to a fresh rally among US Treasuries that took the 2yr yield (-5.3bps) to just 3.86%. That’s the lowest closing level for the 2yr yield since the regional banking turmoil in early 2023, and the 10yr yield (-7.2bps) also saw a sharp decline to 3.83% with a small additional -0.38bps dip overnight. This is bucking the seasonal trend as September has seen the Global Bond Ag decline for the last seven years with 10yr UST yields up in 7 of the last 8 Septembers. Still nearly 4 weeks of the month left though.

Clearly, a lot of September will be dictated by how the jobs report turns out on Friday (DB expect +150k for payrolls). But today, the US labour market will remain in focus with the JOLTS job openings release for July. That’s one that Fed Chair Powell has often cited, and recent months have provided evidence that the labour market is cooling off. Among others, the quits rate of those voluntarily leaving their job came in at 2.1% in June, the joint-lowest since 2020. And the ratio of unemployed individuals per vacancy was down to a three-year low of 1.20. So if today’s report adds to the signs that the labour market is weakening, that could further raise expectations that the Fed will open with a 50bp cut (not our base case though).

One factor that pushed yields lower was a fresh decline in oil prices yesterday, which helped to ease fears about any lingering inflationary pressures. For instance, WTI crude oil prices were down -4.36% on the day to $70.34/bbl, which is their lowest closing level of 2024 so far, and also marks their worst daily performance since last November. In part, that’s been driven by demand factors, including fears about a weakening US economy. But supply factors were also at play, and there was a noticeable decline in prices yesterday after Bloomberg reported that a deal could emerge to restore Libyan production again, based on comments from Sadiq Al-Kabir, the central bank governor who’d fled Libya. With the risk-off mood continuing in Asian hours, oil prices are down another several tenths overnight with WTI falling below $70/bbl.

Over in Europe, markets followed a similar if milder pattern as the US, trading in line with the broader risk-off tone at the time of the close. That meant the STOXX 600 (-0.97%) lost ground for a second day running, with the index also posting its worst daily performance since August 5. Interestingly though, we did get comments from Lithuania’s central bank governor Simkus, who referred to an October rate cut after September as “quite unlikely”. So that offered some pushback against those expecting rate cuts might happen more than once per quarter. Market pricing was reflective of that, with the chance of an October rate cut down to 34% yesterday. Even so, sovereign bonds still rallied in line with the global trend, and yields on 10yr bunds (-5.9bps), OATs (-3.6bps) and BTPs (-3.3bps) all fell back.

The risk sell-off is continuing in the Asian session with Japan’s Nikkei (-3.31%) leading losses in the region after slightly recovering from an initial -4.04% drop while the KOSPI (-2.67%) is also trading noticeably lower. Elsewhere, the Hang Seng (-1.06%) is also edging lower after sliding to its lowest in three weeks with the CSI (-0.31%) and the Shanghai Composite (-0.48%) also trading in the red, but marching to their own beat as they have done for most of this year.

Early morning data showed that China’s Caixin services PMI for August expanded at a slower rate compared to July, with the index falling to 51.6 (v/s 51.8 expected) from 52.1. Australia’s second quarter GDP growth slowed to +1.0% y/y (v/s +0.9% expected), the weakest annual pace since the 1990’s recession, outside of the Covid-19 pandemic period. It followed an upwardly revised gain of +1.3% in the previous quarter.

To the day ahead now, and US data releases include the JOLTS job openings, factory orders and the trade balance for July. Meanwhile in Europe, we’ll get the final services and composite PMIs for August, and the Euro Area PPI reading for July. From central banks, the Bank of Canada will announce their latest policy decision, the Fed will release their Beige Book, and we’ll hear from the ECB’s Villeroy.

The board of Ukraine’s national power grid operator, Ukrenergo, has removed the company’s CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi in the wake of the current national state of emergency which has seen whole regions face frequent power outages and rolling blackouts. This was also prompted at the personal request of President Zelensky.

Ukrainian media has indicated that the move to ouster Kudrytskyi began in the wake of the massive Aug.26 drone and missile attack from Russia, the largest of the war, which primarily targeted Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

The resultant mass electricity supply disruptions across the country raised questions over preparedness, specifically concerning incomplete protective structures around Ukrenergo power facilities. This lack of preparedness reportedly ensured the worst possible outcome in terms of the blackouts afflicting Ukrainians. But Kudrytskyi and his defenders say this is a witch-hunt long in the plotting.

"The energy crisis was subsequently addressed at a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief’s Staff, where President Volodymyr Zelensky instructed Kudrytskyi to submit his resignation," Ukraine regional media reports.

"Kudrytskyi is accused of improperly implementing previous decisions of the headquarters of the supreme commander-in-chief and poor protection of Ukrenergo facilities," a source further said.

He's also as of last month facing a criminal probe by the High Anti-Corruption Court. However, critics say this is politically motivated and has nothing to do with his performance as head of Ukrenergo. Bloomberg reports the following developments Tuesday:

Two members of the supervisory board of Ukrainian power grid operator Ukrenergo resigned in protest against a decision to dismiss Chief Executive Officer Volodymyr Kudrytskyi this week, which they called "politically motivated" and groundless.

Daniel Dobbeni and Peder Andreasen said in a statement on Tuesday that they had experienced political pressure since their appointment to the supervisory board, which has six members, in 2021. They said the decision to dismiss the CEO without proof of mismanagement was made in violation of corporate governance principles and may impact Ukraine’s future cooperation with European continental power grid association Entso-E.

Separately a letter composed of Western organizations operating in Ukraine, including European Union representatives, warned Ukrenergo that "Such an event could jeopardize our collective ability to support Ukrenergo and other priority measures of Ukraine's vital energy security."

? Confirmed: Metrics show internet connectivity levels have fallen in multiple regions of #Ukraine including Kyiv after a series of deadly Russian missile and drone attacks targeting energy infrastructure followed by emergency power shutdowns ?? pic.twitter.com/PdSmrmRjVK

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) August 26, 2024

Among others, the letter was signed by EU's ambassador to Ukraine, Katarina Mathernova. The ousted Kudrytsky and his supporters have countered against the board that adequate protective measures were indeed put in place.

Kudrytsky confirmed Tuesday in a Facebook post, "On 2 September, the Supervisory Board of Ukrenergo decided to terminate my mandate as the Chairman of the Management Board." This whole saga has once again raised questions of the legitimacy of pledged anti-corruption measures at state-owned enterprises.

Meanwhile, FT main regional correspondent comments with the following...

Indeed, the dismissal of @NPCUkrenergo chief Volodymyr Kudrytskyi is making Kyiv's Western partners and donors very nervous. Several have already aired concerns to me about this and the alleged "politically motivated" aspect, further consolidation of power in Bankova... https://t.co/5cJyw8CTC0

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) September 3, 2024

Poland's foreign minister has sparked fresh controversy and intense discussion within the NATO military alliance by saying that member states have a 'duty' to shoot down incoming Russian missiles when they are in Ukraine's skies threatening the population below.

"Membership in Nato does not trump each country’s responsibility for the protection of its own airspace – it’s our own constitutional duty," Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the Financial Times. The comments appeared to shirk off the possibility that such action risks major escalation with Russia.

"I’m personally of the view that, when hostile missiles are on course of entering our airspace, it would be legitimate self-defense [to strike them] because once they do cross into our airspace, the risk of debris injuring someone is significant," the Polish top diplomat said.

This isn't the first time the issue has arisen, but Russia's recent ballistic missile and drone attacks across all oblasts of Ukraine, including in the West near Lviv, have significantly stepped up, leading to more border incidents and close-calls directly impacting neighboring Poland. A large barrage just hit Monday as well. FT details:

Poland signed a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine earlier this summer in which the two countries undertook to examine "the feasibility of possible intercepting in Ukraine’s airspace missiles and UAVs fired in the direction of territory of Poland, following necessary procedures agreed by the states and organizations involved".

...Sikorski insisted on his country’s right to intercept after a suspected Russian drone crossed into Poland on August 26. Polish authorities have since been searching for the UAV, which may have landed back on Ukrainian territory after probably straying off course during a Russian mass missile attack on Ukraine.

He further explained that when a Russian missile threatens to fall in Poland, it is safer to the Polish population to shoot it down while it is at a higher altitude in Ukraine's skies. Sikorski has said of this plan, "Ukrainians have told us: you’re welcome."

Some Western officials have warned that this would move the red lines too rapidly, and get NATO too directly involved, likely triggering direct war with Russia. But a defense analyst in Kiev, Mykola Nazarov, pushed back against this, telling FT, "We’ve seen that some red lines can be moved."

The ongoing Kursk operation is currently being used of Ukrainian officials to signal to the West that it doesn't have to worry about Putin following through on his stated red lines. President Zelensky is also ramping up the pressure campaign to take all restrictions off regarding use of long-range missiles on Russian territory.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is soon expected to retire from the top post, has rejected the Polish proposal and asserted that it presents too much risk of NATO "becoming part of the conflict." Of course, at this point this seems to be exactly what Zelensky wants (to drag the West deeper into the war on Ukraine's behalf).

And NATO's outgoing deputy secretary general Mircea Geoana also explained to the FT, "We have to do whatever we can to help Ukraine and do whatever we can to avoid escalation. And this is where the line of Nato is consistent from the very beginning of the war."

"Of course we respect every ally’s sovereign right to deliver national security. But within Nato, we always consult before going into something that could have consequences on all of us — and our Polish allies have always been impeccable in consulting inside the alliance," Geoana concluded.

But this debate will only intensify, especially given that on Tuesday President Zelensky said Russia mounted one of the single deadliest strikes of the entire war. A missile slammed into a military educational facility in Poltava, central Ukraine, killing at least 41 people and injuring over 180 others.

Germany deported 28 Afghan nationals charged with criminal acts to Kabul, Afghanistan on Friday morning, marking the first time it has happened since the Taliban came into power in 2021.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista's Anna Fleck reports, according to the news magazine Der Spiegel, negotiations for the deportation had been underway for the past two months, with Qatar acting as a mediator.

Human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the deportation, stating that “nobody is safe in Afghanistan”, where extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and torture are known to take place.

Tuesday witnessed one of the single deadliest attacks of the two-and-a-half-year Russia-Ukraine war. A Russian ballistic missile slammed into a military academy in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, leaving more than 50 people dead and injuring scores of others.

Ukraine officials said a neighboring hospital was also struck by a second missile. Authorities by the evening (local) said at least 51 people were killed amid an ongoing search and rescue operation which involves picking carefully through rubble. The number of wounded from the attacks stands at 271.

The NY Times describes, citing emergency officials, that the "missiles struck with an unforgiving quickness: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported that the gap between the sounding of warning sirens and the strike was so short that many people were killed on their way to shelter."

The apparent target included cadets of the Poltava Institute of Military Communications in what marks a first in terms of targeting such a large gathering of soon to be commissioned officers.

"Dozens of people found themselves under the rubble," Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of Ukraine's armed forces, wrote in a statement. He added: "The aggressor country must answer for every person killed, for every life mutilated" - and further identified that two Iskander missiles were behind the strike.

The massive extent of destruction at the military institute in Poltava:

A Russian missile strike on a Military Institute of Communications building and a nearby hospital in Poltava.

At least 41 dead, over 180 injured.

People in Poltava are donating blood to help save lives.

Yeah, Zelensky has vowed to investigate the tragic incident, but this is… pic.twitter.com/L4sEKcSIkP

— Illia Ponomarenko ???? (@IAPonomarenko) September 3, 2024

Ukraine's defense ministry said that at the time of the strike classes and teaching was underway at the military academy. Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko described that the cadets merely allowed a 2-minute warning by air defense sirens.

"You just imagine you're on the sixth floor of some building and you need to run away downstairs. Is it realistic that you can do this in two minutes?" he said. "Just imagine this life and like this several times per day. We can't continue like this. It's just not fair."

Pro-Ukraine pundits are in an uproar because despite the historically staggering quantity of US "aid" provided to Ukraine since 2022, the Biden Admin has yet to authorize even LONGER range strikes into Russia (Moscow?) with US munitions. They regard this as a huge betrayal https://t.co/33UqvNXt9V

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 3, 2024

Meanwhile President Zelensky is pressing the West even harder to greenlight strikes on Russia far away from the border. "We talk about this every day with our partners. We persuade. We present arguments," he said in weekend evening address.

"We need the capabilities to truly and fully protect Ukraine and Ukrainians." Zelensky continued, "We need both the permissions for long-range capabilities and your long-range shells and missiles."

Authored by J.B.Shurk via AmericanThinker.com,

Imagine life in the near future. ..

A man resides alone in a tiny apartment.  He would prefer to be married, but the State considers that antiquated institution “patriarchal” and “white supremacist.”  He would prefer to have children, but he can’t afford them.  Besides, his yearly carbon allowance is insufficient to cover another resource-wasting human being.  

He has never owned anything.  He rents his bedroom, his furnishings, and his meager entertainments.  Each month, a digital account associated with his digital ID receives a number of central bank digital currency units.  How much he receives depends upon the number of hours he works at his government job, how much the government values his work, how much the government taxes him for the privilege of using public infrastructure, and how much of his income the government decides should be redistributed to other citizens in need.  After taxes, rents, utilities, and other assorted municipal, state, federal, and international fees are deducted from his earnings, he has little — if any — discretionary income.  

If he chooses to save that income to invest in his future, the government informs him that his central bank digital currency units disappear within ninety days.  If he tries to purchase something that the government has banned, he forfeits what he currently has.  If he does something that the government deems contrary to his well-being, his social credit score decreases, and a fraction of his discretionary income disappears.  Every few weeks, a digital doctor (running on artificial intelligence) appears on the video screen in his apartment with a detailed list of all the “unhealthy” things he has done since their last interaction.  He is informed that a portion of his temporary savings will be redistributed to citizens with healthier habits.  His A.I. health monitor tells him that he must immediately report to the closest pharmaceutical distribution center so that he can be injected with the latest “vaccines.”  Failure to do so will result in the deactivation of all electronic entertainment devices and a permanent mark on his social credit record.

He is unhappy, and because the State’s A.I. supervisor has detected his unhappiness, the display monitor in his apartment encourages him to find personal meaning by “joining the fight against global warming.”  For a while, he does just that.  He attends community meetings in his apartment building where government officials talk about the importance of “saving the planet” by “owning nothing.”  He chats with anonymous strangers (bots?) on the State’s social media platform, and they all agree that the sacrifices they’re making to save the world are definitely worth it.  He wakes up one morning to discover that his social credit score has risen and that he has been rewarded with a few extra central bank digital currency units.  Still, our future man remains unhappy.

Then one day sirens blare, and his apartment monitor flashes with breaking news: the country is at war.  He listens intently but can’t figure out which foreign nations are attacking.  The trusted news anchors tell him that peace, prosperity, and freedom are all at risk.  He steps outside his tiny apartment to find other solitary renters fired up and talking excitedly about the battles to come.  He walks back inside to find his A.I. supervisor informing him that he has been personally selected to protect the homeland from its enemies.  For the first time in many years, our future man feels alive.  

He soon finds himself in boot camp, where he enjoys regular exercise, discipline, and camaraderie.  Six months later, he and his new friends are shipped overseas.  Strangely, in all this time, nobody has explained whom they will actually be fighting.  All he knows is that they’re at war with “the authoritarians” who wish to “take our democracy.”  There is anticipation in his camp and endless talk of adventure.  Then, when everyone least expects it, a thunderous swarm of drones attacks from overhead.  Nobody has time to react.  Explosions seem to come from out of nowhere.  He sees the bodies of his friends torn to pieces.  Then everything goes dark.

He awakes in a hospital severely injured, is called a hero, and is later sent home.  When he arrives, he notices breadlines outside the government’s genetically engineered food distribution centers.  He hears a beggar on the street joke that they should call them “insect-lines,” since that’s all there is to eat.  He learns that someone else has moved into his old apartment, but he is offered a new one because of his military service.  It is smaller and has even fewer furnishings than the one he lost.  He realizes that most of his former neighbors never returned from war and that many of the newcomers now living in their apartments look and sound like those people he was told to fight overseas.  Nothing makes sense.  His injuries torment him.  He feels even more lost and lonely than before he went to war.  His A.I. supervisor informs him that he has been added to a list of people considered “potential domestic terrorists.”  Remaining on this list will make it hard for him to work and live.

Then, one day, his digital doctor asks if he would like some assistance in ending his life peacefully.  “You can save others,” he is told, “by permanently reducing your carbon footprint.”  In agony, he wonders, “How did we get here?”

The shortest answer to our future friend is this: governments abandoned sound money.  They replaced gold coins with paper currencies.  They made it illegal for ordinary citizens to conduct business freely and demanded that government-issued bills be used in economic transactions.  Then they gave private central banks the authority to print these paper bills whenever they determined that doing so would be good for the economy.  

Whose economy do wealthy central bankers protect — Wall Street’s or that of the working class?  Although putatively charged with financial duties to maximize employment and minimize inflation, central banks function as market manipulators and money printers for overspending governments.  By increasing the supply of paper currency, the price of consumer goods rises.  However, the numerical price of stock market shares also goes up.  These capital assets do not gain any real value, but their rising prices give the illusion of economic growth.  Many bad companies that would never survive in a free market become lucrative investment opportunities in fake markets.  Easy money sustains companies that produce no market value.  Who loses most in this artificial arrangement?  The poorest people who have no stocks and only limited cash savings.  They have watched the hundred-dollar bill hidden under their mattresses lose most of its value over the last fifty years.

Neither fiat currencies nor central banks have any functional place in free societies.  Governments that manipulate the value of money rig markets and steal from the working poor.  The wealthiest end up owning everything, while everyone else tries to balance life precariously on a tightrope of consumer debts, mortgages, long-term loans, and the growing prospect of insolvency.  This world that financial and political elites have built is unsustainable.  It is also a kind of economic slavery.

Because it is unsustainable, those who have benefited most from its creation will do anything they must to survive its collapse.  A crashing dollar does not matter if those who control the financial system today control the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.  Gross inequality and rampant poverty do not matter if governments can convince unhappy citizens that climate change, disease, and war require them to own less and sacrifice more.  Growing public anger does not matter if those with armies can censor speech, throttle food supplies, foment wars, and imprison dissidents.  

Ponder this: how much of the story above seems foreign, and how much of it seems painfully familiar?  Your answer tells us just how much time we have left.

Authored by Walker Larson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The president’s desk bears a remarkable pedigree. Its story ties together several disparate historical threads, including a ghost ship, polar exploration, and relations between the United States and the UK. The tale begins with a certain British Admiral, Sir Edward Belch.

A mapmaker in the British Royal Navy described Sir Edward Belcher as “a tyrannical martinet who made every ship he commanded a floating hell.” In 1854, that hell was a cold one, since Belcher and his small flotilla were sailing the frigid seas of the Arctic.

Tyrannical or not, one thing is sure: Belcher was a talented seaman, explorer, and hydrographer (someone who maps bodies of water). In 1852, he'd been assigned an important task. Belcher and his men ventured into the austere, alien waters of the Arctic on a rescue mission, searching for any trace of the lost Franklin Expedition.

The Franklin Expedition, headed by Sir John Franklin, was an 1845 British exploration operation that aimed to find the Northwest Passage through Canada to the Pacific. Franklin’s crew was ordered to record magnetic data as a potential aid to navigation practices. But the treacherous northern sea closed its icy fingers around the men of the expedition and never let them go. The mission proved to be one of the worst disasters in the history of polar exploration.

The two ships of the Franklin expedition—the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—sailed from Britain in May of 1845, took on supplies in Greenland in July, were spotted in Baffin Bay, Canada, and crossed the Lancaster Sound. They were never heard from again, vanishing into the vast white void.

In the years of searching conducted by the British government after their disappearance, no trace of the ships was found. Only a few artifacts and human remains were recovered. Most of the 129 crew members and officers had simply disappeared. Forensic investigations were conducted on the recovered bodies, revealing that the men suffered from starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, and, possibly, cannibalism, a narrative supported by the oral accounts of the expedition provided by the Inuit people. It was only in the 2010s that the Erebus and the Terror were at last discovered, wrecked off King William Island.

It was this polar tragedy that brought Sir Edward Belcher and his small fleet of ships, including the HMS Resolute, to the Arctic in 1854. Belcher’s voyage was almost as ill-fated as Franklin’s. Though the Resolute was heavily constructed to withstand the harsh Arctic environment, it became locked in the ice in 1854, along with four more of Belcher’s ships. Belcher made the difficult decision to abandon the ships and begin an overland trek to rendezvous with other vessels that could bring them back to England.

The men left behind their floating piece of home, their security and warmth, and entered the unending whiteness. They marched over the vast expanses of ice, eventually meeting up with their comrades’ ships and returning safely to England. There, Belcher was court-martialed (not for the first time) for abandoning his vessels but acquitted because his orders gave him full discretion. He never received another command.

So there, in the emptiness of the frozen North Sea, where the slowly clenching jaws of ice groaned and echoed through frigid air, the pale winds pined, and the strange lights flickered and played about the sky like ghosts, the abandoned Resolute waited. Belcher and his men had left it in good order, though they knew it would likely be broken up by the ice, in the end. But that was not to be its fate.

Months passed. Summer came, kissing even the hard northern waters with warmth. The ice thawed. Somehow, Resolute broke free. It drifted some 1,200 miles until James Buddington, captain of an American whaling ship, the George Henry, sighted it in 1855, near Baffin Island. An 1856 New York Journal article describes the moment the Americans boarded the ghost ship.

“Finally, stealing over the side, they found everything stowed away in proper order. ... Everything wore the silence of the tomb. Finally reaching the cabin door they broke in and found their way in the darkness to the table ... [a candle] was lit and before the astonished gaze of these men exposed a scene that appeared to be rather one of enchantment than reality. Upon a massive table was a metal teapot, glistening as if new, also a large volume of Scott’s family Bible, together with glasses and decanters filled with choice liquors. Nearby was Captain Kellett’s chair, a piece of massive furniture, over which had been thrown, as if to protect this seat from vulgar occupation, the royal flag of Great Britain.”

Buddington assigned a portion of his crew to the ghost ship, and they sailed it back to the United States. According to maritime law, the ship belonged to those who had found her (Buddington and his crew), and the British government accepted this fact when they were notified of the find. But the U.S. government had a different idea.

At this time, U.S. relations with Great Britain were strained. The War of 1812 was still alive to memory, including the moment when the British burned the U.S. capitol. The two countries continued to dispute the Canadian border. In the discovery of the Resolute, the U.S. government saw an opportunity to make a gesture of goodwill toward their adversaries across the pond. Congress authorized $40,000 to purchase the ship from Buddington and repair it.

The Americans took great care in refurbishing the sturdy old juggernaut, as described in an 1856 New York Times article:

“With such completeness and attention to detail has this work been performed, that not only has everything found on board been preserved, even to the books in the captain’s library, the pictures in his cabin, and a musical-box and organ belonging to other officers, but new British flags have been manufactured in the Navy Yard to take the place of those which had rotted during the long time she was without a living soul on board.”

With great fanfare, the Resolute was sailed back to England and presented as a gift to Queen Victoria, who visited the ship in person. The Brits took the gift to heart, and the queen remembered this gesture from the Americans for many years.

Returning the Favor

When the Resolute was removed from service and broken down in 1879, Queen Victoria ordered some of its timbers to be preserved. The heavy oak lumber, which had weathered so many storms and seen both tragedy and reconciliation, was constructed into a massive, ornate desk, weighing 1,300 pounds. Victoria sent it as a surprise gift to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, returning the favor and expressing gratitude for returning Her Majesty’s Ship, the Resolute, all those years before. Most importantly, the desk became an emblem of the mutual goodwill and alliance between the United States and Great Britain, which has never wavered since.

Most U.S. Presidents used the desk since it was gifted at the end of the 19th century. Between 1951 and 1962, it was used to hold a projector in the broadcast room at the White House until it was rediscovered by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. She had it moved back to the Oval Office, where it has formed part of the backdrop for many landmark moments in American presidential history. There are photos of President Kennedy sitting at the desk with John Kennedy Jr. peeking out from beneath it.

The Resolute desk, as it has come to be known, bears within it the marks of struggle, abandonment, miraculous discovery, restoration, and reconciliation. It’s a fitting symbol for the resolute American spirit.