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Tue, 24 May 2022 00:40:00 +0000 Ukraine War Pushes Globe's Total Displaced Persons Past 100 Million For 1st Time Ever
Ukraine War Pushes Globe's Total Displaced Persons Past 100 Million For 1st Time Ever
The United Nations Refugee Agency has cited conflicts not only in Ukraine but also disasters and war in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria,
Read more.....
Ukraine War Pushes Globe's Total Displaced Persons Past 100 Million For 1st Time Ever
The United Nations Refugee Agency has cited conflicts not only in Ukraine but also disasters and war in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to calculate that the world's total number of displaced persons has now surpassed 100 million for the first time in recorded history .
"One hundred million is a stark figure — sobering and alarming in equal measure," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said Monday. "It’s a record that should never have been set" - which should "serve as a wake-up call," according to the official.
Refugee center for fleeing Ukrainians, via AP
"To reverse this trend, the only answer is peace and stability so that innocent people are not forced to gamble between acute danger at home or precarious flight and exile," Grandi said.
Specifically on Ukraine, the new UN statement said , "In 2022, the war in Ukraine has displaced 8 million within the country this year and forced around 6 million to leave the nation ."
The UN is expected to release a comprehensive official report covering the new data in June. "The number of refugees, who are primarily driven out of their homes and living situations by war, conflict and disasters, now represents more than 1 percent of the entire world population and would equal the 14th most populous country if the people represented a nation," according to preliminary details from the UN.
Many among the total 100 million are internally displaced persons in conflict zones and disaster stricken regions, such as Yemen. Significantly, that figure represents 1% of the world's total population .
A quarter of those are under the age of 18. "This must serve as a wake-up call to resolve and prevent destructive conflicts, end persecution, and address the underlying causes that force innocent people to flee their homes," Grandi urged.
An estimated 38 million were internally displaced within their home countries in 2021, which includes 14.4 million impacted by conflict, and 23 million fleeing natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes .
The UN statement added that "Meanwhile, weather-related events such as floods, storms and cyclones resulted in some 23.7 million internal displacements in 2021, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region."
* * *
Meanwhile according to the latest note from Rabobank:
Inflation and geopolitical instability aren’t going to go away any time soon . Linking the two, as one should, a former German ambassador to Moscow tells @Tagesspiegel that President Putin is hoping his blockade of Ukraine’s grain supplies will lead to a migration crisis, with starving people then fleeing to Europe, that destabilizes the EU and pushes them to soften sanctions on Russia. Does he look wrong in that call when Germany, France, and Italy are already hardly hawkish? More pointedly, does the West have any answers to a hybrid warfare that weaponizes food, as in the past?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 20:40 Close
Tue, 24 May 2022 00:20:00 +0000 Oil Market Faces Elevated Hurricane Risk
Oil Market Faces Elevated Hurricane Risk
By Jake Lloyd-Smith, Bloomberg Markets Live Commentator and Reporter
The most consequential event for the oil market this week may come on Tuesday, but not f
Read more.....
Oil Market Faces Elevated Hurricane Risk
By Jake Lloyd-Smith, Bloomberg Markets Live Commentator and Reporter
The most consequential event for the oil market this week may come on Tuesday, but not from the battlefields of Ukraine or a high-profile analyst talking the talk.
With WTI more than 40% higher YTD on the fallout from the invasion, rising demand, and tight product markets, another bullish risk comes to the fore: Atlantic hurricane season looms and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is set to issue its initial outlook.
It could be a difficult few months, with scope for interruptions to offshore supply, as well as to refinery operations. President Joe Biden -- who’s already ordered a vast SPR crude release as oil prices rallied -- has warned “another tough hurricane season ” awaits with storms that’ll be more intense.
Separately, early projections from Colorado State University and AccuWeather suggested a rough ride.
Officially, the hurricane season starts on June 1, beginning at almost the same time as the US summer driving season, which will elevate gasoline and diesel demand.
[ZH: As if right on cue, the National Hurricane Center has spotted a pre-season tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico already. NHC said the system is located over the north-central Gulf of Mexico and has a very low chance of strengthening into a named tropical storm. It is expected to move inland over the central Gulf coast early this week. ]
Stockpiles of both key fuels are low and falling, with prices rallying to records.
Given all the risks, it’s unlikely those prices have yet topped out.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 20:20 Close
Tue, 24 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 US Army Mulls Letting Soldiers Switch Bases If Local Laws Discriminate Against Gender Identity
US Army Mulls Letting Soldiers Switch Bases If Local Laws Discriminate Against Gender Identity
The US Army is circulating a draft policy that would allow soldiers to move bases if they feel state or local laws discriminate a
Read more.....
US Army Mulls Letting Soldiers Switch Bases If Local Laws Discriminate Against Gender Identity
The US Army is circulating a draft policy that would allow soldiers to move bases if they feel state or local laws discriminate against them on the basis of race, religion, sex, or gender, according to Military.com , citing two sources with direct knowledge of the plans.
Transgender Army Capt. Jennifer Sims, 2017
The guidance adds specific language on discrimination to an existing policy, and would need final approval from Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. If enacted it would constitute one of the Army's most pro-LGBTQ policies to date .
"Some states are becoming untenable to live in; there's a rise in hate crimes and rise in LGBT discrmination," said Lindsay Church executive director of Minority Veterans of America, an advocacy group. "In order to serve this country, people need to be able to do their job and know their families are safe. All of these states get billions for bases but barely tolerate a lot of the service members."
If finalized, the new rules would clarify what situations would entitle a soldier to a so-called compassionate reassignment. Right now, those rules are vague but are mostly used for soldiers going through family problems that cannot be solved through "leave, correspondence, power of attorney, or help of family members or other parties," according to Army regulations .
The updated guidance, which sources said was drafted in response to several state laws but before a draft of a potential Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, would instruct commanders that they can use compassionate reassignment specifically to remove troops facing discrimination from their duty stations. -Military.com
According to a 2015 Rand study , around 6% of the US military is gay or bisexual, while 1% is transgender or nonbinary - numbers which Military.com suggests are "likely low," given that the survey was taken just four years after the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and before transgender troops could openly serve.
The leaked draft policy follows comments by Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, the service's top enlisted leader, who told lawmakers that the force is considering a response to the end of Roe v. Wade .
"The answer is yes, we are drafting policies to ensure we take care of our soldiers in an appropriate way," he told a House Appropriations Committee subpanel. "There are drafts if it were to be overturned, but that would be a decision for the secretary of the Army to decide the policy."
That said, the policy change allowing for switching bases was written in April , weeks before the Roe v. Wade draft decision leaked, according to the report.
Read the rest of the report here .
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 20:00 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 23:40:00 +0000 White House Press Secretary Says There’s No Timeline for When Baby Formula Shortage Ends
White House Press Secretary Says There’s No Timeline for When Baby Formula Shortage Ends
White House Press Secretary Says There’s No Timeline for When Baby Formula Shortage Ends
Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on May 22 said she didn’t have a timeline for when parents in the United States “will be able to readily” obtain baby formula.
“The president understands the struggle of moms and dads and parents and caregivers and making sure that … a child has … a healthy way of eatin g,” Jean-Pierre said during a press gaggle on Air Force One en route to Tokyo.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre holds her first news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington on May 16, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
She added,
“A healthy formula … safe formula … is our number one priority … which is why we have been very, very acutely aware of … the process that we’ve initiated with the flyover and also the DPA [Defense Production Act]. ”
President Joe Biden, who is currently in Japan after visiting South Korea, invoked the DPA on May 18 to accelerate domestic production of baby formula, in the face of a nationwide shortage.
A day later, the White House announced an operation titled Operation Fly Formula, to transport the equivalent of up to 1.5 million eight-ounce bottles of Nestle baby formula from Switzerland to Indiana, via commercial air cargo with contracts with the Pentagon.
“I don’t have a timeline for you yet,” Jean-Pierre continued.
“We want to … make sure it goes very quickly, because it’s so critical. And we know … what families are going through. … but I don’t have an exact timeline. …. clearly, we want this to happen as fast as possible, as quickly as possible.”
A U.S. military cargo plane carrying 35 tons of baby formula arrived in Indianapolis , Indiana, on Sunday. The formula, made in Nestle’s plant in Zurich, Switerzland, would be enough to feed 9,000 babies and 18,000 toddlers for a week.
Jean-Pierre said the shipment from Zurich would be “enough for over half a million bottles.”
“This formula was manufactured in an FDA-approved facility and will be inspected on arrival like all food imports ,” she added.
“We prioritize this for the first shipment because this formula type serves a critical medical purpose and is in short supply in the United States as the result of the Abbott Sturgis plant closure.”
Supply chain disruptions and a February recall by Abbott Nutrition have led to the current nationwide shortage of infant formula. According to Datasembly , the United States out-of-stock rate for baby formula was relatively stable, ranging between 2 and 8 percent, in the first half of last year. The rate stood at 43 percent for the week ending May 8.
On Sunday, Abbott Chief Executive Robert Ford apologized for the shortage and said the firm’s Sturgis plant would reopen during the first week of June.
Ronna McDaniel , chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, responded to Jean-Pierre’s no timeline comment on Twitter, saying that Biden administration officials “were warned 7 months ago.”
“Was told a baby formula shortage was coming – he [Biden] did nothing ,” McDaniel wrote in a separate post several hours later.
In November last year, there were media reports of parents struggling to find baby formula on the shelves of Walgreens, Target, and Walmart. On May 12, AFP published an interview with a woman in Washington who said she had known about the supply crunch “for almost seven months.”
On May 19, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, published a timeline that he said chronicled the failure of the Biden administration and U.S. Food and Drug Administration in “creating the infant formula crisis.” One key event on the timeline was how the nationwide out-of-stock rate for baby formula reached 11 percent in November, up from 8 percent in July.
“There were warning signs of an impending infant formula shortage as early as last fall,” Burr said according to a statement. “The Administration downplayed the shortage until it became a political liability for them.”
“When the infant formula shortage is finally resolved, the Biden Administration will attempt to take credit for solving a crisis they first, created and secondly, ignored ,” Burr said.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 19:40 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 23:20:00 +0000 "I Need To Get The F*ck Out Of This Car": Two Separate Teslas Ignite Last Week, One Trapping Driver, One Burning Child's Car Seat
"I Need To Get The F*ck Out Of This Car": Two Separate Teslas Ignite Last Week, One Trapping Driver, One Burning Child's Car Seat
Solar flares? The alignment of the planets? Just plain old terrible production quality ? What
Read more.....
"I Need To Get The F*ck Out Of This Car": Two Separate Teslas Ignite Last Week, One Trapping Driver, One Burning Child's Car Seat
Solar flares? The alignment of the planets? Just plain old terrible production quality ? What possible explanation could their be for two separate Teslas catching fire within a couple days of each other this weekend?
In fact, the incidents in question took place so close to each other, that we couldn't even finish writing about one of the stories before the other one broke - we so combined them into one piece.
First, it was reported late last week that a blaze in California had been started by a 2019 Tesla Model 3.
Owner Ediel Ruiz said that after taking a trip in the vehicle, he was greeted with a notification on his phone that his car's alarm was going off. When he looked outside at the car, it was filled with smoke and flames.
Ruiz said the first thing to melt was his 4-month-old’s car seat , according to KBAK .
"Honestly, I didn’t know how to react, I mean it just kind of happened," he said. “We had that, the stroller, formula, [his partner] had just graduated from USC the day prior. All her graduation stuff burned up.”
“We were going to go to Bakersfield to go eat at Texas Roadhouse. Luckily, for whatever reason, her grandparents canceled and we didn’t go. It didn’t happen while we were driving.”
He called the California City Fire Department to help remove the vehicle after the blaze: “I tried to make it clear that the car was completely gone. I don’t think they understood how bad the fire was. So when he showed up, he said, ‘I’m not prepared or equipped to remove this, I can’t drive this down the freeway or the ash will go everywhere.’”
Then, on Monday morning, it was reported by electrek that an almost brand new Model Y caught fire after powering down while driving. The incident happened last Friday, when the owner was says the car "pushed an error notification and then powered down" before the cabin began filling with smoke.
He told the fire department: "I had to smash the window to get out of the car. I kicked through the window. Everything stops. The power didn’t work. The door didn’t open. The windows didn’t go down so I’m thinking I need to get the f*ck out of this car so I kicked through."
"Oh f*ck there's the fire," you can hear someone on the video say. "I swear to God, all of a sudden my car just shut down, it just said 'error, error, error', and then all of a sudden the battery started smoking..."
"It’s going to be interesting to see the results of this investigation," electrek wrote. To which we ask, what investigation?
Here is video of the incident, where you can see clearly how the driver had to kick the window out:
VIDEO
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 19:20 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 23:00:00 +0000 NYC Parents Want In-Person Meeting With Mayor Over Toddler Mask Mandate: "Our Calls Have Gone Unanswered"
NYC Parents Want In-Person Meeting With Mayor Over Toddler Mask Mandate: "Our Calls Have Gone Unanswered"
NYC Parents Want In-Person Meeting With Mayor Over Toddler Mask Mandate: "Our Calls Have Gone Unanswered"
Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A frustrated group of more than 200 New York City parents have called the city’s mayor and public health chief to sit down and talk to them about the prolonged mask mandates for toddlers.
A girl, wearing a mask, walks down a street in the Corona neighborhood of Queens in New York City on April 14, 2020. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)
Under the city’s public health policy, masks remain mandatory for children aged 2 to 4 in public schools and daycare centers. Mayor Eric Adam’s order to extend the mandate beyond its March expiration was initially struck down by a Staten Island judge, who called it “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable,” but was later restored by an appeals court.
In their letter sent to the City Hall, the parents alleged that the mayor’s office has repeatedly ignored their complaints about forcing preschoolers to mask up.
“We write this letter because our hundreds of phone calls and emails, and our direct requests for meetings, have gone unanswered ,” the parents wrote. “We are now publicly requesting a meeting, by May 17, with both Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Ashwin Vasan to discuss NYC’s Toddler Mask Mandate.”
Specifically, the parents wanted the mayor and his health team to explain the reasoning behind the decision, including how exactly continuing to mask the youngest New Yorkers does more benefits than harm.
“We want to review the city’s analysis of how the benefits of covering the faces of babies who are still in diapers outweighs the harms,” the letter read. “We want to know why our young children continue to be masked even as every other resident of this city is given the option to unmask, regardless of vaccination status.”
In a statement to The New York Post , which first reported the matter, Adams said that he’s willing to unmask the children, but only when “the science says it is safe to do so.”
“My team of health experts and I will continue to evaluate the data, day after day, and we will continue to communicate with New Yorkers with additional updates,” the mayor told The Post.
Among the co-signers of the letter is Danyela Souza Egorov, a Manhattan-based mother of two. She told The Epoch Times that the parents have yet to receive any response from City Hall regarding their request.
“The parents are very frustrated because we don’t know which metrics are being used to decide this for us, or when, if ever, our toddlers will be able to take the masks off,” Egorov said, adding that wearing a mask may impede a child’s speech and language development. “At this point, I think the risk of COVID is very low for this particular group, but the risk of not being ready for kindergarten is very high.”
Egorov, who is running for New York State Senate as a Democrat, said parents should be able to decide whether their children wear masks.
“It’s very important to give the option to people—families who feel that they should continue using masks should continue to use masks ,” she said. “Families who feel that at this point, the masks are causing more problems than benefits for their children, should have the right to unmask.”
The Epoch Times also reached out to the New York City Department of Health to ask whether Vasan or Adams are planning to meet the petitioning parents. In response, a spokesperson for the department directed The Epoch Times to the mayor’s statement to The Post.
“The Health Department has participated in approximately 2,000 community conversations and hundreds more community events and briefings with stakeholders,” the spokesperson added. “We will continue to dialogue with New Yorkers, but, in the meantime, we will continue to implement policies that protect children from contracting COVID-19.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 19:00 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 22:40:00 +0000 Unprecedented: US Air Force To Join Israelis In Mock Attack On Iran
Unprecedented: US Air Force To Join Israelis In Mock Attack On Iran
As if an intense proxy war with nuclear powerhouse Russia isn’t bringing enough heat, the Biden White House has now given the greenlight for unprecedented U.S. part
Read more.....
Unprecedented: US Air Force To Join Israelis In Mock Attack On Iran
As if an intense proxy war with nuclear powerhouse Russia isn’t bringing enough heat, the Biden White House has now given the greenlight for unprecedented U.S. participation in an Israeli drill simulating a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
According to The Times of Israel , “The U.S. Air Force will serve as a complementary force, with refueling planes drilling with Israeli fighter jets as they simulate entering Iranian territory and carrying out repeated strikes .” The mock attack on Iran will happen this month, as part of a broader Israeli military exercise called “Chariots of Fire.”
In September, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi said the IDF had “ greatly accelerated ” preparations for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
“Dozens of Israeli air force fighter jets are expected to take part in the exercise and fly hundreds of miles from Israel to the west above the Mediterranean in a way that simulates a flight route to Iran,” reports Axios . General Michael Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, landed in Israel on Tuesday to observe the exercises.
Though there’s no indication of an imminent real-world strike, U.S. participation in the drill is an implicit endorsement of an Israeli-initiated war of aggression—and a signal that the United States might not only agree to it, but participate.
If so, it wouldn’t be the first time USAF tankers facilitated aggression in the region: Before a halt was announced in 2018, American tankers controversially aided Saudi strikes in Yemen. In addition to directly killing civilians—including 131 men, women and children gathered at a 2015 wedding celebration —the Saudi campaign has plunged Yemen into one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises .
To the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi , the hawkish participation in the Israeli drill is a “puzzling” extension of a pattern, as Biden perpetuates an aggressive Trump-like posture toward Iran that Biden previously condemned:
“Biden heavily criticized former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal and opposed his ‘maximum pressure’ strategy seeking to force Iran to capitulate by crushing its economy through unprecedented sanctions. Yet, 18 months into his presidency, Biden has yet to shift away from Trump’s sanctions policy.”
The saber-rattling move by Biden comes as talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are stalled. A key sticking point: Iran wants the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps removed from the list of designated—and sanctioned—terrorist organizations.
As with sanctions, Biden’s intransigence on the IRGC designation represents another hypocritical embrace of Trump policy. Parsi notes that, in 2017, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that such a designation by the Trump administration would needlessly escalate tensions.
But hey, whether it’s Ukraine or Iran, ditching honest diplomacy in favor of nerve-racking brinksmanship seems to be the Biden administration’s trademark.
Sure, it pushes us deeper into the threshold of World War III. On the other, as Biden’s approval rating has just reached yet another a new low , at least it helps keep our mind off surging price inflation, baby formula shortages and an economy that’s teetering along the edge off the abyss.
Maybe that’s the point.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 18:40 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 22:20:00 +0000 It's Not Just The USA: The Economic Instability Is Global
It's Not Just The USA: The Economic Instability Is Global
It's Not Just The USA: The Economic Instability Is Global
Authored by Paul Tolmachev via The Mises Institute,
The actions of the authorities in developed countries, essentially an extension of the Keynesian economic policy discourse, have brought the economies into disrepute. These actions consist of immense stimulus and virtually unfunded government indexation of voter income in the face of expected impoverishment amid COVID, lockdowns, and other global problems.
The government is making money cheaper, just to maintain electoral support. This leads to a dispersal of demand and a proliferation of zombie companies, it distorts the incentives for healthy competition, it reduces business efficiency, and it kills the innovation factor of economic growth. Most importantly: it creates leverage - the dominance of needs over opportunities, demand over supply-in other words, it leads to dramatic market disequilibrium.
Before COVID times, such imbalances over the past 20 years were bought with new leverage, and the imbalances went away for a while, giving birth to inevitable new imbalances in the future. The Austrian cycles perfectly describe this process, its starting points and its consequences. In fact, this leftist social agenda for buying electoral loyalty is a new political doctrine based on simplification, and most importantly, on the abolition of any concern for tomorrow.
In ?OVID times, however, all that has changed. Another injection of mega liquidity, the cheapening of money by all possible means - from direct budgetary donations to the inflating of the Fed's balance sheet - occurred against a background of blocked demand, rather than falling due to economic stagnation. As a result, the savings of all agents increased abnormally, people stopped wanting to work, the flow of investment into the stock market and into financial assets increased, creating hyperinflation in them and moving them away from their fair value.
The assumption was that, once the restrictions were lifted, the intensified and unmet buying intentions would sharply accelerate the economy, because the capacity and potential of supply is enormous: supply has the capacity to satisfy demand, synergistically accelerating the economy. This has not happened, however, because there have been structural shifts as a result of excessive lockdowns: gaps in supply chains, reduced labor force participation, and labor shortages in general, hypertrophied growth of commodity markets, and geopolitical tensions that reinforce all of the above factors. As a result, supply is unable to meet the demand because of cheap money, and inflation is again eating away at the economy.
At the same time, instead of reducing its clumsy intervention, the government, on the contrary, increases social programs and government spending in the form of infrastructure projects. In this way it depresses business through the inevitable increase in the tax burden and further contributes to the compression of supply, reducing efficiency, the desire to invest and, in general, worsening business expectations and expanding the mandate and the number of bureaucratic entities.
Against this same backdrop, by continuing its conciliatory policy with resource autocracies, the government is forcing a green agenda at the worst possible time, underfunding both conventional and alternative energy, which cannot cover the current need for the capacity provided by conventional energy. A cursory reading of Klaus Schwab's The Great Reboot is enough to understand the inadequacy of such a utopian concept, the adherence to which, as we can see, leads to anti-utopian consequences.
The result was a geopolitical tension caused by differing interests, preferences and expectations of global players : Russia, as a resource autocracy, saw a window of opportunity and the vulnerability of the economic position of the Collective West - and played the tactical card. In the short horizon, the calculation proved correct: on the whole, post-conservative externalities and leftist populist policies of Western power elites weakened developed economies, led to stagflation and increased the threat of recession. The blow to the Western world in the form of the military conflict in Eastern Europe and its aftermath was well-timed for the resource autocracy itself, which from within needed a new impetus for self-preservation and confirmation of the regime's legitimacy by the population.
What do we get in the end?
We end up with structural shifts, when all the post-Soviet problems multiply manifold.
Stagflation is already a fact today; recession is inevitable tomorrow. Social discontent, which will inevitably happen and is already taking place in various parts of the Western world, will force governments to continue to care about today without thinking about tomorrow - and to continue the policies of populism and leftist expansive discourse, which will inevitably lead to even greater leverage and exacerbate economic, and therefore social, imbalances.
Commodity inflation will not end quickly, since significant exporters of raw materials are in conflict and alternative channels of resource importation have not been established. New energy is clearly insufficient against the background of limiting imports of old energy from the resource autocracy. This means that traditional energy supplies must be recanalized, which is inevitably accompanied by rising costs and acceleration of inflation. Supply is under stress from rising costs - logistical lockups, commodity inflation and labor shortages. An additional stress is on the way, or rather, already in the room - rising credit costs and a potential drop in demand.
At the same time, China, as the embodiment of an alternative sociopolitical pole, benefits in the short horizon. Against the background of universal turbulence and socio-economic disequilibria in the Western world, the ability to centrally stimulate the market in the initial stages of the capitalist impulse can be quite a success story. At this point, there are still no acute dependencies on state injections, no meaningful imbalances in supply and demand dynamics, and no ideological constraints on imported raw materials.
China, with its own problems of growing state capitalism in the form of hypertrophied infrastructure capex and an authoritarian political frame leading to market and innovation inefficiencies over the long haul, now has a distinct advantage. It lies in the possibility of directive economic management and linear monetary and fiscal incentives. This is an advantage that Western states no longer have and that, by the way, China itself will soon lose, because games of "big government" do not succeed for too long. They always end in one thing: social and economic collapse in its various forms and outcomes.
As a result, Western economies are faced with a dilemma as never before: to continue state expansion and addiction treatment with a new dose, or to start bringing the economy into balance. Of course, this is associated with tough and unpopular political decisions, all the more painful in a situation of global tension. But this is precisely the situation in which politicians show their true skills, namely the ability to convince voters to sacrifice something today for the sake of a better tomorrow. Otherwise, there will be no tomorrow at all.
So far, we have been assured of only one thing: we are living in one day and there is no tomorrow. In short, it's like Keynes: we are all going to die in the long run. I think we've been through this before.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 18:20 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 22:00:00 +0000 Bird Flu Outbreak Plunges US Egg Production To 7-Year-Low
Bird Flu Outbreak Plunges US Egg Production To 7-Year-Low
Avian influenza has already impacted more than 37 million birds across 34 US states this year. The Read more.....
Bird Flu Outbreak Plunges US Egg Production To 7-Year-Low
Avian influenza has already impacted more than 37 million birds across 34 US states this year. The fast-spreading viru s has sent the production of eggs tumbling and prices at the supermarket soaring.
Bloomberg reports the production of US eggs in April plunged as millions of egg-producing hens were slaughtered to mitigate the virus' spread. The latest data from the USDA shows egg production fell 3.9% to 7.55 billion, while the number of egg-laying birds dropped 5.3% from a year ago.
The reduced output will continue to pressure retail prices for a dozen of eggs higher. In April alone, prices jumped 23% from the month before to $2.52. Prices reached levels not seen since early 2016, a period that followed the avian influenza outbreak of 2014-15, which led to a 50% increase in egg prices in the second half of 2015.
Egg prices could rise more as producers fail to meet increased demand as supplies tighten. The cost of breakfast is soaring. Everything from orange juice to bacon to wheat has jumped in price -- the first meal of the day used to be the most affordable -- not so much anymore.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 18:00 Close
Mon, 23 May 2022 21:54:48 +0000 Posobiec Gives Details Of Davos Detention
Posobiec Gives Details Of Davos Detention
Update (1753ET): Posobiec has detailed what went down, via TPUSA .
"The World Economic Forum under Klaus Schwab has its own paramilitary police forc
Read more.....
Posobiec Gives Details Of Davos Detention
Update (1753ET): Posobiec has detailed what went down, via TPUSA .
"The World Economic Forum under Klaus Schwab has its own paramilitary police force called the World Economic Forum Police," he said.
"Two minivans full of officers, essentially a quick reaction force pop up, everybody storms out, they've got MP5s, one of the guys is flagging me... and then each of us was taken, the entire crew - one by one - behind the building and behind this stack of tables, and we were made to empty our pockets, and we were frisked, " he continued.
Watch:
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Journalist Jack Posobiec and his crew were briefly detained without explanation in Davos, Switzerland on Monday, where the World Economic Forum has kicked off its annual conference.
In a clip posted to Twitter, Davos police can be seen surrounding Posobiec of Human Events , along with his crew. When a woman he was with began asking questions, a policewoman in plain clothes asked her to stop filming.
The policewoman said "We're just making a normal police patrol, because you know, it's WEF..."
"Is there a reason he specifically was targeted?" the woman asked.
"There is a reason, because we have to have a reason to control a person ."
When asked what the reason was, the policewoman said "I don't have to tell you. "
Watch:
Posobiec attended CPAC Hungary last weekend where he was a guest speaker.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/23/2022 - 17:54 Close