Be careful staying short stocks. It feels like sentiment is at a local nadir/we are out of sellers for the time being.
Viking Ekes Out 1% Monthly Gain as Tiger Global, D1 Finish Flat
ENTERING THE SUPERBUBBLE’S FINAL ACT
Guggenheim’s Minerd Says Stocks Should ‘Fall Another 20%’ by Mid-October.
Citi Says Near-Panic Stock Mood Would Flash Buy If Not for Risks
Citigroup Inc. said the stock market’s mood is so pessimistic that it would signal a rebound is afoot if there weren’t so many risks ahead.
The Levkovich Index, a sentiment gauge that tracks everything from margin debt to short interest to the put-to-call ratio, fell to -16 this week, a hair away from a -17 level that defines panic, the bank’s data show. A reading this low has almost always indicated that a selloff has run too far and corresponded with positive returns in the next 12 months.
Huh? If there weren’t any risks, why would anyone be pessimistic in the first place?
What we are seeing is the fourth grand failure in 15 years of the whole idea that regulators can monitor bank assets and thereby keep the financial system safe.
What next? Well, stress testing having failed once again, here comes the bailout and stimulus, which seems to be our governments' only response to anything.
There is no lack of demand mysterious Keynesian economics afoot here. This is a good old fashioned shoot-self-in-foot supply shock. Borrowed or printed money cannot make a nation better off.
We create inflation by printing up money and debt and handing it out. Then, to solve the problem we... print up more money and debt and hand it out. You can see where this is heading.
San Francisco Fed note claiming a huge increase the effect of inflation expectations on wage growth post-pandemic.
Powell and I explain our policies to Joe Sixpack. Powell dismissed NGDP targeting, when he spoke on Thursday, as too hard to communicate to the public. I agree with Sumner, there may be good reasons to not target NDGP, but NGDP targeting is in no way more complex or less intuitive than current policy.
Bearish Euro thesis.
If you have to ask how much the UK’s energy plan costs, you probably can’t afford it.
Izabella Kaminska interviewing Craig Pirrong on the EU and UK energy packages.
Nothing new particularly, but a nice goldbug presentation on inflation.
Hopefully he’s not allowed to pick his own passwords anymore. Biden, Remaking Climate Team, Picks John Podesta to Guide Spending.
They will probably nail him for pocketing the Macron nudes, but they are working on a fallback— The Dry Run: The Ouster of a County Official as an ‘Insurrectionist’ Creates Ominous Precedents for Trump.
The decision could have enormous repercussions for the nation’s next presidential race, as advocacy groups have vowed to try to bar Trump from appearing on state ballots on the grounds that his role in instigating the Capitol riot disqualifies him from holding federal office.
The Fakery of “Fighting Inflation”
It is therefore quite absurd to give the Fed or any other central bank credit for “fighting inflation.” You might as well give your hard-partying neighbor credit for “fighting loud noise” because he turned his stereo volume down from 10 to 7. Key point: If the neighbor wasn’t home to “fight loud noise,” the volume would be 0.
Brad DeLong’s book Slouching Towards Utopia was recently released—review and another review.
What will self-reliance mean for China?
The phrase conventionally translated here as “self-reliance” is zili gengsheng (自力更生), which has historical resonances in Chinese that the neutral English translation fails to capture. Zili gengsheng was a key slogan during the Mao era, and Xi’s repeated use of the term in recent years is one of the things that make people think he wants to return to the autarky of the 1950s.
The Weakness of Xi Jinping—Brutal profile of Xi and the state of the CCP.
The more a political system centers on a single leader, the more the flaws and peculiarities of that leader matter. And in the case of Xi, the leader is thin-skinned, stubborn, and dictatorial.
The Despotism of Isaias Afewerki: Eritrea’s dictator makes his move on Tigray.
For Isaias, this portends a final decision by force of arms. He will fight without mercy. If he prevails, his lifelong ambition of becoming master of the Horn of Africa will be within his grasp.
You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me. Foreign policy blob argument to intervene in Myanmar.
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The Rise of the Liberal Hawks: They picked the right side.
In 1967, King was right to see Vietnam as a catastrophe for America, at home and abroad. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” But today we face a different world, and a stark choice. Zelensky, Ukrainian progressives, and the European Union? Or Putin, Trump, and Tucker Carlson? The left picked the right side.
The state of South Africa, 28ish years post-apartheid.
Poverty and inequality are sky high. The economy was performing terribly even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and unemployment sits somewhere between 34% and 47%(!), depending on how you measure it. Economic indicators related to social welfare are generally negative (there are still people and corporations making a killing). Some of this is due to the legacy of apartheid; but much of it is also due to a lack of accountable or competent leadership, and a massive program of organised corruption that has completely undermined the ability of the state to perform its basic functions, including keeping its citizens safe or encourage investment.
Inside the crypto black markets of Argentina. Not a great story for crypto, according to this article, crypto is used primarily in Argentina by cuevas (illegal currency exchanges) as a back-end/substitute for physical dollars.
Inside Tether’s brave new world of digital petrodollars and retrodollars.
Coinbase is admirably fighting back against the Treasury Department’s Tornado Cash sanctions. Defending Privacy in Crypto
Facing the hard facts about the ‘world class’ US Navy.
Recent research on Navy leadership suggests that the situation as bad, if not worse, as in 2004. According to a 2021 survey of current and retired Navy officers: “Concern within the Navy runs so high that, when asked whether incidents such as the two destroyer collisions in the Pacific (McCain and Fitzgerald), the surrender of a small craft to the IRGC (Iranian Republican Guard Corps) in the Arabian Gulf, the burning of the Bonhomme Richard, and other incidents were part of a broader cultural or leadership problem in the Navy, 94% of interviewees responded ‘yes.’”
The military ‘kill-chain’ concept as a meta-strategy for countering disinformation.
Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.
The Chilean voters are jerks who hate science. ‘I feel lost’: Chilean researchers saddened by vote to reject new constitution: Nearly 62% of Chileans voted against the proposed charter, which would have boosted science.
The Looming Extinction of the Working Class.
The Clerisy’s War on the Yeomanry. Like the Catholic Church and the medieval aristocracy, the contemporary Clerisy enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the oligarchic elites. These are also the main financiers of the Clerisy and their prime employers within NGOs, the universities, the media, and culture industries. In contrast to the traditional yeomanry, who tend to oppose controls, they are often beneficiaries of the regulatory state, either directly as high-level government employees or as consultants, attorneys, or through nonprofits. If the oligarchs destroy the middle class as a function of their business interests, the Clerisy does so intentionally for ideological reasons.
Perhaps the most perfidious Clerisy assault focuses on the value systems that underpinned the rise of the middle class. Many in these elites despise the traditions of country, religion, and family. Their hatred increases the conflict among cultural and racial identities. Once normal bourgeoise success is defined as mere “privilege” for males and whites, the idea of merit and rewards for work are destroyed. But in a racially and ethnically diverse capitalist society, merit is among the very few ideals that can keep such a society together.
DUH! A New Study Suggests That Black Southerners' Access to Firearms Reduced Lynchings.
It's (Almost) Always the Feds: How the FBI Fabricates Schemes To Entrap Would-Be Radicals
Here's a tip: If you have some radical political views and an acquaintance reaches out, encourages you to act on your convictions, and maybe offers to introduce you to a guy who can sell you some bomb parts, don't take him up on it. That guy's almost definitely working for the feds.
Have you seen Fat Leonard? New Details Revealed in ‘Fat Leonard’ Escape, Detention as Manhunt Continues. How could they have possibly stopped this daring escape?
More than seven hours passed between when federal authorities were alerted by the GPS monitor and when marshals arrived at the house.
Unknown to federal monitors, Francis had been moving belongings out of the property – he lived there with his mother and children, according to court documents – for several days as neighbors told federal authorities they saw several U-Haul trucks “coming in and out of the residence,” Castillo said. “There was more than one” seen on Friday or Saturday.
“As of now, we think he’s probably going international. It sounds like he’s been planning this for a while.”
Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency. I really need to stop using Gmail.
Is the Order of Malta still 'sovereign'?
Against Alcohol: A review of ‘Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health’
Is the Psychedelic Therapy Bubble About to Burst?
The more time she has spent working with patients, the more Watts has come to believe that the drugs themselves are not the key; the real value lies, she says, in the therapeutic experience—the “assisted therapy” part of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This is where a person sits with a guide for hours after having taken a psychedelic, in what should be a safe and compassionate context, with the space to untangle deeply buried feelings and trauma. The effects of the psychedelic help to create this space.
Salt is good for you. Less dietary salt equals more osteoporosis