Yearly Archives: 2020

Americans Have Already Skipped Payments On More Than 100 Million Loans, And Job Losses Continue To Escalate

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Economic Collapse Blog

Those that have been hoping for some sort of a “V-shaped recovery” have had their hopes completely dashed.  U.S. workers continue to lose jobs at a staggering rate, and economic activity continues to remain at deeply suppressed levels all over the nation.  Of course this wasn’t supposed to happen now that states have been “reopening” their economies.  We were told that things would soon be getting back to normal and that the economic numbers would rebound dramatically.  But that is not happening.  In fact, the number of Americans that filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week was much higher than expected…

Weekly jobless claims stayed above 1 million for the 13th consecutive week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hammer the U.S. economy.

First-time claims totaled 1.5 million last week, higher than the 1.3 million that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting. The government report’s total was 58,000 lower than the previous week’s 1.566 million, which was revised up by 24,000.

To put this in perspective, let me once again remind my readers that prior to this year the all-time record for a single week was just 695,000.  So even though more than 44 million Americans had already filed initial claims for unemployment benefits before this latest report, there were still enough new people losing jobs to more than double that old record from 1982.

That is just astounding.  We were told that the economy would be regaining huge amounts of jobs by now, but instead job losses remain at a catastrophic level that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history.

With the addition of this latest number, a grand total of nearly 46 million Americans have now filed initial claims for unemployment benefits since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

If you can read that statement and still believe that the U.S. economy is not imploding, I would like to know what you are smoking, because it must be pretty powerful.

Some of the things that we are seeing happen around the country right now are absolutely nuts.  For example, earlier this week in Kentucky it was being reported that people were waiting in line for up to 8 hours to talk with a state official face to face about their unprocessed unemployment claims…

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

By now, the U.S. economy was supposed to be roaring back to life and we were supposed to be entering a new golden age of American prosperity.

Unfortunately, the truth is that more bad economic news is hitting us on a continual basis, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Over the past few days, we have learned that Hilton is laying off 22 percent of its corporate staff, and AT&T has announced that it will be eliminating 3,400 jobs and closing 250 stores…

The wireless carrier AT&T is cutting 3,400 jobs and shutting down 250 stores over the next few weeks, according to a statement from the Communications Workers of America, a union representing AT&T workers.

The AT&T Mobility and Cricket Wireless retail closures will affect 1,300 jobs, while the other layoffs are said to be affecting technical and clerical workers.

Needless to say, all of these job losses are having a tremendous ripple effect throughout the economy.

Without paychecks coming in, a lot of Americans are having a really tough time paying their bills, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that payments have already been skipped on more than 100 million loans…

Americans have skipped payments on more than 100 million student loans, auto loans and other forms of debt since the coronavirus hit the U.S., the latest sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on people’s finances.

The number of accounts that enrolled in deferment, forbearance or some other type of relief since March 1 and remain in such a state rose to 106 million at the end of May, triple the number at the end of April, according to credit-reporting firm TransUnion.

Wow.

To me, that is an almost unimaginable number, and it has become clear that a tremendous amount of pain is ahead for the financial institutions that are holding these loans.

A lot of people out there are going to keep hoping that there will be some sort of an economic rebound, but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that fear of COVID-19 is going to keep a large segment of the population from resuming normal economic activities for the foreseeable future.  And it certainly doesn’t help that the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. has been steadily rising over the past couple of weeks and that the mainstream media has been endlessly warning that a “second wave” is coming.

If you doubt what I am saying, just look at what is happening to the restaurant industry.  We had started to see a small bit of improvement in the numbers, but now fear of a “second wave” has caused restaurant traffic to start cratering again…

After three months of slow but consistent improvement in restaurant dining data in the US and across the globe, in its latest update on “the state of the restaurant industry”, OpenTable today reported the biggest drop in seated restaurant diners (from online, phone and walk-in reservations) since the depth of the global shutdown in March.

As shown in the OpenTable graphic below, on Sunday, June 14, restaurant traffic suddenly tumbled, sliding from a -66.5% y/y decline as of June 13 to -78.8% globally.

This was mostly due to a sharp drop in US restaurant diners, which plunged by 13% – from -65% to -78% – the biggest one day drop since the start of the shutdown in the US, and the second biggest one day drop on record.

Business travel is another area where we are seeing signs of big trouble ahead.  The following comes from Yves Smith…

Business travel is not coming back any time soon. People are getting accustomed to Zoom. And word may also get out that domestic flying is much worse than it used to be, which will be a deterrent to those who might be so bold as to want to get on a plane. That is a fundamental blow to airlines, airport vendors, hotels, restaurants, and convention centers. Hotel occupancy in April was 24.5% which if anything seems high based on my personal datapoints. The pricings I see say that hotel operators are not expecting much if any improvement through the summer.

Like many of you, I wish that economic conditions would go back to the way they used to be, but that simply is not going to happen.

Yes, we will see economic numbers go up and down over the coming months, but a return to “the good times” is not in the cards.

And what hardly anyone realizes is that this is just the beginning of our problems, and I am working on a new project right now which will explain why this is true in great detail.

So stay tuned, because things are about to get really, really “interesting”.

Russiagate’s Last Gasp

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By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

On Friday The New York Times featured a report based on anonymous intelligence officials that the Russians were paying bounties to have U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan with President Donald Trump refusing to do anything about it.  The flurry of Establishment media reporting that ensued provides further proof, if such were needed, that the erstwhile “paper of record” has earned a new moniker — Gray Lady of easy virtue.

Over the weekend, the Times’ dubious allegations grabbed headlines across all media that are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans — which seems to have been the main objective. To keep the pot boiling this morning, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s daily web piece, “The Morning” calls prominent attention to a banal article by a Heather Cox Richardson, described as a historian at Boston College, adding specific charges to the general indictment of Trump by showing “how the Trump administration has continued to treat Russia favorably.” The following is from Richardson’s newsletter on Friday:

— “On April 1 a Russian plane brought ventilators and other medical supplies to the United States … a propaganda coup for Russia;

— “On April 25 Trump raised eyebrows by issuing a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin commemorating the 75th anniversary of the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops on the bridge of the Elbe River in Germany that signaled the final defeat of the Nazis;

— “On May 3, Trump called Putin and talked for an hour and a half, a discussion Trump called ‘very positive’;

— “On May 21, the U.S. sent a humanitarian aid package worth $5.6 million to Moscow to help fight coronavirus there.  The shipment included 50 ventilators, with another 150 promised for the next week; …

— “On June 15, news broke that Trump has ordered the removal of 9,500 troops from Germany, where they support NATO against Russian aggression. …”

Historian Richardson added:

“All of these friendly overtures to Russia were alarming enough when all we knew was that Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election and is doing so again in 2020.  But it is far worse that those overtures took place when the administration knew that Russia had actively targeted American soldiers. … this bad news apparently prompted worried intelligence officials to give up their hope that the administration would respond to the crisis, and instead to leak the story to two major newspapers.”

Hear the siren? Children, get under your desks!

The Tall Tale About Russia Paying for Dead U.S. Troops

Times print edition readers had to wait until this morning to learn of Trump’s statement last night that he was not briefed on the cockamamie tale about bounties for killing, since it was, well, cockamamie.

Late last night the president tweeted: “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or the VP. …”

For those of us distrustful of the Times — with good reason — on such neuralgic issues, the bounty story had already fallen of its own weight. As Scott Ritter pointed out yesterday:

“Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels. …”

And who can forget how “successful” interrogators can be in getting desired answers.

Russia & Taliban React

The Kremlin called the Times reporting “nonsense … an unsophisticated plant,” and from Russia’s perspective the allegations make little sense; Moscow will see them for what they are — attempts to show that Trump is too “accommodating” to Russia.

A Taliban spokesman called the story “baseless,” adding with apparent pride that “we” have done “target killings” for years “on our own resources.”

Russia is no friend of the Taliban.  At the same time, it has been clear for several years that the U.S. would have to pull its troops out of Afghanistan.  Think back five decades and recall how circumspect the Soviets were in Vietnam.  Giving rhetorical support to a fraternal Communist nation was de rigueur and some surface-to-air missiles gave some substance to that support.

But Moscow recognized from the start that Washington was embarked on a fool’s errand in Vietnam. There would be no percentage in getting directly involved.  And so, the Soviets sat back and watched smugly as the Vietnamese Communists drove U.S. forces out on their “own resources.” As was the case with the Viet Cong, the Taliban needs no bounty inducements from abroad.

Besides, the Russians knew painfully well — from their own bitter experience in Afghanistan, what the outcome of the most recent fool’s errand would be for the U.S.  What point would they see in doing what The New York Times and other Establishment media are breathlessly accusing them of?

CIA Disinformation; Casey at Bat

Former CIA Director William Casey said:  “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”

Casey made that remark at the first cabinet meeting in the White House under President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, according to Barbara Honegger, who was assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser.  Honegger was there, took notes, and told then Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who in turn made it public.

If Casey’s spirit is somehow observing the success of the disinformation program called Russiagate, one can imagine how proud he must be.  But sustained propaganda success can be a serious challenge.  The Russiagate canard has lasted three and a half years.  This last gasp effort, spearheaded by the Times, to breathe more life into it is likely to last little more than a weekend — the redoubled efforts of Casey-dictum followers notwithstanding.

Russiagate itself has been unraveling, although one would hardly know it from the Establishment media.  No collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  Even the sacrosanct tenet that the Russians hacked the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks has been disproven, with the head of the DNC-hired cyber security firm CrowdStrike admitting that there is no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.

How long will it take the Times to catch up with the CrowdStrike story, available since May 7?

The media is left with one sacred cow: the misnomered “Intelligence Community” Assessment of Jan. 6, 2017, claiming that President Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC. That “assessment” done by “hand-picked analysts” from only CIA, FBI and NSA (not all 17 intelligence agencies of the “intelligence community”) reportedly is being given close scrutiny by U. S. Attorney John Durham, appointed by the attorney general to investigate Russiagate’s origins.

If Durham finds it fraudulent (not a difficult task), the heads of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials may roll.  That would also mean a still deeper dent in the credibility of Establishment media that are only too eager to drink the Kool Aid and to leave plenty to drink for the rest of us.

Do not expect the media to cease and desist, simply because Trump had a good squelch for them last night — namely, the “intelligence” on the “bounties” was not deemed good enough to present to the president.

(As a preparer and briefer of The President’s Daily Brief  to Presidents Reagan and HW Bush, I can attest to the fact that — based on what has been revealed so far — the Russian bounty story falls far short of the PDB threshold.)

Rejecting Intelligence Assessments

Nevertheless, the corporate media is likely to play up the Trump administration’s rejection of what the media is calling the “intelligence assessment” about Russia offering — as Rachel Maddow indecorously put it on Friday — “bounty for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan.”

I am not a regular Maddow-watcher, but to me she seemed unhinged — actually, well over the top.

The media asks, “Why does Trump continue to disrespect the assessments of the intelligence community?”  There he goes again — not believing our “intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin.”

In other words, we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood.  As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.”  Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”

“This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, adding the aphorism she memorized several months ago: “All roads lead to Putin.”  The unconscionably deceitful performance of Establishment media is as bad as it gets, though that, of course, was not what Pelosi meant.  She apparently lifted a line right out of the Times about how Trump is too “accommodating” toward Russia.

One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia as a reflection of the need to pre-empt the findings likely to issue from Durham and Attorney General William Barr in the coming months — on the theory that the best defense is a pre-emptive offense.  Meanwhile, we can expect the corporate media to continue to disgrace itself.

Vile

Caitlin Johnstone, typically, pulls no punches regarding the Russian bounty travesty:

“All parties involved in spreading this malignant psyop are absolutely vile, but a special disdain should be reserved for the media class who have been entrusted by the public with the essential task of creating an informed populace and holding power to account. How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity? It boggles the mind.

It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.”

Project Venezuela: Right-wing activists push Wikipedia to blacklist MintPress, other alternative media

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A group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets covering Venezuela, including MintPress News.

By Alan MacLeod

Source: Intrepid Report

Still unable to convince a sufficient number of their countryfolk to support them, the Venezuelan opposition has turned their efforts towards convincing an international audience—primarily Americans—to support their cause. Part of that is spending inordinate amounts of time online, arguing in English on social media, creating bot networks, and editing Wikipedia articles. Many Wikipedia articles on Venezuela are particularly biased towards the opposition, containing numerous inaccuracies, falsehoods and non-sequiturs.

Now, according to The Grayzone, a group of right-wing Venezuelans has managed to ban the use of a range of alternative media outlets that do not comport with their views. These include MintPress (already blackballed by Wikipedia), The Grayzone, and the much-lauded independent news site Venezuelanalysis, the most extensive English-language resource on the country available. One user in particular, ZiaLater, a member of a group called “Project Venezuela” who control and moderate content related to the country, was the catalyst for the banning of the sites taking an anti-imperialist stance. Some members of Project Venezuela spend long hours changing Venezuela-related pages so they are more critical of the government and sympathetic to the opposition.

Policing the narrative

Wikipedia suggests using corporate-funded mainstream sources who they feel are “generally reliable.” However, on Venezuela, these same outlets closely resemble and parrot U.S. regime change propaganda. For example, CNN, the BBC, and the Daily Telegraph all reported the blatant falsehood that the Venezuelan government burned aid trucks trying to enter the country last year. In reality, it was the opposition themselves that burned their own trucks, as immediately reported by The Grayzone, MintPress News, and other outlets who were actually there. Multiple well-circulated live streams also showed the event in real-time. However, that was all ignored. The New York Times, a site recommended by Wikipedia for citation, currently employs a journalist covering Venezuela who openly admitted to me on tape that he considers himself a “mercenary” and deliberately plants outrageously exaggerated stories into Western media to push his goals. Other journalists told me that their colleagues consider it their number one mission to overthrow the Maduro government.

In 2017, The Washington Post published an article openly calling for a violent coup in the country, and currently employs a Venezuelan journalist who resigned from The New York Times, saying, “Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism” that he “can’t possibly be neutral.” Meanwhile, The Guardian described Oscar Perez, a local ex-soldier who hijacked a helicopter and used it to bomb parliament buildings as a “patriot,” and even pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that Perez was a “government plant.” They have not retracted it, nor apologized. This is just a minor sampling of the opposition propaganda disguised as objective reporting pumped out constantly by corporate media.

“The media coverage of Venezuela is about as terrible as for any country in the world, except possibly for Palestine. It is utterly biased, misleading and distorted,” said Dan Beeton, an economist and Latin America specialist from the Center for Economic Policy Research. “The gap between the image and the reality of Venezuela,” said professor William I. Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “is so enormous that it is unfathomable.”

In contrast, MintPress has a number of experienced contributors based in Latin America, including Camila Escalante and Ollie Vargas. I myself have published a Ph.D., book, and five peer-reviewed studies in academic journals on the country and find myself in the mainstream of academic thought. Yet the chasm between how specialists see the country and how it is reported in media is so large that we appear ultra-partisan in comparison to the corporate monolith.

A tool to propagate the biases of the ruling elite

While the popular view of Wikipedia is that it is a collective public undertaking that anyone and everyone can add to, in reality, the online encyclopedia has come to mirror the inequalities present in society. The more edits you do, the more power, prestige and influence you accrue, allowing individuals to wield unreasonable power over the world’s 13th most visited website. A class of powerful editors has emerged, who spend hours every day editing and changing content how they see fit. There are strong suspicions that governments and other wealthy organizations are paying people—or teams of people using the same account—to moderate the site full-time, and these power users openly advertise their services to corporations or other groups who want to sanitize or promote their image by changing their pages. Because these users have climbed the Wikipedia hierarchy, their edits become law and are very difficult to overrule.

The CIA has been exposed changing the pages of politically sensitive topics, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, an FBI computer was spotted editing the entry on Guantanamo Bay, while the NYPD amended Eric Garner’s page and even tried to remove pages focussing on police brutality. Israeli groups are also active on the site, conducting an information war, trying to improve the country’s image. The Guardian revealed they even gave out awards and prizes like free balloon rides for those selected as the “best Zionist editor.”

Thus, the site has effectively been turned into “a tool to propagate the reigning ideology and biases of the ruling elites,” in the words of former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges. As Wikipedia has shown little interest in opposing the site being slowly taken over by organized groups, it is unlikely that the mass blacklisting will be overturned.

Meet BlackRock, the New Great Vampire Squid

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By Ellen Brown

Source: Web of Debt

BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions of bailout dollars from the Federal Reserve. The fate of a large portion of the country’s corporations has been put in the hands of a megalithic private entity with the private capitalist mandate to make as much money as possible for its owners and investors; and that is what it has proceeded to do.

To most people, if they are familiar with it at all, BlackRock is an asset manager that helps pension funds and retirees manage their savings through “passive” investments that track the stock market. But working behind the scenes, it is much more than that. BlackRock has been called “the most powerful institution in the financial system,” “the most powerful company in the world” and the “secret power.” It is the world’s largest asset manager and “shadow bank,” larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China), with over $7 trillion in assets under direct management  and another $20 trillion managed through its Aladdin risk-monitoring software. BlackRock has also been called “the fourth branch of government” and “almost a shadow government”, but no part of it actually belongs to the government. Despite its size and global power, BlackRock is not even regulated as a “Systemically Important Financial Institution” under the Dodd-Frank Act, thanks to pressure from its CEO Larry Fink, who has long had “cozy” relationships with government officials.

BlackRock’s strategic importance and political weight were evident when four BlackRock executives, led by former Swiss National Bank head Philipp Hildebrand, presented a proposal at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2019 for an economic reset that was actually put into effect in March 2020. Acknowledging that central bankers were running out of ammunition for controlling the money supply and the economy, the BlackRock group argued that it was time for the central bank to abandon its long-vaunted independence and join monetary policy (the usual province of the central bank) with fiscal policy (the usual province of the legislature). They proposed that the central bank maintain a “Standing Emergency Fiscal Facility” that would be activated when interest rate manipulation was no longer working to avoid deflation. The Facility would be deployed by an “independent expert” appointed by the central bank.

The COVID-19 crisis presented the perfect opportunity to execute this proposal in the US, with BlackRock itself appointed to administer it. In March 2020, it was awarded a no-bid contract under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to deploy a $454 billion slush fund established by the Treasury in partnership with the Federal Reserve. This fund in turn could be leveraged to provide over $4 trillion in Federal Reserve credit. While the public was distracted with protests, riots and lockdowns, BlackRock suddenly emerged from the shadows to become the “fourth branch of government,” managing the controls to the central bank’s print-on-demand fiat money. How did that happen and what are the implications?

Rising from the Shadows

BlackRock was founded in 1988 in partnership with the Blackstone Group, a multinational private equity management firm that would become notorious after the 2008-09 banking crisis for snatching up foreclosed homes at firesale prices and renting them at inflated prices. BlackRock first grew its balance sheet in the 1990s and 2000s by promoting the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that brought down the economy in 2008. Knowing the MBS business from the inside, it was then put in charge of the Federal Reserve’s “Maiden Lane” facilities. Called “special purpose vehicles,” these were used to buy “toxic” assets (largely unmarketable MBS) from Bear Stearns and American Insurance Group (AIG), something the Fed was not legally allowed to do itself.

BlackRock really made its fortunes, however, in “exchange traded funds” (ETFs). It gained trillions in investable assets after it acquired the iShares series of ETFs in a takeover of Barclays Global Investors in 2009. By 2020, the wildly successful iShares series included over 800 funds and $1.9 trillion in assets under management.

Exchange traded funds are bought and sold like shares but operate as index-tracking funds, passively following specific indices such as the S&P 500, the benchmark index of America’s largest corporations and the index in which most people invest. Today the fast-growing ETF sector controls nearly half of all investments in US stocks, and it is highly concentrated. The sector is dominated by just three giant American asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, the “Big Three” – with BlackRock the clear global leader. By 2017, the Big Three together had become the largest shareholder in almost 90% of S&P 500 firms, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. BlackRock also owns major interests in nearly every mega-bank and in major media.

In March 2020, based on its expertise with the Maiden Lane facilities and its sophisticated Aladdin risk-monitoring software, BlackRock got the job of dispensing Federal Reserve funds through eleven “special purpose vehicles” authorized under the CARES Act. Like the Maiden Lane facilities, these vehicles were designed to allow the Fed, which is legally limited to purchasing safe federally-guaranteed assets, to finance the purchase of riskier assets in the market.

Blackrock Bails Itself Out

The national lockdown left states, cities and local businesses in desperate need of federal government aid. But according to David Dayen in The American Prospect, as of May 30 (the Fed’s last monthly report), the only purchases made under the Fed’s new BlackRock-administered SPVs were ETFs, mainly owned by BlackRock itself. Between May 14 and May 20, about $1.58 billion in ETFs were bought through the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), of which $746 million or about 47% came from BlackRock ETFs. The Fed continued to buy more ETFs after May 20, and investors piled in behind, resulting in huge inflows into BlackRock’s corporate bond ETFs.

In fact, these ETFs needed a bailout; and BlackRock used its very favorable position with the government to get one. The complicated mechanisms and risks underlying ETFs are explained in an April 3 article by business law professor Ryan Clements, who begins his post:

Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) are at the heart of the COVID-19 financial crisis. Over forty percent of the trading volume during the mid-March selloff was in ETFs ….

The ETFs were trading well below the value of their underlying bonds, which were dropping like a rock. Some ETFs were failing altogether. The problem was something critics had long warned of: while ETFs are very liquid, trading on demand like stocks, the assets that make up their portfolios are not. When the market drops and investors flee, the ETFs can have trouble coming up with the funds to settle up without trading at a deep discount; and that is what was happening in March.

According to a May 3 article in The National, “The sector was ultimately saved by the US Federal Reserve’s pledge on March 23 to buy investment-grade credit and certain ETFs. This provided the liquidity needed to rescue bonds that had been floundering in a market with no buyers.”

Prof. Clements states that if the Fed had not stepped in, “a ‘doom loop’ could have materialized where continued selling pressure in the ETF market exacerbated a fire-sale in the underlying [bonds], and again vice-versa, in a procyclical pile-on with devastating consequences.” He observes:

There’s an unsettling form of market alchemy that takes place when illiquid, over-the-counter bonds are transformed into instantly liquid ETFs. ETF “liquidity transformation” is now being supported by the government, just like liquidity transformation in mortgage backed securities and shadow banking was supported in 2008.

Working for Whom?

BlackRock got a bailout with no debate in Congress, no “penalty” interest rate of the sort imposed on states and cities borrowing in the Fed’s Municipal Liquidity Facility, no complicated paperwork or waiting in line for scarce Small Business Administration loans, no strings attached. It just quietly bailed itself out.

It might be argued that this bailout was good and necessary, since the market was saved from a disastrous “doom loop,” and so were the pension funds and the savings of millions of investors. Although BlackRock has a controlling interest in all the major corporations in the S&P 500, it professes not to “own” the funds. It just acts as a kind of “custodian” for its investors — or so it claims. But BlackRock and the other Big 3 ETFs vote the corporations’ shares; so from the point of view of management, they are the owners. And as observed in a 2017 article from the University of Amsterdam titled “These Three Firms Own Corporate America,” they vote 90% of the time in favor of management. That means they tend to vote against shareholder initiatives, against labor, and against the public interest. BlackRock is not actually working for us, although we the American people have now become its largest client base.

In a 2018 review titled “Blackrock – The Company That Owns the World”, a multinational research group called Investigate Europe concluded that BlackRock “undermines competition through owning shares in competing companies, blurs boundaries between private capital and government affairs by working closely with regulators, and advocates for privatization of pension schemes in order to channel savings capital into its own funds.”

Daniela Gabor, Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Western England in Bristol, concluded after following a number of regulatory debates in Brussels that it was no longer the banks that wielded the financial power; it was the asset managers. She said:

We are often told that a manager is there to invest our money for our old age. But it’s much more than that. In my opinion, BlackRock reflects the renunciation of the welfare state. Its rise in power goes hand-in-hand with ongoing structural changes; in finance, but also in the nature of the social contract that unites the citizen and the state.

That these structural changes are planned and deliberate is evident in BlackRock’s August 2019 white paper laying out an economic reset that has now been implemented with BlackRock at the helm.

Public policy is made today in ways that favor the stock market, which is considered the barometer of the economy, although it has little to do with the strength of the real, productive economy. Giant pension and other investment funds largely control the stock market, and the asset managers control the funds. That effectively puts BlackRock, the largest and most influential asset manager, in the driver’s seat in controlling the economy.

As Peter Ewart notes in a May 14 article on BlackRock titled “Foxes in the Henhouse,” today the economic system “is not classical capitalism but rather state monopoly capitalism, where giant enterprises are regularly backstopped with public funds and the boundaries between the state and the financial oligarchy are virtually non-existent.”

If the corporate oligarchs are too big and strategically important to be broken up under the antitrust laws, rather than bailing them out they should be nationalized and put directly into the service of the public. At the very least, BlackRock should be regulated as a too-big-to-fail Systemically Important Financial Institution. Better yet would be to regulate it as a public utility. No private, unelected entity should have the power over the economy that BlackRock has, without a legally enforceable fiduciary duty to wield it in the public interest.

Trust No One

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

The title of today’s post is not meant to be taken literally. I trust plenty of people. I trust friends who’ve demonstrated their trustworthiness over the years. I trust my family. Having people in my life I love and trust makes everything far more meaningful and pleasant. I hope people reading this likewise have a circle of trust they’ve built over the years.

On the other hand, you should never trust anyone or anything that hasn’t given you good reason to do so, and if someone or something gives you good reason not to trust them, you should never forget that. The more power a person or institution has in society, the less trustworthy they tend to be. I don’t say this because it’s fun to be cynical, I say this because my life experience has demonstrated its accuracy.

In the 21st century alone, I’ve been given good reason to distrust all sorts of things around me, including the U.S. government (all governments really), intelligence agencies, politicians, mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, to name a few. These power centers make up “society” as we know it in 2020, which is really just massive concentrations of lawless financial and political power obfuscating rampant criminality behind the cover of various ostensibly venerable institutions. What’s most remarkable is how many people still maintain trust in so many of these provably untrustworthy organizations and industries, which speaks to the power of propaganda as well as the comfort of denial.

That said, the ground is clearly beginning to shift on this front. As more and more people recognize that the system’s designed to work against them, increased numbers will reject conventional wisdom and search for an alternative framework. Unfortunately, this next step can be equally treacherous and it’s important not to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

This is where social media comes into play. It offers an endless array of opinions and analysis that you don’t get from mass media, but it’s also filled with bad actors, professional propagandists and con artists. At this point, everyone knows that social media is the new information battleground, so every character or institution with malicious intent is aggressively playing in this arena and often with boatloads of money. The charlatans at MSNBC will have you believe it’s just the Russians or Chinese, but every government and every single special interest on the planet is now involved. They’re all on social media in one form or another, trying to push you in a specific direction that’s usually not in your best interests.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally recognized how unthoughtful and treacherous social media is whenever some big news event hits. Important arguments quickly lose all nuance and devolve into binary talking points and agendas. People split into teams in a way that feels very much akin to the traditional, and now largely discredited, red/blue political theater. For covid-19, it felt like half of Twitter thought it was an extinction-level event, while the other half was convinced the whole thing was a hoax. In the aftermath of George Floyd, you were either cheering on the civil unrest, or wanted to send in the military. Increasingly, if you aren’t in one of two manufactured camps on any issue you’ll be shouted down and ostracized.  That’s not the kind of discussion I’m here for.

As someone who’s found great value in Twitter over the years, I’ve become far more careful in how I use it and where to direct my attention and energy. It reminds me of Mos Eisley in Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but simultaneously a place you can connect with Han Solo and get a spaceship.

As we move forward, it’s going to feel like the world’s ending, and in some ways it will be. No the world isn’t literally ending, but a specific kind of world is ending, and it’ll be extremely difficult for many people to tell the difference as it’s happening. This will likely lead to many more episodes of mass insanity as professional manipulators take advantage of millions upon millions of disoriented people. Priority number one should be to stand guard at the gate of your mind during this time so as not to become a victim.

The best thing you can do from here on out is use your time and energy as productively as possible. We’re going to need builders, creators and inventors more than ever before, because we’re past the point of putting this thing back together. We’ll need to recreate, reimagine and rebuild, and all of this must spring from a point of consciousness in order to bring forth something that is both better and sustainable. Become more beautiful and resilient as others become ugly and unhinged. Focus on what’s within your capacity to control and always remember to resist the crazy.

Saturday Matinee: The Monkey King

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“The Monkey King” (2014) is a Hong Kong/Chinese fantasy film directed by Cheang Pou-soi and based on an episode of Journey to the West, a Chinese literary classic written in the Ming Dynasty by Wu Cheng’en. The film focuses on the origin of Sun Wukong (Donnie Yen), the titular protagonist who’s the only one who can prevent the Bull Demon King (Aaron Kwok) from taking over the heavenly kingdom.

The financialization of the end of the world

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By Kurt Cobb

Source: resilience

For those who are fans of cartoons from The New Yorker magazine and consistent readers of this blog, you might be able to guess my two favorite cartoons. In the first one, a man in a coat and tie stands at a podium and tells his unseen audience the following: “And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

In the second, a man in a tattered suit sits cross-legged near a campfire with three children listening to him intently as he says this: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Now, in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up category, financial writer Paul Farrell used the caption from the first cartoon in a 2015 piece for MarketWatch entitled: “Your No. 1 end-of-the-world investing strategy.” The subheading is: “How to pick stocks for the near term when long-term trends say collapse is near.” The subhead actually seems like it might be another caption from a New Yorker cartoon (or possibly one from The Onion). Why exactly would you invest in stocks—as opposed to seeds of food crops and sturdy garden implements—”when long-term trends say collapse is near”? But I’ll put that down to bad headline writing.

In Farrell’s defense, he frequently used his column in MarketWatch to warn his readers of the coming collapse of modern civilization if we don’t change our ways. He was obliged to give investment advice, of course, because that’s what the column was for.

Few other investment gurus are as intellectually honest as Farrell. Among prominent investment managers, only Jeremy Grantham comes close to understanding the scope of the challenges we face. Grantham wrote a piece in 2013 called “The Race of Our Lives” that outlines the myriad challenges humans face. He starts with a discussion of the fall of civilizations. (He updated his views in 2018.)

One would think that the coronavirus pandemic would allow for some sober reflection among those in the financial community as the pandemic-induced crash of the economy and the markets has called into question the stability of practically all the arrangements of modern civilization. Instead, the focus is on how stock markets could be back at or near all-times highs at the beginning of what is arguably the next Great Depression.

The New Yorker cartoons linked above appropriately characterize the madness that grips late-stage civilizations as their pillars begin to fall. Instead of attempting to adapt to new realities, every attempt is made to maintain the current fragile system. The trillions of dollars pumped into the world financial system by central banks and governments in the wake of the pandemic have done little except stoke renewed financial bubbles in practically all financial markets (and thereby bailed out the mostly wealthy owners of financial assets).

The disconnect is hard to miss. The latest reading of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow indicator, which is frequently updated as new data becomes available, now predicts that U.S. GDP will contract by 45.5 percent in the current quarter. (The number is annualized and seasonally adjusted.)

Even so the NASDAQ Composite Index hit a new all-time high earlier this month just three months after the recent trough reached during the crash. The S&P 500 is now very close to a new all-time high. Neither development makes sense in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. For comparison, it took more than two years for the NASDAQ Composite from the bottom in 2009 during the Great Financial Crisis to regain its 2007 highs. It took the S&P 500 more than four years.

Of course, the financialization of everything continues. Vaccine makers are in line for government funds. Naturally, it takes money to develop a vaccine. But drug makers aren’t in the business of keeping people healthy. They are in the business of making money. In the United States at least they are helped by the fact that they aren’t liable if their vaccine kills or injuries someone. And, executives in one money-losing pharmaceutical firm cashed in stock right after their company goosed the shares significantly higher with a very preliminary announcement about the company’s coronavirus vaccine research.

When it comes to real estate, it used to be that people bought it for income and as a store of value. Now firms buy real estate mostly with borrowed money and try to make gains mostly through property price appreciation. Often the real estate loans are packaged into securities that are sold and resold as part of the giant Wall Street and worldwide financial casino.

One of the surest signs of the financialization of everything and the growing disconnect of finance from reality is the credit default swap (CDS). The CDS is essentially insurance for loans and bonds. The buyer pays the seller a premium every month. If the instrument insured defaults, the seller provides a predetermined payment to reimburse the CDS buyer. Now here’s the weird thing: An investor doesn’t even have to own the loan or bond to insure it. It’s like me taking out an insurance policy on your home against fire when I have no ownership or interest in the home. In fact, I have every incentive to make sure your house burns down. Do you see any problem with that?

For normal insurance, the buyer must have an insurable interest. Typically, this means the buyer must actually own the thing he or she is insuring. The CDS, on the other hand, is an ideal instrument for those who want to bring on a financial end-of-the-world scenario. The buyers have every reason to want the economy to go down the drain as their payments may be 10 or even 20 times their initial investment.

Many wealthy people fear and even believe an end-of-the-world scenario is possible or probable. Some think they can hold up in luxury bunkers until the dust clears. But what if, when the dust clears, their wealth is gone and the financial world they used to inhabit has vanished.

Perhaps they will sit around campfires telling their grandchildren about the old days when finance was king and the real economy of goods and services was just a place where rubes got their daily bread—while, of course, simultaneously providing an outsized portion to the rich.