- The new $400,000 deflategate
- “Climate denialism,” bad… Incompetence, meh
- Coming soon: Major Social Security overhaul?
- Sean Ring: “Europe may actually get away with it”
- Vietnam War’s vainglorious bastards… The “TikTok-ization” of media… East Palestine, Ohio: Lost in the middle… And more!
File this one under “What an Empire in Decline Looks Like”…
Yesterday, the president finally strode before the cameras to talk about the three mystery objects that U.S. military jets shot out of the sky last Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Except he didn’t say much — only that they appear unrelated to any “Chinese spying” and instead are private balloons, either commercial or scientific.
Turns out one of them might belong to a group of amateur radio hobbyists called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade. (Yes, the name is a nod to the 2009 kids’ movie Up.)
The club launches smallish balloons with data transmitters attached, just to see where they go. These “pico balloons” can cost as little as $12 and no more than $180.
One of the club’s balloons was last tracked over Canada’s Yukon Territory on Saturday — the same time and place where one of the mystery objects was shot down.
To be sure, there’s no definitive proof yet. But hard-core hobbyists like Ron Meadows — founder of a business called Scientific Balloon Solutions — are reasonably certain. “I tried contacting our military and the FBI — and just got the runaround — to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are,” he tells Aviation Week.
“And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down.”
With this tale serving as prologue, we turn our attention next to a much more costly and destructive government activity…
One of the last major obstacles to Western governments pursuing a hard-core “green” agenda just got pushed out of the way.
World Bank president David Malpass, nominated by Donald Trump in 2019, is leaving the post roughly a year ahead of schedule. His statement offered no hint about the “why” behind his decision.
“But last September,” says The New York Times, “he came under fire for his own views on climate change. When asked if he accepted the overwhelming scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels was causing global temperatures to rise, he demurred. ‘I’m not a scientist,’ he said.
“The exchange, during a live interview at a New York Times event, set off a slow-motion public relations crisis for Mr. Malpass that came to a head on Wednesday when he said he would resign from his role by June 30.”
It is profoundly telling about the priorities of the power elite that “climate change” would prove to be Malpass’ downfall — and not his horrendous history of botched economic prognostications.
Last March, Malpass saw no threat to the global economy’s post-pandemic recovery — even though Russia had just invaded Ukraine, China was doubling down on zero-COVID and supply chains were a mess.
Three months later, nothing had changed about the threats to global economic growth, but Malpass had done a 180: “The war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, supply chain disruptions and the risk of stagflation are hampering growth. For many countries, the recession will be hard to avoid.”
But we expected no less from the guy who in August 2007 totally blew off the risk that housing and debt markets posed to the economy. Only seven months later, trouble in the housing and debt markets took down Bear Stearns — the very investment bank that employed him as chief economist.
Anyway, the NYT is quick to point out that Malpass’ departure “will also give President Biden, who came to office with an ambitious climate agenda, the opportunity to install a leader whose term will stretch until 2028.”
Which would also grease the skids for huge amounts of money to change hands — funding energy and infrastructure projects that check all the “green” boxes.
Also speeding up implementation of the green agenda is something we mentioned Wednesday — the move of Lael Brainard from vice chair at the Federal Reserve to director of the National Economic Council.
More than anyone else in the Fed power structure, Brainard pushed to add climate-change priorities to the Fed’s traditional mandate of “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” But she never got much traction.
At the White House, however, Brainard will have much freer rein.
From a speech she gave two years ago: “There is growing evidence that extreme weather events related to climate change are on the rise — droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves are all becoming more common,” she said.
“Future financial and economic impacts will depend on the frequency and severity of climate-related events and on the nature and the speed at which countries around the world transition to a greener economy.” [Emphasis ours.]
You see where this is all going, right? Malpass is on his way out… Brainard is on her way in… and the decks are being cleared to implement a radical green agenda.
Paradigm’s own Jim Rickards says it’s even worse than you think: “Any day now,” he says, “a series of new regulations — authorized by the Biden administration — are set to go into effect.
“Once they do, nearly every public company will be forced to waste money on political initiatives that will do absolutely nothing to boost their sales… but will instead force them to embrace radical ideologies, or suffer the consequences.
“If you’re invested in the stock market — whether through a 401(k), IRA or stock portfolio, or a student of finance — it’s critical that you know exactly what’s about to happen… because you WILL most likely be affected by these new regulations whether you realize it or not.”
That’s why Jim is organizing an urgent briefing for all our readers set for this coming Monday at 7:00 p.m. EST. At that time, Jim promises, “You will see just how deep the swamp really goes. I will reveal Biden’s diabolical plot to turn the stock market into a political gladiator pit… where companies will be forced to sacrifice their own profits for political brownie points.”
Registration for this exclusive event is as simple as clicking right here: We’ll send you a follow-up message with everything you need to know to be ready on Monday.
Another day, another sea of red for the major U.S. stock indexes.
At last check, the Dow is holding up best — down about a quarter percent at 33,600. The S&P 500 has shed 40 points or nearly 1% to 4,051. The Nasdaq is taking it worst — down 1.4% to 11,690.
With two weeks’ hindsight, it’s apparent the monster rally at the start of the year ended on Feb. 3 with the release of way-better-than-expected job numbers. It’s been a sideways grind since.
It’s no better and in fact worse in the bond market — prices down, yields up. At last check the yield on a 10-year Treasury note is up to 3.86%, the highest since late last year.
Not much to say in the commodity complex — gold at $1,838, silver at $21.65 and crude sinking over two bucks to $76.42.
But crypto is looking remarkably resilient in the face of horrid news all week — proposed new SEC rules, government pressure on banks to drop their crypto customers and so on. Still, Bitcoin is a shade over $24,000 and Ethereum is $30 away from $1,700. Bitcoin’s price today is substantially higher than it was before the blowup of FTX last November.
For the record: Social Security’s drop-dead date has been moved up a year.
The Congressional Budget Office now projects Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted in 2032 — forcing an immediate 20–25% cut in benefits.
For all the partisan rancor in D.C., it still wouldn’t surprise us if the debt-ceiling drama ended later this year with a major bipartisan overhaul of Social Security. There’s nothing about the system that can’t be saved without a combination of higher taxes and a higher retirement age, unpalatable as both of those are.
Medicare? That’s a whole other story — which we hope to tackle here before the end of the month.
So Europe didn’t freeze in the dark this winter. What gives?
We concede we were among those who expected the worst: In response to Western sanctions, Russia steadily shut off the flow of natural gas to Europe throughout 2022. How could the consequences not be catastrophic?
“It looks like we’ll get through this winter just fine,” says Sean Ring, Paradigm’s eyes and ears in Europe. “And next winter, too,” he writes from his perch in northern Italy. “That’s an even bigger surprise.”
Sean identifies several factors at work…
- A milder-than-usual winter in Europe
- German willingness to fill up its storage at any price (thus record-high natgas prices in Europe last July and August)
- Beijing’s zero-COVID policy putting a crimp on Chinese energy demand during the early winter months
- Plentiful shipments of liquefied natural gas from the United States and Qatar.
Of course, China has lifted zero-COVID, so that source of demand is coming back. Still, the European Union’s gas reserves remain over 50% of storage capacity.
True, those LNG imports from America and Qatar aren’t cheap… but they’re available.
“Europe may actually get away with it,” Sean concludes. “Europe has escaped Putin’s grasp with a warm winter, a closed China and U.S. LNG.”
To the mailbag, and a reaction to Russia’s now-underway “Tet Offensive”…
“The ’68 Tet Offensive was portrayed by American media as a huge defeat for the American military. You actually have to know some history to know the VC and NVA were massacred in that fight. The TV news reported it as a defeat. Newspapers and magazines reported it as a defeat.
“If Walter Cronkite had 1/1000th of the personal and professional honor and integrity he was reputed to have had, he would have announced they got it wrong and the Tet offensive was a stunning victory for the American military.”
The 5: Seriously, you’re gonna put it all on Cronkite?
I don’t want to read too much into your remarks here. It’s one thing to point out, as I did on Wednesday, that the United States and South Vietnam came out on top during the Tet Offensive. It’s another thing altogether to suggest we coulda won if it weren’t for the traitorous media.
Like it or not, there just weren’t enough Vietnamese who supported the U.S./ARVN cause. It’s mighty hard to win a war on someone else’s home turf if those someone elses don’t want you around.
The redcoats learned that the hard way, too — as the journalist A.J. Langguth realized while reporting from Saigon in the 1960s. “The unconventional tactics of the National Liberation Front as its soldiers fought the world’s most powerful nation brought back memories of the battles of Lexington and Concord from high-school history class.”
Langguth was thus inspired to write his 1988 book Patriots, perhaps the most readable history of the American Revolution you’ll find. Recommended!
Anyway, quit blaming Cronkite and Jane Fonda. Put the blame where it belongs — on LBJ and Westmoreland, McNamara and Bundy, the whole vainglorious bunch of ’em who lied over and over to the American people…
On the subject of the “TikTok-ization” of news and the media’s treatment of the train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio…
“I don’t think it could be much clearer than what you read here in this article,” writes a reader who sends along a non-paywalled link to the still-anonymous writer known as Doomberg.
“It contains more news (hard facts) and less hyperbole. Granted this article would be considered by some as dry reading and requires you to think (gasp!) versus the clickbait emotional drama found elsewhere as you have mentioned.”
The 5: We have mad respect for Doomberg around these parts. He (they?) has articulated better than anyone else the sheer physical impossibility of the green agenda. Not if we want to retain anything resembling a first-world lifestyle, that is.
That particular article is a nice counterbalance to the AMERICAN CHERNOBYL! histrionics you find elsewhere on the interwebz — including the premier alt-financial site ZeroHedge.
In any event, East Palestine finally became national (and international) mainstream news on Wednesday night with the “town hall” meeting at which Norfolk Southern representatives were a last-minute scratch.
Why the paucity of media attention before then? For all the talk of a “blackout,” I think the explanation is more prosaic — and I say this having spent 20 years in broadcast news before taking up my current line of work.
For one thing, legacy media outlets have been slashing budgets for decades. They no longer have bureaus, crews, etc. in the hinterlands. Meanwhile, the newer breed of online news outlets have tunnel vision. If it’s not happening in their NY-DC-LA orbit, it might as well not be happening at all.
It wasn’t an intentional blackout, but the effect is the same and it’s still a damning indictment.
Anyway, thanks for continuing to put your trust in The 5 as part of a well-balanced informational diet. We appreciate it more than you can know.
Have a good weekend,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
