- ECB chief Christine Lagarde gets punked
- Who’s zooming who? (CBDCs)
- Corporate media’s conspiracy of silence
- Crypto’s resilience (Bitcoin $30K)
- What’s eating small-business owners?… Green energy takes precedence over Black farmers… Cryptic remarks from Kenya’s president (USD)… And more!
Of all the stories suppressed by corporate media in the last year, this one might be the most damning of the media’s priorities… and the most alarming for you and me.
European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde was punked recently — heh, I guess I’m aging myself by using that term — by the Russian comedy duo known as Vovan and Lexus.
In the past, these pranksters have successfully fooled everyone from George W. Bush to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
In the present instance, the pranksters got Lagarde to believe she was talking with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The topic at hand — a European central bank digital currency. The phony Zelenskyy observes that everyday Europeans might object: “The problem is they don’t want to be controlled” by a CBDC.
“There will be control, you’re right,” Lagarde replies. “You’re completely right.”
Oh, but it would be a “limited” amount of control, she says. “We are considering whether for very small amounts, anything that is around €300, €400, we could have a mechanism where there is zero control.” [At today’s exchange rates, we’re talking roughly $325-440.]
But even that amount is problematic, she suggests. Lagarde blamed “very small anonymous credit cards” for helping to finance riots that broke out in France during the 2010s.
For what it’s worth, cash payments in several EU countries — notably France and Italy — are already prohibited over €1,000. Anonymous crypto transfers over that amount are banned throughout the EU.
Lagarde did not specify what sort of “control” would be put on transactions over the €300-400 threshold. Evidently that “will be decided in October,” she said. Which makes you wonder whether the Biden administration’s timetable for an American CBDC is being accelerated, no?
The “discussion” was posted on the free-speech video platform Rumble March 16… although it didn’t really catch on with Western audiences until the watcher.guru site reposted it five days ago.
Not one news outlet of significance has picked up the story — unless you count the crypto-oriented site Cointelegraph.
For the corporate media, it remains a conspiracy of silence whenever the subject of a CBDC comes up — unless they deploy their disingenuous “fact checkers” to perform drive-by smears of our own Jim Rickards. And so it goes.
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Through midnight tonight only, we’re applying a $603.75 credit to your account, good toward an Insider Intel membership. Yes, there are terms and conditions, but we think they’re ones that you’ll like… as Jim explains when you click here.]
The most interesting story in the markets today is Bitcoin cresting $30,000 for the first time since it went into free fall 10 months ago.
Back then, the meltdown of the crypto lender Celsius Network sent Bitcoin on a sickening 38% plunge in only 10 days — from over $31,000 to under $19,000. The much bigger blowup of FTX in November had much less impact, pushing Bitcoin below $16,000.
But here we are, Bitcoin up 7% in the last 48 hours to $30,204 — and Ethereum at $1,916. Resilient. What’s more, it looks as if crypto might be breaking free of its recent correlation to tech stocks: The Nasdaq has been a snooze so far this week, oscillating around the 12,000 mark.
Indeed, the Nasdaq is the only major U.S. stock index in the red today. The S&P 500 continues to hold the line on 4,100 and the Dow sits just over 33,700.
Gold is back above $2,000, if just barely. Silver is a penny over $25. Copper is up a penny to $4.01 and crude is up over a buck, pushing $81 a barrel.
“Small-business owners are cynical about future economic conditions,” says Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist with the National Federation of Independent Business.
The NFIB is out with its monthly Small Business Optimism index. It slipped in March from 90.9 to 90.1. The index has spent 15 straight months below its long-term average going back nearly 50 years.
“Hiring plans fell to their lowest level since May 2020,” Dunkelberg adds, “but strong consumer spending has kept Main Street alive and supported strong labor demand.”
We always like to dig into the “single most important problem” part of the NFIB survey. Inflation still tops the list, cited by 24% of survey respondents. But that’s down from 28% the previous month.
Nipping at inflation’s heels is “quality of labor,” cited by 23%. In other words, good help is still hard to find. Taxes are in third place, cited by 15%.
Media hype notwithstanding — the front page of today’s New York Times wails, “As Banks Retrench, Credit’s Hard to Find” — only 3% of respondents say financing is their top concern.
That said, “A net 26% of owners reported paying a higher rate on their most recent loan, up two points,” says the NFIB report. “Rates are rising, but credit is still available.”
The state of Tennessee has made its priorities clear: Green energy takes precedence over Black farmers.
In 2021, Ford announced plans for a $5.6 billion electric truck and battery production plant scheduled to open in 2025, employing 5,800 people.
Yes, the state offered up generous subsidies — $884 million, to be precise. But the most outrageous handout is the use of eminent domain to seize private farmland for a road from the factory site to Interstate 40. And the farmers will get only a fraction of fair market value.
“The proposed new route winds through predominantly Black-owned properties in Tipton, Haywood and Fayette counties,” reports the Tennessee Lookout site. The land in that area typically sells for $200,000 or more per acre.
But the state is suing Marvin Sanderlin for 10 acres, offering him a mere $3,750 per acre. “You can’t buy a swamp here for $3,500,” he says. “They want your land, but they don’t want you to participate in the wealth.”
All told, the state is eyeing 35 parcels… still needs access to 20… and has filed seven lawsuits to date, making shockingly lowball “offers.”
“It’s bad enough when a state decides to give hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to companies worth billions,” writes Joe Lancaster at Reason. “But it’s truly abhorrent to seize land from private hands simply because the state feels that a company should use it instead.”
It’s also interesting context for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s recent remarks about using eminent domain for green energy projects. Without them, he said, “we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”
Pipelines? Well, fossil fuel companies are often notorious for resorting to eminent domain as well. But two wrongs don’t make a right…
Now a 5 follow-up to those cryptic remarks by the president of Kenya about the U.S. dollar.
An alert reader picked up on them last week — and he expressed skepticism about whether they actually portended the downfall of the dollar along the lines of “Operation Sandman” (which failed to materialize yesterday). His skepticism was well-founded.
Jim Rickards joins us to explain: “In the past, Kenya valued the dollar as a means of payment for Kenyan exports such as coffee, and in its valuable tourism sector. As a result, many Kenyan individuals and enterprises have hoarded dollars, often in physical form as $100 bills, because of their perceived value and as a hedge against the devaluation of the local currency, the Kenyan shilling.
“Now the government is declaring war on the hoarders and the dollar itself. The government has announced plans to allow oil importers to use shillings to pay for the oil. These new arrangements will eliminate the need for dollars in much of the economy, since the oil sector represents 30% of Kenyan imports. At the same time, the government is trying to flush out hoarders.
“For the time being, this is being done on a voluntary basis. The government is saying since the economy will need fewer dollars as a result of the new shilling arrangements, there is less reason for the private sector to hoard dollars.”
However, “beyond the invitation to the hoarders to cash in their dollars is an implied threat that the government will either seize the dollars or make them non-convertible in the near future,” says Jim.
So there’s your context for President William Ruto’s remarks on March 22: “I am giving you free advice that those of you who are hoarding dollars, you shortly might go into losses. You better do what you must do because this market is going to be different in a couple of weeks.”
The doom-porn crowd took those remarks totally out of context, adding fuel to the fire of the 130 COUNTRIES DUMPING THEIR U.S. TREASURIES AT ONCE hysterics.
Once more, with feeling: The end of the dollar’s reserve currency status is a process, not an event. (We’ll return to that theme tomorrow, with Jim Rickards’ considerable input.)
“I am afraid I am writing to you with a complaint that needs immediate action please,” writes a very new reader.
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“The emails are filled with sales materials, are not concise and are far more than 5 Mins. long. Your contributors should be in the same caliber as authors such as James Rickards… rather than any Joe Bloggs that have spent five minutes on Wall Street.
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“Moving forward, I would like the newsletters to be:
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The 5: We forwarded your email to our customer care director; he’s been in touch with you directly, and I trust that he’s addressed your concerns.
But since you’ve come into the Paradigm Press fold within only the last two weeks, I imagine other newer readers might benefit from a few generalized remarks here.
Because The 5 Min. Forecast comes to you each day, it’s easy to get the idea that what you’re reading is the main product. But no — it’s a freebie, an add-on to your paid subscription.
And while 5 Mins. are central to the promise of this e-letter… I imagine you’d be pretty disappointed if (for instance) your monthly issue of Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence was limited to that length, instead of the 20 printed pages we usually serve up.
In addition, please rest assured that all of the Paradigm Press editors have extensive backgrounds in their areas of expertise, vetted by our publishers. In addition to Jim Rickards…
- James Altucher has extensive experience in hedge funds and venture capital, and he was early to the crypto party — talking up Bitcoin a decade ago when it was a mere $63
- Zach Scheidt also cut his teeth in the hedge fund world where he perfected sound money-management and income-generating strategies for the high and mighty (but he finds it more satisfying to put his know-how to work for everyday folks)
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And they’re supported by a cracker-jack team of analysts — including Jim Rickards’ senior analyst Dan Amoss, who’s been with us since 2006 and came from a leading family of mutual funds.
No Johnnies-come-lately here. Readers pay us their hard-earned money, and we want to deliver good products in return — knowing that trust isn’t something we earn just once, but rather something we have to keep earning every day.
Anyway, welcome to the fold. We hope it’s the beginning of a long and prosperous relationship!
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Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
