from Dollar Collapse
From Michael Pento’s Pento Portfolio Strategies:
The global sovereign bond market is fracturing, and its ramifications for asset prices cannot be overstated. Borrowing costs around this debt-disabled world are now surging. The long-awaited reality check for those that believed they could borrow and print with impunity has arrived. From the U.S., to Europe and across Asia, February witnessed the biggest surge in borrowing costs in years.
Thursday, February 25, 2021, was the worst 7-year Note Treasury auction in history. According to Reuters, the auction for $62 billion of 7-year notes by the U.S. Treasury witnessed demand that was the weakest ever, with a bid-to-cover ratio of 2.04, the lowest on record. Yields on the Benchmark Treasury yield surged by 26 bps at the high—to reach a year high of 1.61% intra-day–before settling at 1.53% at the close of trading.
The point of being resilient is to be able to weather life’s storms, metaphorically and literally.
“We need to act big,” declared Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a February 4 interview with Good Morning America about COVID spending. The next day Vice President Kamala Harris took those words to heart, wielding her tie-breaking vote to push a package worth nearly $2 trillion through the split Senate, ignoring the official Republican counterproposal to spend a mere $618 -billion.
Even ten minutes reading from a teleprompter on a Saturday afternoon was too much for the 46th President of the United States. I suppose his handlers figured that it was important to mark Senate passage of the nearly $2 trillion pork-laden, blue state-bailing out “stimulus” bill with some presidential remarks. It may, after all, turn out to be the high point of the Biden presidency, since Senate passage of the rest of the Biden agenda looks iffy, now that Senators Manchin and Sinema have stated their opposition to ending the filibuster.
To let some hot air out of the markets? As long as it isn’t “disorderly.”
Enjoy this brief period of relative stability while you can, because it won’t last. I have been sitting here searching for the right words for this article, and I hope that I can accurately convey the urgency of this hour to all of you. Following the election of Joe Biden, there appears to be a bubble of hope in the United States. Short-term economic conditions have stabilized a bit, the COVID pandemic seems to be subsiding, and many are hoping that life will “return to normal” this summer. But what most people do not understand is that the next chapters of “the perfect storm” are about to begin.
Getting along by going along with the patently absurd.
Last week the Fed announced that, retroactive to May 2020, its M1 money stock measure would include savings deposits, which were reclassified as transaction accounts similar to other deposit components of M1 such as demand deposits and other checkable deposits (i.e., NOW accounts and ATS accounts). Previously, savings deposits were considered to be nontransaction accounts and relegated exclusively to the broader monetary aggregate M2, which included, in addition to M1, other nontransaction accounts such as small-time deposits (CDs of less than $100,000) and retail money market mutual fund shares (MMMFs). Savings deposits were previously considered nontransaction accounts, because some (but not all) types of withdrawals and transfers of funds were restricted to six per statement cycle. But in December 2020, the Fed announced that, pursuant to the changes in Regulation D announced in April 2020, this limit would be permanently abolished on February 23, 2021. Thus savings accounts are now combined with other checkable deposits into a new category of M1, “other liquid deposits.”
shoA Democrats in New York has put forward a bill to introduce comprehensive sex education to children in kindergarten.
Leaders of the campaign to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Sunday that they have gathered nearly 2 million signatures — half a million more than required, more than a week before the March 17 deadline to force a recall vote.
YouTube has banned the platforming of former President Donald Trump’s full 2021 CPAC speech from their platform, unless users add “countervailing viewpoints” about Trump’s refuted elections claims to their post.
This time last year, Americans were blindsided by a shocking policy to shut down the US economy to control a virus. The presumption of the officials who enacted this policy is that it would be far more deadly than it turned out to be. They further presumed that the virus could be controlled using state power, precisely as China had claimed to have done in Wuhan.
The American people are really going to regret putting the warmongers back in control. Joe Biden has been in the White House for less than two months, and the warmongers that Biden has surrounded himself with have been feverishly setting the stage for the next war in the Middle East. I do not believe that it will start within the next week, but I do believe that it is inevitable. While President Trump was in the White House for four years, the U.S. didn’t start any new conflicts, but now the Biden administration is quite determined to start projecting “American influence” all over the globe once again. Most Americans don’t understand the bigger picture, but the truth is that this is going to have very serious implications over the next few years.
Most of you probably know what this past week was like in market land. Enormous swings up and down. The NASDAQ losing 2K points from its high just 14 sessions ago. Entire indexes giving up all their 2021 gains.