by Josh Hammer
The Epoch Times
[…] In the aftermath of the disgraceful Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the American ruling class has flexed its muscles like never before.
Big Tech oligarchs moved in unison to kneecap upstart Parler, a would-be Twitter competitor, and ban former President Donald Trump and scores of other conservatives. Simon & Schuster, one of the nation’s most reputable book publishers, canceled a book deal that it had commissioned with the conservative Sen. Josh Hawley. President Joe Biden, in direct defiance of his campaign-season vows to unify the country, oversaw a deeply divisive and ideological first week in office. And just last week, popular retail brokerage Robinhood took severe measures to restrict trading of GameStop’s stock after a populist Reddit-induced stock-buying frenzy dramatically spiked the firm’s share price and wreaked havoc for short-selling hedge funds.
Strengths
At least nine top New York health officials have left their posts since March of last year over Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic.
President Joe Biden has issued a thinly veiled threat to Chief Justice John Roberts in the form of a new commission that will study Supreme Court reform. The threat is clear: if Roberts doesn’t limit the court’s conservative influence on key issues like abortion, gun rights and immigration, Democrats will pack the court.
Anita Dunn, an adviser to President Joe Biden, believes Democrats can reach bipartisan goals without working with GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate.
GameStop, along with Hertz, AMC and others have made headlines recently as their share prices soared in defiance of their near-death fundamentals. Crowds of traders often called a “flash mob,” mostly brash young novices, got together via social media to bid up the shares, motivated partly by the age-old prospect of selling to a greater fool, but also to “stick it to the shorts,” meaning force holders of short positions to buy the shares and cover their losses, thereby driving shares still higher, and presumably reaping a dose of schadenfreude for the mobsters along the way.
March weather, according to folklore, comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, although late March often has its share of nasty winter storms where I live. Donald Trump’s presidency has followed a similar pattern.
Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm says that wearing more than one mask at a time likely does more harm than good.
Have you ever heard of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation? What about Cede and Company? If those names are foreign to you, then you don’t really understand how the core of our financial system really works. A lot of people are blaming Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and the heads of other major trading platforms for the stock trading restrictions that we witnessed last week, but it was actually the DTCC that suddenly jacked up deposit requirements ten-fold. Robinhood and other trading platforms were put in a vise-like grip, and they had no choice but to act. Someone needs to investigate how these decisions were made at the DTCC, and if laws were broken those that were responsible for the decisions need to go to prison.
President Trump’s plans to completely withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan this year now appear to have been scrapped according to NATO and Pentagon sources.
Finance and economic expert Alasdair Macleod says watch interest rates and the U.S. dollar set the direction for the markets in 2021. Macleod explains, “You can see how, through interest rates, the future of the dollar is actually tied to the future of financial asset markets. If you get a pop in the bubble, and there is no doubt equity prices are wildly overvalued compared to the economic outlook. . . . Quite honestly, there is no alternative but for markets to correct very, very heavily. When that happens, you are going to have portfolio outflows out of the dollar. . . . The effect of that will be to take the dollar down along with financial asset prices. . . . We can get the collapse of the dollar happening very, very rapidly.”
Meanwhile, away from the stock market mania…