by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Auto loans jump after historic price spikes. Credit cards still in stimulus wonderland. Student-loan borrowers count on debt forgiveness, mmmkay.
Consumers have undertaken an astounding project instead of consuming: Paying down their credit cards. In September, outstanding balances of credit cards and other revolving credit ticked down by a tad to $949 billion, not seasonally adjusted, the lowest since July 2017.
Credit card balances spike in December during the shopping season and then decline during credit-hangover season in January and February. In March, they start rising again. But not this year. In March, credit-card balances fell, and then in April, when the stimulus checks arrived and when people stopped going out and spending money, credit-card balances plunged the most ever. And they have continued to tick down every month since then (not seasonally adjusted). By the end of September, according to Federal Reserve data on Friday, they were down 9.2% from September last year:
If we don’t stand up now, we may not ever get another chance. I haven’t written much since the day of the election, and that is because like most people I have been transfixed by the bizarre drama that is unfolding on the national stage right now. An election is literally being stolen right in front of our eyes, and if we allow them to get away with this there won’t be any limits to what they think they can get away with in the future. I have been writing about election fraud for many, many years, but in the past it was always more subtle. Unfortunately, they were not so subtle this time around. Here in 2020, they were so desperate to prevent another four years of Trump that they decided to dramatically overplay their hand. In Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump had huge leads throughout most of the counting, but in each case a massive surge of Biden votes right at the end made all the difference. And even though voter turnout was fairly normal in much of the nation, we are told that unprecedented turnout in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee was enough to push Biden over the top.
Even though every mainstream media (MSM) outlet has now called this 2020 election for Joe Biden, journalist Alex Newman says don’t buy it. This is a continuing psyop to cover and ignore massive election fraud unlike ever seen before in the free world. Newman explains, “This is a flagrant effort to steal this election. We actually warned that this was coming months ago. I said the Deep State was planning a coup d’état, a Color Revolution, and vote fraud was a central element of that operation. Now, you are seeing the other pieces fall into place. As Donald Trump challenges this, they are going to send out the mobs. They are going to send out Black Lives Matter and Antifa to go riot and loot. We are already starting to see a little bit of that in Oregon . . . and New York. It’s going to get a whole lot nastier because Donald Trump is not just going to roll over and say okay, you can just steal the election and I’m going home.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) this week floated the idea of keep track of people who supported President Trump but may regret affiliation with him in the future.
The vast conspiracy that Donald Trump says delivered the presidential election to Joe Biden gets broader with each passing day. It now includes not just a cabal of pollsters, mainstream media outlets, and corrupt Democrats but also Republican officials and Trump-friendly new organizations.
Elements of the left and their allies in the media are constantly driving this point home: White people are bad and so is the culture that they have created. Everything we value as a society is bad and, more than that, little more than an ex post facto justification for the subjugation of non-whites. Western culture is white culture, and all things white are bad.
All over the country, Trump’s lawyers are gathering evidence showing that Democrats deliberately interfered with the election outcome. These facts are needed, but one can make a good case that the most powerful evidence of all is mathematical data showing that this election outcome could not possibly have happened. One would think that the Democrats – who “believe in Science” – would be all over this stuff.
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.
“A man walks through an eerily quiet, once-busy street lined with closed-down stores and burnt-out vehicles. Some of the storefronts display boarded-up windows, others with spattered red paint on the glass like blood on a wrecked car’s windshield. Some of the stores have been victims of looting, the shards of glass on the ground a diamond-like reminder of the recent mayhem. Our protagonist takes a deep breath; the sound audible in the vast silence. He releases the breath slowly and continues to walk. His nostrils flare. He detects a familiar smell in the air: something’s burning. His ears twitch as he hears the distant roar of a mob, the volume rising with each step he takes. He sees in the distance a fiery orange glow growing larger; the fire that has been raging for months, continuing to spread.”
Gold and silver broke out from a three-month consolidation in an extraordinary week, which saw a political muddle in America: at the time of writing, the presidential election was still unresolved. By morning trade in Europe today, gold had risen $70 to trade at $1948, and silver by $1.70 to trade at $25.30. Bitcoin also rose, about $2000, signalling perhaps that the crowd outside the gold and silver communities most educated about fiat currency debasement are now aggressively hedging it.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned Sunday that if Democrats manage to prevail in the two runoff Senate races in Georgia, the American people threaten to plunge into a “socialist abyss.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Saturday that Democrats will “change America” if they win two runoff elections in Georgia that will determine which political party controls the Senate.
Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” House Minority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) reacted to the President Donald Trump campaign’s legal battle over the 2020 presidential election results.
As I write this, we still don’t know who won the presidency. It is, however, time to declare at least one winner. After almost sixty years of fighting, it’s clear that the War on Drugs is almost over and drugs have won. As the Associated Press reports, recreational marijuana has been legalized in New Jersey and Arizona, it looks like it is about to be legalized in Montana and South Dakota, medical marijuana has been approved in Mississippi, and Oregon has loosened restrictions on hard drugs.
The acrid aroma of voter fraud has grown so strong that even Biden supporters must smell it. To them, however, it undoubtedly has a fragrance as sweet as lilacs in August. Unfortunately for America, no matter how deep, wide and ugly the scandal might become, it may not be enough to overturn the election result. The news media have demonstrated their ability to control the narrative so completely, and to snuff those who would challenge it so brutally, that it’s possible nothing short of a new election can change the outcome. That is not to say Trump’s all-out effort to prove widespread fraud is just so much tilting at windmills. In Wisconsin, for example, there is evidence of tampering so brazen that it recalls the days when the Kansas City mafia ran a wide swath of Las Vegas. They were skimming one casino’s profits so greedily that a New York capo stepped in to warn KC’s wiseguys to leave a little profit for the house. In Milwaukee, and conceivably many other places, Democrats seem to have departed recklessly from the don’s call for moderation when stealing, Here’s some damning analysis of the city’s vote from Jack Cashill of AmericanThinker.com: