from ITM TRADING, INC.
U.S. Treasury Chief Urges IMF, World Bank to be Prudent Fighting Pandemic
by Andrea Shalal, David Lawder
Reuters.com
In a statement to the two institutions’ steering committees, Mnuchin said they needed to continue to provide financing, advice and capacity development to aid countries hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. But as they disburse billions of dollars in emergency funds, they need to plan for transitions to normal financing arrangements, he added.
“It is critical that the World Bank manage financial resources judiciously and transparently, with clear justifications for allocations to countries with robust access to other financing sources, so as not to burden shareholders with premature calls for new financing,” Mnuchin said.
What if We Ignore the Government?
by Andrew P. Napolitano
LewRockwell.com
What if we all start a return to normal life now that the government says the worst of the pandemic is behind us? What if we all make conscious choices to move about as before or to stay sheltered, based on our own exercise of our own informed free wills and not on the basis of governmental edicts? What if each of us decides if it is healthier to breathe in fresh air from outside or recycled air from under a mask?
What if massive numbers of us make these decisions on our own?
What if the governors’ edicts don’t really carry the force of law? What if governors have assumed the power to tell us how to live from either out of thin air or from unconstitutional and outdated state laws?
What if it is profoundly unconstitutional for a state legislature to give its law-making powers to the state’s governor?
Twitter Blocking a New York Post Article Was Dumb, but Not Illegal, Censorship, or Election Interference
Plus: 898,000 new jobless claims, and more…
by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason.com
By definition, Twitter can’t violate the First Amendment rights of the president, members of Congress, or anyone else. First Amendment violations are things the government does to the people, not the other way around. There is nothing in the Constitution prohibiting Twitter from restricting speech on its platform, and it is certainly not “censorship” (which has denoted government suppression of information since the office of censor was created in Ancient Rome to impose public morality).
This shouldn’t need repeating as often as it does these days. But President Donald Trump and those who support him have been working hard to recast censorship as something private companies can do to the most powerful man in the country (see Trump’s executive order on Twitter) while arguing that government should be allowed to restrict these companies’ freedom of speech, conscience, and association.
The Latest Updates from Martin Armstrong – 2020.10.15
by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
Facebook Shuts Down Political Candidates in New Zealand Running for Election
Twitter Bans Trump Campaign – It’s Time They are Taken to Court
Schwab is Finally Starting to be Noticed
The COVID Waltz – the New Norm
Twitter & Facebook Censoring the Truth
Leonardo DiCaprio is in League with Bill Gates
Xi Jinping Tells Elite Troops “Prepare for War” as U.S. Destroyer Sails Through Taiwan Strait
from Zero Hedge
China has again put its military in a “high state of alert” after two US Navy warships recently sailed through the Taiwan Strait. Late last week the US destroyer John McCain sailed near the disputed Paracel Islands administered and militarized by China, upon which the PLA military warned the US to “halt its provocations”.
The latest incident was Wednesday, when the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry passed through the strait. Washington was quick to emphasize that it was a “routine transit” like others toward the purpose of peaceful ‘freedom of navigation’ operations, while Beijing once again denounced the “trouble-stirring statements and moves”.
Goodbye Middle Class: Half of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year
by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
If you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.
Will the Silent Trump Voters Roar on November 3rd?
by John Kudla
American Thinker
The polls appear to be shifting in favor of Joe Biden. A commonly heard explanation from Trump supporters is many of the polls are oversampling Democrats. This is true in some cases but not all. So, is something else going on here we do not really understand?
It is difficult to get an accurate sample of the electorate, especially when party affiliation numbers vary with the political climate. According to a Gallup survey during the first two weeks of September, party affiliation comes in at Republican 29%, Democrat 30%, and Independent 40%. When you factor in voters who lean one way or the other, the split is a 5% Democrat advantage, 50-45.
Most of the polls in the Real Clear Politics National Average, at least the ones without a subscription in which I can find data on party affiliation, are fairly close to the Democrat +5 number.
Twitter Locks Account of Press Secretary McEnany, Other Verified Users for Sharing Biden Story
by Penka Arsova
LaCorte News
Twitter restricted a recent New York Post story about Joe Biden and his son and then cracked down on accounts that shared the report.
How we got here: Facebook said it will slow down the spread of the story until its fact-checkers confirm its authenticity and Twitter cited its policy against sharing hacked materials.
“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted Wednesday. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
“In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter,” a spokesperson for Twitter said in a statement. The platform later said the story violated its privacy rules as well because “images contained in the articles include personal and private information.”
Average Inflation Targeting Risks Further Politicizing the Fed
by Nicolás Cachanosky
The American Institute for Economic Research
The Fed has announced a major change on its policy regime. The Fed abandoned a 2 percent inflation target in favor of a 2 percent average inflation target (AIT). The former policy treated the 2 percent more as a ceiling than as a target to hit. The new policy changes this, and treats the 2 percent inflation as a target to hit on average.
The new average inflation targeting policy regime is intended to help with a credibility issue. The former inflation targeting policy regime prevented the Fed from anchoring long-run inflation expectations at its preferred two percent. The new policy regime may not do much to anchor short-run inflation expectations, but it is expected to anchor long-run expectations more effectively.
The First Time We Went to See the Germans…
by Viktorija
Sovereign Man
I was probably six or seven years old when my mother first put that idiotic pink bow in my hair.
She had me dressed up like a little doll, in my nicest shoes and dress, all because we were going to see ‘the Germans’.
I didn’t understand what this meant when I was a little girl. But now I know– we were crossing the borders from one country into another.
That’s what life used to be like in Europe; border crossings were a major event.
The Upbeat Downbeat on Housing and Commercial Real Estate
by David Haggith
GoldSeek
I mentioned in a recent article that the weird thing about this recession is that it is the only one in which personal income has gone up during a recession. That, of course, is because of government assistance, which is making it so we don’t have to feel the pain of a recession that the government, itself, caused — through its massive debt, tax breaks for the 1%, reliance on the Fed to solve government’s problems, and most currently through its forced economic shutdown as a response to COVID-19 — something that even the WHO now says was failed policy that should never have happened — even though they helped make sure it did happen!
All of that is weird stuff, but another really weird thing about this recession is that the housing market took off as though we had just entered the best of times this summer. Who would have guessed: 32-million people out of work, and we have a housing market melt-up? Of all the unlikely times for a new bubble to form! I didn’t read anyone who saw that coming. Neither did I see it coming, but it added brilliance to the summer that has continued burning all the way into October.
Classic Moment: Dem Senator Mansplains to Barrett. Barrett Flattens Him: ‘I Assure You I Have My Own Mind’
by Hank Berrien
Daily Wire
On Wednesday, after Delaware Democrat senator Christopher Coons consistently badgered her about whether she would essentially rubber-stamp the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinions, Judge Amy Coney Barrett decided she had had enough, firing back, “I hope that you aren’t suggesting that I don’t have my own mind or that I couldn’t think independently, or that I would just decide, ‘Let me see what Justice Scalia has said about this in the past,’ because I assure you I have my own mind.”
Coons started his attack by stating the predicate: “Judge Barrett, in accepting President Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court, you stated you shared the judicial philosophy of Justice Scalia, your mentor, the justice for whom you clerked. His philosophy, is, of course, originalism, essentially, the idea that the authoritative meaning of the Constitution is what it meant when ratified, whether that was 150 years ago, 240 years ago, but meant when ratified.”
Here’s Where Sweden Stands After Refusing to Require Strict Coronavirus Lockdowns
Sweden has largely kept its coronavirus guidelines voluntary in contrast with the U.S. and many European nations.
by Jake Dima
DailyCaller.com
Sweden hasn’t employed many of the coronavirus restrictions seen in around the world, but the Nordic country has less deaths than some major European countries when scaled for population.
Sweden largely rejected the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s recommendations in early April, which included face mask use by the general public and social distancing. Sweden’s public health authorities decried the guidelines in an email and chose their own path, according to Science Mag.
Sweden refused to close daycares and grade schools, and in May had a concert gathering of over 30,000 people, according to Science Mag. The vast majority of the country’s guidelines have been described as voluntary, McGill’s Office for Science and Society reported.
Twitter Locks Trump Campaign Account Less Than Three Weeks Before Presidential Election
by Allum Bokhari
Breitbart.com
Twitter locked the account of @TeamTrump, an official Trump campaign account, citing the same policy it used to ban links to the New York Post’s bombshell story on hitherto unrevealed links between Joe Biden and the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.
Mike Hahn, a social media manager for Team Trump, revealed the censorship in a tweet earlier today.
“Twitter has suspended ? TeamTrump for posting a video calling Joe Biden a liar who has been ripping off our country for years, as it relates to the ?@nypost ?article” said Hahn. He added the suspension comes “19 days out from the election.”
According to the screen Hahn tweeted, the tweet violates the platform’s rules against “posting private information.”
Are the Big Social Media Companies Literally Trying to Determine Who Wins the Presidential Election?
by Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
In 2016, the big social media companies were criticized for allowing others to influence the outcome of the election, but in 2020 the big social media companies are directly interfering in the election more than anyone else is by a very wide margin. They insist that they have a duty to prevent the flow of “harmful information”, but whenever they act it always seems to help Democrats and hurt Republicans. It has become obvious that Facebook, Twitter and other large social media companies are trying to help Democrats win, and that is especially true when it comes to the presidential election. No matter what you think of Joe Biden and no matter what you think of Donald Trump, all Americans should want the election to be fair. Unfortunately, the big social media companies have discovered that they have the ability to sway public opinion on a massive scale, and this is the first election in which they are really flexing those muscles. But if we allow those that control the levers of power on the Internet to determine the outcomes of our elections from now on, our system is doomed and the American experiment will be over.