from Mark Dice
Nervous Kamala Ignores Reporter Asking, ‘Are You Worried About Trump?’ On Eve of Debate
“I’m getting a lot of nervousness from some Democrats,” BBC correspondent Katty Kay says of upcoming debate.
by Jamie White
Info Wars
Democrat nominee looked tense as she deplaned from Air Force Two in Philadelphia and beelined to her motorcade while ignoring a reporter who asked if she was “worried about Trump” on the eve of the presidential debate.
[…] Harris simply waved and entered her vehicle without offering a reply.
Internal sources close to Harris’s campaign claimed Kamala has been “nervous” about her upcoming debate with Trump.
“I’m getting a lot of Democrats texting me, I had a long call yesterday with a strategist and I can fill you in a bit more. But I’m getting a lot of nervousness from some Democrats,” BBC correspondent Katty Kay said Sunday.
“I’m picking up quite a lot of nervousness by the way on the state of the race,” she added.
The Mindset Shift: Breaking Through the Barriers to Success with Cody Alexander
from Kerry Lutz's Financial Survival Network
Cody Alexander and Kerry discussed the keys to success, including curiosity, competitiveness, and interpersonal skills. They emphasized the importance of personal responsibility and taking ownership of one’s actions and attitudes. The conversation also covered the value of learning from experiences, having a clear game plan, and avoiding the pitfalls of not knowing one’s direction. Additionally, Kerry interviewed Cody about his role as the chief marketing officer at StocksToTrade and his podcast business, Marketing from the Edge. Cody discussed the company’s platform and shared his experiences in buying and scaling a business in the financial education space. He emphasized the importance of having a solid offer and learning from customers when starting a new endeavor.
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Finance U: Beware The Rate Cuts!
Currencies, Oil, gold, stocks and bonds. Everything is in flux at the moment and markets have the feel of being ‘toppy.’ Things could get really bumpy over the next few months.
by Dr. Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
This week Paul Kiker and I discuss the historical fact that it’s only after the Fed starts cutting rates that the equity markets take a tumble. As they say, It ain’t over until the Fed funds sink!
Also, more and more oil-savvy people are beginning to note that the oil markets seem to be under some form of manipulation designed to drive prices lower. Why? Probably for political reasons.
Or, possibly, oil is weak because there’s a rip-roaring recession on the way that will dent demand. Either way, oil is not at a constructive price to deliver future supplies.
Does Anyone Else Smell a Market Crash in the Air?
by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Markets are manipulated, yes, but they’re still structures of tightly bound, self-organizing complexity which lend themselves to sudden non-linear collapses.
Just as thunderstorms scent the air before their arrival, market crashes often announce themselves in the autumn zephyrs. Markets don’t crash when everyone’s in full-blown panic; they crash when the headlines and data are reassuring, analysts are confident in ever-higher profits, and complacency reigns supreme, evidenced by record-high household allocation in stocks and Bullish sentiment readings.
Markets crash after a brief bit of panic selling is immediately bought and markets are returned to a permanently high plateau of valuation as we saw in August, as the S&P 500 shot back up within a whisker or two of all-time highs. Punters buy every dip because this quick reaction to any drop has been richly rewarded for 15 years, and everyone has confidence in the Fed Put, i.e. the belief that the Fed will move Heaven and Earth to restore “market confidence” and the wealth effect.
It Was a Win/Win Deal. So of Course They Rejected It.
by James Hickman
Schiff Sovereign
It’s been three years since the guy with five decades of experience ordered his top military generals, against their advice, to rush their withdrawal out of Afghanistan.
So in their haste to comply with the boss’s orders, the US military abandoned billions of dollars worth of equipment— aircraft, guns, tanks— and left it behind for their sworn enemy the Taliban.
This made their oppressive regime even stronger, and the Taliban did not hesitate to use the abandoned weaponry against their own people.
To make matters worse, as we discussed last week, the US State Department also inadvertently gave hundreds of millions of dollars worth of foreign aid to the Taliban. Talk about clownish incompetence.
The Woke Plot to Destroy Our Economy
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
LewRockwell.com
“Woke” people claim that they want to wake up racial and sexual minorities to the way they are being discriminated against. Because of past and present exploitation, blacks and other “protected” groups are not getting what rightfully belongs to them. The solution to this is that the better off, especially if they are white, should have their wealth and income seized and given to those they are exploiting.
The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last month, gives a good account of the fallacy: “Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism’ Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.
How to Read the July Jobs Report
by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its report for July, indicating a slight uptick in employment. It is difficult to trust BLS data after their latest data revision that showed the Biden-Harris Administration have failed to create new jobs outside of the public sector. It was their steepest revision to data since 2009, yet all eyes were on July’s report. The headlines are optimistic about the workforce but fail to note two main issues – manufacturing is declining while the public sector is rising.
Manufacturing appeared flat during Q1 but it has been on the decline ever since as corporations move their operations overseas to avoid US regulation and taxation. The Biden-Harris Administration pledged to attract 1 million new manufacturing jobs in 2024. They believe that the CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will attract business and spent billions on these measures that have failed to produce a single job. Initial data claimed that manufacturing was soaring under Biden but that was only due to businesses reopening after the pandemic.
1 in 3 College Students Say Violence in a Campus Protest Can Be Acceptable, Survey Finds
The survey of over 50,000 students also found that 37 percent of students said it was “sometimes” or “always” acceptable to shout down a speaker, up from 31 percent last year.
[Ed. Note: Studies show that 98.8% of them change their minds the first time their skull is struck with a police baton.]
by Emma Camp
Reason.com
Thirty-two percent of college students believe it can be acceptable in at least some circumstances to use violence to stop a campus speech, according to a newly released survey of over 50,000 college students from 258 universities. The survey, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment group, is the fifth released by the organization.
FIRE’s survey polled students on a range of questions about their attitudes toward free expression and the general climate at their universities. FIRE also ranked schools based on student reports, as well as their formal speech policies and their administration’s history of speech-stifling actions.
The public University of Virginia (UVA) took the top spot this year, while Harvard—for the second year in a row—came in last place. However, FIRE’s ranking process is complex.
A Very Encouraging COT Report, But…
by Ed Steer
Silver Seek
The gold price didn’t do much through almost all of the Globex trading session on Friday, but was then sold down a bit starting at or shortly after the noon silver fix in London — and that lasted until five minutes before the 8:20 a.m. COMEX open in New York. It shot higher on that b.s. jobs report number…but ‘da boyz’ were laying in wait…engineering it two sharps steps lower — and setting its low tick at 12:40 p.m. EDT. It was allowed to rally a bit from there until the 1:30 p.m. COMEX close — and it didn’t do much after that.
The high and low ticks in gold, both of which were set in COMEX trading in New York, were reported as $2,536.10 and $2,490.70 in the October contract — and $2,559.80 and $2,513.90 in December. The October/December price spread differential in gold at the close in New York yesterday was $23.10… December/February was $21.40 — and February/April was $17.40 an ounce.
Rate Cut Mania Now Crushing Stocks After Whipping Stocks Into Frenzy or Whatever. Mag 7 Down $2.5 Trillion From Peak, Nasdaq Bloodied, Semis Crushed
by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
A 4% drop will put the Nasdaq back to Nov 2021. Amazon, Tesla, and Alphabet already back where they’d been 3 or 4 years ago. Nvidia -24% from peak.
Rate cuts are coming, they’re going to happen starting September 18. The stock market’s dreams are getting closer. Until July, rate cut mania whipped the market higher, and now that these dreams are lining up to become true, it’s getting ugly in some big corners of the stock market.
The S&P 500, after digesting the jobs report on Friday, fell 1.7% for the day and 4.2% for the four-day week, the biggest weekly drop since March 2023, to 5,408. But it’s still relatively well behaved, down only 4.6% from the peak in mid-July, compared to the nuts and bolts we’re going to look at in a moment (all stock data via YCharts):
Is Artificial Intelligence the Next Easy-Money Bust?
by Justin Murray
Mises.org
Since early 2022, the big buzz in the tech industry, and among laymen in the general public, has been “artificial intelligence.” While the concept isn’t new—AI has been the term used to describe how computers play games since at least the 1980s—it’s once again captured the public’s imagination.
Before getting into the meat of the article, a brief primer is necessary. When talking about AI, it’s important to understand what is meant. AI can be broken down into seven broad categories. Most of the seven are, at best, hypothetical and do not exist. The type of AI everyone is interested in falls under the category of Limited Memory AI. These are where large language models (LLMs) reside. Since this isn’t a paper on the details, think of LLMs as complex statistical guessing machines. You type in a sentence and it will output something based on the loaded training data that statistically lines up with what you requested.
The Time Has Come
by John Mauldin
GoldSeek
I remember traveling as a young boy on long trips and asking my parents, “Are we there yet?” I was later punished for this annoying behavior by having my own children ask me the same question over and over.
On a national scale, we have been asking the same of the Fed. Now I think we can confidently say, “We’re here.” Barring unusual events, the Federal Reserve will finally start loosening its grip this month. Jerome Powell himself, speaking at the Fed’s Jackson Hole conference, all but promised rate cuts are imminent.
Powell’s iconic line, “The time has come for policy to adjust,” grabbed all the headlines but his speech had other interesting points. It was also admirably free of the Fed doublespeak that often leaves us even more confused. Powell seemed to relish the chance to finally deliver what he feels is good news.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Republicans Have Become ‘the Party of the Common Man’
by Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart.com
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong, die-hard Democrat, said on Sunday that the Republican Party had become “the party of the common man,” while Democrats had become the party of elites.
Kennedy recently suspended his campaign in battleground states, and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kennedy said: “There’s been an inversion now where the Republican Party has become the party of the common man, of working people, of the middle class, and the Democratic Party has become the party of Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, BigAg, Big Tech, the Big Banking Systems and all of what @realDonaldTrump calls the Deep State.”
Scientific Prophets and Morality
by Joetta Forsyth, Ph.D.
American Thinker
Scientists are increasingly taking on the role of dictating morality. Academic papers are full of pronouncements about how their touted research improves society. The field of economics is an excellent example. Economists create “utility functions” to study human behavior. A “good” is simply something that makes a person happier, as expressed by a higher utility. However, the devil is in the details.
In economics, a pedophile and a child both have utility functions. Suppose that the pedophile really enjoys abusing a child, while the child is so abused that he hardly notices the abuse anymore. Are we to add their utility together and decide that the overall effect is positive? If not, should we weight their happiness? Perhaps the pedophile should only be given a 30% weight to his feelings while the child gets a 70% weight.
Preparing For a Crash? Warren Buffett Has Been Selling Off Hundreds of Millions of Shares in 2024
by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
Warren Buffett did not become a billionaire by being stupid. According to Forbes, Buffett is worth more than 144 billion dollars, and that makes him one of the wealthiest men in the entire world. He made his money in the stock market, and so why is he now pulling money out of the stock market at a feverish pace? Does he anticipate that a crash is coming? Earlier this year, Buffett shocked the investing community when his company sold off half the Apple shares that it was holding…
Warren Buffett, the legendary investor known as the “Oracle of Omaha” (and “Fireball” by his father), is famous for his smart investment choices. So when it was revealed that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, sold half its Apple shares, many investors were puzzled, trying to understand what it meant.
The number of Apple shares that Berkshire Hathaway has dumped is absolutely astounding.
The Fed’s Balance Sheet Feeds Bailout Culture
by Paul Mueller
The American Institute for Economic Research
Fed-watching has become a hobby for many, and an occupation for some. When will the Fed cut interest rates? (September) How much will it cut interest rates? (25 – 50 basis points) How will this affect credit card and mortgage rates? (They will start coming down)
These are the kinds of questions most people ask. But what people wrongly ignore is the Fed’s huge balance sheet and its related consequences: subsidizing explosive government deficit spending and creating a bailout culture.
During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve engaged in unprecedented interventions into the financial system. They opened Pandora’s Box and out of it came large scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs – better known as quantitative easing (QE). QE caused the Fed’s balance sheet to expand dramatically.