from Zero Hedge
Last week, when Biden released his $6 trillion budget, we asked if it was a joke that the BIden budget saw just 2.1% inflation in 2021 and 2022.
Is this a joke: the BIden budget sees 2.1% CPI in 2021 and 2022
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 28, 2021
Fast forward to this weekend, when Fed Chair Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen addressed our rhetorical concern, and following the G7 finmin meeting in London where the world’s most advanced nations agreed to impose a 15% minimum corporate tax rate (with zero enforcement provisions), said that contrary to the Biden Budget, inflation could climb as high as 3% this year in what the WaPo said was “the first time the Biden administration projected what inflation could be through 2021″, which by the way is dead wrong since Biden’s budget just last week predicted only 2.1% CPI in 2021.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s new book, Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward, recently had its listing removed by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. What we can say with near certainty is that Amazon and Barnes and Noble didn’t delist the political left’s most marketable saint for the past year because they disagree with the book’s content, which undoubtedly touts his wisdom in supporting compulsory masking and distancing, strict government lockdowns, and the suspension of constitutional freedoms as the panacea for national health crises.
In 2003, Reason named Clarence Thomas one of the magazine’s “35 Heroes of Freedom” because the Supreme Court justice had proven himself “a reliable defender of freedom of speech in such diverse contexts as advertising, broadcasting, and campaign contributions.” Alas, Thomas’ recent statements in support of greater government control over “digital platforms” such as Twitter and Facebook have somewhat tarnished his First Amendment bona fides.
A sign of how messed up the moving parts of the economy have become, amid massive excesses and distortions connected by malfunctioning gearing.
A lot of things haven’t made sense for a while, right?
Many of the imbalances that are contributing to the nightmarish shortages that we are currently witnessing are not going to be solved any time soon. Ever since I started The Economic Collapse Blog, I have been warning that outsourcing the production of just about everything and running massive trade deficits year after year would eventually have very serious consequences down the road. Well, now we are officially “down the road”, and our incredibly foolish trade policies have put us in a very precarious position. During the “good times”, being extremely dependent on the rest of the world to make stuff for us wasn’t a problem, but now it is rapidly becoming a national security issue.
The gold price traded flat in Far East trading on their Friday morning until a few minutes before 10 a.m. China Standard Time on their Friday morning. The bids got pulled at that point — and the price cratered by a bit over ten bucks in just a few seconds. It rallied from there until shortly before noon CST — and then didn’t do much of anything until the job numbers hit the tape at 8:30 a.m. in New York. Gold rallied sharply at that juncture, but ran into ‘something’ at exactly 10:30 a.m. EST, minutes before it was about to blow through $1,900 spot. It was then sold very quietly and evenly lower until fifteen minutes before the COMEX close — and it then crept a few dollars higher for the next few hours, before trading flat until trading ended at 5:00 p.m. EDT.
Bing, the search engine run and operated by Microsoft, has reportedly censored searches for the iconic image of a still-unidentified Chinese “tank man” who confronted a convoy of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Are we getting close to a major seismic event on the west coast? Within the past several days, we have seen hundreds of earthquakes happen in southern California, there have been large earthquakes offshore near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and there has been a very alarming swarm of earthquakes at Mt. Hood. We haven’t seen this much seismic activity along the west coast in quite a long time, and many are concerned that this could be leading up to something really big.
Comedian and HBO host Bill Maher excoriated higher education on his show last Friday, calling it a “grift” and likening it to Scientology.
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the recent criticisms of him are “really very much an attack on science,” and “the thread going through what’s happening now is very much an anti-science approach.”
Biblical cycle expert and financial analyst Bo Polny predicted in November of 2020 the stock market (DOW) would “top out in May 2021 at around 33,000 to 34,000 and then crash in June.” So far, half of the prediction is spot on, and we are waiting for the crash. Polny says, “The greatest financial event in human history is not and will not happen on a Trump watch. I repeat, the greatest financial event in human history is not going down on a Trump watch. It’s going to go down under the current, whatever you want to call him. Trump is a builder. The builder comes in to fix things.”
If we’d known the pandemic would trigger the most reckless monetary blowout in history, could anyone have imagined that the U.S. dollar a year later would have fallen by just 14%? That doesn’t even qualify as a bear market, just a middling correction of a powerful bull run begun in 2008, a year ahead of the historic rally in stocks. The Dollar Index was trading around 70 at the time, about to embark on a nine-year climb to 104 early in 2017. It subsequently swooned as low as 88 early in 2018 but hasn’t traded any lower since; it’s currently at 90.12. That’s with the Fed showering trillions of dollars in helicopter money on America, a feat that achieved a dubious milestone recently when central bank purchases of Treasury debt exceeded purchases by foreigners. Biden for his part has been ramping up outlandish spending proposals, promoting the timeless Democratic canard that “the rich” will pay for it all. The proposals are likely to grow even more outlandish, since Biden fears that a Republican Congressional victory in 2022 could close the window of opportunity for a fiscal expansion dwarfing FDR’s New Deal.
The Federal Reserve has added $2.6 trillion to the US economy since the start of 2020. These actions, along with recent fiscal spending programs, have caused many economists to worry about the risks of price level inflation and overheating of the economy, potentially sowing the seeds of future economic collapse.