Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience.com,

There are now an estimated 1.7 million electric vehicles (EVs) on U.S. roads, compared to roughly 400,000 in spring 2018. That means that a lot more Americans are experiencing the joys and pitfalls of EV ownership, from silent, swift acceleration and emission-free driving on the positive side to slower fueling times and shorter driving ranges on the negative side.

More Americans are also learning that frigid temperatures affect EVs differently than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, chiefly by cutting into their driving range to a greater extent. While a typical ICE vehicle might have its range reduced by 15% to 25% in below-freezing temperatures, an EV’s range will be slashed 20% to 50% depending upon driving speed, temperature, and interior climate preferences. Combustion reactions occur more inefficiently at colder temperatures, accounting for the range decline in ICE vehicles. But cold slows the physical and chemical reactions in EV batteries to a larger degree, limiting the energy and power the battery can deliver to the motors. Moreover, while ICE vehicles utilize otherwise wasted heat from the engine to warm car interiors in winter, EVs use electric heaters to perform much of the climate control, further draining the already hamstrung battery.

The Arctic blast that chilled much of the “Lower 48” last week showcased the EV range hit to more Americans than ever, and also yielded a few more lessons.

EV owners sounded off about their experiences on social media and subreddits. Here are a few of the takeaways:

1. EVs are not ready for frigid road trips. 

I warned about this in August: Driving an EV on the highway in extreme cold will produce a range loss of 40% or more. EV owners of various brands traveling for the holidays shared numerous stories verifying this annoying (and potentially dangerous) reality. Drivers traveling in temperatures at or around zero with a headwind could go only 100 to 150 miles before needing to stop and recharge, depending upon the car, significantly increasing travel time. When they did charge, they had to deal with another disconcerting problem with EVs and winter…

2. EV fast-chargers operate much more slowly in extreme cold, if they work at all.

 The colder the EV battery, the slower the rate of charge that it will accept, making “fast-charging” in subzero temperatures a potentially miserable and plodding experience. Think a 45 to 60 minute charge instead of a 25 to 35 minute one. To top it off, users reported that fast-charging equipment, particularly from Electrify America, often just didn’t work in temperatures below -10 °F. Tesla’s proprietary Superchargers didn’t seem to have the same reliability issues. The generally sorry state of charging infrastructure shed light on another takeaway…

3. EVs driven in regions with a cold winter need to be charged at home. 

Preferably with a garage. Owners simply can’t rely on public infrastructure in its present state with current battery technology. However, this situation could easily change in five to ten years with novel batteries that suffer less range loss and more widely available chargers, preferably housed indoor.

4. Aside from range issues, EVs handled the Arctic air well. 

Owners reported that their cars started without issue, drove well (albeit with slightly reduced power), and heated quickly thanks to their fast-acting electric heaters. For drivers who didn’t need to worry about traveling long distances, their EVs were functional, comfortable, and relatively untroubled by the cold.

The Biden family has remained “estranged” from Hunter Biden’s 4-year-old daughter, and ‘seemingly wants nothing to do with the child,’ according to the Daily Beast, citing the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The woman who mothered Hunter’s secret lovechild, Lunden Alexis Roberts, filed paperwork on Tuesday requesting that an Arkansas court allow the child, Navy Joan Roberts, be given the Biden name, claiming that the toddler would “benefit from carrying the Biden family name” because it’s “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.”

The Bidens, meanwhile, have completely ignored the President’s grandchild – striking her attendance from the 46th presidential inauguration and allegedly refusing to offer security aid to the mother-daughter pair, despite domestic violence threats from Roberts’ ex.

The filing cites President Biden, Jill Biden and Hunter’s late brother Beau as examples of successful individuals bearing the last name, and says that the Biden family remains “estranged from the child. To the extent this is misconduct or neglect, it can be rectified by changing her last name to Biden so that she may undeniably be known to the world as the child of the defendant and member of the prestigious Biden family.”

Roberts, originally from Batesville and an Arkansas State University graduate, met Hunter Biden while she was living in Washington, D.C., and worked for him, Lancaster previously said.

The child, initially referred to in the case as “Baby Doe,” was born in August 2018; the paternity suit followed in May 2019, days after Hunter Biden’s marriage to a South African filmmaker, the former Melissa Cohen.

A DNA test showed, “with near scientific certainty,” that Biden is Baby Doe’s father, Judge Holly Meyer declared in a January 2020 order. That month the parties agreed on temporary child support until the issue was resolved. -Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Hunter Biden wrote in his 2021 book “Beautiful Things” that he fought Roberts’ paternity suit because, being a crackhead, he had no recollection of the incident that led to the pregnancy.

“The other women I’d been with during rampages since my divorce were hardly the dating type. We would satisfy our immediate needs and little else,” wrote Hunter, adding “I’m not proud of it.”

According to Roberts, Hunter has a “long, and lengthy, history of attempting to avoid discovery by filing endless and recurrent motions for protective orders. Additionally, this case was finally resolved the first time when this court denied the defendant’s motion for a protective order relating to discovery.”

Roberts has requested a list of Hunter’s residences for the past 10 years, along with vehicles he’s owned or driven for the past five years in order to obtain evidence of his “well-established history of a lavish lifestyle.”

“[Biden] objects and refuses to provide all the requested information. Instead, [Biden] seeks a protective order,” reads a filing. She’s also requested information related to a federal investigation into Hunter’s “tax affairs.”

“This information is relevant to determine if, as Federal authorities insinuated, the defendant failed to disclose all his income as this goes to earning capability and Mr. Biden’s credibility.”

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.org,

The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: a year that saw the end of the post–Cold War era and the return of geopolitics; the first energy crisis of the enforced energy transition to net zero; and the year that brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%. The three are linked. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies. Net zero—the holy grail of ESG—has turned out to be Russia’s most potent ally.

It wasn’t only a bad year for ESG on the stock market. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced that it was quitting Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (NZAM), set up by former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney a little over a year ago. “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks,” the world’s second-largest asset manager said. 

Two months ago, Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled “The End of ESG”—without a question mark. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Since governments are democratically elected by a country’s citizens, they are best placed to address externalities, whereas investors disproportionately represent the elites. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value,” Edmans says.

October also saw the publication of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, where the former BlackRock senior executive penned what amounts to a requiem for ESG. Rather than “doing well by doing good,” the logic of Keeley’s case, as I reviewed for RealClear Books, is that investors in conventional ESG investment products are likely to end up not doing very well and leave investors feeling good, not doing good.

It has not all been going one way. In May, HSBC terminated Stuart Kirk, its global head of research at HSBC’s asset-management arm, for voicing some hard truths about ESG. Earlier this month, HSBC announced that it will stop financing new oil and gas fields, putting the West’s third-largest bank on Putin’s side in Russia’s energy war on the West. 

What is now a negative factor disadvantaging the West in a world increasingly characterized by East–West geopolitical tensions originated after a period when the United Nations had been fostering a horizontal global division between a rich North and an exploited South. As University of Pennsylvania’s professor Elizabeth Pollman records in her June 2022 paper “The Origins and Consequences of the ESG Moniker,” through the 1970s and early 1980s, the UN promoted the New International Economic Order that called for the regulation of transnational corporations on the alleged grounds that they were widening the gap between developed and developing countries. 

After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in 1997, the UN shifted from a strategy of confrontation to co-optation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, Annan launched a Global Compact between business and the UN. In 2004, the Global Compact’s financial-sector initiative published a report titled “Who Cares Wins”—a rip-off of the British special-forces SAS motto “Who Dares Wins”—arguing for “better consideration of environmental, social and governance factors” in investment appraisals, claiming that this would both improve outcomes for investors and help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals. 

ESG means different things, depending on whom you’re talking to. Is it about risk disclosure? Or about factors driving long-term shareholder value? Or is it about society holding business to account? One thing is clear: ESG’s unsustainable dual mandate of boosting shareholder returns and at the same time making the world a better place— “doing well by doing good”—was present at the creation of ESG. It was a masterstroke by ESG’s designers to incorporate “G” for governance. No investor can be against improved governance, and it helped mainstream ESG, whereas previous iterations, such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), remained niche. 

The 2008 financial crisis subsequently turbocharged the uptake of ESG. Having caused the financial crisis, Wall Street was going to redeem itself by saving the world from a planetary catastrophe. Without climate change, ESG would have vastly less salience. Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. In reality, it’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies. 

According to ESG doctrine, there are two types of climate financial risk—physical risk and transition risk—and it’s straightforward to demonstrate that both are spurious. Take the Bank of England. For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses a scenario derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) extreme and physically implausible RCP8.5 climate scenario. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and Justin Ritchie have documented how use of the RCP8.5 scenario represents “a stubborn commitment to error,” with its absurd projection of a sixfold growth in per-capita coal consumption to 2100, based on erroneous reports in the late 1980s of virtually unlimited coal deposits in Siberia and China. The Bank of England compounds implausibility with impossibility by taking the RCP8.5 pathway of 4 degrees by the turn of the century and telescoping it into a 3.3-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Central banks resorting to these types of games constitutes strong evidence that climate physical risk is a nonissue for financial stability. 

When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney gave an agenda-setting speech alleging a tragedy of the horizon as the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. Climate catastrophes are presumed to be triggered by tipping points, one of the earliest being the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC declared that with sustained warming, there was limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would disappear “over multiple millennia.” That is some time horizon. Despite the best efforts of central bankers, geologic timescales of millennia and human timescales of decades are completely out of whack.

Similarly, climate transition risk and the stranded assets trope defy economic and financial logic. If you restrict the flow of capital into a sector producing stuff that people want and are willing to pay for, the price of the output of a capital-embargoed sector will rise, as will the value of its invested capital. This, in essence, is what has been happening in energy and capital markets over the past year and explains why ESG as an investment strategy does not work. In the absence of draconian government policies to suppress demand for oil and natural gas, ESG policies strangling the supply of capital to Western oil and gas producers have two effects: they push up the price of hydrocarbons; and they displace supply from Western producers to neutral or hostile ones, with major detriment to the economies and security interests of the West.

Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically. This is already happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia, and Utah. It also requires concerted leadership at a national level to get central bankers and financial regulators to quit playing covert climate policy and to shame banks such as HSBC into switching their support from Russia in the energy wars by dropping their anti–oil and gas financing policies. Defeating ESG not a case of “who cares wins” but “who fights wins.”

Ray Epps, the uncharged man identified as a key instigator behind the January 6, 2020 Capitol Breach for telling people to storm the Capitol, said in a text message to his nephew that he “orchestrated” things, according to newly released witness transcripts from the January 6th Committee.

On January 6, 2021 Ray Epps texted his nephew to say, “I WAS IN THE FRONT WITH A FEW OTHERS. I ALSO ORCHESTRATED IT.” See the relevant section and also link to full transcript below https://t.co/JV1cITkprd pic.twitter.com/EJb6UKoDfU

— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) December 30, 2022

“At that point, I didn’t know that they were breaking into the Capitol,” Epps told Congressional investigators, adding “I didn’t know anybody was in the Capitol. … I was on my way back to the hotel room.”

But the night before, Epps was seen going around to various groups of Trump supporters, telling them they need to storm the capitol. 

Ray Epps was near the front line from the very beginning of the riot when he was whispering in Ryan Samsel’s ear to when he helped push a large metal sign into the police line (for which others have been charged with felonies)

No “I didn’t know what was going on” for him https://t.co/SJUpIXzH8h

— Stephen Horn (@stephenehorn) December 30, 2022

In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Epps also told members of the Committee that he found himself playing peacekeeper between Trump supporter “Baked Alaska” and the police – who called Epps a Fed.

“I was trying to find some common ground,” said Epps. “This guy was trying to turn people against me…he was calling me ‘boomer,’ and it’s his generation’s fault that we’re in the position we’re in.”

Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.

Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.

Speculation that Epps was a ‘fed’ intensified after a Revolver News reported with the headline: “Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol“

Revolver also determined, and will prove below, that the the FBI stealthily removed Ray Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, just one day after Revolver exposed the inexplicable and puzzlesome FBI protection of known Epps associate and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. July 1 was also just one day after separate New York Times report amplified a glaring, falsifiable lie about Epps’s role in the events of January 6.

Lastly, Ray Epps appears to have worked alongside several individuals — many of them suspiciously unindicted — to carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy. -Revolver News

As speculation over Epps grew, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) claimed that Epps had “cooperated with the Jan 6 committee,” and was removed from the FBI’s most wanted list “because apparently he broke no laws.”

pic.twitter.com/ZNF8QMNkpl

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 18, 2022

We’re sure Epps, who claims he wasn’t working for the feds, ‘cooperated’ indeed.

And who’s this guy?

Who unlocked the magnetic doors on the east side of the Capitol on January 6? When George Tenney first tried to open them, both were locked. Then after he pointed at the doors and said something, the left door opened. #SmokeyInsider #GreenSidesPack #ScruffyBouncer #January6 pic.twitter.com/4VlH2pIlhJ

— 🇺🇸 (@FreeStateWill) January 29, 2022

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” – George Orwell, 1984

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

It’s as if O’Brien and Mustapha Mond are running the show, using behavioral conditioning, restricting freedom of speech, adhering to a strict caste system, surveilling everything we say or do, using our fears to control us, utilizing propaganda to produce false narratives, and ultimately threatening to stomp a boot on our faces forever if we do not obey and conform. Virtually everything we are told by politicians, government bureaucrats, military brass, “esteemed” journalists, medical “experts”, bankers, and corporate executives is lies. They do not believe their lies, but they know it benefits themselves financially to lie, and as long as they work together, they know the ignorant masses will believe them.

George tells Jerry “It’s not a lie if you believe it” as he is going to take a lie detector test. I wonder how Fauci, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Comey, Wray, Pelosi, and the slew of other Deep State coup conspirators would fare on a lie detector test about Russiagate, Covidgate, J6 Insurrectiongate, and Vaccinegate. Based on the titanic volume of lies they have spewed over the last several years, I’m sure the machine would overheat and explode if hooked up to any of this traitorous vile scum.

The humorous phrase uttered by George Costanza on a sitcom twenty-seven years ago captures a significant kernel of truth about the mindset of the vast majority of non-critical thinking drones roaming the aisles of Wal-Marts and waiting in the drive-thru at McDonalds across our dystopian states of America. The lies run so deep you need hip-boots to wade through them on a daily basis. The reason our leaders lie is because we let them lie. The majority prefer comforting lies to unpleasant truths, because accepting unpleasant truths would require them to act and they prefer being distracted by trivialities like sports, reality TV, social media likes and otherwise being addicted to their technological gadgets.

“The process of mass-media deception has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.” – George Orwell

Orwell’s explanation of mass-media deception is a brilliant assessment of how the ruling class changes the narrative to suit their needs, and without blinking an eye are able to deny what they have said and done. Orwell saw this manipulation of the truth before TV, the internet, social media, or professionally created government propaganda existed. In his day only newspapers, radio, and speeches existed to push deception upon the public.

The proliferation of technologically enhanced mass-media deception has accomplished everything the ruling class/oligarchs/Big Brother surveillance state could hope for. Lies and deception are nothing more than a means to their ends of control, wealth, and power. Right and wrong; good and evil; justice and injustice; truth and falsity; humanity and inhumanity; are meaningless concepts to the corrupt, greedy, power hungry, immoral, deviant, evil overlords who wield their wealth to maintain and expand their control over the ignorant masses, unwilling and unable to resist because their indoctrination runs deep, and the unceasing propaganda keeps them confused and angry at phantom enemies.

The perfect example of Orwell’s mass media deception in practice has been this entire Covid hoax, which has been built on a foundation of lies from the very beginning. At the outset Fauci scoffed at the concept of masks providing any protection from a microscopic virus while being interviewed on 60 Minutes. He wasn’t lying. Numerous scientific studies documented by the CDC proved beyond a doubt, masks are absolutely useless in preventing the spread of viruses. But a few weeks later the covid controllers realized the usefulness of masks as the perfect fear inducing symbol of a fake pandemic and the first step in demanding compliance and obedience by the masses.

Suddenly Fauci and his Big Pharma bought medical “expert” lackeys discarded the inconvenient facts that masks do not work, and piously preached that everyone must mask or mass death would occur. Any dissenting voice speaking the truth about masks was the enemy and needed to be silenced, scorned, ridiculed, and destroyed. The deception was aided and abetted by Twitter, Facebook, Google and the feckless MSM doing the bidding of the ruling elite, while being paid off by Big Pharma.

This was only the beginning of a worldwide conspiracy of lies. The videos from China of bodies in the streets were fake. Evidently to provoke fear among the global community. The purported origin of the virus being bats in a wet market in Wuhan was a lie concocted by Fauci, Daszik, and their Chinese co-conspirators to cover-up their illegal weaponization of viruses in the Wuhan Bio-weapon lab. This cover-up was maintained by the dying legacy media, Twitter, Facebook, and Google through the censorship and banning of anyone (ZeroHedge) who dared question the government approved narrative.

The demand for national lockdowns was built on the lies of Neil Ferguson, a 3rd rate academic, and his fear mongering Imperial College model of deaths if the world didn’t shut down. His ludicrous outcomes, based on false assumptions, were the basis for the disastrous decisions made by corrupt politicians across the world. The results in Sweden, which did not lockdown, have proven his model to be worthless, and responsible for the destruction of the lives of millions across the globe.

They lied about social distancing, based on a 3rd grade girl’s school paper. They used a PCR test improperly to falsely produce “positive” cases in order to terrify the masses into a mass formation psychosis. A case was not a sickness. They drastically overestimated the fatality rate and attributed the deaths of extremely old sick people to covid when they died from their existing malady. Only 6% of covid deaths can be attributed to strictly covid. The overall survival rate if you contracted covid is 99.7%, with anyone under 70 years old 99.9%. Virtually no one under 21 years old died from covid. It was less lethal than the annual flu to young people.

The overlords and their bevy of apparatchik whores in the government, media, and academia needed to ramp up the fear through rising cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in order to get rich off this plandemic, while planting the seeds of their Great Reset scheme to turn the world into a compliant surveillance state. The coup de grace of lies was to be the miraculous “Operation Warpspeed vaccine” which would rid the world of this perilous pestilence. Supposedly brilliant virologists developed amnesia over the concept of herd immunity, which has been known for centuries.

This War on Covid has gone as well as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, meaning it has been a complete and utter failure in defeating its supposed foe, but has been hugely successful in enriching politicians, corporations, and the multitude of toadies in the media, academia, and the bureaucracy who perpetuate the lies and disinformation they are paid handsomely to disgorge. The lies engulfing the supposed vaccine run deep and wide.

The entire vaccine scheme is built on an altar of lies, mistruths, misinformation, deception, and censorship. mRNA gene therapies have existed for decades and had consistently failed in application as every animal tested using these concoctions died. Pfizer faked their trial data, lied about adverse reactions, lied about long-term safety, lied about effects on pregnant women, and tried to keep these results hidden for seventy-five years. The tripe about these “vaccines” being safe effective has been and continues to be the Big Lie.

The emergency use authorization for these experimental jabs could only be given if there were no existing medications which were an effective treatment for the illness. There were dozens of scientific studies and world-renowned physicians acknowledging the effectiveness of both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in treating covid and alleviating its symptoms safely and effectively – and cheaply. That was the real problem. The hundreds of billions in profits to be made by Big Pharma, and then divvied up to politicians, legacy media companies, the FBI, and social media censorship arms of the ruling class, would be impossible if the truth about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin was allowed to be acknowledged.

Therefore, Fauci and his sycophants claimed they were dangerous, horse de-wormer medicine, and ineffective. Twitter, Facebook, and Google censored and banned doctors who posted anything positive about either treatment. Meanwhile, Fauci sentenced tens of thousands to death by pushing Remdesivir, a treatment he financially benefitted from, and recommending ventilators for those with covid. Fauci sentenced tens of thousands to death by not allowing these treatments to be used. He deserves the same fate for his treacherous actions but is treated like a saint by the left-wing media and the Biden minions.

“In a meta-analysis of 63 studies of ivermectin versus COVID-19 in humans, 100% of these have shown positive results… 29 of those studies were found to be statistically significant regarding use of ivermectin alone.https://t.co/KRWm8dSTAc

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) December 27, 2022

The biggest Orwellian mass-media deception of them all was what the “experts” unequivocally declared about their glorious vaccines. Just as every vaccine in history was supposed to keep you from contracting the illness you were vaccinated against, Fauci, Biden, Walensky, Gates, the Pfizer CEO, and a myriad of other paid “experts” told the global population they would not contract or spread covid once they were vaxxed. They are on video and in print declaring this to be true.

But when it was proven to be not true, they just denied they had ever said so. As long as the masses could be convinced the lie had become the truth, then the lie was the truth, according to the Party and its journalistic narrative guardians. Controlling the narrative through suppressing and censoring the truth is how they continue to maintain control. The release of the Twitter files by Musk confirms every “conspiracy theory” put into the public domain by the naysayers, critical thinkers, and a few honest journalists. They have lied about everything.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – Orwell

When confronted by the reality these experimental, toxic, gene altering, spike protein generating brews do not prevent anyone from contracting the virus, being hospitalized by the virus, or dying from the virus, the powers that be just changed the definition of a vaccine and attempted to alter the narrative and pretend they had never said what they said. How Orwellian of our Big Brother overlords. The past is alterable in a totalitarian regime.

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Even the current definition of vaccination is a lie. Not only does it not protect you from the virus, but the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE), warned about by highly regarded doctors like Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, and Pierre Kory over a year ago, is now happening to the vaxxed and boosted victims. Biden’s lie about this being a pandemic of the unvaccinated has transformed to the truth we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated. The vaccinated are now 4x as likely to contract covid as an unvaxxed person who has recovered from covid. Natural immunity, which has protected humanity for centuries, is real and far superior to these Big Pharma jabs.

The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed runs deep. They are too embarrassed and ashamed to admit they were duped and lied to. How many more young people need to “die suddenly” before they turn on Fauci, Biden, Big Pharma CEOs, media talking heads, politicians, and the sickcare industrial complex, and hold them accountable? Is the mass formation psychosis too ingrained in their psyche to ever revolt?

The lies about the covid vaccines being safe and effective, promulgated through a multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign running non-stop for the last two years, paying famous athletes, Hollywood stars, social media influencers, and unethical doctors, are proving to be the most diabolical and fatal falsehoods ever perpetrated on global humanity. The “effective” nonsense was put to bed last year when covid spread faster after more than half the country was berated and threatened into getting the jab, then a 2nd jab, then a 3rd jab, and then a booster, because the previous three failed.

And still half the country refuses to accept the truth because they don’t want to question the narrative or abandon their fellow vaccine cultists. The “safe” garbage narrative is collapsing on a daily basis as factual data about sudden deaths, real scientific studies proving the extreme dangers of these vaxxes, fertility data, excess mortality data, a constant stream of reports about young people contracting myocarditis, having heart attacks, and developing blood clots, has swamped Fauci and his ship of lying fools – with the ultimate result of breaking the mass formation psychosis of the masses.

Essentially, these vaccines are creating a slow-motion mass casualty event, and everyone involved in their premature use in human beings should stand trial for murder, but they won’t. That is because the totalitarian Deep State has grown too powerful, too arrogant, and too filled with contempt for those they rule over. They feel invincible, as they blatantly steal elections, keep peaceful protestors in dungeons, assassinate those who might implicate them in child trafficking conspiracies, use the mechanisms of the surveillance state to crush all opposition, and collude with mass media networks and the Silicon Valley mafia media to suppress the truth and censor those who dare question the Deep State sanctioned narrative. The Twitter files confirm the deceit and treason at the highest levels of government, media, and military. Hannah Arendt describes how totalitarian regimes depend on fabrications to maintain their power.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

At this point in history virtually everything uttered by the president, any politician, government bureaucrat, media personality, corporate executive, medical “expert”, and faux journalist is a fabrication, exaggeration, disinformation or outright lie. The list of lies is never ending, and has been going on since Adam and Eve, but the quantity and audaciousness of the lies in recent times has accelerated to a point where the totalitarians no longer fear revelations about their lies. They are comfortable knowing the masses will believe absurdities as long as they confirm their ideologies, biases, and beliefs.

The masses do not mind being lied to because they are entranced by narratives created to keep them under control and focused on whichever enemy they are propagandized to hate, whether it be Trump, lockdown and mask dissenters, anti-vaxxers, phantom white supremacists, J6 “insurrectionists”, the Russians, or “election deniers”. Provenly bold faced liars like Biden and Fauci are admired and celebrated for their dedication to the narrative, despite its falseness. It happened in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union, Mao’s Communist China, and today as we plunge towards a new world order totalitarianism of unknown outcomes and atrocities.

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

I think a list of big lies is sufficient to prove we are ruled by totalitarian ideologues who don’t care their lies are destroying our country, culture, and societal norms. During my lifetime: they lied about JFK’s assassination; they lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to get us into the Vietnam War; they lied about 9/11; they lied about WMD in Iraq; they lied about the 2008 financial collapse; they lied about the 2014 CIA coup in the Ukraine creating the havoc we have today; they lied about global warming and had to switch to climate change when the original lie was revealed; they lied about Russiagate and their coup against Trump, they lied about the “peaceful” BLM protests; they lied about the cause of George Floyd’s death (fentanyl overdose); they lie about child trafficking and grooming; they lie about butchering children in the name of gender identity; they lied about Hunter Biden’s computer and the Biden family crime syndicate; they lied about rigging the 2020 election; they lied about Epstein’s “suicide”; they lied about the FBI and Pelosi staging the January 6 “insurrection”; they lied about colluding with Twitter, Facebook, and Google to influence elections and create a fake pandemic; they are lying about our border being safe and secure; they are lying that Biden isn’t a dementia ridden puppet controlled by Obama, Soros, and Gates; they are lying that Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX money laundering operation wasn’t an arm of the Democrat party, using ill-gotten funds and funneling it to Democrat candidates; and they are lying about their intentions to destroy our society through suicidal economic, social, and legal policies in order to usher in a totalitarian Great Reset New World Order run by wealthy elites and their detestable acolytes. Our dystopian nightmare is on-par with Orwell’s.

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.” – George Orwell

Totalitarian regimes have tremendous success using fake data and fake charts to give the appearance of truth to a populace too willfully ignorant to investigate whether the data and charts are a truthful and accurate reflection of reality. It is so much easier to believe supposed experts than it is to think critically and question the narrative, especially when they are telling you what you want to hear. Even though the average person knows their financial situation has steadily deteriorated over the last two decades, along with the financial situation of the country, they still believe the fake data vomited on a daily basis by the government and Wall Street banking cabal.

They are lying about the inflation rate being 7%. It is more than double the government reported figure, based upon the calculation from 1980 when Volker needed to raise the Fed Funds Rate to 18%.

They are lying about the 3.7% unemployment rate. The total working age population is 265 million, up from 212 million in 2000. There are 158 million employed today, versus 137 million in 2000. The unemployment rate in 2000 of 4% is virtually the same as the rate reported today. How could that be if the working age population went up by 53 million, but employment only went up by 21 million? Quite a conundrum. It’s easy if you lie. According to the government 100 million working age Americans choose not to work, therefore they aren’t unemployed. That number was 70 million in 2000. Fully 40% of our working age citizens are not working today, but the government tells you our unemployment rate is 3.7%. This might be the biggest lie ever told.

The government has reported positive real GDP growth for most of the past two decades, with short-term dips in 2008/2009 and due to covid in 2020. Those figures are lies. Using a truthful inflation figure shows GDP has barely stayed flat for the last 20 years. The great American economy hasn’t grown in 20 years. We are a dying lying empire of debt. Our national debt grew from $5.7 trillion in 2000 to $31.5 trillion today. The debt to GDP ratio has gone from 55% in 2000 to 122% today. Throughout history, when this ratio exceeds 90%, economic disaster follows.

The biggest lie has been perpetrated by the Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, whose mandates are a stable currency and low unemployment. With a straight face these jokers declare they have succeeded, while the USD has lost 97% of its purchasing power since the deceitful inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the real unemployment rate is north of 20%. Losing the last 3% of purchasing power guarantees to be the most painful.

After documenting the outrageous multitude of lies being told by those controlling the levers of society, I’m torn regarding whether I trust enough people can be awakened from their self-induced stupor of belief in authority to mount a counter-offensive of truth. I guess I wouldn’t be writing articles about these subjects unless I thought there was a kernel of hope I could plant with my reasoning. But I find myself drawn more towards the conclusion reached by Alexandre Koyré over fifty years ago about mobs and the ease with which totalitarian authority figures can manipulate them:

“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.” ― Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge

When the mob has been essentially hypnotized by totalitarian authority figures, unbound from the law through illegally invoking “emergency” powers to ensure the safety of the masses, it takes massive bloodshed and enormous upheaval before the mob will come to their senses and realize their dreadful misplacement of trust in tyrants. Personally, I hope I am wrong about what lies ahead, but I don’t see a pathway towards a peaceful, reasoned resolution of what plagues our country and the world.

Fools, knaves, and low IQ ideologues control the narrative, the political power, the media messaging, the banks, and the minds of the mob. We can attempt to distance ourselves from the onslaught, but there really is no way to escape the impact of a Fourth Turning, whether it be global conflict, civil chaos, financial Armageddon, or the wrath of the mob for being right about the vaccines, politicians, or the financial markets. I am not surprised or upset about the lies told to me by those running the show. Neitzsche and Carlin, two brilliant thinkers, pretty much sum up my feelings.

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“My first rule:  I don’t believe anything the government tells me.  Nothing.  Zero.” – George Carlin

Very few people who need to awaken from their propaganda induced stupor of believing absurdities will read this article. Those who are already awake and can see what is happening clearly have few or no options to impact the course we are traveling. Too few see the iceberg dead ahead as the U.S. Titanic accelerates towards its rendezvous with destiny. We can shout and wave our hands, but there is nothing we can do to alter the course of an empire run by idiot ideologues, hellbent on the destruction of our ship of state. As Bradbury presciently noted in his masterpiece of societal self-immolation, I can’t make people listen to a message they don’t want to hear.

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

At this point I’m torn between the darkness of Orwell’s vision and the stoic attitude put forth by Tolkien. We are living in a time of universal deceit and telling the truth feels like a revolutionary act when the mob is under the spell of mass formation psychosis. It is an interesting dichotomy that this article will only be read by a small audience of people who already agree with most of my arguments. If it ever reached a wider audience, I would be attacked by the mob, censored, threatened, and doxed in an attempt to destroy my life. So be it.

I will do what I can do with my limited resources, protect my loved ones, strengthen relationships with like-minded hobbits, disconnect from this warped and deviant society as much as possible, distance myself from the government, prepare for an uncertain future, and try my best to navigate the perils ahead. We only have a limited time on this earth to make a difference. We each must decide what we do with the time given us. God help us.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

*  *  *
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Before we get to the big picture on the month, quarter, and year, this week has ended with no ‘Santa Claus’ rally this year for US stocks…

Until the last few minutes, the S&P 500 pinning around 3835 just as we said as JPM’s Collar trumped 0-DTE chaos, then everything melted up into the close…

As SpotGamma remarked earlier, as January is a put-heavy OPEX, any downside start to January could energize those puts, and serve to press markets lower.

This could lead to higher IV, and a reflexive selling loop to the downside. We’d then look for a rally after OPEX, as those puts expire.

Conversely, should January start off with strength, those puts could help to fuel a rally as their values collapse leading to an early, material stock rally.

OPEX could then trigger a reversal of that market strength. We currently assign edge to this scenario.

Trade the first week of January should help shed light on the timing of the rally (i.e. pre-OPEX or post-OPEX) as the machines show the way…

The dollar slipped lower, gold higher, and bitcoin lower on the week as Treasury yields surged into year-end…

Source: Bloomberg

December saw stocks behave rather oddly with the S&P 500 cumulatively unchanged overnight and the massive bulk of selling occurring during the US day session…

On the year, global stocks suffered a 20% decline in 2022, the 2nd worst year since 1974, as central banks fought inflation in the face of supply chain shortages and an energy crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

Source: Bloomberg

Worse still, as The FT reports, a traditional portfolio consisting of 60% US stocks and 40% US bonds will have seen its worst performance since 1932, when the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression.

As US bond returns are suffering their worst stretch in over a century…

US equity and bond markets lost a combined $17.4 trillion in 2022 at their October lows…

Source: Bloomberg

And while The Dow ‘only’ fell 9% in 2022, Nasdaq plunged over 33% (worst year for US stocks since 2008 in percentage terms)…

Source: Bloomberg

Over $7 trillion in stock market cap has been erased from the Nasdaq 100. While the Nasdaq 100”s drop was bigger in 2008 (down 41.9%), it was only down about $1 trillion in 2008 though, because the denominators have gotten so much bigger…

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks were also slammed lower (worst year since 2018) with UK worst and Spain the prettiest horse in the glue factory…

Source: Bloomberg

With the ‘longest duration’ stocks having been hammered the hardest…

Source: Bloomberg

Energy stocks turned in a dramatic performance and were the only US equity sector with gains in 2022 (as Consumer Discretionary and Tech underperforming)…

Source: Bloomberg

“This has been a year to be in the bunker,” says John Bilton, head of global multi-asset strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management.

Gold ended the year unchanged as the dollar surged; and while bonds and stocks were monkeyhammered lower, crypto was really clubbed like a baby seal…

Source: Bloomberg

The volume of negative-yielding debt has collapsed in 2022 (from a peak over $18 trillion in Dec 2020, there remains a modest $113 billion left, mainly in short-dated JGBs)…

Source: Bloomberg

As The Fed unleashed its most aggressive tightening cycle in decades…

Source: LPL

Some investors welcome this new discipline.

“This has been a train crash waiting to come,” says Alexandra Morris, chief investment officer at Norway’s Skagen Funds.

“Now, money has a cost. You can’t just throw money at unprofitable businesses, very risky businesses. We need to have a much more sensible allocation of capital.”

As the year ends, 113 counterparties parked a record $2.554 trillion at the Fed’s overnight reverse repurchase agreement facility, in which counterparties like money-market funds can place cash with the central bank. That was $245 billion more than the day before, the biggest one-day increase ever.

Source: Bloomberg

Demand for the facility has tended to surge at the end of each quarter as dealers curtail their activity in the market for repurchase agreements in order to shore up their balance sheets for regulatory purposes.

US Treasury yields exploded higher this year, led by the short-end, as the market realized The Fed wasn’t kidding about its anti-inflation stance. 2Y Yields rose a stunning 370bps in 2022 while 30Y yields rose over 200bps…

Source: Bloomberg

Which meant a massive flattening in the yield curve…

Source: Bloomberg

…driving the entire curve deep into inversion…

Source: Bloomberg

For some context, 2Y Yields started the year at 0.72% and ended at 4.43% (with Fed Funds now trading above it)…

Source: Bloomberg

The last six months have seen dramatic swings in the market’s expectations for The Fed’s monetary policy trajectory with the terminal rate surging up to around 5.00% as the expectations for a H2 2023 rate-cutting cycle (which implies a recession) surging dovishly in Q4…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar has gained more than 8 percent over the year, but it lost more than 8 percent this quarter on expectations the Fed may not raise rates as high as previously feared…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos took annus horribilis to ’11’ this year with the big ones – BTC and ETH – down 64% and 67% respectively as chaos reigned across the ecosystem…

Source: Bloomberg

On the commodity side of the board, it was a very volatile year with copper down notably (growth/demand scares) and energy up (supply scares), though the latter is dramatically below its mid-year panic highs…

Source: Bloomberg

WTI had a volatile year as Putin invasion reactions battled China COVID restrictions

Source: Bloomberg

Despite the dollar’s gains, gold ended unchanged on the year, rallying back above $1800 after triple-testing $1600 support…

Source: Bloomberg

Silver outperformed gold on the year, with Q4 seeing the gold/silver ratio top out (at 2019/2020 resistance) and fall back into the red for the year…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, if you’re hoping for a rebound in 2023, there’s really only one factor you can pray for…

Source: Bloomberg

When (or if) The Fed ends its QT program? Or this?

See you in 2023!

Via Thanefield Capital,

We’ve done our best to put together 22 points that we think tell the story of this year in crypto.

Everything shown is as of December 26th or December 27th.

Without further ado, Thanefield Capital’s 22 Changes in 2022.

1. Total crypto and stablecoins market cap

2021: +$162mn per hour

2022: -$164m per hour

Almost exactly, 2022 undid every dollar crypto and stablecoins added in 2021. Year over year market cap destruction first flashed in Q1 and was tagging $2tn by November. We’d love to see a more standardized measurement of total crypto value (addressing problems like FDV and liquidity) gain popularity, but this is the headline number.

2. Bitcoin and Ethereum futures open interest

Futures open interest for the two biggest cryptos went up only in coin terms, doubled, and then blew up with the FTX crash. Both charts will still close the year out significantly higher than at the start. Both charts are of course lower when measured in dollars.

3. Ethereum gas

The cost/demand to transact on Ethereum dropped around 80%.

4. Session performance

For the second year in a row, crypto tended to go down during Asia market hours. It was the worst time of day for Ethereum but the best for Bitcoin. All three sessions had negative absolute performance.

5. Crypto lending

OTC leverage imploded after 3AC went down – with market leader Genesis originating $8.4bn in loans this Q3 vs. $50bn in the last quarter of 2021. The more recent Q4 numbers are likely to be even lower.

6. Binance dominance

Binance pushed their total futures market share to almost 70%.

7. Altcoin drawdowns

This year sent a whopping 2/3rds of the names in our Binance spot universe (~80 coins) down more than 90% from their all time high.

8. Ethereum volume share

Starting this year at just half the size, it is now a toss up whether Ethereum futures will trade more volume than Bitcoin on any given day. This came and went with the merge trade but surged again in Q4 and appears to be sticking around.

9. SBF

The face of crypto was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States.

10. Implied volatility

The average implied volatility for 1 month Bitcoin and Ethereum options averaged just under 100 in 2021, and looks set to close this year under 75. The adjustment lower has accelerated in recent weeks.

11. Futures margin

2022 solidified the crypto futures transfer to cash margin from coin margin – taking the ratio from 200% to 700%.

12. Solunavax

Solana, Luna, and Avax wiped out roughly $236bn in FDV. This number was on par with 2019’s total crypto market cap.

13. Perps volume

Total perpetual futures volume opened the year averaging around $90bn a day and will end the year crashing under $40bn a day.

14. Put love

Downside is the new upside – crypto options stopped trading with a negative skew this year. Chart is cropped at zero for visual purposes.

15. Heroes

Half of the top 10 crypto funds going into this year are now either bankrupt, missing in action, or both.

16. Carry

What was left of the once >40% annualized basis trade in Bitcoin and Ethereum was squashed to zero and then some, and has stayed there.

17. Ethereum supply

The merge gave crypto’s second largest asset a wildly different emissions schedule, moving Ethereum further into direct competition with Bitcoin.

18. Stablecoins

For the first time in their history, stablecoins saw a decrease in circulation this year. It’s a slow turning chart and it’s only going one way right now.

19. Weekends

Crypto markets were further integrated into a M-F lifestyle, with Bitcoin averaging almost 70% more volume on weekdays than weekends now, up from a roughly 30% difference at the start of the year. The kicker is that this took the form of less volume on weekends, not more volume on weekdays.

20. The bigger picture

Macro left us on our own this year with one of the worst performances for a US 60/40 portfolio in history.

21. Fundraising

Here’s the chart that sticks out like a sore thumb. This year’s total crypto fundraising topping the 2021 total goes to show just how extreme activity here remained well into H1. Post-FTX, everything is different but the data will take some time to come in.

22. GBTC

GBTC made the transition from a troubled product to a failed, parasitic product as the NAV discount blew out to more than half. The discount widening played a large part in the downfall of 3AC.

See you next year!

Russian President Vladimir Putin in a Friday virtual meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping hailed Russia-China ties as at their “best in history” and the strategic partnership between the two countries a “stabilizing factor” amid broader geopolitical tensions with the West. Putin vowed to his “dear friend” Xi to strengthen military cooperation with China, while Xi reciprocated by saying Beijing stands ready to expand ties.

“In the context of soaring geopolitical tensions, the importance of the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership as a stabilizing force is growing,” Putin emphasized, saying relations will continue to expand “dynamically” from this point on.

The Chinese leader in response said: “Under our joint leadership, the Chinese-Russian comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction in the new era demonstrates… resistance to stress [or difficulties],” according to a Russian state media readout.

Xi additionally sought to reassure Putin that China “in the face of a simple and far from unambiguous international situation” stands ready to “increase strategic cooperation with Russia, provide each other with development opportunities, and be global partners.”

Xi’s remarks about the ongoing Ukraine crisis and conflict, which Putin himself this month for the first time referred to as a “war” (a definite upgrade in terminology from the previous “special military operation” reference), were interesting considering that they carefully avoided condemning the invasion of Ukraine…

Xi also told Putin that the road to peace talks in Ukraine would not be smooth and that China would continue to uphold its “objective and fair stance” on the issue, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

With these words, Xi once again shirked continued pressure from Western countries to issue a full condemnation of the war.

Another big development to come from the Friday virtual summit is that the Kremlin unveiled an invitation for President Xi to travel to Russia in the spring of 2023. Putin expressed hope that this would present a united front and public solidarity in closer relations in the face of the pressure campaign from the West.

Putin said: “We are expecting you, dear Mr Chairman, dear friend, we are expecting you next spring on a state visit to Moscow,” adding that the state visit would “demonstrate to the world the closeness of Russian-Chinese relations.”

🇷🇺🇨🇳Putin – Xi Jinping:”We aim to strengthen cooperation between the Armed Forces of Russia and China.Coordination between Moscow and Beijing in the international arena(in the UN,BRICS,G20,SCO) serves to form a just world order based on international law.” pic.twitter.com/f2rjqvyzMf

— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) December 30, 2022

Given that part of the meeting was televised, and the formal invitation made public as part of this, it’s very likely Xi will indeed proceed with the spring visit, which is likely to have already been long in the planning process.

Putin further summarized what kind of message this would send to Russia and China’s rivals and enemies, stressing to Xi that “Amid unprecedented pressure and provocations from the West we are standing up for our own fundamental views.”

Bloomberg synopsis – “China is helping Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, but they don’t really like it.” These articles only serve to weaken calls to sanction the Communist regime. It’s why the business community cannot be trusted with our national security. https://t.co/NHfozcb7j7

— General Spalding (@robert_spalding) December 30, 2022

* * *

As we detailed this week of Zoltan Pozsar’s year-end big picture global sitrep, a major (recurring) theme of which includes the following observation: “in a moment when the world is going from unipolar to multipolar, the actions of heads of state are far more important than the actions of central banks”… 

According to Pozsar the special relationship between Russia and China “has a financial agenda to it, and what President Xi and President Putin say about the future of money – that is, the future they envision – matters for the future of the U.S. dollar and liquidity in the U.S. Treasury market.” But even more important is what they do, i.e., it is their actions that are forging something new, or as Zoltan puts it: 

Bretton Woods III is slowly taking shape, and in light of developments to date, my motto for Bretton Woods III – “our commodity, your problem” – remains apt.

Premium subscribers can read more here.

A downturn in the residential real estate market could be nearing, Kieran Clancy, a senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, recently warned. The potential for a major price decline has been on our radar in recent quarters as elevated mortgage rates and record-high prices create an unfavorable environment for buyers.

The only reason housing prices have yet to plummet is because of the lack of housing inventory. That’s the primary difference between the current market and the market during the 2008 housing crash.

For now, we keep our eyes peeled for the changing dynamics in supply/demand. A new Redfin report might be the first sign inventory is increasing. 

For the four weeks ending Dec. 25, the total number of homes for sale jumped 18% compared to the same period a year ago. Redfin said this was a record year-over-year increase, adding homes are lingering on the market longer. 

“Inventory is up even though new listings are down by double digits because homes are taking a long time to sell amid 6%-plus mortgage rates (the average 30-year rate ticked up to 6.42% this week), economic uncertainty and the typically slow holiday season,” the report said. 

The residential real estate market is freezing as homes on the market now take 40 days to go under contract, more than double from a record low of 18 days in May and the slowest pace since January 2021. 

A jump in supply is not a promising sign for the market heading into 2023. Goldman Sachs analysts slashed their outlook for home prices from around flat next year to down 4%, noting “unsustainable levels of housing affordability to continue weighing on housing demand.”

The median home sale price was $351,860, up a measly 0.7% year-over-year, the slowest growth rate since the beginning of the virus pandemic. 

During the four weeks leading up to Dec. 25, prices fell 9% year-over-year in San Francisco, 6.5% in San Jose, 6% in Los Angeles, 4.5% in Detroit, 4.4% in Pittsburgh, 3.7% in Sacramento, 3.6% in Oakland, CA and 2.3% in Austin. They slipped 2% or less in New York, Seattle, Anaheim, CA, Phoenix, Chicago, Newark, NJ, Riverside, CA, Boston, and Washington, DC.

And for more insight into what’s next. Industry insider and CEO of US home-furnishings company RH, Gary Friedman, warned in a recent earnings call “there will be no soft landing” in the residential real estate market. 

The bottom line is that momentum in the housing markets has stalled, inventory is now building, and perhaps it’s just a matter of time before prices decline.  

By Grant Smith and Mark Cudmore, Bloomberg markets live reports and strategists

Oil prices may have surrendered the bulk of this year’s gains, but the conditions are right to lure back bulls in the new year.

Brent crude futures are set to end 2022 with a modest increase of 7% — a mere fraction of the $60-a-barrel gain they had racked up in the spring, when alarm over the war in Ukraine was at its peak. Faltering fuel demand, fears over a US recession and China’s Covid resurgence have all helped to dissolve the rally.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of reasons why oil is poised for a renewed surge next year.

On the demand side, the coldest part of winter has yet to bite and should stoke the need for heating fuels in the first months of 2023. Later in the year, China’s re-opening may have gathered strength, bringing more cars onto the road and planes in the air. Hedge fund star Pierre Andurand estimates that demand growth could double mainstream expectations next year, soaring by 4%.

As for supplies, Russian exports may have defied the skeptics throughout last year but that’s because sanctions are only now going into full force. Insurers are shunning their traditional trade in Russian cargoes, a portent of the supply drop to come. The 15% plunge in Russian output long-predicted by the International Energy Agency may finally be on the way.

Meanwhile oil’s forward curves testify to the underlying market strength, with Brent spreads largely showing a premium — known as backwardation — that signifies supply tightness. If all else fails, Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ allies have demonstrated they’re willing to defend the market by slashing oil production, even if it means enduring political outcry.

It’s this combination of demand surprises and supply shortfalls that may well send Brent — ending the year close to $83 a barrel — back towards triple digits in 2023.