Waiting for a government – any government – to release their “secret” files is a waste of your time, and reading anything they eventually publish is doubly so.
If you didn’t learn that from the nothing-burger that was the 28 pages on 9/11, or the pathetic exercise in revisionism that made up the Afghanistan Papers…you should definitely have learned it today.
Yes, Joe Biden’s administration has just released their promised “secret” JFK papers.
Turns out that Oswald acted alone.
I know, I was shocked too.
Further, the release dials back on the (very slight) anti-Russia messaging of last year’s release.
The latest batch reassures us that Oswald never worked for the KGB, and that the Russians thought he was “too crazy” to recruit.
One gets the impression that has as much to do with managing propaganda positioning over the war in Ukraine as anything else. Either way, its a ridiculously transparent attempt to reinforce the “lone wolf” lie.
“He was too crazy and unstable even for the Russians!”
the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner”.
Yes, before Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald they were apparently “not connected in any manner”. He had never met Oswald before the assassination, and barely had any idea who he was when he shot him on November 24th.
This means the current “official story” is that Ruby randomly chose to attend the press conference where Oswald spoke on the evening of November 22nd, despite not being a member of the press.
During this press conference, Ruby correctly pointed out Oswald had joined the “fair play for Cuba committee” (presumably an inspired guess, seeing as they did not know one another).
Then, two days later and on a complete whim, he decided to sneak back into the police station carrying a gun and shoot a man he had never met for no reason at all, in the parking lot of a police station, while surrounded by police officers.
That’s what these “secret files” tell us…the same ridiculous story as the very unsecret Warren Commission.
So, yet again, we see just how pointless these long-awaited government releases are, and how they are only every used to reinforce the official narrative.
It was always going to be that way.
After all, JFK has been dead for six decades, that is more than enough time to redact, edit, censor and indeed forge documents ’til they tell the story you want to tell.
Hell, it’s possible these files didn’t even exist until a couple of days ago. Why on Earth should we give the CIA, FBI or National Archives the benefit of the doubt?
Supposing they are sitting on some cache of massively incriminating evidence…are they really likely to release it? Just because someone asks nicely?
Imagine the police rocking up to a murder suspect’s house, knocking politely, and asking if he wouldn’t mind going inside and fetching all the evidence that he killed his wife. Then quietly waiting sixty years for him to do it.
Founded by Australian professors Tom Oxley and Nick Opie, the company on Dec. 16 announced it had closed a $110 million Series C funding round involving Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, and ARCH Venture Partners.
The Synchron Switch is a “brain-computer interface” that is implanted in the blood vessels at the surface of the motor cortex of the brain via the jugular vein.
Once set, the interface will detect and wirelessly transmit information from the brain, allowing severely paralysed individuals to control personal devices without needing to use their hands.
The funds will be put towards a pivotal clinical trial.
“We have an opportunity to deliver a first-in-class commercial [brain-computer interface],” said Oxley, also the CEO of Synchron, in a statement.
“The problem of paralysis is much larger than people realize. 100 million people worldwide have upper limb impairment,” he added.
ARCH Managing Director Robert Nelson said Synchron was helping individuals with untreatable conditions “regain connection to the world.
“It is an exciting time for neurotechnology,” he said.
How Does it Compare to Musk’s Neuralink?
Clinical trials are currently underway in the United States and Australia with Opie saying the procedure was minimally invasive—a factor he believes sets it apart from Musk’s Neuralink.
“We don’t need to remove the scalp and skull or put electrodes directly into delicate brain tissue,” he said in comments obtained by AAP.
“We’ve come up with a clever way of getting to the right place in the brain just by using the body’s naturally occurring highways and blood vessels.”
He added this ensured patients recovered faster as well from the procedure.
So far, four Australian paralysis patients have received implants since undergoing the procedure at Royal Melbourne Hospital in 2020.
“All of those patients were able to control a computer with their mind,” he said. “And there were no serious device-related effects.”
The first U.S. patient was treated in July 2022 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York after Synchron received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year.
In contrast, Musk’s Neuralink has yet to receive approval from the body and is also facing questions over potential animal welfare violations.
Musk had wanted to start human trials in six months, yet the billionaire is also reported to have approached Synchron about a potential investment.
Opie says no deal is on the table.
Other investors include Reliance Digital Health, Greenoaks, Alumni Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Project X, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures, NeuroTechnology Investors, METIS, Forepont Capital Partners, ID8 Investments, and Shanda Group.
With China’s upcoming Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC), markets will be looking for any pro-growth signals after a year of turbulence. But the most consequential action for growth has already happened: the decision to abandon Zero Covid.
The key questions now are
will the Zero Covid exit endure?
how much will property rebound?
will there be more significant stimulus?
Here we briefly unpack our views on these three questions.
Covid: China Has Crossed the Rubicon Toward Coexistence
Although 4Q growth will still come in around expectations in our recent outlook, we underestimated the degree to which an about-face on Zero Covid would occur. One of the key factors is that the pre-Party Congress politics on Zero Covid have evaporated, making it much easier to shift course. Combined with bottom-up demands and an economy in dire straits, those advocating an exit have won. At this point, we expect China to embark on a swift exit and reach near full opening by the end of 1H2023.
If anything, the concern now is whether China is exiting hastily without much planning for case surges and ensuring sufficient hospital capacity. To be sure, the path from containment to coexistence will be paved with its share of chaos and setbacks, but we believe that China has passed the point of no return and is decisively moving to coexistence.
Fast-moving developments in the Chinese capital bear monitoring as a leading indicator. That’s because what happens in Beijing won’t stay in Beijing—that is, with the Chinese capital already confronting a bad surge, the government’s acceptance of case spread without reversing course will send a strong signal across the country for emulating the approach. At this point, even with infections mounting, we believe the government is unlikely to tighten controls again and will hold the line on reopening.
Property: From Rescuing Developers to Stimulating Demand
The property sector’s prospects have improved as of late because state banks have been quietly lending to property developers without resorting to a formal splashy bailout. But there is strong reluctance behind these actions, as the central government is serious about reducing banks’ exposure to the property sector and maintaining its fiscal prudence.
So Beijing will want to shift the burden of the property rescue from the state to households as soon as possible. And the Covid exit presents as good an opportunity as any for Beijing to seize on to unleash more household spending. We expect announcements on stimulating property demand during the CEWC, including measures such as reducing down payment and mortgage rates.
Skepticism on whether demand-side stimulus will work is warranted, since incentives for property purchases have been largely unsuccessful to date as sales declined by more than 20% through October. But at the same time, Chinese households have accumulated 6 trillion yuan (~$1 trillion) in excess savings this year, largely as a result of not buying homes. That pent-up demand is more likely to materialize this time because the Covid exit will lead households to reconsider their outlook as the economy reopens.
With households more willing to take on debt and resume property purchases, that will also improve the cash flow of property developers that depend on sales. That will lead the state sector to withdraw its lending once the sector appears more stable.
Fiscal Stimulus: Overly Conservative
While the Zero Covid exit and a potential property rebound are looking up, there remains the risk that stimulus will be withdrawn too quickly. While we believe that the on-budget fiscal deficit will modestly increase in 2023, the overall macroeconomic policy stance will likely be contractionary.
For one, any increase in the fiscal deficit will not be able to offset the ending of other stimulus measures such as the tax refund and the central bank’s dividend payments—together accounting for 3% of GDP in 2021. Second, the latest Politburo meeting once again puts financial risk as a top concern for 2023, effectively ruling out broad-based monetary easing.
The bottom line is that the move to Covid coexistence will be the biggest boon to growth in at least two years, even as a weaker stimulus will be a headwind to growth in 2023. We will have more detailed analysis of China’s economic prospects in our 1Q2023 Macro Outlook.
Leaked files reviewed by MintPress expose how intelligence services the world over can track cryptocurrency transactions to their source and therefore identify users by monitoring the movements of smartphone and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as Amazon Echo. The contents comprehensively detonate the myth of crypto anonymity, and have grave implications for individuals and states seeking to shield their financial activity from the prying eyes of hostile governments and authorities.
The documents are among a trove related to the secret operations of Anomaly 6, a shadowy private spying firm founded by a pair of U.S. military intelligence veterans.
The company covertly embeds software development kits, or SDKs, in hundreds of popular apps, then slices through layers of “anonymized” data in order to uncover sensitive information about any individual it chooses anywhere on Earth, at any time. In all, Anomaly 6 can simultaneously monitor roughly three billion smartphone devices – equivalent to a fifth of the world’s total population – in real-time.
Having previously hawked its wares to U.S. Special Operations Command, as this journalist revealed on December 6, Anomaly 6 is now using British private military company Prevail Partners – heavily involved in the West’s proxy war in Ukraine – to market and sell its product to a variety of Western military, security, and intelligence agencies the world over. This is despite the company’s own founders fearing its global dragnet could be completely illegal under national and international data protection regimes.
The company’s international surveillance reach could be more sweeping – and invasive – than even that of the C.I.A. and N.S.A. MintPress can reveal individuals, organizations, and states seeking to bypass traditional financial structures and systems loom prominently in Anomaly 6’s mephitic crosshairs, and spying on their transactions is a pivotal component of its sales pitch to government and private clients. This Orwellian technology leaves cryptocurrency users the world over nowhere to hide.
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS?
Ever since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, anonymity has been an absolutely fundamental tenet of cryptocurrency. The ability to make and receive payments incognito through a secure, decentralized platform without needing to register a named bank account, or even interact with established financial gatekeepers at any stage, was and remains a unique selling point for the asset.
The principle of anonymity is taken so seriously by crypto practitioners and aficionados alike that industry platforms are graded according to their levels of privacy. Many crypto entrepreneurs, some of whom manage hundreds of millions of dollars for clients, conduct business without ever disclosing their names, or any identifying information at all. Venture capital firms have even invested vast sums in crypto ventures with wholly pseudonymous founders, an unprecedented sectoral development.
Anomaly Six’s website features no other data but the company name, contact and location
In recent years, however, there have been several clear indications that cryptocurrency anonymity is under significant threat, and indeed could already have been mortally compromised by the U.S. intelligence apparatus. In June 2021, it was revealed that the F.B.I. had successfully traced and recovered $2.3 million in Bitcoin extorted by hackers from Colonial Pipeline in a ransomware attack, which had shut down the company’s computer systems, causing fuel shortages and a spike in gas prices.
U.S. officials declined to reveal how they tracked where the ill-gotten funds had ended up, and identified the ultimate owners of 23 separate cryptocurrency accounts belonging to DarkSide, the hacking collective responsible for the cyberattack, although public statements by C.I.A. director William Burns in December that year may provide a clue. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal summit, he acknowledged that his Agency was engaged in “a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency.”
“This is something I inherited. My predecessor had started this,” he said. “Trying to look at second- and third-order consequences as well and helping with our colleagues in other parts of the U.S. government to provide solid intelligence on what we’re seeing as well.”
While it’s certainly true that cryptocurrency’s anonymity is attractive to criminal elements and terrorist groups, there are a wide variety of entirely legitimate reasons for seeking privacy in financial transactions, and preventing regulators, big banks, and governments from keeping an eye on what one is doing.
For example, political and social movements of every stripe in all corners of the globe have embraced the asset, as they can be financially supported from overseas without any paper trail being left at either end. In turn, activists can send money to each other and make purchases in secret, and organize events and construct local and international support networks, leaving authorities none the wiser.
In Venezuela, cryptocurrency has provided vital respite to an entire country, as crippling U.S.-led sanctions have in recent years deprived both its government and citizens of access to, and the ability to buy, even basic necessities, including food and medicine. The national currency’s value reduced to almost zero, crypto transactions offer a literal lifeline by which goods and services can be accessed, and import and export restrictions imposed by Washington circumvented.
‘PATTERNS OF LIFE’ AND ‘BED DOWN LOCATIONS’
A February 2021 U.N. special rapporteur report on the impact of American sanctions on Venezuela ruled they were “collective punishment,” and Caracas lived on just 1% of its pre-sanctions income. The previous March, Alfred de Zayas, formerly an independent expert for the United Nations Human Rights Council, calculated that over 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of the restrictions.
Despite this monstrous human toll, and countless calls from prominent rights groups and international institutions to end the suffering, Washington rigidly enforces the sanctions regime, and seeks to harshly punish any individual or organization helping Caracas skirt restrictions. While measures have eased slightly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Stateside prosecution of Colombian businessman Alex Saab, abducted from Cape Verde in October 2020, for selling food to the Venezuelan government is ongoing.
Saab could be soon joined in the dock, if Anomaly 6 has anything to do with it. One of the company’s leaked sales presentations provides several case studies showing how its spying technology can be used by security and intelligence services to “derive understanding of the actions of individuals associated with sanctions violations.”
By homing in on the location of the Venezuelan government’s sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange, the National Superintendence of Cryptoactives and Related Activities (Sunacrip), which manages all crypto activities in the country, Anomaly 6 identified two specific IoT devices “which show the value of the A6 dataset in this endeavor.”
Scouring data generated at the site back to January 1, 2020, Anomaly 6 found thousands of signals emitted by IoT devices and smartphones. From there, it “built out the pattern of life for the devices in that search” – in other words, the locations device owners traveled to and from, when, and where they lived. In all, these devices produced “over 593,374 geographic points of reference”, in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.
From this amorphous corpus, Anomaly 6 identified one device with “a unique travel pattern which makes it worth further investigation.” In particular, its movements indicated a “very well-defined pattern of life in and around Caracas” – although the company professed to be “much more interested in its travel to the Colombian border in the Cúcuta/San Antonio del Táchira border area.”
That Anomaly 6 was able to track this device while in flight was said to highlight a “unique aspect” of its dataset. The device “took a less than seven hour trip from Caracas to San Antonio del Táchira (Juan Vicente Gómez International Airport) which landed (or was on final approach at 0923 on 23 Feb).”
“With less than 10 flights a day on average to this airport (pre-Covid 19), it would not be difficult to ascertain a short list of personalities of interest with access to Venezuelan passenger name records,” Anomaly 6 bragged. “Additionally, we can see that this device transits to the border crossing locations in the short time it was located in the area.”
This border area was of note for Anomaly 6 as, “according to open source reporting, historically, Venezuelans have used border areas for cash pickup/drops to skirt sanctions put in place by the international community.” Such activities “provide access to hard currency to actors and governments which have been cut off from U.S. dollar trading platforms.”
A “second device of interest” was found to have traveled to Medellín, Colombia, and its “pattern of life” indicated its owner had “connections to the financial/banking environment.”
“Both of these devices exhibit [patterns of life] that warrant further exploration, especially when combined with fact [sic] they have been located at the Sunacrip HQ,” Anomaly 6 concluded. “Further investigation can find bed down locations as well as other insights for business locations, international travel, and other device co-location.”
THE DEVIL TURNS AROUND
Due to a highly successful mainstream media campaign over many years to demonize the government of Venezuela, and by extension its people, it is likely some American citizens will be entirely unsympathetic to Caracas’ plight, and approve of efforts to prevent the state bypassing sanctions. However, the ease with which Anomaly 6’s tools of mass surveillance could be domestically deployed, and the likelihood they already have, should give them pause.
As I revealed in my initial report, Anomaly 6 can identify U.S. smartphone users by name, address and travel history. Another leaked sales presentation details how by linking a single anonymous individual’s smartphone signal recorded in North Korea to a network of hotels, schools, and other sites, the company determined with pinpoint accuracy their identity, marital status, where they worked and lived, the names of their children and the schools and universities at which they study, and more.
Such capabilities would no doubt be of much interest to the C.I.A. and N.S.A. – both of which are in theory prohibited from spying on U.S. citizens, but have been recurrently embroiled in controversy for engaging in such activity.
Concerningly, it has been revealed that the C.I.A. for many years sought to bulk collect international financial data in service of tracking the Islamic State’s funding sources, and incidentally vacuumed up voluminous quantities of sensitive information on U.S. citizens in the process.
Heavily redacted records related to the connivance were unearthed due to pressure from senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Upon reviewing the material, they wrote to U.S. Director of Intelligence Avril Haines, righteously admonishing the C.I.A. for brazenly ignoring longstanding constitutional checks and balances on the Agency’s domestic activities.
“[The C.I.A.] has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection,” they fulminated.
Anomaly 6’s services, of course, mean the C.I.A. and N.S.A. can dodge restrictions at home, without fear of landing in hot water. Other agencies permitted to monitor Americans can likewise now do so without a warrant too. And there is no reason to believe that its spying would be restricted to financial transactions, either
“Anomaly 6 data can be used in multiple use cases to support cyber intelligence and operational use end states,” the leaked crypto sales deck declares. “By utilizing multiple targeting methodologies, this data can support the building of a far superior intelligence picture that enables clients to move towards actionable end states. Fusing A6 data with other classified and unclassified data sets places the client at the forefront of the cyber mission space.”
Other leaked Anomaly 6 files openly discuss how its technology is ripe for both “counterintelligence” and “source development” purposes, and it’s not merely U.S. citizens in the firing line. The firm boasts of having spied on the movements of “devices from other friendly countries,” including members of the Five Eyes global spying network, and France and Germany.
In other words, Anomaly 6 turns every citizen on Earth into a potential “person of interest” to intelligence agencies, and thus a target for recruitment, surveillance, harassment, and much, much worse, the most intimate details of their private lives easily accessible by shady actors with a few clicks of a button, and without their knowledge or consent.
While the mainstream media is yet to acknowledge the leak of the company’s sensitive internal papers, this has all the makings of an Edward Snowden-level international scandal of historic proportions. If Anomaly 6 is to be successfully stopped in its tracks, and Western intelligence agencies prevented from egregiously violating the privacy of innumerable individuals without compunction or oversight, it will require concerted collective action from concerned citizens worldwide.
Which countries have the largest populations? What about the rural versus urban population divide? And which countries have the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP), military expenditures, or tech exports?
Instead of comparing countries by one metric, Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang introduces this animation and series of graphics by Anders Sundell uses 20 different categories of World Bank data to compare countries.
The data was sourced in July 2022 and contains the latest available data for each country.
Below, we provide some context on eight of the 20 categories, and share some facts on the top ranking countries for each category.
With a GDP of nearly $23 trillion in 2021, the United States has the largest economic output of any country in the world. While China is currently second on the list, some projections have China’s nominal GDP surpassing America’s as early as 2030.
And even more evident on this map is the weight of economic power to Western countries and just a few Asian countries. Africa, South America, and the rest of Asia are tiny in contrast.
China ranks first as the world’s most populated country, with a population of 1.4 billion. China has been the world’s most populated country for more than 300 years, but this could change in the near future.
According to the UN’s latest population prospects, India’s population is expected to surpass China’s as early as 2023. However, it’s still unclear what the consequences of this shift will be.
While China also takes the top spot when it comes to total elderly population, it’s worth noting that Japan has a larger per capita population of people aged 65 and over.
According to the Population Reference Bureau, nearly 12% of China’s population is 65 or older, while in Japan, more than 28.2% of people are 65+.
Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world’s population lived in rural areas. But by the early 1900s, urbanization started to skyrocket, and now more than half of the world’s population lives in cities.
China’s urbanization really took off as soon as the country’s economic reforms began in the late 1970s. As of 2021, China’s urban population of roughly 861 million people made up 63% of its overall population.
Many Asian and East African countries rise to the front when it comes to rural population comparisons, but India easily has the world’s largest share with around 898 million people.
As of 2021 figures, about 65% of India’s population is rural. This is actually a significant drop compared to the 1960s, when the country’s rural population made up a whopping 82% of its overall population.
Still, that’s still significantly higher than Western countries. For instance, only 17% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas.
When it comes to comparing countries by sheer size, Russia comes first with a land area of 16.4 million square kilometers—that’s nearly 2x bigger than China, which comes second on the list.
According to National Geographic, Russia is so big, it accounts for one-tenth of all land on Earth. The country has 11 different time zones, as well as coasts on three separate oceans.
Why isn’t Canada ranked second? Though it is generally accepted as the world’s second largest country, around 8.9% of its total area is made up of water. In pure landmass, China and the U.S. have an edge.
The U.S. ranks as the world’s top fuel exporter, with the United Arab Emirates in close second.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas sector is responsible for about 8% of America’s total economic output, measured by GDP.
And this map also highlights the many other countries dependent on energy for GDP. This includes OPEC members like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran, as well as well-known energy exporters like Norway and Russia.
While China ranks first as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, it’s worth mentioning that the country is not even in the top 10 when looking at per capita carbon emissions.
That being said, China’s annual emissions of 10.7 billion tons CO₂ make up a massive share of global emissions. They are more than double the second largest emitter, the United States.
Comparing Countries by Other Metrics
This series of graphics shows 20 distinct measures of comparing countries, but they are just a few of the hundreds of possible examples.
From different economic measures like remittances, employment, and GDP to the multitude of factors that one can find in a demographic census, each comparison can yield different results and shed new lights on how countries relate to each other.
Perfect Storm Arrives: “Massive Wave” Of Car Repossessions And Loan Defaults To Trigger Auto Market Disaster, Cripple US Economy
For almost a year now, we have been dutifully tracking several key datasets within the auto sector to find the critical inflection point in this perhaps most leading of economic indicators which will presage not only a crushing auto loan crisis, but also signal the arrival of a full-blown recession, one which even the NBER won’t be able to ignore, as the US consumers are once again tapped out. We believe that moment has now arrived.
But first, for those readers who are unfamiliar with the space, we urge you to read some of our recent articles on the topic of car prices – which alongside housing, has been the biggest driver of inflation in the past 18 months – and more specifically how these are funded my the US middle class, i.e., car loans, and last but not least, the interest rate paid for said loans. Here are a few places to start:
So while the big picture is clear – Americans are using ever more debt to fund record new car prices – fast-forwarding to today, we have observed two ominous new developments: the latest consumer credit report from the Fed revealed a dramatic spike in the amount of new car loans, which increased by more than $2,000 in one quarter, from just over $38,000 (a record), to $40,155 (a new record).
Now this shouldn’t come as a shock: a simple reason why new car loans have hit record highs is simply because new car prices have also soared to all time highs, as the next chart shows.
Here we will ignore for the time being cause and effect, or “chicken or egg” questions – i.e., whether record new car prices are the result of easy record credit, or whether record new car loans are simply tracking the explosive surge in car prices, and instead focus on something even more ominous: the explosion in the average interest rate on a new 60 month auto loans: according to Bankrate, as of Dec 16, the number is just over 6.50%, almost doubling since the start of the year, and the highest in 12 years.
It is this surge in nominal auto debt as well as the unprecedented spike in new auto loan rates, that we believe has finally pushed the US car sector to the infamous Wile Coyote point of no return.
Consider the following: according to various recent financial analysts, a growing number of consumers are falling behind on their car payments – a trend which will only accelerate – in a sign of the strain soaring car prices and prolonged inflation are having on household budgets.
As NBC reports, whereas repossessions tumbled at the start of the pandemic when Americans got a boost from stimulus checks and lenders were more willing to accommodate those behind on their payments, in recent months, the number of people behind on their car payments has been approaching prepandemic levels, and for the lowest-income consumers, the rate of loan defaults is now exceeding where it was in 2019, according to a recent report from Fitch.
Naturally, with the economy set to slump into a Fed-induced recession, the trend will only get much worse into 2023 with economists expecting unemployment to rise, inflation to remain relatively high (at least until the economy crashes) and household savings – already at record lows – set to dwindle. At the same time, a growing number of consumers are having to stretch their budgets to afford a vehicle; the average monthly payment for a new car is up 26% since 2019 to $718 a month, and nearly one in six new car buyers is spending more than $1,000 a month on vehicles. Other costs associated with owning a car have also shot up, including insurance, gas and repairs.
“These repossessions are occurring on people who could afford that $500 or $600 a month payment two years ago, but now everything else in their life is more expensive,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at car buying website Edmunds. “That’s where we’re starting to see the repossessions happen because it’s just everything else starting to pin you down.”
The silver lining is that while the US auto sector faces unmitigated disaster in 2023, for those in the repossession business, it’s been difficult to keep up. Jeremy Cross, the president of International Recovery Systems in Pennsylvania, said he can’t find enough repo men to meet the demand or space to hold all the cars his company has been tasked with repossessing. With the holidays approaching, he’s been particularly busy as people prioritize spending elsewhere, and he’s expecting business to keep up throughout next year and 2024.
“Right now, it’s really the perfect storm,” said Cross. “Over the last two years, vehicle prices were inflated because there was no new car supply, people were still buying like crazy because they had a lot of stay-at-home cash, they had inflated credit scores, so it was like a recipe for disaster.”
Ironically, at the same time, the number of repossession companies has shrunk by 30% as many firms closed up shop and the workers found jobs in other industries when repossessions tumbled during 2020, Cross said. Now, he told NBC, lenders are paying him premiums to repossess their cars first in anticipation of a continued increase in loan defaults (read: plunging prices).
“The volume is picking up, and the remaining companies that are still performing repossessions are very busy,” Cross said. “The overall numbers are still not prepandemic numbers, but we will see a big change coming in ‘23 and ‘24 that I think the lenders are starting to recognize because they are offering financial incentives that they never had to do in the past. They’re jockeying for position knowing that there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth available.”
Predictably, the coming auto crisis is an issue that’s raised concern among officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who say they are seeing troubling signs in the auto market, particularly among so-called subprime borrowers, who have below-average credit scores, and those with loans taken out in 2021 and 2022 when auto prices were particularly high.
Yes: that 2008 deja vu feeling is back front and center….and so are the defaults.
“Loans taken out in those years are performing worse than prior years just because those consumers had to finance cars once the supply chains were jammed and the prices started to go up,” said Ryan Kelly, acting auto finance program manager for the CFPB. “Those consumers got hit with inflation twice. First, when they had to finance a car after the prices went up, and then when they had to put gas in the car after the Russia-Ukraine conflict started. So there’s just a lot of consumer stress.”
What happens next?
Well, as the economy continues to deteriorate in 2023, the number of those falling behind on their car payments will continue to rise, even as consumers tend to give priority to their car payment ahead of most bills because of the importance a car plays in getting to work or potentially providing shelter, industry analysts said.
For now, the rate of defaults and repossessions isn’t expected to reach 2008 and 2009 levels, when there was a spike caused by the financial crisis. The percentage of auto loans that were 30 days delinquent was at 2.2% in the third quarter compared with 2.35% delinquent over the same period in 2019, according to data from Experian. By contrast, just over 4% of auto loans went into default in 2009. However, that could quickly change once the 2023 economy unleashes the final whammy of mass layoffs (which have already slammed the tech sector).
“We’re expecting it to continue to increase and maybe even breach prepandemic levels because of the macroeconomic headwinds of higher interest rates, higher cost of borrowing and expectations for unemployment to continue to increase,” said Margaret Rowe, the lead auto analyst at Fitch. “I think our expectation is that we’re going to continue to see it go up, but it’s just been so low that even going up isn’t like what we saw in the Great Financial Crisis.”
Some, like Cox Automotive, remain optimistic: their analysts (who just may be a little conflicted) forecast that while loan defaults and repossessions will increase from their pandemic lows, long-term through 2025 they predict overall defaults and repossessions will remain at or below historic norms.
Still, the financial squeeze has been particularly difficult for lower-income consumers looking for budget vehicles, which have been particularly hard to find. While in the past, those car buyers would have purchased a used car for $7,000 to $15,000 they are now having to spend $20,000 to $25,000 for the same type of vehicle. Among dealers that cater to subprime and deep subprime consumers, the average listing price on their cars has almost doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the CFPB.
“That near prime and subprime group of consumers, they’re getting hit very, very hard by inflation. That group of people did not have much disposable income. They had to finance a more expensive car and then they got hit with prices going up overall. There’s just a lot of stress,” said Kelly.
Ally Financial, which has a significant share of loans to subprime borrowers, said in its October earnings report that it expects delinquencies to increase to as much as 3.8% compared with 3.1% in 2019. That estimate will prove to be overly optimistic.
Another risk to car buyers’ finances is the growing length of auto loans, many of which now exceed seven years. While those longer term loans can lower the monthly payments amid higher prices, consumers risk paying off the loan much more slowly than the car is depreciating, leaving them underwater if they need to sell the vehicle. It can also mean higher interest costs over the life of the loan on top of already inflated vehicle prices.
And speaking of interest rates, they have not been this high since 2009 and will stay at their current levels until the Fed finally pivots. As NBC notes, “for consumers, there is unlikely to be any relief over the next year. Interest rates are expected to remain high for those needing to borrow to buy a vehicle, and Covid-related plant closures and material shortages are continuing to ripple through the car manufacturing supply chain, limiting the number of new vehicles.”
“I dare think what happens to people who are signing up for new loans today,” said Drury. “It’s not going to be better when we see these payments so high.”
But wait, there’s more.
As twitter’s CarDealershipGuy – who claims to be an anonymous auto-industry CEO and whose analysis has been featured in places like the NY Post and who frequently Tweets about the state of the auto market – laid out a long thread on Thursday, all of the above may end up being an overly optimistic assessment of the perfect storm that’s about to hit the auto sector:
“This morning I discovered something *extremely* alarming happening in the car market, specifically in auto lending. I’m now convinced that there is a massive wave of car repossessions coming in 2023,” he wrote.
Recapping much of what we said above, he noted that over the past 2 years, many people took out exorbitant loans on cars and while car values were inflated (and still are) but many people simply had no choice and bought an overpriced a car. Then, echoing the Fitch assessment, he notes how those buyers are underwater: “Car valuations are now plummeting. Some cars have declined in value as much as 30% y/y. And these same people that took out these big loans are now ‘underwater’. Basically, they owe banks more on these cars than they are worth. And the banks are well-aware of this.”
The punchline is his personal experience from late last week. “This morning, one of our General Managers opened up DealerTrack — a portal that dealers use to communicate with auto lenders — and highlighted something very concerning. 9 of our lending partners have started WAIVING ‘open auto stipulations’ for consumers.”
What this means, he explained, is that once consumers are stuck with a vehicle they paid too much for, they can’t trade it in without putting some money up front to cover the difference of what is owed on it versus what it is worth. At that point, he notes, “Dealer can’t sell consumer a car, Consumer can’t buy a car, And, you guessed it, lender can’t finance a car!”
The lender then knows that most consumers are stuck and waives the open auto stipulation – meaning they allow the consumer to buy the new car with a second loan knowing they already have a first one. But the lender does it because they know that the buyer will default on the old, other car.
Cue default avalanche: “This is NOT normal. But it’s the only way lenders can finance cars and dealers can put cars on the road. And the implications of this will be tons of repossessions,” the CEO wrote.
He concluded: “I’ve been a doubter, but after what I saw this morning, I’m now FULLY convinced that a wave of car repossessions will hit in early/mid 2023. If lenders are willing to backstab each other in order to put more loans on the road, we’re in trouble.”
Here is a snapshot of his entire thread:
This morning I discovered something *extremely* alarming happening in the car market, specifically in auto lending. I’m now convinced that there is a massive wave of car repossessions coming in 2023.
Here’s what I discovered (and what no one knows):
Background:
Over the past 2 years, many people took out exorbitant loans on cars. Car values were inflated (and frankly, still are to some extent). But many people simply had no choice and bought an overpriced a car.
Well…
Car valuations are now plummeting. Some cars have declined in value as much as 30% y/y. And these same people that took out these big loans are now “underwater”.
Basically, they owe banks more on these cars than they are worth. And the banks are well-aware of this…
But there is no easy solution. You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle. This brings me to what happened this morning:
Every Friday I conduct a team meeting to recap our week.
This morning, one of our General Managers opened up DealerTrack — a portal that dealers use to communicate with auto lenders — and highlighted something very concerning:
9 of our lending partners have started WAIVING “open auto stipulations” for consumers.
Wait, wtf does that even mean?
Let me explain using a simple, hypothetical scenario:
1) Consumer takes out an auto loan in 2020/2021 on an overvalued car
2) 2022 comes around and that overvalued car is now rapidly declining in value
3) With the car declining in value, consumer now owes more on the car than it is worth
4) Consumer no longer wants the car. Maybe they outgrew it. Or maybe it keeps breaking. So consumer wants to trade it in.
5) But dealer can’t trade the car in because the consumer owes WAY too much on it. So dealer asks consumer for lots of money down to cover the difference.
6) But of course, the consumer doesn’t have $1,000s to cover the difference between what they owe on the car and what it’s worth. And here comes the perfect storm…
7) Dealer can’t sell consumer a car, Consumer can’t buy a car, And, you guessed it, lender can’t finance a car! Everybody loses! Oh no. So what happens next?
8) Lender knows that most consumers are stuck in this situation, and does the following:
WAIVES THE OPEN AUTO STIPULATION.
Meaning, the lender lets the consumer buy the car KNOWING that they already have an open auto loan with another bank!
Why the f*ck would they do this?
Surely the lender knows that consumers that take out a 2nd auto loan are MUCH riskier and have a MUCH high risk of default? Right? RIGHT?
Yes, but the lender does it because they know that the consumer will default on the other car !!!!
Dog eat dog style.
Let me be clear: This is NOT normal.
But it’s the only way lenders can finance cars and dealers can put cars on the road.
And the implications of this will be tons of repossessions.
I’ve been a doubter, but after what I saw this morning, I’m now FULLY convinced that a wave of car repossessions will hit in early/mid 2023. If lenders are willing to backstab each other in order to put more loans on the road, we’re in trouble.
This will not end pretty.
What does this mean in simple terms: well, besides the imminent devastation across the auto sector, including a surge in defaults and car repossessions, we are about to witness a historic collapse in car prices. In fact, in a subsequent tweet, the CarDealershipGuy noted the plunge in prices at troubled used-car dealer Carvana which will be the first domino to fall and be forced to liquidate much if not all of its inventory to stay afloat:
These are all retail-ready cars being advertised to other dealers – likely at a big loss.
Translation: just as soaring car prices were the leading indicator for red-hot, runaway inflation in 2021 and 2022 (followed by housing, food, goods and finally services) so the plunge in car prices – first used, then new – is the canary in the recessionary coal mine of deflation that will send all prices – cars, houses, and everything else – sharply lower in the coming months.
SBF Changes Mind On Extradition To US After Four Days In Bahamian Jail
After spending just five days in a Bahamian jail cell, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is backpedaling on his decision to contest extradition to the United States to face fraud charges, Reuters reports, citing a person familiar with the matter.
According to the report, SBF will appear in court on Monday to formally consent to extradition – which will pave the way for him to appear in US court to face charges that he commingled customer deposits to cover expenses and debts, and to make investments through his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research LLC.
That said, legal experts tell Reuters that a trial is likely over a year away.
As Fox News reported last week, the Bahamas prison where SBF was reportedly heading – Fox Hill – is “harsh” due to “overcrowding, poor nutrition [and] inadequate sanitation,” along with cells that are “infested with rats, maggots, and insects.”
“He will be in sick bay for orientation purposes and then we will determine where best to place him,” said Bahamian Commissioner of Correctional Services Doan Cleare in a statement to Reuters.
A 2021 U.S. State Department report said prisoners at Fox Hill described “infrequent access to nutritious meals and long delays between daily meals.”
“Maximum-security cells for men measured approximately six feet by 10 feet and held up to six persons with no mattresses or toilet facilities. Inmates removed human waste by bucket. Prisoners complained of the lack of beds and bedding,” according to the report. “Some inmates developed bedsores from lying on bare ground. Sanitation was a general problem, and cells were infested with rats, maggots, and insects.“
“Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate access to medical care were problems in the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services men’s maximum-security block,” the report continued. “The facility was designed to accommodate 1,000 prisoners but was chronically overcrowded.”
On Thursday, Bankman-Fried sought bail from the Bahamas Supreme Court following his Dec. 12 arrest. On Tuesday he was remanded to Fox Hill Prison after Chief Magistrate JoyAnn Ferguson rejected his request to remain at home while awaiting a hearing on his extradition to the US.
The city of Denver declared a state of emergency on Thursday in order to stave off a local humanitarian crisis amid an influx of illegal aliens from the southern border, mainly from El Paso, Texas.
Mayor Michael Hancock, a Democrat, issued the declaration as several hundred illegal aliens, mostly from Central and South America, have arrived in the state in just the past few days alone.
“Let me be frank: This influx of migrants, the unanticipated nature of their arrival, and our current space and staffing challenges have put an immense strain on city resources to the level where they’re on the verge of reaching a breaking point at this time,” Hancock said at a news conference on Thursday.
“What I don’t want to see is a local humanitarian crisis of unsheltered migrants on our hands because of a lack of resources,” the mayor added.
According to Hancock’s office, more than 900 aliens have arrived in Denver over the past several months, including more than 600 people since Dec. 2.
Another 247 aliens have arrived since Monday alone, while 75 turned up at a local homeless shelter overnight on Thursday evening, according to his office.
Approximately 404 aliens are currently being accommodated in the city’s emergency shelters, including 102 at church and nonprofit shelter sites, the mayor’s office said.
The “anticipated nature” of the arrival of the influx of illegal aliens has placed extreme pressure on the city’s efforts to shelter them, leading to limited space which is being further exacerbated by a lack of staffing, Hancock’s office said during Thursday’s news conference, noting that winter weather was set to make the situation worse.
Hancock added that Denver is currently “at the level where we are on the verge of reaching breaking point at this time.”
“The declaration is another tool in the toolbox to help serve the increasing number of migrants arriving in Denver, particularly as winter weather sets in,” Hancock said.
Under the emergency declaration, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, will be alerted that Denver is enacting a state of emergency.
Denver will then be able to access additional emergency resources to help manage the influx of aliens, and will also be able to continue requesting financial assistance from various funding sources.
Hancock said that, together with community partners, and the help of local churches and nonprofits, the city continues to provide aliens—the majority of which are coming to the city having entered the United States through El Paso, Texas—with emergency shelter.
Denver has already forked out more than $800,000 on the illegal alien sheltering effort, and that number is expected to increase significantly.
A majority of the aliens who have arrived in Denver are from Venezuela, according to Hancock, and are fleeing a political and humanitarian crisis in their home country.
The mayor took aim at the Biden administration for failing to address the “critical situation” or respond adequately, despite being aware of it.
Musk Releases Doxxing Journalists From Twitter Jail After Poll
Twitter CEO Elon Musk reinstated a handful of left-wing journalists who had been booted from Twitter days ago for violating the social media platform’s “doxxing” policies.
Shortly after midnight, Musk tweeted, “the people have spoken … accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”
The people have spoken.
Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now. https://t.co/MFdXbEQFCe
Musk decided to lift the suspensions of the lefty journalists who shared his private jet locations earlier in the week after a Twitter poll he conducted on Thursday night showed 58.7% of the 3.7 million users who voted wanted the journalists reinstated “Now.”
Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time
Some of the accounts that were suspended include Keith Olbermann, Aaron Rupar, Tony Webster, NYT’s Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, WaPo’s Drew Harwell, Mashable’s Matt Binder, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, and VOA’s Steve Herman.
“Matt Binder is back,” the Mashable journalist tweeted early Saturday.
Olbermann’s account remains suspended as of early Saturday morning.
Musk accused the journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts. He said in a Twitter Space on Thursday:
“You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it.”
All of this stems from an incident on Wednesday where Musk alleged a “crazy stalker” attacked the car one of his children was riding in.
Musk said, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
“Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok,” Musk added.
Musk also said:
“If anyone posted real-time locations & addresses of NYT reporters, FBI would be investigating, there’d be hearings on Capitol Hill & Biden would give speeches about end of democracy!”
One of the first accounts suspended was @elonjet, a Twitter account operated by a college kid that tracks Musk’s private plane locations (the account is still suspended).
Lefty journalists who had years of running amok on the social media platform where rules didn’t apply to them but only applied to their opposition have finally got a taste of what it’s like to end up in Twitter jail.
Former President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will bar the federal government from using terms such as “misinformation” and “disinformation” to describe domestic speech if he’s reelected.
In a video released by the New York Post, Trump said that if he’s named the winner in 2024, one of his first executive acts will target federal rules around speech. The advertisement-like clip showed Trump making his announcement in front of two American flags.
“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” Trump said.
“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly—whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are,” he added.
Since last week, several journalists have published installments of the “Twitter Files,” promoted by new Twitter owner Elon Musk, that revealed how Trump’s account was suspended in early 2021 as well as how officials and campaigns communicated with Twitter executives through back channels.
The 45th president also proposed a “Digital Bill of Rights” that “should include a right to digital due process—in other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.”
“In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose,” Trump said.
After taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden has called on news outlets and social media firms to tackle what he said is misinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines.
“I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: Please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that is on your shows,” Biden said earlier this year. “It has to stop. COVID-19 is one of the most formidable enemies America has ever faced. We have got to work together, not against each other.”
Months before that, Biden told reporters that Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms are “killing people” by allowing certain claims about the virus to proliferate.
Activity
A week after the midterm elections, Trump announced at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he would be embarking on a third campaign for president but has kept a relatively low profile since then.
Trump has made few policy statements after his Nov. 15 speech declaring his candidacy and reportedly has not left Florida to campaign or hold rallies. Republicans, meanwhile, underperformed during the 2022 midterms after forecasters predicted a “red wave” in both the House and Senate.
Days after announcing his candidacy, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to lead investigations into Trump’s 2020 election challenges and handling of records since he left office. The FBI searched Trump’s home in August, recovering what Department of Justice prosecutors say were classified materials.
Meanwhile, Trump faced controversy for a dinner meeting with rapper Kanye West and political commentator Nick Fuentes. On Truth Social, the former president described West as a “seriously troubled man” in confirming the meeting: “I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win.”
Trump’s Twitter account, which has around 90 million followers now, was recently reinstated by Musk after the Tesla CEO conducted a poll that found a majority of users wanted the former president back on the platform. So far, Trump has not used his once-highly engaged account and has told media outlets that he will stick to using Truth Social instead.
