Abandoning petrol-burning vehicles and adopting low-­carbon technologies to power tomorrow’s economy are trends accelerating across the nation. To do this, access to rare earth metals, key ingredients in many of these ‘green’ technologies, must be sourced domestically – not from China, an emerging national security threat to the US. As the world fractures into a multipolar state, there is a big push domestically to revive America’s metals and mining industry and reduce reliance on Asia. 

Morgan Stanley analyst Carlos De Alba recently conveyed his optimistic outlook for the US metals and mining sector to clients. He highlighted that investment levels in the industry have reached their lowest level in decades. He believes the sector is poised for massive investments and outlines the companies that will benefit. 

“US reliance on import critical minerals has reached a 30-year high, and investment in the industry is near its lowest point in decades,” the analyst said, pointing out America’s heavy reliance on imported minerals from China:

“The US government has identified 50 minerals it deems critical to the US economy and to national security; for 43 of those critical minerals, more than 50% of domestic consumption depends on imports. 

Since 1990, the US has seen a significant increase in both the variety of imported minerals and the level of dependence on these imports. In 1990, the US was fully reliant on imports for the supply of 9 minerals, and imports exceeded 50% of consumption for 27 minerals (including all minerals, not only critical ones).

 These figures have risen to 15 and 51, respectively, as of 2022. China currently dominates the global mineral processing/refining industry, and the US is heavily reliant on China (>50% of net import reliance) for imports of 26 minerals.” 

China’s global dominance in rare earth metals is a national security threat. Were Western leaders asleep at the wheel over the last three-plus decades to allow this to happen? 

The analyst detailed how China dominates the global supply of rare earth minerals and cautioned against rising vulnerabilities in US mineral supply chains, especially given the ongoing tensions in Sino-US relations:

“China is in a powerful position to influence the global mineral markets and has already started to flex its strength through mineral export restrictions. For US policymakers, the US’s mineral dependence on imports highlights the growing vulnerability of the US mineral supply chain and the urgent need to strengthen domestic supply chains. In addition, the US faces a multi-decade decline in investment in the domestic mining and exploration industry, which has fallen from ~2.0% of GDP in 1960 (and a peak of ~3.1% in 1981) to just ~0.5% today.”

After being asleep at the wheel for decades, the bloated US government, thank former President Trump – has awakened from its slumber and realized that it must play a serious “catch-up” game with policy reform and incentives for private industry to rebuild America’s domestic mining and separation sector. 

“US permitting reform and other government incentives will likely act as a tailwind for the domestic mining industry through encouraging the development and helping mitigate the associated risks of building new mine supply,” the analyst said.

He said the big winner of “permitting reform” that is “geared toward promoting the development of mining projects” will be the “Junior Mining and Exploration industry.” 

One company that stands to benefit is MP Materials, the largest US-based miner of rare earths. The analyst said this company is a “play on accelerating adoption of electric vehicles and electrification trends in wind turbines.” 

He continued:

“The company’s mission is to restore the full US rare earth supply chain. MP has executed on its plan of restarting the Mountain Pass mine in California and it is currently ramping a refining facility to produce rare earth oxides. The company will get into the production of NdFeB alloy flake and permanent mag-nets (critical components for electric vehicles and wind turbines) with a plant that is under construction in Texas.” 

Shares of MP Materials have roundtripped Covid lows. 

He said Cleveland-Cliffs Inc and United States Steel Corporation are “key beneficiaries to building ex-China supply chains given CLF is currently the only producer of electrical steel in the US and X is ramping up a greenfield electrical steel facility this year.” 

He added: “All steel names under our coverage (NUE, STLD, CLF and X) will broadly benefit from re-shoring trends given manufacturing facilities, and the equipment to outfit them is often steel intensive.” 

And the analyst listed a few junior miners with assets in the US that should interest investors:

• American Rare Earths Ltd (ARR.AX | Market Cap ~A$138 million): ARR is a rare earth exploration & development company. Their 100% owned flagship project, Halleck Creek deposit, is located in Wyoming and has extensive rare earth mineralization. According to the company, the project has the potential to be amongst the largest rare earth deposits in the US

• USA Rare Earth (Private): According to USA Rare Earth, the company owns the only scalable, sintered neo-magnet manufacturing system in the Western Hemisphere (located in Oklahoma). The company is targeting magnet production in 2024 and is aiming to supply the plant with rare earth feed stock mined from the Round Top property in Texas in late 2025 or early 2026. USA Rare Earth owns an 80% stake in the Round Top property, Texas Mineral Resources (OTCBQ: TMRC) owns the remaining 20% stake.

• Perpetua Resources (PPTA.TO | Market Cap ~C$360 million): Perpetua’s flagship development project is the Stibnite Gold Project located in Idaho, which according to the company has one of the largest economic reserves of antimony and could supply ~35% of US demand in the first six years of production. Antimony is considered a critical mineral and is used in batteries, munitions and semiconductors. The company was recently awarded up to $15.5 million in funding for the Department of Defense to help demonstrate a fully domestic antimony trisulfide supply chain.

• IperionX Ltd. (IPX.AX, IPX.O | Market Cap ~A$525 million): IperionX goal is to re-shore a fully integrated titanium metal supply chain to the US. The company plans on extracting titanium minerals from its Titan Project in Tennessee, in addition to producing rare earths and zirconium as co-products. The company plans on producing high-performance titanium alloys, from titanium minerals or scrap titanium

In addition to profiting from what could soon be an explosion of investment in the mining sector, we outlined to readers days ago another big trade theme in a note titled “The Next AI Trade.”

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) paused the implementation of its climate disclosure requirements for companies as legal challenges against the rules are pending in a circuit court.

In March, the SEC finalized a controversial rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose any climate-related risks to their business. The SEC’s Final Rules also required some midsize and large firms to reveal how much CO2 is emitted from their operations. This led to several Republican states, companies, and business groups filing lawsuits against the regulations, asking for the SEC rule to be stayed. Two energy companies—Liberty Energy Inc. and Nomad Proppant Services LLC—sought an administrative stay on the rule, which was granted by the Fifth Circuit court on March 15.

According to SEC rules, businesses must report on the potential impact climate risks may have on their financial condition as well as the strategies undertaken to mitigate such risks. Businesses have to disclose their climate targets and the losses suffered due to severe weather events.

Other legal challenges against the rule were filed at the Second, Sixth, Eighth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuit courts. All the lawsuits, including the Fifth Circuit one, were consolidated into a single case, with the Eight Circuit set to hear the challenge.

On March 26, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, the Texas Association of Business, and the Longview Chamber of Commerce filed a motion in the Eighth Circuit, seeking a stay of the SEC rules pending judicial review.

Challenging SEC

Lawsuits from Republican states claim that the SEC breached their rule-making authority by asking public firms to disclose climate risks while such regulations have not received approval from Congress.

SEC’s rules create costly, unnecessary “red tape” for businesses. They accused the climate rules of being part of the Biden administration’s push to make sure investment decisions in the country are driven by climate considerations rather than financial returns.

On April 4, SEC Secretary Vanessa Countryman issued an order staying the agency’s climate rule requirements while litigation proceeded in the Eighth Circuit.

Ms. Countryman argued that given the procedural complexities involved in litigating the multiple cases filed against the climate rules, the SEC’s stay “will facilitate the orderly judicial resolution of those challenges.”

In addition, “a stay avoids potential regulatory uncertainty if registrants were to become subject to the Final Rules’ requirements during the pendency of the challenges to their validity.”

Though the SEC is issuing a stay on the climate rule, the agency continues to hold the view that the regulations are “consistent with applicable law” and within the authority of the commission, the order stated.

“Thus, the Commission will continue vigorously defending the Final Rules’ validity in court and looks forward to expeditious resolution of the litigation.”

‘Outrageous’ Climate Mandate

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, one of the Republican AGs that led 25 states to file lawsuits against the climate rules, called the SEC’s April 4 stay a “victory” that “shuts down the most outrageous climate mandate for businesses since Biden took office.”

“The SEC’s job is to protect people from fraud. It has no business slapping companies with extremist climate mandates. We are making it clear that Biden has to follow the law like everyone else,” she said.

“By halting this mandate, we are protecting businesses from costly red tape, securing our supply chain, and defending family farms. Next, we are going to make this win permanent!”

In addition to Iowa, other states in the lawsuit are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The SEC rule “will also require businesses to disclose climate-related risks, including higher insurance rates from weather disasters, and release a plan to adapt to climate-agenda recommendations. The plan is estimated to cost businesses billions of dollars every year.”

SEC Votes

When the SEC finalized its climate rules in March, agency commissioners had voted 3–2 to pass the measure. The votes were done along party lines, with all Democrats voting in favor of the rule and Republican commissioners voting against it.

Republican commissioner Hester Peirce had pointed out that the climate rules would be expensive and burdensome for businesses while creating a large amount of inconsistent information overwhelming investors.

“However well-intentioned, these particularized interests don’t justify forcing investors who don’t share them to foot the bill,” he said. The SEC estimates the climate rule to impact around 2,800 American firms.

The rules adopted in March were a watered-down version of an earlier draft that contained more stringent measures, including requiring companies to report certain indirect emissions. These stringent measures triggered intense opposition from the business community.

In an interview with The Epoch Times in June 2022, Sean Griffith, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, suggested that SEC rules enforce viewpoint discrimination since the regulations are essentially forcing companies to endorse certain assumptions about how the earth’s climate is being affected by human actions.

“The reason why the climate rules are so problematic is that either they’re politically driven—which is very plausible—or they are driven by this desire to appease the institutional asset manager community, which has its own profit interest because they generate revenue from the assets under management of those ESG portfolios. At the end of the day, it’s not about investors.”

Authored by Daniel Lacalle via The Mises Institute,

Thirty major central banks are expected to cut rates in the second half of 2024, a year when more than seventy nations will have elections, which often means massive increases in government spending. Additionally, the latest inflation figures show stubbornly persistent consumer price annualized growth.

In the United States, headline PCE inflation in February will likely grow by 0.4%, compared with a 0.3% rise in January, and consensus expects a 2.5% annualized rate, up from 2.4% in January. This is on top of the already 20% accumulated inflation of the past four years. Core inflation will likely show a 0.3% gain, according to Bloomberg Economics, which means an annualized 2.8%, building on top of the price increases of the past years.

Thirty central banks easing and seventy national governments increasing spending in an election year means more fuel for the inflation fire in a year in which money supply growth has bounced significantly from its 2023 lows.

Central banks ignored monetary aggregates when they shrugged off the risk of inflation in 2020, and now they are, again, easing way too fast when the battle against inflation has not finished.

Furthermore, the only real tool that central banks have used is hiking rates, because different parallel measures of money growth, including reverse repo liquidity injections, have kept money supply growth at an elevated rate even when the balance of the G7 central banks was moderating, albeit at a slower pace than announced.

Cutting rates may come too late because, by the time it is implemented, it will cause a double negative.

Government deficits will be cheaper to refinance, bloating an already record-high public debt yet again, but those cuts may have little impact on small and medium enterprises and families because they suffer significantly more from the accumulated effects of inflation, which means weaker margins, more difficulties to make ends meet, and impoverishment.

We must also remember that these persistent levels of official inflation come after relevant tweaks in the calculation of the consumer price index. We certainly know one thing: consumers do not pay attention to the annualized rate of growth in prices, but to the accumulated level of destruction of their purchasing power, and everyone, from Europeans to Americans, knows that they have become artificially poorer by the insane fiscal and monetary policies implemented in 2020.

Nobody who takes inflation seriously would even consider easing in an election year, adding trillions of dollars of deficit spending to the fire of inflation. Furthermore, the history of inflation warns us about giving up easily and too fast.

The Fed is making a big mistake by cheering the headline economic figures that come from disguising a private sector recession with a massive increase in public debt and weakening employment figures embellished by temporary jobs and public sector hiring. Additionally, it is making a mistake by giving dovish signals that make market participants take more risk. There has been no relevant reduction in the money supply if we include the different layers of liquidity injections. Announcing forthcoming rate cuts will certainly make speculative debt rise but will hardly change the credit demand from the backbone of the economy, small businesses, and families. Since the US government has rejected any calls for normalization and instead added more deficits and debt as if rising bond yields were not a problem, citizens and businesses have already suffered greatly from ongoing inflation and rate increases. As such, the rate cuts will help an already bloated government spending and the zombie corporations that keep access to capital markets. Everyone else will be hurt both ways, with inflation and lower access to credit.

You may think all the above problems are policy mistakes, but they are not. This is a slow process of nationalizing resources. Inflation and artificial money creation through deficits and monetization are a gradual transfer of wealth from real salaries and deposit savings to the government. You are basically becoming poorer to sustain an ever-increasing government size. The next time you read that massive deficits and monetary easing are good policies for the middle class, ask yourself why you find it harder each year to pay for goods and services. The mistakes made in 2020–2024 will cost the middle class many more taxes, even if the government promises it will only be “taxes on the rich,” the oldest gimmick to raise your taxes.

More taxes, persistent inflation, the hidden tax, and the loss of value of your wages. That is “easing” for you. A private sector recession with headline economic figures bloated by government debt. The recipe for stagflation.

As if hyperinflating cocoa bean prices and re-accelerating global food inflation weren’t enough, Arabica coffee futures hit their highest level in over a year and a half. 

Arabica coffee futures with May delivery jumped 12.5% on the week (the largest weekly gain since July 2021), closing at $2.12 per pound. 

The contract is at its highest level since early October 2022. 

As for weekly CFTC data on futures and options, managed money-only long contracts hit a record high. 

“The current move can largely be attributed to a heat wave in Vietnam affecting Robusta coffee production and as a result, providing carryover support for premium Arabica beans,” Aakash Doshi, senior commodities strategist at Citi, wrote in a note to clients. 

Doshi forecasts Arabica coffee futures to be trading between $1.88 and $2.15 through the 2024 calendar year. He indicated prices could go higher if the physical outlook tightens. 

Separately, Hernando De La Roche, a senior vice president at StoneX Financial Inc., told Bloomberg that dealers were caught in a vicious “short and forced to cover while funds have been adding long positions,” adding that importers were forced to abandon hedges. 

Meanwhile, the recent surge in Brent crude prices due to the worsening geopolitical situation in the Middle East could begin to lift global food prices. 

Food inflation is not going away. This is more bad news for central banks. 

Via SchiffGold.com,

With gold hitting yet another awe-inspiring all-time high in the wake of Powell’s remarks reassuring markets (more or less) to expect rate cuts in 2024, a few analysts are pointing out risk factors for a correction – so is there really still room to run?

The Wall Street Journal points out that oil price spikes driven by the acceleration of war in the Middle East could cause the Fed to reverse its position of cutting rates three times this year – especially as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has reached historic lows.

Since Biden took office, the SPR has been drained by over 40% — ironically, as part of a desperate gambit to keep oil prices artificially low in the face of its proxy war in Ukraine and out-of-control inflation, which can only get even worse after the Fed cuts rates. Now that the SPR won’t be refilled as expected (itself a taxpayer-funded sale), Americans will feel even more of the inflationary reality when they head to the gas pumps.

For context, the SPR was founded in 1975 and is now hovering at levels not seen since the early 80’s:

Source: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=a

But as the conflict in Gaza and beyond continues to accelerate, the US will find more excuses to expand its own involvement as it has from the start.

Whatever form the meddling takes, the US will inevitably need to finance it by printing money. So, as usual, the Fed is damned if they do and damned if they don’t, defeated by their own games: they need to finance the Middle East meddling with money printing, but both the money printing required to fund the war and the effects of the war itself will work together to drive oil prices up.

Coincidentally, both factors will also work together to push gold to hit fresh all-time highs this year, unless the Fed decides to buck the Military-Industrial Complex and renege on its rate cut promises, making it much more challenging for Biden administration war hawks to keep the US involved to the extent they’d like.

On the same topic of Russia and the Middle East, the BRICS countries’ continuing de-dollarization efforts mean that we can expect them to keep stockpiling gold as they continue to divest from petrodollar dependence. Russia says they’ll be doubling their gold and foreign currency purchases, and China’s central bank just hit a new reported record high for its gold reserves late last month.

Still, some are skeptical, saying that gold and other metals are overbought and due for a correction, and interpreted Powell’s remarks on Wednesday as mildly hawkish. Powell did say that more progress needs to be made on inflation in order for the Fed to move forward with rate cuts. These statements added a dash of uncertainty for some:

“We do not expect that it will be appropriate to lower our policy rate until we have greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably down towards 2 percent…Reducing rates too soon or too much could result in a reversal of the progress we have seen on inflation and ultimately require even tighter policy to get inflation back to 2 percent.”

But even as Powell admitted the fight against inflation is “not done” (an epic understatement), markets were reassured that the Fed is still expecting to lower interest rates, saying that the data doesn’t justify changing the current course:

“The recent data do not, however, materially change the overall picture, which continues to be one of solid growth, a strong but rebalancing labor market, and inflation moving down toward 2 percent on a sometimes bumpy path.”

So is gold too overbought, or does the macro environment provide enough upward pressure to give it room to keep running?

While short-term corrections are always something to consider during such dramatic price-run ups, I’d call them buying opportunities.

And if the mainstream media’s reaction is to be used as a barometer, the true reality of what the skyrocketing price of gold truly means for the economy and the US dollar still hasn’t been priced in. As Peter Schiff tweeted earlier this week:

The mainstream media has finally noticed #gold, but has no idea why it’s rising, or has any appreciation for how high it’s going. They’re also not encouraging anyone to buy it. All of this is a good sign that the rally still has a long way to go before any meaningful correction.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) April 3, 2024

The more skeptical analyses acknowledge that it will be an uphill battle for it to sustain the same awe-inspiring upward pace that it has had since the start of the year. But even they, like I, still expect a confluence of factors in 2024 to continue pushing it higher.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is severing diplomatic relations with Ecuador following a police raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, where they arrested former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had sought political asylum in the embassy after being indicted on corruption charges. 

AMLO announced Friday night that Ecuadorian police raided the Mexican embassy to arrest Glas. He has been hiding in the embassy since December as diplomatic relations between the two countries deteriorated. 

By order of the president of Ecuador 🇪🇨, Daniel Noboa, the Ecuadorian army stormed the Mexican 🇲🇽 Embassy and arrested former socialist vice president Jorge Glas, who was about to escape to Mexico through a safe conduct granted by López Obrador.
pic.twitter.com/BB7Q2nPkWm

— BowTiedMara (@BowTiedMara) April 6, 2024

“This is not possible. It cannot be. This is crazy,” Roberto Canseco, head of the Mexican consular section in Quito, told local press, as quoted by AP News. 

Canseco continued, “I am very worried because they could kill him. There is no basis to do this. This is totally outside the norm.”

Glas, one of the most wanted men in the South American country, was recently convicted of bribery and corruption. 

AMLO called Glas’ arrest an “authoritarian act” and “a flagrant violation of international law and the sovereignty of Mexico.”

Hours before the raid, Mexico granted Glas political asylum – something the Ecuadorian government viewed as illegal. 

Ecuador’s Presidency wrote in a statement, “Ecuador is a sovereign nation, and we are not going to allow any criminal to stay free.” 

On social media platform X, Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, said her team will take Glas’ detainment to the International Court of Justice “to denounce Ecuador’s responsibility for violations of international law.”

By Brian McGlinchey via Stark Realities

A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.

This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe.

In part, the wartime-prosperity myth springs from the fact that, during conflict on the scale of World War II, broad, macroeconomic measures like gross national product (GNP) and the unemployment rate are completely untethered from the economy’s most important facet: the standard of living enjoyed — or endured— by everyday people.

Between 1940 and 1944, real GNP rose at an unprecedented 13% annual clip. Using GNP alone, one would think the war delivered a major improvement in the standard of living, with Americans enjoying a greater abundance of goods, accompanied by a rise in quality, selection and affordability.

The reality was the exact opposite: Americans endured rationing, shortages, declining product quality, and the outright unavailability of many new goods, such as cars, trucks and stoves. This was the inevitable result of factories and raw materials being redirected from the creation of things consumers want to building things like tanks and fighter planes that do nothing whatsoever to improve people’s lives (setting aside the separate issue of the war’s justness).

In many respects, America experienced an outright economic devolution. In the preceding century, industrialization and the division of labor led to enormous increases in productivity. During World War II, however, shortages motivated people who’d contentedly relied on farmers to start growing their own food and canning it. The scarcity of new clothing led homemakers to redirect time and energy to sewing their own garments and resewing them to stretch as much use out them as possible.

“Those remaining on the home front were forced to produce for themselves what they had previously been able to purchase,” wrote Steven Horwitz and Michael J. McPhillips. “The household again became a center of production rather than consumption alone.”

GNP wasn’t the only measure falsely signaling wartime prosperity; employment numbers from the era were likewise misleading. The US unemployment rate plummeted from 17% in 1939 to 1.2% in 1944. Note, however, that military service members are not considered part of the labor force — which means that the draft extracted 11.5 million men from the denominator in the unemployment rate calculation.

Another 6.3 million volunteered, though many signed up because they preferred to secure a role they favored rather than face the chance of being drafted as an infantryman.

While it’s true that draftees and volunteers were “employed” by the armed forces, all these millions of men — no matter how noble their overseas missions may have been — weren’t doing anything to create prosperity at home.

That’s not to say the war machine didn’t demand laborers. With so many able men taken out of the economy, the slack was taken up by teenagers, women and retirees, many who’d have preferred to be doing other things.

In a growing economy, more people are producing goods and services, and elevating standards of living in the process. That was far from the case during World War II. Factories were humming, but they were making bayonets, bombs and battleships. “Four-tenths of the total labor force was not being used to produce consumer goods or capital capable of yielding consumer goods in the future,” noted Robert Higgs.

Defying conventional wisdom about “wartime prosperity,” Americans’ standard of living suffered tremendously from their government’s entry into World War II. In The Reality of the Wartime Economy, Horwitz and McPhillips tapped some interesting source material to bring the grim economic realities of American life during World War II into sharp focus.

For example, a series of newspaper ads placed by Canton Electric Light & Power Company — a local New York State utility — present a vivid, time-lapse portrayal of rapidly declining conditions following the December 1941 declaration of war:

• Foreshadowing anticipated shortages, a March 17, 1942 ad for appliances is headlined “You Can Still Buy Them.” The ad includes a qualifier that’s upbeat while still signaling creeping scarcity: “We have a fairly good supply.”

• Just two months later, Canton Electric’s ad says “Now Is The Time” to buy various appliances and equipment, warning that “production of most of these items has stopped and only the supply in your dealers’ stock is available.”

• Another two months later, a July 1942 ad indicates that some items that were briefly not available are back in inventory.

• In November of that first year of America’s World War II participation, Canton Electric switched to warning consumers that, “due to the war emergency, it is quite impossible to get replacement motors for civilian use,” and urging them to ensure they’re properly maintaining their “stokers and oil burners.”

• Later that same month, Canton Electric punted on advancing its retail business altogether, instead using its ad space to encourage readers to grow their own food, eat everything on their plates and comply with ration-stamp rules.

Horwitz and McPhillips also drew on letters written between 1942 and 1945 by Saidee Leach to her son serving in the Pacific. Contrary to the image of prosperity supposedly indicated by leaping GNP or plummeting unemployment, she tells him of:

• Conserving scarce home-heating fuel during the coldest days by wearing fur coats indoors and residing only in their kitchen

• Having her typewriter seized by the government, and now using a lesser model she acquired from a Howard Johnson “which had to close due to the ban on pleasure driving.”

• Making an Easter dinner centered on fried Spam, because she “could not get fresh meat of any kind,” and later noting that “potatoes have entirely disappeared”

• Local farmers refusing to sell their turkey flocks for Thanksgiving meals at the prices set by the Office of Price Administration — illustrating the folly of government price controls.

That is not the picture of an economy delivered from the Great Depression. Rather, “World War II institutionalized the falling standards of living of the depression through wage and price controls, and extensive rationing of consumer goods and services,” wrote Peter Ferrara. “The economic deprivation, and reduced standards of living, continued, although people perceived it was now for a good cause.”

America’s postwar experience presents another pointed contradiction of the myth of wartime prosperity.

As the war’s end grew closer, Keynesian economists unanimously predicted peace would bring economic disaster. For example, Paul Samuelson said America would experience “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation any economy has ever faced.” 

Alvin Hansen warned that the economy must be kept on a centrally-controlled wartime footing, even in peacetime: “When the war is over, the government cannot just disband the Army, close down munitions factories, stop building ships, and remove all economic control.”

However, that’s pretty much what happened — and Hansen, Samuelson and their fellow economic flat-Earthers couldn’t have been more wrong about the consequences. “The year 1946, when civilian output increased by about 30 percent, was the most glorious single year in the entire history of the U.S. economy,” wrote Higgs.

This despite the fact that government purchases of goods and services collapsed by 68% between the second quarter of 1945 and the first quarter of 1946 — and upwards of a million civilian government employees were laid off and millions of service members discharged.

As war-fighting men poured back into civilian life, millions of women withdrew from the labor force, contentedly returning to duty as mothers and home managers. Rather than soaring as predicted by the “experts,” unemployment merely edged higher, from 1.9% in 1945 to 3.9% in 1947.

“Less than a year and a half after VJ-day,” crowed President Truman, “more than 10 million demobilized veterans and other millions of wartime workers have found employment in the swiftest and most gigantic change-over that any nation has ever made from war to peace.” (Note this happened despite — and in part because of — Truman’s failure to institute a higher minimum wage as the war ended.)

Having been proven enormously wrong about the economic implications of peace, Keynesians scrambled to credit the war with enabling the postwar boom, arguing that it was fueled by people drawing down savings accumulated while the supply of consumer goods was sharply restricted. However, as Higgs determined by studying the data of the time, “Holdings of liquid assets did not decline at all after the war. People financed their spending for consumer goods by reducing their saving rate.”

Contrary to the myth, it was only after World War II that — free from the government’s commandeering of factories, workers and resources, and saddled with fewer price controls and other federal market intrusions — America was finally able to emerge from the Great Depression.

You wouldn’t know that if you evaluated the economy’s health using Keynesians’ preferred measure. Just as the GNP gauge provided a 180-degree misreading of wartime economic realities, it failed in similarly spectacular fashion during the postwar boom: From 1945 to 1947, GNP plummeted 22%.

In addition to further illuminating the shortfalls of aggregate economic measures, America’s postwar economic experience delivered another broadside to the myth of World War II-fostered prosperity, and to the idea that government spending, central planning and market interventions are essential to economic achieving economic recovery.

Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com 

* * *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The CIA has denied a whistleblower allegation that the agency “intervened in the investigation of Hunter biden to prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) from interviewing a witness,” according to a response issued to House Republicans on Friday.

According to the whistleblower, in August 2021, the IRS wanted to interview Hunter Biden associate (who loaned Hunter $6.5 million), Patrick Kevin Morris – and that “the CIA intervened to stop the interview.“

“Two DOJ officials were allegedly summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia for a briefing regarding Mr. Morris,” at which “it was communicated that Mr. Morris could not be a witness during the investigation.”

CIA Denies

Two weeks later, the CIA has responded in a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (‘obtained first’ by CNN).

“Without confirming or denying the existence of any associations or communications, CIA did not prevent or seek to prevent IRS or DOJ from conducting any such interview. The allegation is false,” CIA Director of Congressional Affairs, James A. Catella, wrote to the Chairs.

House Republicans push back

In response to the response, House Judiciary Committee spokesman Russell Dye told CNN “The allegation is not false.”

In a Friday post to X following the CNN report, the House Judiciary GOP said “The CIA is wrong. But what’s new?”

The CIA is wrong. But what’s new? https://t.co/BGQb5Z1kZt

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) April 5, 2024

Raskin POUNCES

Following the CIA’s reply, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) slammed the Republicans for not sharing their source.

“This is a serious charge, but you have completely ignored my staff’s requests to be allowed to review the information that you say prompted your letter and upon which your letter is putatively and entirely based,” Raskin wrote to Comer on Friday.

Republicans have raised questions over Morris’ loans to Hunter Biden, which Morris claims has nothing to do with President Joe Biden..

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Ukrainian men are reportedly paying disabled women in the country to marry them, as a way of avoiding being drafted to fight on the frontlines of the war with Russia.

An investigation by Ukrainian outlet NGL Media found that fighting age men are exploiting a loophole in the country’s martial law that allows them to skip military service.

If they have a disabled dependant, they are able to apply for a deferral from military duty as well as being allowed to cross the border, at which point many are fleeing for good.

The investigation found scores of Facebook and Telegram groups in which men are posting marriage proposals, and disabled women are offering marriage to the highest bidders.

There are even people profiting from the practice by acting as intermediaries.

The investigation notes that a payment of around €3,000 is usually enough to secure a sham marriage to a disabled woman.

Yevhen Filipets, a lawyer in Ukraine, told the outlet “In my experience, out of 100 cases of servicemen who apply for discharge for family reasons, 95 cases use that topic, i.e., if their wife, their parents or their wife’s parents have a disability.”

“To get an exemption, it is enough to have such a marriage,” the lawyer added.

Filipets further noted that “it is almost impossible to prove the marriage is fake; it is possible only through a court decision. And one of the spouses has the right to go to court to recognise such a marriage as fake. Will he or she apply in these circumstances? I don’t think so. (…) Ukrainian people are very resourceful.”

As we highlighted earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a law that lowers the country’s age of conscription by two years to make up for troop shortfalls.

The new legislation lowers the age of mobilization from 27 to 25 years, meaning more young men will be removed from the struggling Ukrainian economy and sent off to the meatgrinder in anticipation of another Russia summer offensive.

Videos have previously emerged which purport to show Ukrainians who tried to avoid being conscripted being thrown off a bus and beaten by SBU, Ukraine’s equivalent of the FBI.

“Ukrainians thrown out of the bus on top of each other and beaten like dogs by the SBU”

SBU – Ukraine’s equivalent of the FBI.

People taken from their homes sent to the front to die for Biden’s war in Ukraine which many gave him a standing ovation. “Churchillian speech” yuck🤡 pic.twitter.com/9q1BSQtwQG

— sulatron1ka 🕊️ (@sulatron1ka) March 9, 2024

The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is now over 40 years of age, the same as Russia, underscoring how the whole conflict has been a devastating bloodbath for both sides.

Well over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed already, forcing Ukraine to call up older personnel.

As we previously highlighted, shocking videos have emerged showing a mentally disabled people on the front lines of the war being mocked by other soldiers.

Last month, General Rajmund Andrzejczak, the ex-chief of the Polish General Staff, said that Ukraine is losing the war.

“More than 10 million people are missing. According to my estimates, losses should be in the millions, not hundreds of thousands. The country has no resources, no one to fight. Ukrainians are losing this war,” said the general.

Also this week, US State Department consultant Edward Luttwak says that NATO countries will have to send soldiers to Ukraine or “accept catastrophic defeat,” and that Britain and France are already making preparations to do so.

*  *  *

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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been accused of illegally recording a lawyer in the Trump-Georgia case.

During an interview with Townhall columnist and legal analyst Phil Holloway, an attorney for Trump co-defendant Harrison Floyd, Christopher Kachouroff, claimed that Willis recorded a phone call between herself and one of his colleagues in Maryland.

“Fani did reach out to one of my colleagues in Maryland” said Kachouroff. “And was rude and abrupt with him on the phone … and she ended up recording him.“

He further noted that Maryland is a “two party state,” meaning that both parties on a phone call have to consent to being recorded.

“So, are you saying she illegally recorded a phone call?” asked Holloway.

“Oh yeah, it’s a felony in Maryland,” Kachouroff replied.

Watch:

Fani Willis ILLEGALLY recorded a 📞 call with my lawyer.

Its a felony!

She is a DEI thug with a law license.

Will anyone in GA stand up to her❓#fultoncounty #corrupt #Georgia pic.twitter.com/2ZPqckPVzD

— Harrison Floyd 🇺🇸 (@hw_floyd) April 4, 2024

Maryland is one of 11 states which require two-party consent. Under the state’s Wiretap Act, recording a private conversation without consent from both parties is punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both.

Harrison Floyd, the defendant, has given Fani until noon on Monday to recuse herself from the case or he “may have no other choice than to pursue all lawful remedies.”

👀👀

Well now, this has escalated quickly

Did #FaniWillis violate Maryland law? https://t.co/WgJRlZu0Xp

— Phil Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) April 5, 2024

As Redstate notes: 

In Floyd’s tweet, it refers to Willis providing a copy or a recording of a call to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution between herself and Carlos J.R. Salvado, an attorney in Maryland, who also represents Floyd on an unrelated matter. 

Atlanta News First and Newsweek have reached out to Willis’ office for comment on this new allegation but she doesn’t appear to have weighed in yet. It will be interesting to see what her response to this allegation is. 

Floyd, who served as a senior campaign staffer for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, was indicted by Willis on three felony counts stemming from his alleged efforts to help Trump overturn his loss in the state. The charges include conspiracy to solicit false statements, influencing witnesses, and racketeering. He has also been accused of assaulting an FBI agent in Maryland. He has pleaded not guilty.

Fani’s wiretapping accusation is the latest debacle involving Willis’ RICO case against Trump and his allies.

On Wednesday, special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s estranged wife filed contempt of court proceedings against him. Wade and Willis’ romantic relationship was the focal point of the disqualification efforts against the district attorney’s office. However, Judge Scott McAfee ultimately allowed Willis to remain on the prosecution so long as Wade stepped down. Wade handed in his resignation hours after McAfee’s ruling. –Newsweek

Floyd, a former Black Voices for Trump leader, turned himself in without a lawyer or bond agreement on August 24 of last year, and was released August 30 on $100,000 bond. He is one of 19 defendants in the case.