Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all. 

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few. 

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have. 

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news. 

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news. 

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway. 

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts. 

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant. 

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money. 

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory. 

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election. 

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed. 

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform. 

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square. 

We cannot allow that to happen.

Three days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott invoked the state’s “Invasion Clauses” to tackle the record-setting influx of migrants illegally crossing the southern border, a new planning document obtained by Army Times and The Texas Tribune reveals Texas Military Department officials are planning to deploy a fleet of fully tracked armored personnel carriers and National Guard troops. 

Texas Military Department officials issued the order Thursday to the headquarters leading Operation Lone Star reveals. It detailed the deployment of ten M113 armored personnel carrier vehicles to the border. 

By Friday, the Texas Military Department released a statement that “aircraft flights and security efforts” will also be ramped up. 

“These actions are part of a larger strategy to use every available tool to fight back against the record-breaking level of illegal immigration.

 “The Texas National Guard is taking unprecedented measures to safeguard our border and to repel and turn-back immigrants trying to cross the border illegally,” the department said.

Governor Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021, deploying soldiers and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to counter the influx of illegals crossing the border while the Biden administration turned a blind eye to the migrant crisis they sparked. 

Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted a shocking video from Eagle Pass, Texas, via drone outfitted with a thermal imaging system. He said the drone “shows a large group of migrants crossing illegally into private property early this morning [Thursday morning].”

Melugin said, as reported by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “there have been over 1,400 illegal crossings in the Del Rio sector in the last 24 hours & 69,000 since 10/1.”

NEW: Thermal drone video from our team in Eagle Pass, TX shows a large group of migrants crossing illegally into private property early this morning.
Per CBP source, there have been over 1,400 illegal crossings in the Del Rio sector in the last 24 hours & 69,000 since 10/1. pic.twitter.com/N1FjKVVuDa

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) November 17, 2022

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz quoted Melugin’s tweet, stating that “5,000,000 illegal aliens have crossed the border since Joe Biden was elected,” adding “over 230 illegal aliens crossed last month alone.”

5,000,000 illegal aliens have crossed the border since Joe Biden was elected.

Over 230,000 illegal aliens crossed last month alone.

And STILL Joe Biden doesn’t secure the border. https://t.co/BBSJadktHB

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 17, 2022

Melugin has shown that migrant inflows were relatively low during the Trump years but have since erupted under Biden. 

BREAKING: CBP reports there were 230,678 migrant encounters at the border in October, the first month of fiscal year 2023. It is an enormous increase over recent Octobers.

OCT FY’23 : 230,678
OCT FY’22 : 164,837
OCT FY’21 : 71,929
OCT FY’20: 45,139
OCT FY’19: 60,781 @FoxNews

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) November 15, 2022

The near-term deployment of the M113s comes as no surprise. These tanks are designed to carry infantry troops and or haul equipment. Each tank can be outfitted with a variety of weapons, heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and antitank missiles. What weapons will be on Texas Guard’s M113s at the border is unclear. 

Authored by Peter Wilson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An executive from the online crowdfunding platform GoFundMe said in testimony before a parliamentary committee that there is no evidence suggesting that any of the funds raised for the Freedom Convoy protest through the platform were illegal or acquired through criminal means.

Conservative MP Larry Brock asked GoFundMe general counsel Kim Wilford if she agreed that there was “no evidence that any of the funds originating to your platform were proceeds of crime.”

“That is correct,” Wilford told the parliamentary joint committee on the declaration of emergency on Nov. 18.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in the House of Commons on Feb. 9 that there was a “flow of funds through criminal activities” being sent to the convoy.

Just over a week later, the prime minister also told the House that the convoy was “being heavily supported by individuals in the United States and from elsewhere around the world.”

“We see that roughly half of the funding that is flowing to the barricaders here is coming from the United States,” he said on Feb. 17.

Wilford said Thursday that 88 percent of the funds donated to the convoy through GoFundMe originated in Canada and 86 of the donors were from Canada.  The convoy’s fundraising page raised over $10 million before GoFundMe removed it on Feb. 4 on the grounds that it violated their service terms.

Wilford confirmed that of the total 133,000 donors who gave to the fundraiser, only 18,000 originated from outside of Canada, with 14,000 of that total coming from the United States.

‘Perhaps A Handful’

A CBC broadcasting host said on Jan. 28 that there was “concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows or perhaps even instigating it from the outside.”

The national media outlet’s ombudsman later called the comment “too bold” and said it should’ve been backed by more evidence.

Wilford told the House finance committee on March 17 that the largest single donation made to the convoy through GoFundMe totalled $30,000 and that it was from Canada.

GoFundMe’s president Juan Benitez told the committee on the same day that “there was virtually no, perhaps a handful at most, of donations from Russia.”

“In our opinion, and from the evidence that we see, there was no coordinated effort there to have any kind of contribution or impact,” he said.

On Nov. 18, Liberal MP Rachel Bendayan asked Wilford to provide the joint committee on with GoFundMe’s numbers outlining where convoy donors originated.

“Can you confirm to the committee that no donations were received from China?” Bendayan asked.

“I do not believe that any donations were received from China,” Wilford said, adding that she didn’t have the exact information at hand and couldn’t “confirm with 100 percent certainty.”

“Can you similarly confirm with respect to any donations coming from Russia?” Bendayan asked.

“Correct, yes,” said Wilford.

David Wagner contributed to this report. 

By Ye Xie and George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live commentators and reporters

Three things we learned last week:

1. Good policy news is bad news for Chinese bonds. Bonds tumbled the most in six years earlier in the week amid growth optimism following the government’s loosening of Covid restrictions and support for the housing market. The selloff prompted retail investors to pull money from wealth-management bond products, which fueled a spiral of price declines and accelerating withdrawals. While redemption remains a wild card, it’s unlikely that rates will keep shooting up. The interbank borrowing costs have already converged with the central bank’s benchmark after persistently staying below. That limits the scope for further tightening unless the PBOC shifts its policy stance. On Friday, the PBOC added liquidity to the banking system for a second day, suggesting that it doesn’t want to see borrowing costs rise much further.

After the selloff, five-year swap rates are about 80 bps above the PBOC’s policy rate, surpassing levels seen in the second half of 2020. The market looks as if it is pricing in a V-shaped recovery  similar to the one two years ago. Those expectations may be misplaced. “We believe the valuation is getting stretched,” Bank of America’s strategists, including Janice Xue, told their clients.

2. That’s because Covid reopening takes time. A little over a week since Beijing issued 20 new guidelines for easing Covid controls, fear and confusion lingers. With daily cases near record highs, China’s largest cities saw dramatic declines in subway traffic due to movement curbs, infection and quarantine worries. That said, there have been only 61 severe cases across the country out of hundreds of thousands of infections in recent weeks. Both authorities and the public may feel more confident in resuming a normal life if severe cases stay low.

3. Tech companies still trade with lower valuations than utilities. The three large Chinese tech firms reported mixed earnings last week. Alibaba posted a surprise loss, while Tencent saw revenue shrink for the second straight quarter. JD.com fared better, reporting higher sales.  Even after the recent rally, Alibaba and Tencent are trading at valuations below utility companies in China and the US, underscoring investors’ skepticism toward big tech’s future  under Beijing’s “common prosperity” drive.

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

The No Normal:

“Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance,” reminded Powell this past summer, on Aug 26. The equity market had just jumped 15% from the lows on hopes of a gentler Fed. The Fed doesn’t tighten into weaker equity markets and a contracting economy. Ever. It’s a rule. Powell changed the rule, an opportunity to win back inflation credibility. And the market listened. The swap market anticipates inflation will collapse to an average of 2.28% next year from 7.02% this year.

Hard landing. Soft landing. No landing. Investors are dusting off playbooks from the past. There is a little bit for everyone.

• Hard landing? Housing demand has fallen off a cliff. Prospective homebuyer traffic is down 49 points since the start of the year, the largest decline ever.

• Soft landing? Credit markets are showing almost no sign of strain, even in areas where activity is weak.

• No landing? There are too many job openings to talk about landings. Real wages have a lot of room to rise, and this could allow the global economy to fumble along.

The Fed keeps hiking until policy rates are above inflation. It’s a bear market until credit cracks. The Fed pivots when something breaks, and nothing has broken yet. Equity valuations are bloated, and earnings-per-share are too high. EPS always declines sharply in recession. S&P 500 EPS is tracking growth of 6% in 2022 and consensus expected to rise another 4% next year. When the Fed is easing into recession, equity markets are usually in decline. Bear-market rallies are noise, not signal. This is the hard-landing playbook.

The soft-landing playbook sees 2022 markets anticipating a recession that never comes. Inflation was driven by temporary supply constraints. The US has withstood three quarters of housing contraction. Credit markets are fine because nominal GDP is running 7.3% annualized for the year, whereas real GDP is flat. The rapid rise in the US dollar is typically tied to foreign credit events. None have occurred. The fall in inflation will give a big boost to real incomes. Policy returns predictable path. All is forgiven – global risk climbs the wall of worry.

These are normal debates in a world that is far from normal. There is no tidy fundamental equilibrium. Balance sheets add complexity, the blind spot of most investors and policymakers. Balance sheets mostly don’t matter. Those who care about them are often in the shadows of institutions, fretting over left tails being underwritten when buying credit. The Fed’s balance sheet is merely a window into deeper challenges. Reserve balances with Fed district banks are $3.13trln. It is the symbol of decades of policy preventing financial failure.

Capital was drawn to duration assets of all varieties in that world. This came at the expense of real investment. Emerging market countries were charged with filling that gap – an epic geopolitical miscalculation. And now, whatever the type of landing that lies ahead, decades of financial imbalances need to be reconciled. Markets need to incentivize a shift to tangible investment. People will hold on to their iPhones longer, keep that ThinkPad an extra year or two. You see, the landing isn’t the problem – it’s that we need to rebuild the runway.

By Zach Strickland of FreightWaves,

Container imports, rail intermodal shipments and truckload demand have fallen from their lofty peaks during the pandemic era and may be a better indicator of how inflation will be tamed in the coming months than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) itself.  

Container import bookings measured by FreightWaves’ Inbound Ocean TEUs Index (IOTI) are now only roughly 6% higher than they were in November 2019 after averaging 80% above pre-pandemic levels through most of 2021.

Loaded intermodal container volumes on the rails (ORAILL) are down 7% versus mid-November 2019 levels. 

The Outbound Tender Volume Index (OTVI), a measure of shipper requests for truckload capacity, is now only 9% higher than it was the week before Thanksgiving in 2019 after averaging nearly 50% above pre-pandemic norms from July 2020 to March 2022. 

Demand destruction has occurred at a much more significant level than suggested by the dollar figures that drive a lot of the macroeconomic data. Dollar values are noisy and measure emotion as well as supply and demand imbalances. The scarcity effect is a prime example of this and has been one of the main drivers of inflation over the past two years.  

The CPI that is representative of inflation, the Fed’s No. 1 enemy, is still moving higher from an annual basis thanks to rising supply costs and companies still passing along upstream cost increases that occurred over the past two years.

Looking at the Producer Price Index (PPI), which is focused more on upstream production costs, that direction has already changed and has been slowing since June. Transportation costs are a portion of this figure. 

The point is that scarcity is diminishing. Supply chain congestion is easing. Consumer conditions have diminished from a purchasing power perspective. It takes time for this all to fully work its way into macroeconomic figures and behavior to change fully. 

The transportation sector has been on the front end of both the economic boom and its recent decline. The reason for this is that transportation is the backbone of the goods economy. All goods, unfinished and finished, need to be moved at some point.

Raw materials move ahead of production and represent the furthest upstream view of aggregate demand. Finished goods moving to brick-and-mortar stores and fulfillment centers are also represented in transportation data. 

While truckload and import demand may not have fully eroded back to pre-pandemic levels, the direction and time of the year suggest that it won’t be long until we are there. Seasonally speaking, retail volumes tend to spike just prior to and around the holidays, but there is little evidence of that at this point.

December and January are the slowest months of the year for domestic freight movements, meaning that it will probably get worse for transportation providers this winter without some sort of black swan event. 

It is hard to tell how long this downward trend will last, as a lot of it will hinge on fiscal policy and investment sentiment. There is some surprising strength in labor numbers, which the Fed cites as a reason for continued rate increases, but this is a lagging figure that may still be reflecting past conditions.

About the Chart of the Week

The FreightWaves Chart of the Week is a chart selection from SONAR that provides an interesting data point to describe the state of the freight markets. A chart is chosen from thousands of potential charts on SONAR to help participants visualize the freight market in real time. Each week a Market Expert will post a chart, along with commentary, live on the front page. After that, the Chart of the Week will be archived on FreightWaves.com for future reference.

SONAR aggregates data from hundreds of sources, presenting the data in charts and maps and providing commentary on what freight market experts want to know about the industry in real time.

The FreightWaves data science and product teams are releasing new datasets each week and enhancing the client experience.

Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has called the Group of Seven’s plan to place a price cap on Russian oil “ridiculous.”

The veteran cabinet member from the Trump administration was speaking with CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on a panel at the Milken Institute’s Middle East and Africa Summit.

In addition to being a former Goldman Sachs partner, Mnuchin now works in private equity investing.

Mnuchin panned the proposal to cap prices as “not only not feasible, I think it’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.”

He explained that that imposing sanctions on Russia and its officials now would have far less of an impact than if they were implemented before the war started.

“Sanctions would have had a big impact back then. I think the problem now is that there’s limited options … there’s parts of the world that are now buying Russian oil outside of U.S. sanctions,” Mnuchin said.

“But look, a price cap, the market is going to set the price. So if you put sanctions on at higher prices, in a way, you’re just making the situation worse, in my opinion.”

The G7, which includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, are trying to set a fixed price cap on Russian oil from Dec. 5. Australia will also participate.

Meanwhile, American and European officials are still trying to decide upon the exact cap level, which has delayed the implementation of the plan.

The price caps, which were first proposed in July, would restrict shipping-related services that involve oil, including maritime transport, insurance, and financing to buyers of Russian oil supplies, unless it was sold at or below the limit.

The scheme is intended to hurt Russia financially, while protecting Western businesses and households from the effect of skyrocketing energy prices.

G7 Continue Stepping Up Sanctions on Kremlin

The United States and its allies have repeated that they are fully committed to rolling out more sanctions on Russia due to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Additional sanctions by the European Union will also take effect in early December and will terminate Russian crude oil deliveries to the bloc by sea, in time for a ban on all refined energy imports from Moscow next year.

The EU is imposing the energy sanctions in solidarity with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, despite the hardship it will cause on already suffering European residents and businesses.

The Kremlin has been pressed to look for new customers in Asia, and has since boosted its oil exports to countries like India and China, as it loses its main export base in Europe.

However, analysts have said that the price cap plan will not work without cooperation from the Asian nations, which both have strong ties with Moscow.

If the Indians and Chinese agreed to follow the price caps, American policymakers anticipate a relaxation in global oil prices, while hitting Russian oil export revenues where it hurts.

The United States said that it has no problem with India still buying oil from Russia, as long as it agrees to abide by the G7 price caps, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, while visiting her counterparts in New Delhi last week.

Indian energy companies “can also purchase oil at any price they want as long as they don’t use these Western services and they find other services. And either way is fine,” Yellen told Reuters.

The Russians have threatened retaliatory measures against any country that imposes price caps on its energy exports and will terminate oil shipments to them.

Peace Negotiations Long Overdue

It currently looks uncertain that the two Asian giants would even go along with the proposed price caps, due to major political and economic factors.

Mnuchin stated that negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv were “long overdue,” and that the best case scenario to avoid an escalating crisis for now would be a truce between both combatants.

Ukraine has repeatedly expressed it will only enter negotiations following the “restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” financial reparations, and the handing over of Russian soldiers and officials for alleged war crimes.

The Russians have outright rejected those offers.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government said on Nov. 18, that “one thing is for sure: the Ukrainians do not want any negotiations,” CNBC reported.

Biden Administration Should Push For Energy Self-Sufficiency

Mnuchin also criticized President Joe Biden for having an “extreme focus on the issue of global warming.”

He said that while he was “not minimizing” climate change, he stated that the White House should not “discourage investment in the carbon economy.”

“With approvals, and again this stuff doesn’t need legislation, there are things the current administration could do, you know, there’s a need for pipeline, there’s a need for infrastructure, there’s a need for more drilling,” Mnuchin said.

He then stated that cheap and secure domestic energy supplies still remain critical to U.S. national security interests.

Mnuchin called for a return to the years of energy self-sufficiency under his former boss, President Donald Trump, and blasted Biden for hypocritically complaining about insufficient oil supplies from exporting nations.

“We can’t turn around and say to OPEC+, ‘Why are you not producing more oil?’ when we’re not doing it ourselves,” the former treasury secretary said.

“There’s plenty of shale oil and at these numbers, it’s very economic to produce,” he said, while noting that the U.S. energy sector was being “starved of capital.”

Mnuchin said that when he was still Treasury Secretary, he wanted to acquire more funding to fill up the National Petroleum Reserve, when prices were still low in the first months of the pandemic.

That oil reserve since has been severely depleted by a decision of the Biden administration to tap it in order to lower U.S. gas prices.

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Six-time, best-selling financial author James Rickards says the upcoming book “Sold Out” lays out the case why a huge crash is already a certainty sometime in 2023. 

In a nutshell, broken supply chains have already caused big inflation, and the Fed is raising rates to tamp it back down.  On top of the perfect storm of inflation and prolonged supply problems, we have the recent meltdown of the FTX crypto currency exchange.  Rickards says,

“It is definitely going to cause sequential collapses in the crypto world, but will it jump the fence into the broader financial world?  My expectation is it will, but it can take six months or more to play out…

We probably have an acute global financial crisis coming anyway.  If FTX never existed, I would say we are staring at a worse financial crisis than 2008.  Throw FTX on top of that, and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire.  It will accelerate the fire.  So, we’re probably going to have problems anyway, but the FTX implosion just makes it worse.”

As far as the dwindling supply chains, Rickards says, “The old supply chain has collapsed.  A new supply chain will emerge, and I talk about that in my book and what it will look like…”

”  Right now, we are in a very messy middle period where things don’t work well.  It’s like a vase.  You knock over a vase, and it breaks into 5,000 pieces.  You can’t put it back together.  You’ve got to go get a new vase.  We broke the vase, and we are shopping for a new one.  We are not there yet.  We are just cleaning up the mess. . . . Russia invades Ukraine.  The Ukrainian plastic conduit factory shuts down, and all of a sudden, the BMW production lines are shut down because they cannot get a part.  Again, this is another example of how this is all falling apart, and it’s not going to be put back together quickly.  There will be a new supply chain, and I call it supply chain 2.0, but we are in that in between time, and it’s going to be just a mess.”

Rickards says the Fed is going to keep raising rates because that is what they keep telling the public.  Rickards says, “They are telling us what they are going to do, and you should believe them.”

Rickards says we do have inflation, and it’s going to be with us for awhile, but we are also going to get deflation too.  Rickards points out,

“Why does Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway have $130 billion in cash?  Buffett is one of the greatest investors of all time.  Why isn’t he out there buying stocks?  Again, why does he have $130 billion in cash?  It’s because Buffett sees what I see.  Yes, this thing is going to completely crash. 

It’s a really good idea to have cash because you can go shopping in the wreckage and pick up some bargains.  My point is, we don’t have to guess.  Look at the Treasury yield curve.  Look at the euro/dollar futures yield curve.  Look at other metrics, and guess what it looks like?  It looks like 2007.  Everything I am describing, but not quite as extreme by the way, was true in 2007…

These euro/dollar futures were behaving then exactly as they are now.  Except now, the inversion is even worse, which means we are in for a worse crisis than 2008.  It’s coming.  Everything I said has nothing to do with FTX.  Throw FTX on top, and as I said, you are throwing gasoline on a fire.”

After the inflation, Rickards says count on big deflation.  He will explain exactly how that happens in the 58-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with six-time, best-selling author James Rickards.  Rickards’ new book “Sold Out” will be coming out in early December.

*  *  *

To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here

If you want to pre-order a copy of “Sold Out,” click here.

Authored by Jan Jekielek and Masooma Haq via The Epoch Times,

With schools teaching sex and gender ideology beginning in kindergarten, the Biden administration encouraging early medical treatments for gender dysphoria, and social media influencers discussing the topic, a record number of adolescent girls believe they are transgender and are transitioning to live as males.

Concerned adults are sounding the alarm on the lack of scientific studies to support transgender medical treatments that permanently alter a young person’s physiology and leave their mental health issues unresolved.

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, who has been a mental health professional for 40 years, said the gender industry is built on the lies of one troubled psychologist.

“The person who came up with the theory was Dr. John Money, and he came up with this idea that a person’s biology—their body, their chromosomes—is completely separate from their feeling of whether they are male or female,” Grossman said during a Sept. 23 interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

Grossman said the industry surrounding gender ideology—from gender clinics and hospitals to transgender pride flags and the emergence of a transgender civil rights movement—is based on a concept that was never proven to be true.

“In fact, the opposite was proven,” she said. “This whole concept of having an identity as male or female being completely separate from your biology has actually been proven incorrect by John Money’s experiment.”

Money was instrumental in establishing the first clinic to perform gender reassignment surgeries on children and adults at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.

In the 1960s, Money set out to prove his theory of gender identity to the world, and the perfect case study showed up in his office, Grossman said. But instead, his theory was disproven, and it was later revealed that his gender theory came from a study that was seriously corrupted.

The Canadian Twins

Grossman told the story of Janet and Ron Reimer, a Canadian couple with twin boys who consulted Money in the mid-1960s after one of the twins, Bruce, suffered a botched circumcision as an 8-month-old that permanently disfigured his genitals.

After seeing Money speak on a TV program about his research, the parents thought their grievously injured son could—like Money was promoting—change the sex he was born with and live a happy life as a girl.

Money’s hypothesis was that humans are born with a blank slate in terms of gender.

“He told the parents that they must immediately change Bruce’s name to a girl’s name, put him in girl’s clothing, tell everybody that he’s a girl, and never, ever tell him the truth about his birth and what happened to him,” Grossman explained.

Money advised the parents to have Bruce castrated and for doctors to construct an elementary female genitalia for the boy, Grossman said. Bruce was renamed Brenda and raised as a girl.

However, after many years of being treated by Money, at about the age of 10 the twins refused to see him again. It was later revealed that Money sexually abused the twins during their appointments. Bruce was reportedly never happy as a girl and had masculine inclinations that disturbed him throughout his life.

When the parents finally revealed the truth to the twins as they were entering puberty, Bruce (who was living as Brenda at that time) chose to revert to living as a male and took the name David.

“We have to acknowledge the unbelievable arrogance of a professional high-standing academic—widely respected, accomplished—the arrogance that he had to exploit this family in order to hold them up as proof of his theory,” said Grossman.

Money received a slew of awards during his treatment of the twins, including 25 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health, Grossman said.

“His ideas about gender were institutionalized, were immediately adopted within an entire field of medicine—within mental health, psychiatry—and outside of medicine as well,” she said.

Indoctrination

Children have been indoctrinated with Money’s gender ideology, and now most young people do not believe there is a fundamental connection between biology and gender, which Grossman said is troubling.

She cited a poll published in September by The New York Times which found that over 60 percent of respondents aged 30 and older said they believe gender is determined by a person’s biological sex at birth, but 61 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 said they believed that gender identity is distinct from biological sex.

The different between the younger and older group is directly due to the spread of gender ideology, Grossman said. This is because children as young as 5 years old have been indoctrinated with Money’s gender ideology in schools.

Kids are repeatedly being told that gender identity is separate from biology and that one can choose one’s gender identity, and it’s being presented as fact in the same way children are taught that the capital of California is Sacramento, she said.

Children are being told that a person can choose their own gender and that “gender-affirming care” is available for them if they want to become a different sex.

The “care” starts with puberty blockers and later progresses to opposite sex hormones and finally sex reassignment surgeries, at which point there is no room for the children to change their minds, Grossman said.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published a study in JAMA Pediatrics (from the Journal of the American Medical Association) and reported that the number of gender-affirming chest surgeries performed in the United States on adolescents aged 13 to 17 years—the majority of which were elective mastectomies on girls—increased from 100 surgeries in 2016 to 489 surgeries in 2019, a difference of 389 percent.

Adolescents are constantly changing and trying to discover who they are, so allowing them to make a drastic change to their bodies during or before puberty is having a devastating impact on many young people and families, said Grossman.

Dutch Protocol Run Amok

Prior to the 1990s, the majority of those seeking medical treatment for gender dysphoria were men in their 30s and 40s, Grossman said. Doctors were finding that opposite-sex hormones and surgeries were less effective after puberty, so they thought if they started these treatments before puberty, the patient might have better outcomes in the sex change.

Researchers in Holland came up with a study that’s now referred to as the Dutch protocol. Children were only chosen to participate in the study if they had discomfort with their biological sex from an early age and their discomfort became worse when they reached puberty. They also could not have any other mental health issues.

“They took those kids and they put them on puberty blockers at age 12. And those puberty blockers had never been used before for that purpose, and to this day, puberty blockers are not licensed or FDA approved in any country to be used with gender dysphoria,” said Grossman. They are only approved for disorders or medical conditions like precocious puberty, she said.

The researchers then gave opposite-sex hormones to the 55 children in the study, and later the children could have surgeries if they wanted them. There were problems with this study, including the fact that there was no control group alongside the transitioning kids, said Grossman.

Grossman said there is a lot of evidence to suggest that if the kids who were uncomfortable with their sex at adolescence had been left alone, the majority of the cases of gender dysphoria would have resolved on their own after puberty.

“This Dutch protocol was immediately adopted in other countries, including in the U.S., as ‘this is the solution for these kids,’” said Grossman.

‘Gender Affirming Care’

The phrase “gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for radical medical experiments that are leaving patients with long-term physical health problems, and they don’t address the more important mental health issues these young people have, Grossman said.

“You’ll have to note, again, the manipulation of language and the Orwellian use of language, when the term ‘gender affirming’ is used. They’re experimenting on the body, and people are paying a massively high price for these medical experimentations,” she said.

“Gender-affirming care means that whatever the child comes up with in terms of their identity, no matter how old they are or what other conditions they may suffer from, that is their identity and we accept it. We affirm it. And we give them the treatment that they would like to get,” said Grossman.

President Joe Biden and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine are promoting these treatments, and the majority of U.S. professional organizations are backing it, leaving parents to fight an uphill battle should they oppose their child’s wishes to change their gender, said Grossman.

Further, there are not enough long-term studies regarding the impact of “gender-affirming care” on children, but there is evidence about the dangerous outcomes, including being left sterile and developing blood clots, heart attacks, cancers, kidney failure, and early menopause, said Grossman.

Even with all the adverse effects of “gender-affirming care,” the Biden administration is trying to mandate that all medical professionals participate and support children to get these types of treatments, Grossman said.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

The Tavistock gender clinic in London has seen an exponential increase in kids seeking sex changes, most with rapid onset gender dysphoria.

Read more here…

Concerns are mounting over the potential for radioactive fallout and disaster at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine following large explosions heard at the site over the weekend. 

Like with prior incidents of shelling and fighting coming near the sensitive facility, each warring side is blaming the other for these latest attacks. “Explosions shook the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine over the weekend in what appeared to be renewed shelling of the facility and the surrounding area, according to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” The Hill reports Sunday. 

The BBC cites local sources who say over a dozen powerful explosions were heard Saturday night at or in the vicinity of Zaporizhzhia plant, which remains Europe’s largest nuclear facility.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi called the reports “extremely disturbing” and “completely unacceptable”. He urged for fighting to halt there immediately. “Whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately. As I have said many times before, you’re playing with fire!”

The IAEA said that in prior weeks there had been a “period of relative calm” in the area, which has now ended. “I’m not giving up until this zone has become a reality. As the ongoing apparent shelling demonstrates, it is needed more than ever,” Grossi stated.

The UN atomic watchdog still has a team of experts on location at the plant, but there’s been no definitive word on which side was behind the renewed shelling which risks destabilizing the plant. 

Most Western media reports have blamed Russia for the powerful explosions which reportedly continued into Sunday, despite Russian troops still being the ones to occupy and oversee the actual site. Ukrainian state energy company Energoatom charged that Russia is “once again… putting the whole world at risk.”

“This morning on Nov. 20, 2022, as a result of numerous Russian shelling, at least 12 hits were recorded on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” Energoatom said.

“You are playing with fire!”

Director General of the international Atomic Energy Agency reacted to reports that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is being shelled and said: “whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately.”

Latest: https://t.co/X3flQUBL0r

📺 Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/L9897zapHB

— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 20, 2022

Russia fired back, with its own nuclear agency Rosatom saying the following: 

Kyiv “does not stop its provocations aiming at creating the threat of a man-made catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” the Russian army said in a statement on Sunday. 

Despite the shelling, radiation levels “remain normal,” the army added.

It said missiles exploded around a power line that feeds the plant, the fourth and fifth power units and “special building number 2.”

Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom, told state-run agency TASS that the “special building” contained nuclear fuel.

As for assessed damage as a result of the weekend explosions, the IAEA said at this point the damage to the buildings is not “critical.”

However, there fears this means escalation in fighting around the plant, with the IAEA statement underscoring the shelling is “abruptly ending a period of relative calm at the facility and further underlining the urgent need for measures to help prevent a nuclear accident there.”