With almost half of the world’s population residing in countries holding executive or legislative elections in 2024, it’s set to be the busiest election year ever recorded.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, uses collated 2024 global elections data from our 2024 Global Forecast Series as well as from Time, while country populations are taken from Worldometer as of January 2024.

Countries Holding 2024 Elections Around the World

Many people are already aware of the U.S. presidential and legislative elections set to be held on November 5th, especially due to American influence on the global political stage and media coverage.

But two governments affecting larger populations, India and the European Union, are also slated to have elections in 2024.

Below, we sort the countries expected to hold elections in 2024 by population (countries with no set election date yet have been marked “N/A”):

A few notable elections have already occurred. Taiwan held general elections on January 13th, with the more anti-China Democratic Progressive Party retaining the presidency but losing its majority in the legislature.

Pakistan also held elections on February 8th, with former Prime Minster Imran Khan’s party and affiliates winning a plurality of seats but losing power to a military-backed coalition.

Pakistan’s election results were cast into doubt by foreign observers and media, with Khan having been arrested and sentenced to prison on corruption charges. It is far from the only country holding controversial and potentially undemocratic elections in 2024.

Bangladesh’s landslide January 7th elections were boycotted by the opposition and voters, and Russia’s March 15th elections had three anti-war presidential candidates barred from competing, including Alexei Navalny before his controversial death in February.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump has asked the judge in his so-called “hush money” case to issue pretrial rulings that would block certain evidence and witness testimony that the former president says his opponents want to exploit to undermine his 2024 presidential campaign.

The case centers on allegations that President Trump falsified business records to hide $130,000 in payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) in exchange for keeping quiet about her allegations about an affair.

President Trump has repeatedly denied any affair or wrongdoing, while calling the case a politically-motivated ploy to hurt his chances of winning the race for the White House.

With trial scheduled to start on March 25, President Trump is now ramping up his rhetoric, accusing prosecutors in a 47-page motion filed on Monday of planning to put forward “improper arguments” and “inadmissible evidence” in order to bolster their “listless ‘zombie’ case” and interfere in the upcoming presidential election.

At the top of the list of what President Trump wants New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to block is any new testimony from his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has admitted to lying to Congress.

Other demands include blocking testimony from Ms. Clifford, former Trump doorman Dino Sajudin, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, as well as other requests related to evidentiary and procedural matters.

More Details

President Trump’s motion challenges the credibility of the witnesses, including calling Mr. Cohen a “liar” and suggesting Ms. Clifford would offer “false” testimony.

“The People should be precluded from suborning additional perjury by Michael Cohen,” President Trump’ attorney, Todd Blanche, wrote in the filing. He said Mr. Cohen lied to lawmakers in 2017 and, more recently, perjured himself while testifying at President Trump civil fraud trial in October.

The judge in President Trump’s civil fraud trial said that Mr. Cohen’s testimony was “significantly compromised” by his misleading statements to Congress and by some “seeming contradictions” in what he said at trial.

Still, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who fined President Trump $355 million for supposedly inflating the value of his properties to get better loan terms, said he found Mr. Cohen’s testimony “credible.”

Mr. Blanche wrote in the filing that prosecutors have an obligation to ensure that testimony presented to judges and juries is truthful. He argued that it was a “troubling” violation of prosecutors’ ethical and constitutional obligations for them to push for testimony from Mr. Cohen, whom he called a “serial liar.”

President Trump’s attorney also asked the judge to issue a pretrial ruling that would render as inadmissible testimony from Ms. Clifford.

“The People should be precluded from offering testimony from or regarding Stephanie Clifford, who has made clear through public statements that she intends to offer false, salacious, and unduly prejudicial testimony relating to President Trump,” Mr. Blanche wrote in the filing.

Ms. Clifford wrote a tell-all memoir that included salacious details of her alleged tryst with the former president at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California, in 2006.

She then promoted the book in a series of media interviews and talk show appearances, in which she claimed she was pressured to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for $130,000 in hush money payments.

Ms. Clifford has also expressed enthusiasm to take the stand against President Trump.

Another of President Trump’s requests for a pretrial rulings is precluding prosecutors from characterizing the alleged hush money payments to Ms. Clifford as an attempt on his part to “improperly influence” the 2016 election.

“Essentially the People are arguing that efforts by a candidate to prevent adverse publicity about himself during a campaign equals an attempt to defraud,” President Trump’s attorney wrote in the filing.

“This argument has no basis in law and is an extraordinary perversion of our election system and the First Amendment,” he added.

President Trump’s motion also seeks to prevent prosecutors from introducing the so-called Access Hollywood recording, which “contains inflammatory and unduly prejudicial evidence that has no place at this trial about document and accounting practices,” as well as nearly 100 statements attributed to the former president that prosecutors have identified as potential exhibits but that “are largely irrelevant, stale, and cumulative.”

The motion comes on the heels of a Monday request by prosecutors  to impose a gag order on the former president, preventing him from making certain public statements about the case.

What’s the Case About?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal $130,000 in payments to Ms. Clifford in exchange for keeping quiet about her allegations of an affair.

Mr. Cohen said he made $130,000 in a number of separate payments to Ms. Clifford via a shell company that was then reimbursed by President Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and recorded as legal expenses.

In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law in connection with the payments. In his plea deal, Mr. Cohen claimed he made the payments at President Trump’s direction and that he was reimbursed by President Trump’s company, even though he earlier claimed he paid the money out of his own pocket.

Under New York state law, falsifying business records by itself is a misdemeanor. But if the records fraud was used to cover up or commit another crime, the charge could be elevated to a felony.

Mr. Bragg has charged President Trump with a felony falsifying records charge, which would require prosecutors to prove that it was done to hide the commission of a second crime.

A number of legal experts have challenged the validity of Mr. Bragg’s move to elevate the misdemeanor into a felony.

Jordan and France have been airdropping food into the Gaza Strip at a moment international organizations are warning of mass starvation of Palestinians. While Jordan has been doing this since the opening weeks of the war, France has recently increased its humanitarian activity, at a moment aid trucks are said to be backed up by the hundreds at the Rafah border crossing.

But sometimes these high-risk humanitarian overflight airdrops, which require approval from the Israeli government to conduct, go wrong—as is seen in fresh video which is circulating widely this week.

Part of the humanitarian air drops for Gaza, by the Jordanian air force, fell … in the sea 😐 pic.twitter.com/z5iGRvCES3

— Arya – آریا 🇮🇷 (@AryJeay) February 26, 2024

While Jordan has thus far conducted an estimated 16 airdrops to Gaza, Monday’s drop saw at least part of the aid destroyed as it was accidentally released over the Mediterranean Sea, reportedly outside Rafah. 

Arab media news source Al Mayadeen reported that “most of the supply drops were swimming with the fish before they made it to the hands of the people of Gaza as they were dropped straight into the Mediterranean Sea instead of on the coast of southern Gaza.” However, based on one of the videos to emerge, at least some of the aid was successfully recovered by men in small fishing boats.

Jordan’s air mission, which is directly authorized and overseen by King Abdullah, is “aimed at delivering aid to the population directly and drop it along the coast of the Gaza Strip from north to south.” It could be that Jordan’s military views the beach or shallow waters off the coast as potentially the safest place to drop it.

The aid is described as comprised “relief and food supplies, including ready-made meals of high nutritional value, to alleviate the suffering of the people of the Gaza Strip,” according to a Jordanian government statement. The aid drops also frequently contain vital medical supplies for field hospitals as well.

The images and footage from this week’s failed air drop were surreal…

في عملية استعراضية تم إنزال المواد للغذائية في مدينة رفح جنوب غزة بدلاً من تنفيذه في شمال غزة كما أبلغوا الوسطاء.
المساعدات أتلفت بشكل كامل لأنها سقطت في البحر ! pic.twitter.com/dbdOxwoCgZ

— بلال نزار ريان (@BelalNezar) February 26, 2024

Some UN officials have accused Israel of a policy of collective punishment which involves keeping food from the Strip’s Palestinian population. However, Israel has said it too has conducted humanitarian aid missions and food supply drops.

Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, was cited in The Guardian Tuesday as saying, “There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza – other than to deny people access to food.”

* * *

Below is a first-hand account from Middle East Eye of the dire lengths people are going through to find enough nutrition to survive as the war against Hamas grinds on…

The famine in northern Gaza, caused by Israel’s strangling siege, has reached extreme levels, Palestinian residents there have told Middle East Eye. There have been several reports of people dying from malnutrition, including infants. 

Life for over half a million people there now revolves around a single task every day: finding something to eat. In this following account, a resident of Gaza City, who did not wish to be named, recounts to MEE’s Lubna Masarwa the struggle to survive in a war-torn city.  

Things are difficult. Getting anything has become a difficult task, even simple things like sugar, salt and rice. We go on looking for them everywhere, even in old shops and abandoned homes. If and when we find them in shops, they are sold at crazy prices. 

About four days ago, around 800 bags of wheat flour came in. There are up to 700,000 people in northern Gaza. This means one bag for around every 1,000 people or so.

My cousin was among those people who managed to get a bag. It’s 25kg. He distributed it among our extended family and each of us got one kilo. Just like everyone else in Gaza, my sister and I mixed our share with corn and soy flour. We do this to increase the quantity.

I spent three hours in the morning starting the fire and cooking it, and in the end, it wasn’t good. It was hard, uncooked and tasted weird. My sister started crying and I tried to calm her by saying we could add thyme to it and eat it that way. 

Then I visited my aunt’s house and they were struggling to get the fire started because the remaining wood in Gaza is not good. So I spent the next three hours helping them. After that, I went to my uncle’s house and they had the same problem, so I helped them. 

My uncle didn’t seem right to me during the visit. I asked him what was wrong and he didn’t answer. Later, his son told me he hadn’t eaten. He gave the small thyme pies they made to the children and refused to eat. At the end of this very long and tiring day, an air strike hit nearby. I was terrified because I was on the upper floor. It was very close.

Dying en masse

We’ve reached our limit. Things are miserable and get worse every day. It’s beyond famine. I’ve become so frail. I was a healthy guy. I used to ride horses and run. Now I can’t even go up the stairs without feeling very exhausted.

I have completely forgotten what food tastes like. I no longer know what fruit or chicken taste like. We had only rice and even that is scarce now.

If found, one kilo of rice costs 80 shekels ($22), when before the war it cost seven shekels ($1.90). We are running out of things like cooking oil, yeast, corn and barley. Even animal feed that we were forced to eat at some point is running out. Every day something runs out.

I know people who started to eat wild herbs. If we stay like this for another week, I think we will start seeing people die from starvation en masse. There’s nothing left here. Healthy people are getting sick and sick people are dying. 

It doesn’t matter whether you have money or not. It doesn’t matter whether you stored food at the start of the war or not. Everything has run out. We’re all the same. There’s no way around it.

To die from the bombs is better than to die from this hunger. At least with air strikes, you die right away. But now, we keep going round and round each day just to find a bite to keep us standing.

Authored by Nikolai Hubble via FortuneAndFreedom.com,

• When it rains, it pours for those in power

• Have the people suddenly woken up?

• How will the Establishment respond?

Our Betters have been very busy these last few years. Climate change, diversity equity and inclusion, ESG, net zero, vaccine rollouts, lockdowns, wars, political scandals, court cases and investigations, causing and then preventing inflation, bank meltdowns, government bond market meltdowns, debanking, sanctions, CBDCs, transgenderism, renewable energy, crypto crackdowns and so much more.

There’s no challenge too big for the powerful. Even the global climate and the definition of a woman is in their control.

But what’s truly striking is that, all of a sudden, things don’t seem to be going according to plan on any of their initiatives. Nobody seems to believe anything they say anymore.

It’s all gone so dreadfully wrong for our Betters.

The Establishment, the Deep State, the Davos crowd, the Elites, the House of Lords, the Globalists, and whoever else you’d like to add to the totalitarian mix – they’re on the retreat, right across the board.

From climate change to migration policy to the economy, if you were to make a list of their pet policies, you could cross them right off again given the news stories coming thick and fast. I’ve never seen so many top-down initiatives flop in such rapid succession.

I mean, I expected net zero to prove problematic. But I thought they’d at least give it a good go. They seem to be giving up at the first hurdle.

There’s probably no need to add insult to injury. But let’s do it anyway by providing a quick summary of what’s unravelling, and then get to why I’m telling you about it.

On the climate change front, it’s all gone so dreadfully wrong. Even the EU is pulling the plug on its own green initiatives. Heck, the German Greens are leading the charge to water down the EU’s green policies.

No prizes for guessing why – the EU’s farmers are up in arms, literally. It’s totally bizarre to see what was the EU’s most coddled interest group, its farmers, rise up against it.

Remembering that the union was originally a protectionist coal and steel trade zone, it’s worth noting that those two groups of workers didn’t exactly kick up half as much of a fuss as they were phased out by their own protectors. But the farmers had other ideas.

The UK was one step ahead of the EU, watering down a long list of climate change policies over the past few months. You’ve heard plenty about all that already.

In central London, Robin Hood and his merry men have been keeping everyday motorists safe from the sheriff by sabotaging his Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras which punish motorists who can’t afford to pay their green taxes or get an EV. “Let them eat cake to avoid the crippling ULEZ charge,” scream the Elites. Or is that bugs?

But what chance have 15-minute cities got if ULEZ faces this much opposition?

The German government, green virtue signallers extraordinaire, have upped their game from transitioning back to coal by felling windmills. Instead, they now want to fill the gap left by shutting down carbon-emission-free nuclear power with billions of euros of new gas power stations.

To be fair, the idea is that they will be converted to hydrogen at some point in the future. With the hydrogen produced… somewhere, somehow, by someone using something other than nuclear power.

The announcement out of Germany was, of course, carefully timed for an announcement from the US to freeze approvals of new natural gas exports. Cue what must have been a truly bizarre diplomatic spat, with the Europeans complaining that the Americans weren’t exporting enough fracking fossil fuels to support the green energy transition. I mean, what was Nord Stream 2 blown up for?

It’s like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.

In Australia, a landmark wind farm was hung out to dry by the government over environmental damage it would’ve done to a wetland. To be fair, we’ll have a lot more wetland should climate scientists be right about climate change. But it leaves everyone wondering what sort of power is permissible in a world where the environment comes first. And it’s not like fossil fuels will be kept online for a lack of renewables… or will they?

Even if we did decide to build a green energy system, we still haven’t figured out where the metal will come from. The German government has walked back EU plans to ensure that the metals used in the energy transition are sustainably sourced. In a truly bizarre twist of fate, it’s the Australian mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest who is complaining about it.

What sort of bizarre world do we live in where Australian mining magnates complain about the lack of green regulation coming out of the EU!? And what will the EU shift do to investment in sustainably sourced metal in the future?

Not that the EU needed to add to the existing damage there. The Australian Financial Review newspaper recently had this headline: “Rich List fortunes gouged by green metals slump”. The idea is that those who invested in green metals projects in Australia have lost a fortune, literally.

One executive responded to his stock losing 52% as only a green dream believer could: “I’m not really wealth motivated to be honest.” I wonder if his shareholders are pleased to hear this.

Capitalism’s greatest strength is that it acts as an accountability mechanism. It forces people to put their own money where their mouth is and parts the gullible from said money if the scheme was never going to work.

That’s why car rental companies are trying to offload their EVs at an eyewatering pace. They’re not just refusing to buy more. And they’re not selling them off slowly to avoid crashing the market either. They’re running for it, presumably because the cars won’t take them where they need to go.

The environmentalists are getting so desperate in their plan to save the planet that they’re turning on the world’s cutest animals to try and save it. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this Telegraph headline: “Squirrels will be chemically castrated and deer will be culled, cooked and served to prisoners under net zero plans to protect England’s trees.”

My first thought was to ask what Australia will do? They don’t have any squirrels to cull to save the planet. And the last time the country had a war on Emus, it lost.

Ironically enough, not so long ago, it was trees that were getting vilified over climate change, with Ohio State News complaining, “Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons,” and theories that trees only temporarily sequester carbon because they eventually die off and release it all again. If trees were to live 26 years, those planted today would wreak havoc on our 2050 net zero goals by dying off…

So, for climate change activists, it’s difficult to tell whether squirrels or trees are the real villains in the story of stopping human caused climate change. Why not go after both?

What we do know is that the targets we set ourselves in the fight against climate change are falling left right and centre. The Renewable Energy Magazine reports, “UK solar target for 2035 obliterated by inflated costs and gridlock.” The French have dropped their renewable energy targets. Bloomberg reports, “California’s ‘Ambitious’ Offshore Wind Goal Seen as Unachievable,” and they’re being polite about it. Fossil fueller Shell calculated in its report on liquefied natural gas (LNG) that the world could fall miles short of net zero because of booming gas demand.

Governments are responding to this shortfall in style. The Labour Party plans to cut its green investment pledge by half…

The current government’s much publicised easing of onshore wind farm regulations have resulted in a grand total of zero new onshore wind turbine project applications, a bit like that offshore wind farm auction we had last year.

The world’s leading wind energy companies are running for the hills, with Orsted and Siemens Energy both shuffling their way out of the wind industry.

EVs, the pride and joy of the environmental movement, are struggling in a surprisingly long list of ways. Even the sceptics couldn’t have come up with such a list. Their share of sales, their ability to move in cold weather, their ability to retain value and plenty more is accumulating into a rather large embarrassment. China’s EV graveyards are in the news, drawing allusions to the ghost cities of a decade ago.

Never afraid to take the moral high ground, the UK’s House of Lords found someone to blame for the EV disappointment: Mr Bean. Apparently he had given EVs a bad review.

It’s of course beautifully ironic that EVs don’t work in the sorts of weather conditions that climate change makes more likely, or less likely, but still rather prevalent, depending on which climate change activist you’re listening to.

More and more governments are abandoning bizarre policies to promote EVs as their various shortfalls and links to China become ever more obvious. The same goes for other vanity projects like heat pumps, electric boilers and more.

Soon the scandals will emerge. Things like the thousands of households in Spain that were left high and dry by the government after overinvesting in solar power based on subsidy promises that evaporated.

Nuclear power, the painfully obvious solution to all this, is becoming ever more difficult to ignore. But that just makes the attempts to ignore it ever more unhinged. The EU is implicitly demanding the French shut down nuclear power to increase the share of renewables on their grid to the EU target of 40%…

But it’s not just climate change that is falling apart for the Globalists. It’s everything else too.

Russian sanctions are proving to be laughable as the Houthis manage to disrupt more shipping than the Western world’s combined efforts against Russia, and Western exports to Russia’s neighbours just happen to go berserk.

Good reason to add more sanctions then, isn’t it? This time for the death of a jailed Russian opposition leader.

While Tucker Carlson is reporting from Moscow about their lavish subway stations and cheap food, Western economies are in or skirting recession.

The only thing that does seem to be going in favour of the Establishment is the stock market. On the days recessions were announced in the UK and Japan, for example, stocks in both places rallied healthily.

That’s because, these days, the only thing keeping markets alive is government and central bank intervention. And recessions make more intervention more likely.

But is that really the basis of a sustainable rally? And what does it do to society to see stocks go up on the misery of everyone else?

Inflation is proving to be “sticky” in many places, just when central bankers were ready to declare victory. Some are even threatening to hike interest rates again, instead of cutting as the markets demand! If the markets are wrong, stocks could plunge.

Facing this difficult situation, the European Central Bank is behaving like my four-year-old who runs around Kindy telling everyone, “You’re not my best friend any more!” One of the ECB’s governors recently said this about those who see the ECB’s climate change agenda as being contrary to its legal mandate: “I don’t want these people anymore.” You know what? We don’t want you either.

The verdict on pandemic era policies are growing increasingly embarrassing, putting all other Globalist mandate plans at risk. Masks, social distancing and lockdowns are viewed by many as debunked, the origin of the virus is looking ever more likely to have been manmade, and vaccines are proving rather unpopular. Sometimes, even government policymakers are the obvious.

In the US, the sitting president, for he can barely stand, has been described as too senile to stand trial for the same crimes that his opponent is sitting trial for. The crime would seem to qualify you for president though, given the response from both supporter’s camps about their own candidate’s performance. But then there’s Hillary Clinton, who also mishandled classified information, but didn’t win an election for it.

With Donald Trump leading polls, the Democrats’ new plan is very American: import voters from overseas. But the consequences of opening borders seem to be costing the Democrats more voters than they can gain. Those who argued for open borders and defunded police are begging the police to remove the migrants on their doorsteps.

Indeed, the mass migration policies which voters associate with the Globalists, because no national government that expects to be held to account at the ballot box would approve them, are triggering protests in some of the most welcoming nations I’ve ever migrated to.

I lived in Austria when the Syrians arrived in 2015. I lived in Ireland before Schengen opened the country to mass migration and visited again several times after. I lived in Germany and the UK when the EU established freedom of movement and the right to reside. I lived in Australia when Tony Abbott’s campaign against illegal immigration began and when the country was flooded with economic migrants from Europe after 2008. Let me tell you, perfectly ordinary people are furious about the current surge in migration. They must have taken a turn for the far right…

Most damning of all are of course the excess deaths figures which continue to bubble away without any government panic, let alone investigation. If only someone would model the deaths instead of reporting on actual ones, then something would be done about it. For now, it’s left to the conspiracy theorists to ponder what’s behind them. And they are getting ever closer.

To be honest, the collapse of these supranational policies is happening so fast it resembles the end of every Star Wars movie, when two hours of accumulated problems and challenges suddenly evaporate in one fell victorious swoop of a spaceship, leaving no loose ends to worry about. But there always has to be another sequel, right?

The collapse of so many campaigns has been very amusing, especially for the people who manage to avoid the disastrous consequences of all the government policies gone wrong. It’s not so funny for German factory workers who burn wood to keep warm in winter as their employer moves to Texas or China. Nor for the Irish who can’t go to their favourite pub for fear of being mugged.

I’m moving to Japan in two weeks, where a lot of this chicanery simply doesn’t fly. And my Japanese isn’t good enough to understand what sort of nonsense the local politicians get up to instead. But, let me tell you, they know what a woman is.

For those of you stuck living in a Western democracy, especially in Europe, the consequences are plain to see. People are taking to the streets and abandoning the mainstream political parties like it matters who you vote for. This is where things get dangerous.

A 2022 survey found trust in government in the EU had fallen from 4.7 out of 10 to 3.6. Can you imagine what it is at now?

For those of you who feel vindicated by all the changes happening around you, don’t. Because they aren’t finished with you yet.

I want to raise the old mantra about dangerous and being cornered. It applies to our leaders, including the ones behind the curtains. Can they really stomach such a defeat across the board without raising the stakes? Or are we going to discover a new disease, asteroid, or social cause imminently to justify a new round of eye-watering government intervention in our lives?

What would you do if you were Klaus Schwab and your agenda began to melt away?

Do the do-gooders slink back into their Swiss caves, universities and think tanks whence they came? Do they give up on trying to engineer the world?

Or do they turn to more drastic measures to keep you in line?

Billionaire investor and Harvard University alumnus Bill Ackman voiced concerns on X on Monday about the health of the woke university’s endowment. This came in the wake of a Bloomberg report earlier that day, indicating the university was “considering” the sale of $1.65 billion in bonds – nearly two months after the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay. 

According to a “Voluntary Notice of Potential Issuance of Bonds” from the Ivy League school, it’s planning to sell $750 million of taxable fixed-rate bonds the week of March 4 and $900 million of tax-exempt bonds in April. 

“Proceeds of the Series 2024A Bonds will be used for general corporate purposes,” the notice read. 

As for the Series 2024B Bonds, the university said the use of proceeds will be for “new capital projects and may also include refinancing, including through a tender and/or exchange, of a portion of the University’s Series 2016A bonds.” 

Ackman wrote a brief note on X, highlighting the challenges facing Harvard’s endowment, including “illiquid assets” and a “dramatic decline in donations” as probable factors behind the university’s recent bond offering announcement: 

The substantial majority of the @Harvard endowment is invested in illiquid assets, principally private equity, real estate, and venture capital. Not reflected on the balance sheet are commitments to new funds of the same type.

Like most endowments, @Harvard models expectations of fund distributions when considering its liquidity and when making future commitments.

Harvard also makes assumptions about inflows from alumni donations.

The model likely did not predict a decline in liquidity events from private equity, real estate, and venture capital and the dramatic decline in donations. That is likely why Harvard announced this recent bond offering, which is being done in a substantially higher interest rate environment than where the funds could have been raised a couple of years ago.

It would be interesting to understand how much the modeled cash flows have declined since original expectations.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Harvard announce a substantial cost reduction program soon.

I suspect that alumni donations won’t be coming back for some time. At a minimum, alumni will want to know who the next president is, and the status of DEI and antisemitism on campus before resuming donations.

The substantial majority of the @Harvard endowment is invested in illiquid assets, principally private equity, real estate, and venture capital. Not reflected on the balance sheet are commitments to new funds of the same type.

Like most endowments, @Harvard models expectations…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) February 26, 2024

Besides Harvard tapping the muni market for financing, Princeton University sold bonds earlier this month and is selling more debt this week. 

So what’s next for Harvard? Is a “substantial cost reduction program” in the works and could be announced soon as Ackman suggested?

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have been writing about the alarming record of the Biden dogs attacking staff and Secret Service agents through the years. At first, the story was a humorous distraction as some of us wondered if the First Family had a vicious dog.

It then became more alarming as each of the dogs were found to be attacking staff and had to be eventually removed. Even more worrisome was the response of the White House and President Joe Biden, who dismissed a Secret Service agent’s account and brushed off the incidents. Now, a report indicates that Commander is responsible for at least 24 attacks. The record shows not only a lack of concern by the Bidens for staff, but a bizarre litany of vicious German Shepherds in their care.

We began our discussion of these incidents with Major, who continued to attack staff until the press finally reported on the complaints from staff. Only when it became a public embarrassment did the Bidens send Major to Delaware. Major was adopted in November 2018 from an animal shelter.

Then, after the coverage died down, the Bidens simply brought Major back to the chagrin of the Secret Service.

He then proceeded to continue to bite agents and staff.

It was then discovered that their other dog, Champ, was also chomping on staff and agents.

Again, the White House dismissed the concerns.

First lady Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael LaRosa told CNN:

“Yes, Major nipped someone on a walk. Out of an abundance of caution, the individual was seen by WHMU and then returned to work.”

The difference between “nipped” and “bitten” is that you are bitten by other people’s dogs. Your dog however only nips, which is somewhere on the spectrum between a lick and a complete devouring.

Then a book came out that detailed these attacks and the President himself seemed to attack an agent.

The book, “The Fight of His Life,” by author Chris Whipple details Biden’s continued mistrust of the Secret Service and his alleged avoidance of saying anything in front of agents. Biden has long had tense relations with the Secret Service, particularly after female agents complained about his exposing himself to them by insisting on swimming in the nude.

The book claims that Biden has his own “deep state” conspiracy theories. Biden reportedly views the Secret Service as essentially the enemy within, suggesting that it is populated by “MAGA sympathizers” due to the fact that the service “is full of white ex-cops from the South who tend to be deeply conservative.”

However, this is a major escalation in that reportedly strained relationship. In one eight-day period, agents were bitten every day. Indeed, outside of the White House, the Biden dogs would qualify for strict liability under the common law as displaying a vicious disposition.

After prior incidents, White House press secretary Jen Psaki characterized the injury as “minor” and insisted that Major was just “getting acclimated and accustomed to his surroundings and new people.”  He was then sent away to Delaware with Champ. It was the equivalent of a politician going into “treatment” at the height of a scandal. Major was later returned to the White House but proceeded to “acclimate” himself on the limbs of Secret Service agents.

The White House failed to disclose the incidents and only partially confirmed past attacks when pressed by the media.

Joe Biden was then quoted as saying that he does not trust the Secret Service and believes that one agent is outright lying about one attack by Major. The President is quoted as saying “Look, the Secret Service are never up here. It didn’t happen.”

The incident was reported by the agent and photos were taken to document that attack. The President’s denial of the location ignored the confirmed attack itself. Other agents complained about the disregard of the agents by the Bidens in the repeated attacks, including one agent who reportedly insisted that the president personally pay to repair a ripped coat after one attack on March 6, 2021.

Then Commander was brought in to replace Major. Commander then started to bite people.

Again, neither the Bidens nor the White House seemed particularly concerned for the staff and brushed off questions.

It now turns out that the attacks increased but the press were not informed . . . again.

According to new internal USSS documents obtained by CNN, that does not even include additional incidents that were previously reported involving executive residence staff and other White House workers.

One June 2023 email even says that the Secret Service has had to change security procedures to deal with the vicious dog:

“The recent dog bites have challenged us to adjust our operational tactics when Commander is present – please give lots of room,” an unnamed assistant special agent in charge of USSS’ Presidential Protective Division wrote to their team in a June 2023 email, warning that agents “must be creative to ensure our own personal safety.”

The material obtained by CNN included a picture that shows how one shirt of an agent was torn up by the dog in one attack.

One Secret Service technician wrote in October 2022, that they were “worried about the family pets behavior escalating and that … something worse was going to happen to others.”

I have taught torts for three decades, including animal liability. In that time, I have never come across a case with such a long history of dog attacks from multiple animals in one family. There is no question that the Bidens would be strictly liable in these attacks, but have been allowed to escape such liability due to the fact that this is the official residence.

Under the common law, the Bidens could claim that Major and Commander were entitled to “one free bite.” They are well beyond that threshold.

The “one free bite rule” is a commonly misunderstood torts doctrine — suggesting that you are not subject to strict liability until after the first time your dog bites someone. In fact, you are subject to strict liability whenever you know or have reason to know of the vicious propensity of your animal. That can be satisfied by conduct such as frequent snapping or aggressive behavior.

However, even with Major, the Bidens failed to protect agents and others. Now they have shown the same failure with Commander.

Indeed, a family with this history of dog attacks (with successive pets) would face a highly skeptical, if not hostile, court in a tort action.

The Biden case is more analogous to  the infamous case from San Francisco involving lawyers and dog owners Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel. They were found both criminally and civilly liable after their two Presa Canario dogs killed apartment neighbor Diane Whipple. Various neighbors complained about the dogs. The dogs had not bitten anyone but were known to be aggressive. That was sufficient.

In one account involving Commander, an agent had to defend himself from the dog with a chair. That was after prior biting incidents. As many as ten people were either bitten or threatened by the dog.

In other words, the Bidens would likely be viewed as knowing the vicious propensity of Commander and subject to strict liability. They showed a pattern of knowledge and a lack of precautions not just with regard to this dog but all of their dogs.

For Secret Service agents, one could understand if they felt that they were high-priced chew toys for the Biden pets.

The record belies the claims of the First Family that they are heartbroken or deeply concerned for staff. They have used these agents like a captive staff who cannot readily complain or sue over their failure to control their dogs. It also raises questions of whether this family should have dogs. If there was just one dog, it could be discounted as a problem pet. The Bidens how have multiple dogs which developed the same vicious propensity.

If these attacks were litigated, I have little doubt that the Bidens would be held liable if they were an average family. Indeed, I would expect a court to seriously consider an order barring the possession of dogs in the future or requiring training classes not only for the dogs but for the Bidens.

SpotGamma invites readers to please join them tonight at 8pm EST for a free webinar on the VIX and the coming March option expiration, to learn how the fear gauge actually works – click here for the Free VIX Webinar

The S&P500 looks like it is entering into a digestion phase into the key March OPEX, which could result in the VIX breaking back down to year-to-date lows. 

Into Thursday’s (2/22) record SPX close near 5,100, 1-month SPX skew showed that upside strikes (i.e. calls) had relatively higher IV’s than at any time vs last several months, as shown by the skew plot (below, green line) being above the shaded cone (red box). 

However, the IV’s for upside strikes did not increase into Thursday’s 2% SPX rally, which is shown by the current skew (green line) staying flat to Tuesday’s close (gray line). This signals that S&P call buyers didn’t chase strikes >5,100 into Thursday’s record move.

Clearly Wednesday nights NVDA’s earnings bolstered concerns about right tail risk, and trader’s feared missing upside. To this point the magnitude of yesterday’s move held up ATM vols (i.e stock up/vol up & the VIX didn’t really “crush”), but the left tail (OTM puts) – we’ll that is getting crushed.

You can see this in “indexified” measures like VVIX, or SDEX, shown below. The SDEX measures the relative IV of a put 1 standard deviation move lower in the SPY, which is now back near all-time lows.

We think that SPX call skews are now likely to flatten, with the VIX likely to start sinking as the pace of higher S&P500 prices slow down. 

To this point, both Monday & Tuesday’s 0DTE ATM SPX straddle was just $20, or a scant 39bps! We can’t recall having seen the 0DTE straddle priced at such tight levels in the recent past, and it suggests a broad level of complacency and trust in the current market paradigm. 

In regards to a 39 bps straddle, we refer to this as “priced for perfection”, as there is nearly no edge for a straddle seller. Any slight market movement, in either direction, can force the seller offsides and cause a cover trade that exacerbates local, jumpy volatility. Jumpy volatility works both ways, and so if traders were still worried about upside SPX performance its not reflecting in short dated straddle prices.

Despite these low 0DTE prices, and to the concept of “stocks up, vol up”, the VIX has only recently pushed back below 14, after holding higher into all time SPX prices.

This relatively higher VIX has been supported by 13.8% 1-month SPX realized vol (green) and 15% 5-day SPX realized vol (red) which are up near highs last seen in November.

Recall that over the last month the SPX is ~4.5% higher, and so volatility is increasing as a result of higher SPX prices. 

What is now interesting about this dynamic is that a VIX of ~14 implies ~88bps daily SPX moves, which is a stark contrast to the 39bps priced into the 0DTE SPX straddle.

This divide between the SPX implied move (88bps) from the VIX and the 0DTE pricing “perfection” (39bps) is likely the result of Thursday AM’s PCE reading, which is the big data point this week. The 0DTE crowd does not have to worry about that print for 3 more sessions, whereas the VIX is pricing in some higher volatility. Assuming the PCE is not some type of hot tail print, we think the VIX and SPX volatility will now likely start to move lower into March OPEX (3/15).

We can get a sense of volatility shifts via the SPX term structure, which shows relatively higher short term IV’s due too both Thursdays PCE print, and Friday’s ISM print (red box). However, following this print, at-the-money SPX IV’s sink to ~9.5% (red arrow).

Assuming that PCE and ISM do not produce tail prints, we think that options positioning will likely build around the 5,100 level, which will constrict realized volatility. This will in turn serve to drag down forward volatility measures, like the VIX.

Accordingly, we highlight the 3/15 OPEX time frame as a potential place for volatility to tick back up due to large options positions expiring and rolling across both the index/equity landscape, but also the VIX. 

The plot below highlights the current size of call delta notional (orange) and put delta (blue) for the S&P500 – and as you can see the positions are quite substantial.

To hear more of SpotGamma’s thoughts on upcoming volatility – join us tonight at 8pm EST for a webinar on the VIX – Free VIX Webinar

Update(1440ET): The Houthi military spokesman has explicitly denied any intention to knock out undersea regional internet cables in a fresh Tuesday statement, however, he reiterated that the Iran-linked group’s top goal is to block commercial shipping and supplies to Israel. 

The full statement is as follows, cited in Al Mayadeen news: “We are keen to spare all cables and their services from any risks and to provide the necessary facilities for their maintenance. The decision to prevent the passage of Israeli ships does not include ships belonging to international companies licensed to carry out marine cable work.”

Over the past two days there were widespread reports that up to four undersea telecoms cables in the Red Sea area between the Saudi city of Jeddah and the state of Djibouti were damaged. As we reported below, the operator Seacom reported connectivity problems, following reports which originated in Israeli media sources. Sky News Arabia had also picked up on the reports Monday.

For months there has been speculation that Red Sea waters, which has been scene of daily Houthi attacks on international shipping as well as Western coalition warships, could be subject to sabotage of global fiber optics lines. However, such a sabotage campaign would be difficult to carry out, given it would likely require submarine or deep water equipment and capabilities, which the Houthis likely lack.

Israeli media such as the Jerusalem Post – which was among the first to report the alleged sabotage of several cables – could also be anticipating such an Iran-backed covert campaign. The reports quickly spread to US media, including in the New York Post.

* * * 

There are new reports saying Yemen’s Houthis have knocked out several underwater telecommunications cables linking Europe and Asia, however, some of the accounts of the extent of damage remain conflicting.

Multiple Israeli publications are reporting Monday that four underwater communications cables between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti have been damaged in recent months – the result of Houthi sabotage. The reporting appears to have originated in Israel’s financial daily outlet Globes.

But one industry publication cautions, “One cable operator has confirmed damage to a cable in the region, but said it didn’t know the cause yet.” Reportedly only the Seacom operator has issued confirmation that it has had cable issues at Djibouti.

According to the Israeli media report:

Three months after the Houthis began attacking merchant ships, the Yemenite rebels have carried out another one of their threats. “Globes” has learned that four submarine communication cables have been damaged in the Red Sea between Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Djibouti in East Africa.

According to the reports, these are cables from the companies AAE-1, Seacom, EIG and TGN. This is causing serious disruption of Internet communications between Europe and Asia, with the main damage being felt in the Gulf countries and India.

Other impacted cables are operated by the companies Tata, Ooredoo, Bharti Airtel, and Telecom Egypt, but these did not issue immediate comment or confirmation as to the reported damage or outages.

But the Seacom outage is now being confirmed by NetBlocks…

⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics show a disruption to network connectivity at the Djibouti Data Center which connects the country’s landing stations; the incident comes as Israeli media report four submarine cables across the Red Sea including SEACOM have been targeted by Houthi rebels ✂️ pic.twitter.com/tjlBLAgYd4

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) February 26, 2024

Israel’s Globes says repairs could take up to eight weeks, but the waters in the region remain high risk due to what are now daily Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthis have lately made veiled threats they could take out the underwater fiber optic cables.

“The repair of such a large number of underwater cables may take at least eight weeks according to estimates and involve exposure to risk from the Houthi terror organization,” the report says. “The telecommunications companies will be forced to look for companies that will agree to carry out the repair work and probably pay them a high risk premium.”

Analyst Alberto Rizzi has explained that “at low depths, trained divers/ship anchors are enough to damage them” and that “Bab-el-Mandeb/Aden is a chokepoint where damage can impact multiple cables at once.”

The fact that Google’s Gemini AI is a complete woke mess comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.

Between Google’s internal culture, and the fact that large language models (LLMs) are largely a reflection of their creators, Gemini is was the predictable digital poster-child for racist, anti-white, anti-conservative, historical revisionist culture – as opposed to the neutral purveyors of information they claim to be.

Mask-off, as they say.

In fact, we couldn’t sum it up better than Mario Juric, director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle.

In a lengthy post on X, Juric says that despite known “many good individuals working there,” he’s “done with @Google.”

I’m done with @Google. I know many good individuals working there, but as a company they’ve irrevocably lost my trust. I’m “moving out”. Here’s why:

I’ve been reading Google’s Gemini damage control posts. I think they’re simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only… https://t.co/dMbKLf6fV1

— Mario Juric (@mjuric) February 26, 2024

The whole thing is worth reading below (emphasis ours):

I’ve been reading Google’s Gemini damage control posts. I think they’re simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only product has the same (if not worse) issues. And second, if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it.

Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).

Setting social irresponsibility aside, in a purely business sense, it is beyond stupid to build a product which will explicitly put your company’s social agenda before the customer’s needs. Think about it: G’s Search — for all its issues — has been perceived as a good tool, because it focused on providing accurate and useful information. Its mission was aligned with the users’ goals (“get me to the correct answer for the stuff I need, and fast!”). That’s why we all use(d) it. I always assumed Google’s AI efforts would follow the pattern, which would transfer over the user base & lock in another 1-2 decade of dominance.

But they’ve done the opposite. After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.

What about the future? Take a look at Google’s AI Responsibility Principles (https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/) and ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google’s promise to include Gemini everywhere, that’s what we’ll be getting (https://technologyreview.com/2024/02/08/1087911/googles-gemini-is-now-i…). In this brave new world, every time you run a search you’ll be asking yourself “did it tell me the truth, or did it lie, or hide something?”. That’s lethal for a company built around organizing information.

And that’s why, as of this weekend, I’ve started divorcing my personal life and taking my information out of the Google ecosystem. It will probably take a ~year (having invested in nearly everything, from Search to Pixel to Assistant to more obscure things like Voice), but has to be done. Still, really, really sad…

Meanwhile, Gavin Baker – managing partner / CIO at Atreides Management, LP, channels the spice to point out that ‘being apolitical or centrist is becoming a significant competitive advantage for companies.’

Being apolitical or centrist is becoming a significant competitive advantage for companies.

Gemini is the first time GPT-4 has been surpassed, yet the launch has been an unmitigated disaster and the product will likely be pulled off the market because of the ideology that was…

— Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) February 26, 2024

Read the entirety of his excellent post on X below (emphasis ours):

Being apolitical or centrist is becoming a significant competitive advantage for companies.

Gemini is the first time GPT-4 has been surpassed, yet the launch has been an unmitigated disaster and the product will likely be pulled off the market because of the ideology that was built into it.

When that ideology isn’t deeply racist or ahistorical it is simply absurd: microaggressions are comparable to a thermonuclear explosion in terms of harm, etc.

Ironic that if Google had simply followed its mission statement of “organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful” they would have had a triumphant product launch.

Instead they will almost certainly have to pull the product in the same way that Microsoft had to pull Tay long ago.  Their PR focus thus far has been on image generation, but the text generation product is much worse in terms of racism and absurdity.  Nothing about the ideology built into Gemini is “useful.”

Gemini 1.5 Pro showed that Google has the technological capability to protect their search franchise; only ideology is standing in the way of a long, slow, embarrassing decline.

There is real “Bud Light” risk here absent swift and decisive action.

Many days have passed since the debut of Google’s insanely racist and sexist Gemini product debut and yet not one person has been fired. Not one.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2024

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The rally in equities might have much further to go, based on the positive outlook for liquidity.

It might not seem like it after a seemingly relentless advance and fevered speculation, but the new bull market is comparatively mild versus the postwar past.

Yet that could change. Excess liquidity – the difference between real money growth and economic growth – shows that the stock rally could have much further to go, turning a so-far historically below-par bull market into one that’s above the past average.

There are many reasons why this might not transpire…

As a natural cynic, I’m more comfortable when the outlook is pessimistic (no room for disappointment) versus when it is optimistic (plenty of opportunity to end up with egg on your face when things do go wrong after all). But sometimes the data just isn’t there to support a downbeat view.

That’s the case today. One of the best medium-term drivers of stock returns is excess liquidity. It’s an intuitive measure: when money, which is created by banks and central banks, is growing faster in real terms than GDP, liquidity is left which is “excess” to the needs of the real economy, and which thus tends to find its way into risk assets.

After beginning to rise in the first half of last year, and supporting the equity rally that began in March, excess liquidity has continued to rise. It is difficult for markets to sell off significantly when there is plenty of risk-asset-supporting liquidity sloshing around the system.

Fiscal and monetary policy are conspiring to keep excess liquidity climbing despite the cumulative impact of higher rates coursing through the economy.

First, what has been driving excess liquidity so far?

It has three main elements: inflation, economic growth and narrow money, with the latter responsible for most of the measure’s rise over the last year.

But that’s not the full picture.

Excess liquidity is a global measure, made up of the money and economic growth of countries in the G10, in dollar terms. That means a weaker dollar boosts non-US excess liquidity.

As the chart below shows, it’s the weaker dollar – down over 9% from its September 2022 highs – that has been the biggest driver of excess liquidity.

 
We can blame fiscal policy here. The US’s expansive deficit has been one of the most important longer-term negative influences on the dollar. There is little sign the deficit is about to improve by much, based on (no doubt conservative) Congressional Budget Office forecasts. Government finances are also unlikely to be straitened whoever the next president is, meaning the primary trend in the dollar (DXY) is likely to remain down.

We can also blame monetary policy for the dollar’s malaise and excess liquidity’s buoyancy. The latter looked like it was about to start turning lower last year, but was saved in the nick of time by the Federal Reserve’s pivot in December.

How? On a shorter-term basis (6-9 months), the dollar is led by the real yield curve. The US currency is driven at the margin by the real return of foreign investors in long-term US assets. In the latter months of 2023, the real yield curve had been steepening, as longer-term real yields were rising more than shorter ones.

 
Then the Fed came with its still unfathomable pivot. Shorter-term real yields fell, but their longer-term counterparts fell by more, and the curve re-flattened. What was a strong supportive sign for the dollar returned to being a weight on it – and thus a continued tailwind for excess liquidity.

It’s not just liquidity that could charge the bull market further. The absence of a US recession, which continues to look off the cards for the time being, also bolsters the case that equities should not soon face a steep selloff. Traditional recession indicators have been misleading in this pandemic-addled cycle, but it has become increasingly clear a downturn in the US is now less likely than not.

Furthermore, the rally might be on shakier legs if sentiment and technicals were overly bullish, but they are not yet historically stretched. The net number of stocks making new 52-week highs, the number trading above their 200-day moving average or their upper Bollinger band, and the advance-decline line are all high but have been higher. Moreover, sentiment is net bullish but not at extremes, while retail allocation to stocks is only at its 5-year average.

Leadership is narrow, with only a handful of stocks driving the advance, but there is little historically to show that this leads to sub-par returns. And when markets eclipse new highs, as the S&P did a few weeks ago, it acts as a psychological all-clear that we are indeed in a new bull market. Whether you agree that’s justified or not, the catch-up money that floods the market creates its own momentum.

No bull market comes without risks and this one is no different. The biggest is a recession. While, as mentioned above, that does not look likely in the near term, a sudden and unanticipated economic slump (either endogenous or due to an exogenous shock) would decimate returns. Also, a bull market that does not begin either during a recession or within 18 months of one is unusual, with only one postwar example (1966).

Equities experience their largest drawdowns in recessions, and given there is little ex ante to indicate one is coming in the current environment, it would likely be particularly devastating.

A blow-off top is another risk. Even then, despite the upset one would cause, it might not be enough to kick-start a new bear market. Inflation, too, will pose a risk to stocks, but to their real returns, unless price growth’s revival is particularly abrupt or steep (bull and bear markets are, sub-optimally, based off nominal returns). A persistent bear-steepening of the yield curve would be the sign the rally is at risk.

To misquote John Templeton, bull markets are born on pessimism, but they grow on liquidity. As long as excess liquidity is supported, the market is primed to keep grinding higher, regardless of how cynical you might be.