Fans of fearmongering classics such as “murder hornets” , “monkey pox” and “take this experimental vaccine or you’ll kill grandma” will love this one…

According to new reports, a population of badass “super pigs” is about to descend on North America from Canada, prompting northern US states such as Montana, Minnesota and North Dakota to take measures against the invasion.

The wild pigs, currently roaming Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, are often crossbreeds that combine the survival skills of wild Eurasian boars with the size and fertility of domestic swine to create so-called “super pigs” that one expert called “the most invasive animal on the planet,” and “an ecological train wreck,” according to CBS News.

What caused this?

According to the report, Canadian farmers just cut pigs loose after the market collapsed in 2001. The pigs persevered – with the strong surviving harsh Canadian winters, and the weak dying off. The result was highly destructive packs of pigs are roaming around, eating anything – including crops and wildlife.

They tear up land when they root for bugs and crops. They can spread devastating diseases to hog farms like African swine fever. And they reproduce quickly. A sow can have six piglets in a litter and raise two litters in a year.

That means 65% or more of a wild pig population could be killed every year and it will still increase, Brook said. Hunting just makes the problem worse, he said. The success rate for hunters is only about 2% to 3% and several states have banned hunting because it makes the pigs more wary and nocturnal — tougher to track down and eradicate.

Wild pigs already cause around $2.5 billion in damage to U.S. crops every year, mostly in southern states like Texas. And they can be aggressive toward humans. A woman in Texas was killed by wild pigs in 2019. -CBS News

Feral pigs already in the United States have caused some $100 million in property damage in Texas, where lawmakers have authorized hot air balloon hunts to eradicate the porcine menace.

Ryan Brook, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and one of Canada’s leading authorities on the problem, has documented 62,000 wild pig sightings in Canada, and have seen them on both sides of the Canada-North Dakota border.

“Nobody should be surprised when pigs start walking across that border if they haven’t already,” said Brook. “The question is: What will be done about it?”

“The only path forward is you have to be really aggressive and you have to use all the tools in the toolbox,” Brook said.

Murdalize em!

Options for eradication include guns, traps such as the “BoarBuster,” and nets fired from helicopters.

Looks like bacon is on the menu, boys!

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump issued a response after the Wisconsin State Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case targeting state election maps.

Last week, Democrats urged the Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps. The lawsuit was first brought by voters the day after the court flipped to what some say is a majority 4-3 liberal control in August. They want all 132 state lawmakers to stand for election under new, more favorable maps in 2024.

The state Legislature’s district maps were first drawn under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, allowing the GOP to keep their majority in both chambers of the state Legislature.

Earlier this week, the former president offered criticism of the challenge, condemning the Wisconsin Supreme Court for taking up the challenge. He also shared a Wall Street Journal editorial that raised questions about the timing of the lawsuit after Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who was backed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, started serving.

“Tremendous cheating going on in a State that I love, Wisconsin. Republicans must do something to stop it!” President Trump said in a Truth Social post.

The Wall Street Journal article, meanwhile, wrote that Democrats fought to get Judge Protasiewicz elected earlier this year so “she could help them retake control of the state Legislature through a rewrite of the state’s political maps. Now the court’s liberal majority is going through contortions to deliver on that anti-democratic judicial promissory note,” describing the scenario as a “looming judicial coup.”

The fight comes ahead of the 2024 election in a battleground state where four of the six past presidential elections have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes, and Republicans have built large majorities in the legislature under maps they drew over a decade ago.

“Everybody knows that the reason we’re here is because there was a change in the membership of the court,” Judge Bradley said. She said ordering elections for all 132 lawmakers, including half of the Senate midway through their current terms, was “absolutely extraordinary.”

“I can’t imagine something less democratic than unseating most of the Legislature that was duly elected last year,” she added.

During a candidate forum last year, Judge Protasiewicz said that the legislative “maps are rigged, bottom line. Absolutely, positively rigged. They do not reflect the people in this state.”

“They do not reflect accurate representation, neither the state Assembly or the state Senate. They are rigged, period. Coming right out and saying that. I don’t think you could sell to any reasonable person that the maps are fair,” Judge Protasiewicz continued.

Attorney Mark Gaber, from the Campaign Legal Center, said the timing of the lawsuit had nothing to do with the election result. He said the challenge over whether the districts are unconstitutionally not contiguous would have been filed, regardless of the makeup of the court. “I don’t see that as a partisan issue,” Mr. Gaber said.

Taylor Meehan, attorney for the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature, said the lawsuit was meritless, brought too late, and that Democrats only filed it because control of the court flipped. “They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing designed to backdoor a political statewide remedy,” Mr. Meehan said.

Due to her comments on the “rigged” maps, Republicans in the Legislature have publicly floated impeaching the judge if she didn’t recuse herself from the case and other redistricting cases.

On Tuesday, a judge dismissed a left-wing group’s lawsuit that claimed a panel researching the possible impeachment of the judge violated the state’s laws. Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington ruled that the group, American Oversight, filed its lawsuit too early, coming after Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos asked former state Supreme Court justices in September to advise on whether it’s legal to impeach the justice.

The legal fight in Wisconsin comes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the state of Alabama’s bid to use a Republican-drawn congressional map. Months before that, the top U.S. court issued a ruling against the state that argued Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act, although Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, said the court erred in its decision.

“It is now clear that none of the maps proposed by Republican supermajorities had any chance of success. Treating voters as individuals would not do. Instead, our elected representatives and our voters must apparently be reduced to skin color alone,” he said at the time.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip after the truce ended Friday morning has quickly translated into rocket and artillery fire in Israel’s north, where emergency sirens have sent residents running for shelter across several towns. 

Hezbollah, which over the past week has respected the Hamas truce during which time it by and large silenced its weapons, has rejoined the conflict. Already there have been deaths in Lebanon after Israel responded by shelling the town of Hula. Hezbollah-affiliated television channel al-Manar said that a mother and her son were killed in the attack.

⚡️Anti tank missile fire from Lebanon targets Israeli occupation site, filmed from Kiryat Shmona pic.twitter.com/uaVuXsTeHp

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) December 1, 2023

Previously in the day Al Jazeera reported that “Hezbollah claimed a strike on Israeli soldiers in the first cross-border attack on Israel since the resumption of the fighting in Gaza.”

Last weekend, the government of Iraq warned that if the Gaza ceasefire doesn’t become permanent, there’s a strong chance the conflict turns into broader regional war.

The Pentagon has forces on high alert at US bases in Syrian and Iraq. Prior the truce of last Friday, American bases in the region had come under some 60 or more total drone and rocket attacks. The US responded with airstrikes several times against ‘Iran-backed militias’. 

Whether these attacks will start up again is a big question the West will be watching closely. The Biden administration has repeatedly threatened to strike against Iran-linked targets and assets if Americans come under threat.

Below: Israeli artillery shelling parts of southern Lebanon

As for Hezbollah, despite that before the truce there were daily attacks on southern Israel, its role has been limited thus far after eight weeks of conflict. Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has previously stated that the group’s intent is to keep Israeli forces bogged down enough in the north to where the IDF can’t focus its entire arsenal and tanks on the Gaza theatre. 

But a big fear in Tel Aviv and Washington remains the possibility that Hezbollah could launch a full war. Its rockets and manpower are considered much bigger than that of Hamas, and a scenario like the 2006 war is something Israeli military leaders likely hope to avoid.

Authored by Mark Hendrickson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Commentary

Last month I got a call from a friend who works in Congress. He was distressed by the absurd condition of the federal finances. How could the wealthiest country in the world be almost $34 trillion in debt while charging ahead into ever-deeper debt? It seems like a horror movie come to life.

Congress is gridlocked with the spigot of federal spending seemingly locked permanently into the wide-open position.

The fundamental underlying cause of our catastrophic debt is a decay of morality. Over the decades, the traditional American respect for the sanctity of private property has eroded and diminished. Under the influence of progressive and socialist ideas and other sophistries, the American people came to believe that they were entitled to receive benefits that others would be made to pay for. This is the self-destructive nature of democracy. By popular demand as expressed at the ballot box, voluntary exchange and charity have been progressively replaced by compulsory government-mandated transfers of wealth (transfers of wealth that would be considered theft if done by non-government actors).

In a democracy, politicians seeking elective office always need more votes. They have found that they can buy votes, not with their own money, but with money from the federal treasury, by conferring ever-larger benefits on ever-more beneficiaries. The political incentive is for Congress and presidents to spend, spend, spend. And since voters hate taxes, another political incentive is to not antagonize voters by raising taxes. Running up the national debt is the inevitable outcome of these incentives.

Government over-spending is the Achilles’ heel of democracy. In words often attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship …”

The Constitution enumerates a relatively small number of functions that the federal government is to perform. There’s no explicit authorization in the Constitution for the federal government to get involved in directing, influencing, or managing such areas of our economy as agriculture, housing, health care, energy, education, transportation, retirement, etc.

It’s clear from the writings of the founding generation that they never expected the federal government to extend into the economic affairs of citizens.

Thomas Jefferson (letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817): “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819): “This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers.”

James Jackson (member of the First Congress): “We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government.”

What happened to our founders’ vision of limited government? Again, the moral decay of “We, the people” bears the primary responsibility. President John Adams hit the nail on the head: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

What President Adams understood is crucial. Any constitution—even one that expresses the most noble ideals and enlightened ideas—is little more than a piece of worthless paper if the people don’t value it enough to accept its authority and lack the commitment to consistently accept, uphold, and defend its strictures and rules.

We need a blueprint like our original constitution. But more than that, we need a moral revival so that we can again live as free people under a federal government limited to the task of defending our lives, liberty, and property.

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

Europe may be experiencing its most significant real estate meltdown since the global financial crisis. The abrupt ending of easy monetary policies and soaring interest rates have led the property and retail conglomerate Signa Holding GmbH to declare bankruptcy following its inability to secure funding. 

Bloomberg reports that Signa, also the co-owner of New York’s Chrysler building, has assets upwards of $25 billion as of the end of 2022. It filed for insolvency in Vienna on Wednesday. 

“Despite considerable efforts in recent weeks, the necessary liquidity for an out-of-court restructuring could not be sufficiently secured,” the company said.

Signa’s current debt load totaled around $5.5 billion, according to creditor representative KSV1870. There are over 273 creditors impacted by the proceedings. 

“From today’s standpoint, it’s impossible to predict whether further companies of the Signa Group will file for insolvency and whether it will lead to a domino-effect,” said Karl-Heinz Götze, the head of insolvencies at the group.

Austrian tycoon Rene Benko heads Signa, which has commercial real estate properties across Europe and is a co-owner of New York’s Chrysler building. 

Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer played down the collapse of Signa. He said, “What’s really important is that all those who invested here, especially the banks, stay stable.” 

Earlier this week, analysts at Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International, one of Signa’s top creditors, warned that the fallout might spark further CRE turmoil if properties must be offloaded. 

“The aim is to continue business operations within the framework of self-administration,” Signa said.

Bloomberg sources said Signa has been ‘frantically’ searching for $650 million in short-term liquidity, reaching out to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Elliott Investment Management, among others. 

The crash of Signa comes as global central banks have likely concluded the most aggressive interest rate tightening cycle in a generation to tame hot inflation. Fed swaps show interest rate cuts are forecasted to begin as early as May. 

Furthermore, we don’t need to expand on the CRE crisis as readers are well-informed about the rumblings this year. We leave you with a recent interview featuring Goldman’s Allison Nathan and Scott Rechler, Chairman and CEO of RXR Realty. 

Rechler told Nathan that the crisis in the CRE space was just beginning.

Recall in March, when several regional banks imploded, we noted “Why Small Banks Are In Big Trouble: As Hedge Funds Pile Into The New “Big Short,” The Next’ Credit Event’ Emerges.” 

So what are the contagion risks with the implosion of Signa? 

McDonald’s has maintained a high level of secrecy about its new spinoff restaurant chain called “CosMc’s.” This small-format concept restaurant was first announced in July with very few details. However, fast-food-obsessed internet sleuths have revealed they found a CosMc’s under construction in Illinois. 

TikToker snackolator, who posts only about junk food, recently shared a video showcasing what seems to be the construction of one of the first CosMc’s stores in Bolingbrook, Illinois.

“The kind of conventional thinking is that this is going to be something of a competitor to like Starbucks, where it’s going to focus on the McCafe stuff and the coffee and the drinks as opposed to serving burgers and fries, which makes even more sense when you realize that this CosMc’s is being built directly next to an existing McDonald’s,” snackolator said, who was quoted by Bussiness Insider. 

Here’s the video:

@snackolator I have no idea what CosMc’s will serve, but I’m very excited to find out what McDonald’s has up their sleeve for this new concept. Are you excited for this new chain? What are you hoping they have? #mcdonalds #mcdonaldslife #mcds #cosmc #cosmcs #fastfood #mccafe #fastfoodlife #macdonalds #newfastfood ♬ original sound – snackolator

The name for the new brand comes from CosMc’s, an intergalactic character in McDonald’s advertisements in the 1980s and 90s. 

In July, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told investors on a second-quarter earnings call that the new restaurant is a “small format concept with all the DNA of McDonald’s, but with its own unique personality.” 

The move for a CosMc spinoff restaurant comes as the fast-food giant has had huge success in driving sales with the revival of another McDonald’s mascot, Grimace. 

McDonald’s revival of advertisement characters from decades ago appears to be a great non-woke ad strategy. Remember, the company scrubbed “ESG” from its website months ago. 

In a move that has prompted many to wonder which is the bigger banana republic, Venezuela or the US, Joe Biden’s new BFF, Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro (who has promised to export a few barrels of oil to the US president – now that draining the SPR is no longer an option – to keep gas prices low ahead of the 2024 presidential election in exchange for sanction relaxation and defacto recognition by the White House that Maduro is the dictatorially “democratically” elected president of Venezuela, making a mockery of a decade of Western virtue-signaling sanctions), on Sunday Caracas is set to hold a referendum among Venezuelans on annexing (i.e., invading and taking over) a whopping 160,000 sq km of extremely oil-rich land in neighbouring Guyana.

Why now? Why only now when Caracas has for more than 200 years claimed rights over Essequibo, a vast swath of the territory Guyana? Simple: because as we said several days ago, it was only a few months ago that Maduro realized he has leverage over the US president of the “most powerful nation in the world” and get away with anything… even invading a sovereign nation.

Biden courts Maduro to get a few hundred thousands barrels of oil so his record low approval doesn’t drop even more, and now an emboldened Maduro is preparing to annex most of the sovereign state of Guayana https://t.co/75USHVR9WT

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 30, 2023

Of course, (oil rich but extraction poor) Venezuela’s heightened interest at this expanse of Amazon jungle springs in part from its resource riches, including offshore oil deposits that have since 2019 made Guyana the world’s fastest-growing economy. Another reason lies closer to home for Venezuela’s strongman leader Nicolás Maduro: elections next year. But at the end of the day, had Biden not signed a smoky back-room deal with Maduro, admitting he needs the dictator’s oil in exchange for what appears to be a diplomatic blank check, none of this would have happened. Instead, we are now facing actual war between two nations which between them have some of the largest oil deposits in the world.

As the FT notes, the potential for Venezuela, an ally of Russia, to follow the referendum with an incursion into western-leaning Guyana has raised concerns in the region. Brazil this week said it had increased the military presence in its northern areas, which border both countries.

“On Sunday December 3, we will respond to the provocations of Exxon, the US Southern Command, and the president of Guyana with a people’s vote,” Maduro said during a broadcast of his weekly television program on November 20.

Guyana correctly fears that the referendum is be a pretext for a land grab, and has appealed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to halt the referendum — a move that Caracas has rejected, though its claim to the land is largely internationally unrecognised.

It isn’t: on Friday, judges at the World Court on Friday ordered Venezuela to refrain from taking any action that would alter the situation on the ground. The court did not expressly forbid Venezuela to hold a planned Dec. 3 referendum over its rights to the region around the Esequibo river, the subject of the long-running border dispute, as Guyana  has requested. However, judges at the International Court of Justice – as the World Court is formally known – made clear that any concrete action to alter the status quo should be stopped.

“The court observes that the situation that currently prevails in the territory in dispute is that Guyana administers and exercises control over that area,” presiding judge Joan Donoghue said. “Venezuela must refrain from taking any action which would modify that situation,” she added

“This is a textbook example of annexation,” Paul Reichler, a US lawyer representing Guyana before the ICJ, said in The Hague last month, claiming that Venezuela was preparing a military build-up in the Essequibo region in case it wished to enforce the outcome of the referendum.

For its part, Caracas said that its troops were carrying out anti-illegal mining operations near the territory, a sparsely populated region that is home to about 200,000 Guyanese who speak English and indigenous languages, though little Spanish.

Meanwhile in pro-Maduro Brazil, local media reported that a senator for the state of Roraima said the defense minister had agreed to his requests for military reinforcements in the municipality of Pacaraima, a strategic location for access to Essequibo. The defence ministry said: “Defence actions have been intensified in the northern border region of the country, promoting a greater military presence.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Brazil’s socialist leader Lula is planning on aiding his comrade Maduro in invading and pillaging Guyana’s oil, but it would be par for the socialist course, especially when the US president is implicitly approving your actions.

That said, analysts question whether Venezuela will genuinely seek to annex the territory. They argue the referendum exercise is aimed at bolstering Maduro’s domestic support ahead of elections that Venezuela agreed to hold in exchange for relief from debilitating sanctions imposed by the US.

“Political calculations are driving Maduro to escalate tensions in an attempt to stir up nationalist sentiment, but those same political calculations also limit his military options,” said Theodore Kahn, director for the Andean region at the consultancy Control Risks.

“An actual invasion would shut the door to further negotiations with the US and force the Biden administration to reimpose oil sector sanctions.”

Come to think of it, that’s a joke of a deterrent, considering Maduro had no problem living with sanctions for years. If Maduro were to get his grubby hands on some of the most state of the art oil facilities in the world – as a reminder, Guyana is where Exxon has invested billions to extract much of the country’s oil- he would do so in a heartbeat.

Still, Maduro needs to mobilise party loyalists to defend two decades of socialist rule during which his party and its predecessors have turned Caracas into an international pariah, shattered its state-run oil industry, fueled mass emigration and empowered violent gangs.

Luis Vicente León, who runs Caracas-based research company Datanálisis, said the government was using the referendum to reduce the perceived impact of a pre-election primary held by the opposition in October despite government disapproval. The primary drew 2.4mn voters to the polls, well above expectations.

“It’s also a test of the government’s capacity to engage its political machinery and mobilise voters,” León said. “Alongside that, it pressures the opposition to take a position on a sensitive subject and gives [Maduro] a potential excuse to declare a state of emergency and avoid the election altogether.”

Maduro, in office since his firebrand predecessor Hugo Chávez died of cancer in 2013, has yet to officially announce his candidacy in the upcoming elections. However, he is widely expected to run despite approval ratings of just 20 per cent, according to Datanálisis, amid an economic and humanitarian crisis.

Hilarious, Maduro’s re-election in 2018 was regarded by the US and its allies as fraudulent, but so much has changed since then, well not that much: just Biden becoming president and folding to Maduro’s demands in exchange for oil. Seeking to entice him into allowing a “free and fair” election this time (please don’t laugh) the US last month relaxed sanctions on oil, gold and secondary financial markets for six months. The move followed a deal between Maduro and a US-backed faction of the opposition to resume political talks.

Yet hopes of a political opening were tempered when just days later, the government-backed Supreme Justice Tribunal suspended the results of the opposition primary, which was convincingly won by María Corina Machado.

Machado, a pro-market former lawmaker who once called for external military intervention in Venezuela, is banned from holding office at present, something she claims will not stop her from running.

While the government and the fractious opposition agree that the Essequibo region is part of Venezuela’s territory, Machado has said the referendum is a “distraction” that must be suspended. She advocates settling the dispute at the ICJ.

The referendum will put five questions to Venezuela’s public. One seeks approval for granting all residents of the Essequibo region Venezuelan citizenship and creating a new state within Venezuela, while another asks voters if they recognise the jurisdiction of the ICJ to rule on the matter. Both would likely lead to a military invasion.

In April, the ICJ ruled that it had jurisdiction to decide on the territorial dispute, following a request from Guyana in 2018 to confirm the border that was drawn in arbitration in 1899 between Venezuela and what was then British Guiana, a colony. A final ruling could take years, however.

“It is not an exaggeration to describe the current threat to Guyana as existential and the need for provisional measures as urgent,” Carl Greenidge, who leads Guyana’s delegation at the ICJ, told judges in The Hague with reference to the referendum.

A specialised US army delegation visited Guyana this week, and discussed “processes to enhance both countries’ military readiness and capabilities to respond to security threats,” said the US embassy in Georgetown. Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s vice-president, said last week that “all the options available for us to defend our country will be pursued. Every option.”

Caracas has long held that the Essequibo river to the region’s east is its natural border, as it was during Spanish rule before 1899. But Venezuela’s interest in pressing that claim has fluctuated. In 2004, while seeking international support for his Bolivarian revolution, Chávez said in Guyana that Georgetown had the right to grant concessions in the Essequibo territory.

But since 2015, when ExxonMobil announced it had found oil beneath the waters off the Essequibo coast in the Stabroek Block, Caracas has adopted a more bellicose tone (well, of course).

In October this year, the US major — which leads a consortium producing oil in the South American country — made another find in the waters claimed by Venezuela. Drilling bids were awarded to companies including Exxon, French major Total, and local company Sispro. Francisco Monaldi, a Latin America energy expert at Rice University in Houston, said: “So far Exxon’s wells and discoveries are in the area north of Guyana’s undisputed land territory, but the awarded oil blocks do go into the disputed waters.”

Oil is transforming the Guyanese economy, which grew 62 per cent last year, according to the IMF, and is projected to expand another 37 per cent this year. With around 11bn barrels in reserves and a population of just 800,000, the country has the largest amount of oil per capita in the world.

Meanwhile, Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, and in its heyday at the turn of the century pumped about 3mn barrels per day, but mismanagement, corruption and sanctions led production to collapse. In September this year, it pumped 735,000 bpd.

Exxon said that “border issues are for governments and appropriate international organisations to address”.

Still, we wouldn’t be surprised if Darren Woods is quietly putting together a mercenary army to quietly take out Maduro. It should cost him at most 2-3 days worth of oil extraction revenues.

Blackstone has limited investor redemption requests from its $64 billion commercial real estate trust for high-net wealth investors for the thirteenth consecutive month. However, the good news: the “backlog is easing,” according to Bloomberg. 

According to a shareholder letter, Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT) recorded investor outflows of $1.8 billion in November. The fund fulfilled 67% of its requests, and demand redemptions fell to the lowest since September 2022. 

BREIT limits redemptions to 2% of net asset value monthly and 5% quarterly to curb sudden runs. This process of gating investors has been ongoing for 13 months due to surging fears of high interest rates and deteriorating conditions for commercial real estate markets. 

Recall: 

• Blackstone Urges Investment Advisors To ‘Keep Clients Calm’ As It Limits Redemptions Of Commercial REIT

The fund is heavily invested in housing, such as multi-family and student housing, as well as industrial properties and data centers. 

Most of the properties are located in the southern and western portions of the US. 

Fund performance has been dampened by deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, only delivering 2.3% this year through October for high-net wealth investors. Last year, it delivered 8.4% in 2022. And since its inception, it has routinely delivered 11.3% annual returns. 

The good news, as explained by a Blackstone spokesperson: Investors who requested to pull their money out of the fund two months ago have received “nearly all” their money back. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Over two years later, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally held a private meeting with the Border Patrol agents that he threw under the bus after they were falsely accused of whipping Haitain migrants near Del Rio, Texas.

There was reportedly no apology from Mayorkas.

We have discussed how Mayorkas was warned that the allegations were false, but still denounced them.

Mayorkas failed to protect the agents even after the President promised that they would be punished before any investigation. Mayorkas joined the chorus of critics in condemning the agents as an example of “systemic racism” in the government.

The media went into a frenzy despite a videotape showing that the story was clearly false.

A photographer captured the scene, which showed agents using bridle reins to guide their skittish horses. The entire videotape clearly shows the agents using the reins on their mounts, not on the migrants. Not only did the photographer quickly deny seeing any officers whip migrants, the videotape clearly refuted that allegation. However, for many in politics and the media it did not matter because it played into a racial-justice claim of the “whipping (of) Haitian asylum seekers.”

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) condemned “the inappropriate use of what appear to be whips by Border Patrol officers on horseback to intimidate migrants.”

• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried “images of inhumane treatment of Haitian migrants by Border Patrol — including the use of whips.” 

• Vice President Kamala Harris emoted on “The View” about how the brutality “invoked images of some of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against the Indigenous people of our country, it has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.”

• Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described the incident as “worse than what we witnessed in slavery” and “white supremacist behavior.”

President Biden rushed to express his own revulsion and rage, too:

“It was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”

At the time, some of us objected that the president had, once again, declared the guilt of accused persons without evidence or investigation. The possible innocence of these officers simply did not matter to the president or to many in the press.

Now, with the passage of time, some of us had hoped that Mayorkas would apologize to the agents even if President Biden has refused to do so.

He didn’t.

The agents after all were just props used by the media and politicians.

They do not have families or careers that need to be considered. 

They whipped migrants on the water’s edge because the media and politicians needed them to be whipping migrants.

Yet, Mayorkas wanted to convey his love for the agents in finally meeting with the men that he previously portrayed as Bull Connor’s on horseback.

Fortunately, the global staff of investigative reporters at Res Ipsa was able to find a video of the Secretary meeting with the agents:

Ahead of the looming Fed blackout period – which lasts until the Dec 13 FOMC meeting – Powell had once last chance to tame euphoric markets after the best November in the past 40 years… and he blew it. Instead of pushing forcefully against the meltup in risk assets after the biggest easing in financial conditions on record during November…

… the Fed chair appeared largely nonchallant, and in his fireside chat earlier today, what the market focused on was Powell’s comment that rates are “well into restrictive territory” which not only assured there would be no more rate hikes, but steamrolled Powell’s other, hawkish warning, that it is premature to speculate when the Fed might ease. The result was a collapse in yields, a surge in stocks, bitcoin spiking to new 2023 highs above $38,000, all driven by renewed bets that the Fed will cut rates as soon as March where the market now assigns odds of a rate cut as high as 80%, roughly double from yesterday.

And while it is unclear if it was Powell’s intention to give markets the green light to keep rallying into year-end, a problem has emerged, the same problem that emerges every time the market views the Fed as willing to sacrifice the dollar to prop up risk assets: gold.

After surging from a ytd low of $1820 in early October, to a high of $2,040 last week, largely thanks to a relentless gold buying spree out of China as we reported previously, gold has finally realized which way the wind is blowing and as shown below, it exploded higher amid a frenzy of institutional, ETF and retail buying (and perhaps continued Chinese buying), all of which managed to finally push the yellow metal to hit new all time highs of $2,075.41, the highest on record.

That’s just the start. As Bloomberg notes, gold calls were also in strong demand, both for futures and the biggest ETF tied to the metal, as bullion marched closer to a record high Friday. As shown in the chart below, the  buildup of open interest between $2,000 and $2,500 has been relentless over the past week on growing optimism that rates are primed to decline:

That, alongside continued Chinese buying, and perhaps a reversal in ETF selling now that gold is clearly breaking out to new all time highs, means that the Fed has a new “old” problem on its hands: wholesale flight from fiat and into the safety of hard currencies, such as gold. No wonder “digital gold”, aka bitcoin, is also surging… although that one still has a ways to go to reach its previous all time high.

Then again, if the Fed is indeed set to cut rates as soon as March, and then proceed with more QE which will be inevitable to monetize the soaring US budget deficit and exploding interest payments, then we are set for new all time highs in everything – gold, bitcoin, stocks… oh and oil; because after the current bout of CTA selling is finally over, oil and commodities will be the next asset class to hit record highs at which point Powell’s mutation into Arthur Burns will be complete, confidence in the Fed will be crushed as the next – and far sharper inflation cycle kicks in – and the countdown to the end of the Dollar reserve currency system can finally begin.