Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is expecting a potential third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make it harder for candidates to “cheat” in the upcoming 2024 presidential race.

Her comments came following RFK Jr.’s suggestion that he may consider “other alternatives” rather than simply pursuing a Democratic nomination.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is talking about running as a third party candidate,” Ms. Lake said on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” on Sept. 9. “That’s going to make it really hard when there’s three people, three parties running in any election, whether it be the senate seat in Arizona, the presidency. It makes it a lot harder for these people to cheat because they don’t know what’s going to be on the inside of the ballot. It might be a Democrat voting, but that Democrat might be voting independent this time around to vote for RFK Jr.”

“So, I think we’re going to see some dynamics in this election that’s going to make it harder for them to cheat and we’re going to work through the court system to also make it harder for them to cheat.”

Mr. Kennedy had said in a Sept. 8 interview with Forbes that he may look for “alternatives” rather than solely focusing on fighting the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat.

“It’s pretty clear that the DNC (Democratic National Committee) does not want a primary. I don’t want to say that they want a coronation, but I think that that’s a fair way to put. They’re essentially fixing up the process so that it makes it almost impossible to have democracy function. They’re effectively disenfranchising the Democratic voters from having any choice and who becomes the Democratic nominee.”

Mr. Kennedy stated that the DNC made rules that none of the votes cast for any Democrat candidate campaigning in Iowa or New Hampshire would be tallied.

“In other words, any delegate that I win in New Hampshire or Iowa would go instead to the president. And now they’re trying to change it so that if I campaign in New Hampshire, that none of the votes cast for me in Georgia will count. That’s significant because it’s hard to win the nomination without Georgia.”

The DNC is “rigging it,” he said.

“We’re looking at it, the tabulations that look like If you add up all the super delegates that they control and all of the automatic delegates that just go to the party and go to the president, I would have to win on almost 80 percent of all of the states in order to beat President Biden even if he only wins 20 percent.”

The DNC is also considering forcing RFJ Jr. and other Democrat candidates like Marianne Williamson to pay for primaries based on the reasoning that the party does not need a primary as they already have a presidential candidate in Biden, RFK Jr. said.

“We live at a time in American history when a lot of Americans think that democracy is broken, that the political system is rigged, and that there’s not really any democracy. And unfortunately, the DNC is taking a lot of steps that confirm on that outlook.”

According to opinion poll analysis firm FiveThirtyEight, President Biden had the support of 65.8 percent of voters in the Democratic primaries, followed by second-placed Mr. Kennedy with 12.3 percent, as of Sept. 8.

A recent poll commissioned by American Values 2024, a SuperPAC supporting Mr. Kennedy, showed that RFK JR. received 41 percent support in New Hampshire against President Biden’s 49 percent in case of a two-way match between them.

In a three-way poll between President Biden, Mr. Kennedy, and Ms. Williamson, the former held his ground with 31 percent support against President Biden’s 46 percent.

RFK Jr. can also create a situation where no presidential candidate succeeds in securing 270 electoral votes necessary for a win. This would allow state delegations of the House to choose the winner of the presidential election. Such a situation can also benefit President Trump as Republicans have a majority in the House.

A survey by No Labels in eight battleground states found that 63 percent of registered voters were open to a moderate independent candidate.

Approaching the 2024 presidential election cycle, which is set to commence this fall, it’s challenging to find just one well-managed major city under Democratic leadership. Many of these metro areas have collapsed into a third-world-like state, plagued with violent crime, homelessness, out-of-control shoplifting, open-air drug markets, and even some with shit-covered streets. 

Death, destruction, and chaos follow failed progressive policies across many Democratic-run cities, such as Detroit, Baltimore City, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Democrats have been in control of major cities long enough that they should take responsibility for the downfall of these metro areas but have deflected blame on everything but themselves.

The seriousness of the blame game is so alarming that in New Mexico, the tyrannical Democrat governor just suspended constitutional gun rights for law-abiding citizens in Albuquerque — blaming the gun rather than disastrous policies and open southern borders for the spike in violent crime. 

Focusing our attention on Philadelphia, just north of imploding Baltimore City and just south of migrant-infested New York City, the ‘City of Brotherly Love’ has streets that look straight out of the zombie apocalypse TV series “The Walking Dead.” 

X user Catch Up shared a startling video titled “This is Philadelphia,” showing zombie streets of working-class folks overdosing on drugs. The video did not specify what drugs these folks were on, but we have detailed before Philadelphia was hit with a veterinary sedative xylazine, also known as the “tranq,” epidemic. 

This is Philadelphia. pic.twitter.com/2xKFei0w7m

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) September 10, 2023

Meanwhile, the shit-covered streets in San Francisco are so bad that Democrats in City Hall have decided to hire a new tourism official to shift the perception of the crumbling metro area. Good luck with that one.

Democrats must stop pretending their major cities are ‘rainbows and unicorns’ and address the chaos. If they don’t, it’s up to the voters in 2024 to hold these politicians accountable. 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the start of this week that it was up to Ukraine whether or not to target Russian territory with US-provided weapons, a policy that brings the US and Russia closer to a direct clash.

Blinken made the comments after ABC News reported that it’s likely the Biden administration will soon arm Ukraine with Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which have a range of up to 190 miles.

While appearing on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ Blinken was asked if he was OK with Ukraine using ATACMS to hit targets deep inside Russian territory.

Here was the Secretary of State’s response: 

“In terms of their targeting decisions, it’s their decision, not ours,” Blinken replied.

When asked about the increasing Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia, Blinken claimed the US does not “encourage” or “enable” the operations. However, The Economist recently reported that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia frequently use intelligence gathered by Kyiv’s Western backers.

ABC reviewed: “With a range of up to 190 miles, depending on the version, deploying ATACMS could allow Ukraine to reach targets nearly four times further away than with the currently-provided rockets for its U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and M270 multiple-launch rocket systems.”

As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has been less and less concerned about the risk of Ukrainian attacks inside Russia escalating the war. The administration previously feared that Russia could respond to such attacks by targeting a NATO country.

America is playing a dangerous game called where is Russia’s redline? https://t.co/Inf3QRKQk5

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) September 11, 2023

The US has also brushed off Russian warnings against providing Ukraine with longer-range missiles, as Moscow has previously called them a “red line.” According to a US official speaking to ABC, the ATACMS “are coming.”

Weaker US Small Business optimism and German sentiment back at COVID-lockdown lows were the only macro catalysts of note today as micro-events dominated (ORCL earnings and AAPL launch event). Though we do have to caveat that with the fact that the Census Bureau reported a decline in real household incomes in the US for the 3rd year in a row…

So much for Bidenomics.

Slowing cloud business growth sent Oracle shares crashing (down 14%, the most since Dec 2011)…

Apple stock slid on its big innovative new iPhone/Watch release (on lower than expected price points)…“There is some disappointment the company didn’t raise iPhone prices on models other than the Pro Max, but the presentation spent a lot of time emphasizing the higher-end devices over the base ones (which could help drive the mix in favor of Pro and Pro Max vs. 15 and 15 Plus)”

Banks were bid today…

Both of which dragged down the Nasdaq (and S&P). About 30 mins into the AAPL launch event (around 1330ET), all the majors started to see heavy selling pressure which dragged Small Caps and The Dow into the red…

All the majors closed below their 50DMAs (Russell 2000 below its 100DMA)…

Treasuries were mixed with the short-end lagging (2Y +2bps, 30Y -3bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

The 2Y Yield pushed barely back above 5.00% but the ranges were very narrow once again…

Source: Bloomberg

The yield curve (2s30s) flattened, erasing yesterday’s steepening…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended higher on the day but was sold for most of the US session…

Source: Bloomberg

After yesterday’s puke back below $25k briefly, today saw Bitcoin panic-bid back up to $26,500…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices surged, breaking out of their pennant pattern with WTI tagging $89 – its highest since Nov ’22…

Gold was lower on the day with spot trading below $1910 intraday…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, with Triple-Witching looming, you are here…

Brace for the unclench.

With all eyes focused (for now) on tomorrow’s CPI, we are seeing inflation expectations (1Y inflation swap) surging higher again…

Source: Bloomberg

That will spoil the ‘goldilocks’ narrative.

It was quite obvious this moment was coming… Russian President Vladimir Putin has mercilessly mocked the US political system for the Biden admin’s prosecution of Donald Trump. This is also after US conservative pundits have long decried these efforts as more befitting a “banana republic”. 

Putin presented the whole drawn out saga as proof of Washington corruption, which further exposes American “rottenness” – in comments given before the Eastern Economic Forum gathering in Russia’s Pacific Coast city of Vladivostok, where the Russian leader is later expected to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Putin speaks out about the cases against Donald Trump:

“This shows the whole rottenness of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach others about democracy. What’s happening with Trump is a persecution of a political rival with political motives.” pic.twitter.com/oouu6rQwyQ

— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) September 12, 2023

“As for the prosecution of Trump, for us what is happening in today’s conditions, in my opinion, is good because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others democracy,” Putin told the audience.

“Everything that is happening with Trump is the persecution of a political rival for political reasons. That’s what it is. And this is being done in front of the public of the United States and the whole world,” he added. Of course, many of those leaders claiming to represent the “international community” probably welcome efforts at going after Trump legally and politically. 

In July, Trump famously said in an interview while on the campaign trail that he would diplomatically resolve the Ukraine crisis within 24 hours of re-entering the White House. Putin commented on those remarks in the Tuesday speech as follows:

“We hear that Mr. Trump says that he will solve pressing problems in a few days, including the Ukrainian crisis. Well, this cannot but bring happiness. This is good,” Putin said.

However, the Russian leader said his country’s poor relations with the United States were unlikely to change significantly regardless of who becomes president.

He strongly suggested that even if former president Trump does take the White House again, little is likely to change in any drastic way. But we should note that by then a battered Ukraine might begin to see its prospects for liberating territory very differently, considering how badly the counteroffensive has gone.

At one point in the talk, Putin used colorful language to explain that Trump “was accused of having a special relation with Russia, which is total nonsense and bullshit.” And that’s when he presented… “But he was the president who introduced the most sanctions against Russia.”

Putin continued, “What to expect from the future, no matter who the president is, it’s hard for us to say, but it’s unlikely that anything will change radically,” Putin said. After years of attempts at isolating Russia and the ‘interference’ in US elections narrative stoked by the Biden people, Putin pointed out that it “will be very difficult for them [a future potential Trump administration] to somehow turn this whole ship” in the other direction.

Trump claims that if elected he’ll solve the Ukraine war before he takes office pic.twitter.com/cHs9Fdmvbl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2023

Elsewhere in the same speech Putin repeated a familiar theme of the Kremlin’s, charging that the West is using the global economy as an instrument of coercion, blackmail, and punishment…

“They prioritize not temporary political events, but the promotion of their own projects… that bring direct and long-term benefits to their populations,” Putin said, adding that this leads to the emergence of a new international model “shaped not by Western standards [and] catering to the selected ‘golden billion,’ but all of humanity… and the developing multipolar world.”

All of this is also coming out of a G20 summit in India last week – something which Putin skipped – and yet it’s being hailed by the Kremlin as a ‘success’ for Moscow’s foreign policy given there was no condemnation of Russia. Instead, large BRICS countries like India and China blocked efforts by the West to issue a muscular condemnation of the Ukraine invasion. 

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

The sheriff in New Mexico’s largest metro area announced Monday his office will not enforce an emergency order by the governor to temporarily suspend the right to carry firearms in public in and around the city of Albuquerque, while also calling for a special legislative session to address the matter.

“It’s unconstitutional, so there’s no way we can enforce that order,” Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said during a news conference.

“This ban does nothing to curb gun violence.”

Late last week, Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the order, which Republicans and many Democrats said was unconstitutional and expressed alarm. Other than Mr. Allen’s statement, a number of other law enforcement officials have said they wouldn’t enforce the rule.

Ms. Grisham told reporters on Sept. 8 that she expected criticism and challenges. State police will handle enforcement, she also said.

“I welcome the debate and fight about how to make New Mexicans safer,” she said, while also acknowledging that criminals surely would ignore her order.

Other Agencies Refuse to Enforce

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, a Democrat party leader who was appointed by Ms. Grisham, joined Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Police Chief Harold Medina saying they, too, would not enforce the ban. A gun rights group filed a federal lawsuit within 24 hours seeking an immediate court order to block the order from taking effect.

Mr. Allen on Monday alluded again to public concerns he expressed about putting deputies at risk if they sought to arrest people with guns.

“I do not want to have political violence towards my deputies or here in Bernalillo County,” he said. “I have enough violence here.”

“The temporary ban challenges the foundations of our Constitution, but most importantly, it is unconstitutional. My oath was to protect the Constitution, and that is what I will do,” the sheriff remarked.

Other reasons he provided for not upholding the executive order included a personal story involving his brother-in-law.

“Last week, as I’m sitting here as the sitting sheriff, I get a phone call that my brother also was a victim of gun violence last week that many of you do not know,” Mr. Allen said. “While he and my nephew were sitting in their car, they were shot at and their vehicle was impacted by numerous rounds. How can I, as a sheriff, tell him to put his firearms away and not be able to protect himself?“

The governor, who was meeting with top law enforcement officials on Friday, told the sheriff and other officials details of her plan just moments before her news conference, Mr. Allen said. He said he was both shocked and irritated, after law enforcement officials had told the governor they were not on board.

“I have to turn my irritation and anger into solutions,” the sheriff said, indicating that he would, among other things, push state lawmakers to call for a special session to address shootings in Albuquerque.

Mr. Bregman, the district attorney for Albuquerque, told the Washington Examiner that “I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional,” adding that his “office will continue to focus on criminals of any age that use guns in the commission of a crime.”

Public Health Order

The firearms suspension was issued as an emergency public health order, reminiscent of the much protested public health orders the governor continually renewed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The governor stated she was compelled to issue her order following recent shootings, including the shooting deaths of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium, a 5-year-old girl who was asleep in a motor home, and a 13-year-old girl in Taos County.

The governor said the gun ban would apply for 30 days to open and concealed carry in most public places and tied it to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met in metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt.

Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney told The Associated Press.

Under the order, residents still could transport guns to some private locations, such as a gun range or gun store, provided the firearm has a trigger lock, a container or mechanism making it impossible to discharge.

Among publicly-listed U.S. companies, the 25 worst stocks have lost shareholders a collective $1.2 trillion since 1926.

Put another way, just 0.1% of all stocks have led to 14% of all cumulative losses in shareholder wealth.

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross and Joyce Ma use data from Henrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University to show the worst stocks of the last century.

How Are Shareholder Wealth Losses Calculated?

Bessembinder took three steps to measure lifetime shareholder wealth losses:

1. Considered U.S. stocks in the Center for Research in Security Prices database from 1926 (or when the stock was first listed) until 2022 (or when the stock was delisted).

2. Measured share price changes as well as cash flows to/from shareholders including dividends, spinoffs, share buybacks, and new share issuances.

3. Calculated the excess wealth generated compared to investing in one-month Treasury bills over the same time period.

If a company exited the database during the period, Bessembinder calculated its delisting return based on any proceeds from mergers or acquisitions as well as estimates of any remaining value after delistings for negative reasons.

The 25 Worst Stocks in Modern History

With this context in mind, here are the worst stocks since 1926.

WorldCom, number one on the list, was a long-distance phone provider and handled internet data. In response to a surplus of telecommunications capacity that reduced pricing power, WorldCom began “cooking its books” to meet growth targets.

An SEC investigation of the accounting scandal found that executives improperly reduced costs by more than $7 billion and exaggerated revenue by at least $958 million. Once the fraud was discovered, WorldCom filed for the largest bankruptcy filing in American history as of July 2002.

Some of the worst stocks by lifetime wealth losses have gone public within the last few years. For instance, Doordash was one of the largest IPOs in 2020, with investor enthusiasm driving its share price 86% higher in the first day. The company has seen its revenue and U.S. market share increase, but it has yet to produce a 12-month profit.

Common Threads

Among the worst-performing stocks, there are some patterns. For instance, eight of the 25 stocks on this list belong to the telecommunications industry. Like WorldCom, many of these companies also engaged in accounting fraud to inflate their financial results.

Financial fraud can be hard to detect, but investors can look for potential red flags such as consistent sales growth while competitors are struggling. The SEC noted in its WorldCom investigation that “WorldCom claimed it was successfully managing industry trends that were hurting all of its competitors”.

Another commonality among some of the worst stocks was the hype around their IPOs. High valuations that are not supported by profitability may lead to large shareholder losses.

Authored by Preston Brashers via The Epoch Times,

Just because the government raises taxes, doesn’t necessarily mean it will raise more revenues. The Biden administration is discovering that the hard way.

In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act into law, which included a new tax on companies’ financial statement income, new IRS funding to increase audits, an excise tax on stock buybacks, and more taxes on natural gas, oil, and coal. To top it off, certain Trump administration business tax cuts simultaneously have been phasing out.

On paper, that adds up to more than $60 billion in tax hikes in 2023.

Yet, as of July 31, tax revenues are down almost $400 billion from the same time last year, representing a 13 percent drop in tax receipts—even larger after accounting for inflation.

It’s unusual for tax revenues to drop from one year to the next, as it’s happened only eight times since 1960. And only once in that 63-year period—from 2008 to 2009—did revenues fall by more than 7 percent.

It’s too early to fully account for why tax revenues are down in 2023. However, there are some factors that are clearly at work, even if it’s unclear how much of the drop in tax receipts each factor explains.

The following are five such factors.

1) Slow Economic Growth

Economic growth has cooled substantially over the past year and a half, leading to stagnant real incomes, which in turn have diminished income-tax and payroll-tax receipts.

Reduced capital gains taxes may especially be dragging down revenue collection. Stocks fell in 2022, and while most market indices recovered in 2023, dividend payouts and stock buybacks have dropped. Existing home sales have also tanked in 2023.

The slowdown in the U.S. economy can’t explain the full drop in tax receipts, though. At the start of the year, the Congressional Budget Office forecasted slow economic growth for 2023, but it only modeled a very slight decline in tax revenues compared with last year.

2) Explosion of Green Tax Credits

The Inflation Reduction Act carved a large hole out of the tax base for the crony green economy. While green companies have long enjoyed generous tax treatment, the 2022 law took things to another level.

Not only can companies in politically favored fields now avoid federal tax liability through nearly two dozen generous green tax credits, they can also sell many of the tax credits they accrue to other companies, giving many green companies negative effective tax rates.

When the legislation was debated and passed, official estimates suggested that the bill’s tax hikes would more than offset these green carve-outs. There was reason to be skeptical even then. And sure enough, more recent estimates show that the green tax credits will ultimately cost two to four times what government forecasters led the public to believe, possibly carrying a price tag of a trillion dollars or more over a decade.

3) IRS Regulatory Activism

Part of the explosion of green tax credits was predictable. Some companies will chase government subsidies like children going after candy thrown at a parade.

But the IRS and the Biden administration have also been playing fast and loose with regulatory interpretations of the new tax provisions. By devising expansive definitions for certain terms written in the statute, the IRS has greatly expanded the size of some of the green tax credits.

In one of numerous egregious examples, the IRS wrote regulations that allow foreign vehicles to circumvent strict domestic-production and battery-content requirements by defining “commercial vehicles” to include any vehicles that are leased, including to consumers.

Because of this regulatory workaround, leases now account for a nearly 500 percent larger share of electric vehicle sales than they did last year, despite the recent spike in interest rates.

4) COVID-19-Era Employee Retention Credits

If you’ve listened to the radio, watched television, browsed the internet, or answered a call from an unknown telephone number in the past year or two, chances are you’ve come across marketing for the employee retention credit (ERC).

The ERC is a refundable federal tax credit that was created in March 2020. It was designed to pay certain employers whose businesses were disrupted by government shutdowns if they kept employees on payroll.

While it may have been well-intended, implementation of the ERC has proven disastrous, delivering more fraud and abuse than the pandemic relief it was meant to provide.

Despite paying out as much as $20,000 per employee, the initial take-up of the ERC was light in 2020—the time when businesses were most impacted by onerous government shutdowns. Then in 2021, Congress made the ERC more generous, paying up to $26,000 per employee while expanding eligibility.

Meanwhile, across the country, a cottage industry of ERC mills formed, companies created solely to market and churn out ERC claims. In many cases, these companies fraudulently persuade small businesses they qualify for the credit, setting them up for IRS disputes down the road.

Even though the ERC expired after 2021, claims have since skyrocketed, with ERC companies pushing businesses to file forms to retroactively change prior tax filings.

The IRS paid out about $10.9 billion on about 120,000 ERC claims through 2020, the period during which it was originally intended to provide relief. But through July of this year, it had processed well over 1 million claims, paying out an estimated $220 billion so far, with an additional half-million unprocessed claims in the backlog.

More ERC claims continue to pour in even now, long after the pandemic.

Instead of a lifeline to help businesses survive the shutdowns, the ERC increasingly looks like a bungled and belated giveaway to the businesses the government didn’t kill.

5) Flaws in Budget-Scoring Process

The Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office produce budget scores of significant tax and spending legislation. In theory, these agencies’ analyses should be tools that help lawmakers write fiscally responsible laws.

But the budget models are far from perfect. Because they don’t account for economic growth, they’re biased against legislation that would grow the economy and in favor of spending bills that pay people not to work.

Meanwhile, lawmakers game the system, using gimmicks to claim artificial deficit reduction on bills that clearly do the opposite.

How do they do this? By not spending money they were never actually going to spend.

Next, they can use the buy-now-pay-later method: Front-load government handouts in the years when they’re expecting to be in office and back-loading the spending cuts and tax increases for future lawmakers to deal with.

This is how the White House and members of Congress can claim credit for a quarter of a trillion dollars of “deficit reduction” from the Inflation Reduction Act and $1.5 trillion from the recently passed Fiscal Responsibility Act, even as the deficit has doubled since last year.

A Sea of Debt

Congress and the White House are spending at a breakneck pace, and now tax revenues have fallen significantly as generous tax credits and a slowing economy outweigh the revenues from Biden’s economically harmful new taxes.

The net result is that Washington is burying Americans under a sea of debt.

In four short years, lawmakers have managed to add $80,000 of debt per U.S. household, and the budget picture looks much, much darker ahead.

Politicians’ gimmicks won’t change the fact that the American middle class will be the ones left to pay history’s largest tab, run up by D.C. lawmakers on your behalf.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

A ‘senior-level’ CIA whistleblower has come forward to allege that the agency bribed analysts to change their opinion that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the NY Post.

The whistleblower told House committee leaders that his agency ‘ tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans,’ according to a Tuesday letter from the chairmen of two House subcommittees investigating the pandemic response and US intelligence, Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH).

The pair have requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s Covid-19 Discovery Team by Sept. 26.

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” reads the letter from the House panel chairmen.

“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.

“The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” the letters continue, adding that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

Wenstrup and Turner also asked for documents and communications between the CIA and other federal agencies, including the State Department, FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Energy Department.

In a separate letter, the House committee leaders identified former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis as having “played a central role” in the COVID investigation and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview. -NY Post

In June, the US Intelligence Community declassified a 10-page report on COVID origins, in which it found “biosafety concerns” and “genetic engineering” taking place in Wuhan, but that most of its “agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.”

As the Post points out, however, several scientists at the WIV fell ill in late 2019 with symptoms “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19,” according to the intelligence report, which concluded that the CIA and another intelligence agency “remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”

Pushback

Not all former US intelligence officials agree with the declassified report – such as former DNI John Ratcliffe, who told Congress that the “lab leak theory” was the “only” credible explanation for the pandemic.

“My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense,” he told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing.

“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,” Ratcliffe continued.

Read the letters below:

Sscp Hpsci Letter to CIA Re… by New York Post

Sscp Hpsci Letter to Makrid… by New York Post

Following yesterday’s subpar 3Y auction, moments ago the US Treasury sold $35BN in 10Y paper in a stronger auction that saw solid, if not spectacular, metrics.

After last month’s 10Y auction priced just shy of 4% (3.999% to be precise), this time it was no longer possible to contain the tidal wave of rising rates, and today’s auction priced at a high yield of 4.289%, up 29bps in the past month, and the highest level since Nov 2007. It also priced on the screws to the When Issued, which was also trading at 4.289% at 1pm. This was the first on the screws auction since Oct 2020.

The bid to cover was 2.52, down from 2.56 last month, but above the six-auction average of 2.43.

The internals were in line with averages, as foreign buyers were awarded 66.3%, also below last month’s 72.2% (and the lowest since June), but just above the recent average of 65.8. And with Directs taking down 19.9% or right on top of the recent auction average, Dealers were left holding 13.8%, higher from last month’s 9.5% but below the six auction average of 13.8%.

Overall, this was a solid, if hardly spectacular, auction and not surprisingly it had zero impact on the secondary bond market with 10Y yields at 4.28% and unchanged for much of the day.