Authored by Benjamin Kew via The Epoch Times,

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s microblogging platform Threads, launched to great acclaim as Instagram’s “Twitter Killer” in July, appears to be showing signs of struggle.

The initial signs for Threads were extremely encouraging.

The platform—nearly a carbon copy of Twitter, now known as X—pulled in a staggering 100 million sign-ups in less than five days.

Forbes senior contributor John Koetsier outlined how Twitter had “imploded” under the leadership of Elon Musk and cited the “instant credibility” and “simplicity” of Threads as an alternative.

Yet nearly two months on from its seemingly successful launch, Zuckerberg’s vision of stealing Twitter’s thunder may be little more than a pipe dream.

Even NBC admitted on Aug. 24 that the platform is “struggling for traction.”

“An analysis of Android users by Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, estimated that daily active users on Threads’ Android app peaked at 49.3 million in early July and fell to 10.3 million after a month—a drop of nearly 80%,” the media outlet reported in mid-August.

A week after its July 5 launch, daily active Threads users peaked at around 26.7 million, then gradually declined to around 13.5 million by month’s end, it said.

“Some celebrities who joined the platform before it was available to the public, such as Jennifer Lopez and Tom Brady, haven’t posted at all since launch week. MrBeast, the YouTube star who was the first user to reach 1 million followers on Threads, stopped posting about a month ago.”

One of the most common theories among conservatives for the platform’s underwhelming start is that while Twitter has finally embraced free speech, Threads is a platform governed by strict content moderation and politically driven censorship.

Allum Bokhari, a senior technology reporter at Breitbart News and author of “Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase a Movement and Subvert Democracy,” told The Epoch Times that the weakness of Threads lies in its failure to attract subversive content.

“Threads was touted as the polite, politically correct alternative to Elon Musk’s X. But when the selling point of your platform is inoffensiveness, you can’t be surprised when users simply get bored,” Mr. Bokhari explained.

“X has become friendlier to edgy, dissident content that polite society would prefer to see banned, and that’s precisely why its users remain loyal.”

This photo illustration shows the X logo (formerly Twitter) on a smartphone screen in Los Angeles, California, on July 31, 2023. (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)

Free Speech Is Not the Only Concern

Yet, issues of free speech are far from the only concern.

Jake Denton, a research associate at the Tech Policy Center for The Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times that while X is moving forward with offering new features, Threads still provides a disappointing user experience.

“While Zuckerberg and Meta were quick to boast about the early sign-up numbers for Threads, that momentum has rapidly dissipated, and the platform seems to be in free fall,” he said. 

“What strikes me most is the stark contrast between the early promises of an exciting new platform and the underwhelming reality that one finds upon logging in.”

Users eager for a fresh experience encountered “a feed saturated with interactions between mega-corporations and consumer brands as” Mr. Denton said, comparing it to “stumbling into a virtual networking event for their social media managers.”

“Meta will truly need a miracle to save this platform from irrelevancy. If Zuckerberg can’t find a way to bring interesting content to the platform—content that people actually want to consume—Threads will be dead on arrival,” he predicted.

Not everyone is as pessimistic about the company’s future.

Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, warned that Threads could be waiting for X to experience a crisis that it can take advantage of.

“Threads doesn’t need to be as good as Twitter to dethrone it—all it needs to be is a close-enough substitute … [so] that when Twitter is destabilized and put into crisis, Threads can be there to catch the fall,” he told The Epoch Times. 

“That crisis can come from several directions: financial, if advertiser boycotts ramp back up; legal, via bankrupting lawfare; and regulatory, via new regulations such as the EU’s new disinformation laws.

“There are 2.3 billion Instagram users, versus only 450 million Twitter users. That’s a 5x size advantage Threads has to tap into in terms of the Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp economy into which Threads is being installed. You can’t underestimate that or rule it out. Especially with government and institutional support,” Mr. Benz said.

He added that, given Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to comply with the demands of the Biden administration, Threads may also benefit from being the app of choice for the U.S. national security state.

“Zuckerberg has won back much of that support after doing the Biden admin’s bidding on all things content moderation ahead of the 2020 election and throughout this term,” Mr. Benz said. 

“Because Zuckerberg has proven to be such a reliable ally to the Pentagon and State Department, I would not be surprised if Threads begins to be pushed by the U.S. government for dissident groups funded by the U.S. national security state to use while organizing revolutions or resistance movements abroad,” he said, likening it to the State Department promoting Telegram in 2020 for the attempted color revolution in Belarus.

“It’s hard to predict at the moment,” Mr. Benz said. “… as the 2024 election approaches, or another pandemic scare, or some other crisis or high-stakes geopolitical event appears, the true nature of the threat posed by Threads will make itself more clear.”

However, others believe that Threads’ commitment to censoring the political fringes will prove fatal to its long-term survival.

Among them is former Harvard professor Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, who argued that Zuckerberg’s best hope is that Elon Musk sabotages his own company.

“I don’t see a way for Threads to overtake Twitter/X in the microblogging domain,” said Mr. Epstein.

“By minimizing moderation—which Facebook can’t do on Threads—Twitter is attracting more extreme content than it ever has before, and extreme content draws traffic. I don’t see a way for Facebook to compete with that.”

“Of course, it is always possible that Musk or his appointees will mismanage “X” so badly that the company just implodes,” he continued. “Perhaps Zuckerberg is counting on that.”

Yet given Mr. Musk’s track record of building successful companies, most notably Tesla and SpaceX, some might argue that this possibility remains remote.

Mr. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, remains publicly optimistic, insisting that he will spend the rest of the year developing its product and fighting to retain its users.

“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily … way ahead of what we expected,” he wrote in late July.

“The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”

We’re not exactly known for exuding optimism, but we can’t help but notice a promising micro-trend in which more and more fed-up American retailers and bystanders are thwarting rampant thievery with delicious displays of force. 

Last month, we wrote about the 7-Eleven workers in California who absolutely pummeled a man who’d been filling a rolling garbage can with tobacco products while calling the workers “bitch-ass niggas.” Now, in two more heartwarming episodes, employees at a Los Angeles jewelry store put a fierce end to a man’s attempt at a daylight smash-and-grab robbery, and bystanders in Scottsdale detained a gem thief. 

The first story’s action kicked off a little after 2pm on Saturday at Meza’s Jewelry in, El Monte, which is on the east side of LA. Police told KABC7 that the as-yet unidentified thief entered the store with a hammer, attacked some of the staffers with pepper spray and smashed a display case. 

Thieves, take note: Family-owned businesses are far more likely to strike back than the big-boxers, as the obese thief who targeted Meza’s jewelry quickly found out. “Me, my uncle and my dad were tugging him out,” an employee told KABC. “I was trying to defend my family because as you could see he was hitting my dad and my uncle.” 

In the video, shot from the sidewalk, we see a struggle that turns into a beating reminiscent of the forementioned 7-11 heroics, as the thief is repeatedly whacked with a long stick. As he slowly pushes his flabby body through the doorway, he ends up having his shirt removed, and he flees down the sidewalk with bosoms a-jiggle and —  consistent with the norms of his vibrant American subculture — his pants falling down.    

MUST WATCH: Jewelry store owners give a would-be robber a surprise beat down in El Monte, California.

Small business owners are fighting back amid the Democrat fueled retail crime spree. pic.twitter.com/ITvotkxIAc

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 3, 2023

California is a shoplifters paradise. First, the state passed a proposition making any theft under $950 a misdemeanor. As if that weren’t bad enough, the state’s senate passed a bill in June that would actually make it illegal to interfere with shoplifters. 

Adding to our detection of a trend in the making, the weekend brought news of another tale of citizens pursuing justice in another case where a jewelry store was targeted. In this case, the thief ran out of a Scottsdale, Arizona store with a tray of treasures, only to be stopped by noble bystanders. 

“[They were] screaming ‘just catch him! He just robbed the jewelry store!’ So we just grabbed him, held him down, and the police were here within three to four minutes,” one of those bystanders, who only was identified as Mark, told FOX10. 

Bystanders stop robbery suspect in Scottsdale Arizona 👏 👏 pic.twitter.com/dDUAiKIUiP

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) September 3, 2023

“They saved my product, saved the neighborhood, and I want to thank everybody that sacrificed themselves to help a neighbor or stranger that they didn’t know,” said Anna Marina Solakian, of Marina Jewelry. Fifty-three-year-old Troy Bell was arrested. 

Finally, to keep the smiles rolling, here’s another look at last month’s 7-Eleven beatdown extraordinaire: 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by 5 element phd (@yo_folkers)

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence – the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor – obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system.

Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent.

Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions – the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally.

Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed.

It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle – and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor – as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two.

Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave.

Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

By Benjamin Picton, senior macro strategist at Rabobank

Today is the Labor Day holiday in the United States, so expect a fairly quiet and illiquid trading day in the markets. That does give us a lovely opportunity to talk about the Americans while they are enjoying some time off though, and particularly to talk about the US non-farm payroll figures released last Friday. It’s fair to say that from the perspective of the Fed and the Biden administration, non-farm read as a bit of a Goldilocks moment. According to the survey, the labor market appears not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Employment rose by more than expected (187k vs 170k on the Bloomberg survey), participation rose, the unemployment rate lifted from historic lows of 3.5% to 3.8% and wage pressures were less acute than anticipated at just 0.2% for the month. All-in-all, the survey gave the impression that maybe the Fed has managed to pull a rabbit out of its hat and set the economy on a glide path for the much touted “soft landing”. This is particularly the case given that the non-farm survey came hot on the heels of the JOLTS report earlier in the week, which showed half a million fewer job vacancies than the participants in the Bloomberg survey were expecting.

Now to introduce the bears and perhaps predictably one of them is us, because we remain unconvinced that the benign labor market data does actually presage a soft landing in the USA. Our resident Fed watcher, Philip Marey, has pushed back his US recession forecast to 4Q23/1Q24 as the flow of data remains unexpectedly resilient, but a recession is still very much our base-case view and has been since 2022. I’ll draw on my high school calculus to illustrate some of our thinking behind this point: The slope of a curve approaches zero as you approach a point of stationarity. As such, it only stands to reason that we would start to see more moderate growth and labor market outcomes as we approach that stationary point for GDP or labor market curves, so what we are really saying is that we are closing in on the point of inflection where the flow of data is at risk of deteriorating at an accelerating pace once we go past it. Capiche?

Our wet-blanketry didn’t seem to move the market on Friday though. Despite higher bond yields, the S&P500 was up 0.18% for the day, but there was an interesting divergence between the Dow Jones (+0.33%) and the duration-sensitive NASDAQ (-0.02%) that seems to reflect the ~6bps steepening in the 2’s10’s to close the week. Are equity markets finally beginning to accept the higher for longer narrative? If they are, nobody seems to have told bond traders yet. The 2’s10’s is still heavily inverted at -70, so we are going to have to see a lot more curve steepening in the months ahead to reconcile financial markets with Fed speak, and that probably suggests continued pressure on long duration equities that most metrics tell us are substantially overvalued. That implies that we would need to see a selloff in the long-end that could coincide with our expected recession. Usually this would be dismissed as an impossibility, but in a market where central bankers openly admit that they have no roadmap to suit the times, the appropriate fairy tale may actually be Alice In Wonderland, where you need to be able to imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

Returning to my original metaphor, bear number two is Europe. Rabobank has recently changed our growth forecast to feature -0.1% GDP predictions for both Q3 and Q4 of 2023. That means that we are now expecting (another) technical recession for the second half of this year. To compound the bad news, we had a Eurozone CPI figure released last week that seemed to suggest more of that pesky stickiness in price pressures. Headline CPI moved not a jot to remain at 5.3% in August, and core inflation declined only moderately to 5.3% from 5.5% a month earlier. The fall in core inflation is certainly welcome, but people actually pay headline prices, not just core prices, and there’s still a long way to go to reach the 2% target with base effects providing less help in the months ahead, and energy prices rising again. It’s no stretch to say the road ahead looks very rocky.

Indeed, with war in Ukraine still raging, a painful and costly energy transition underway and the German manufacturing sector increasingly saying that “somebody (China) has been sleeping in MY bed!”, it might be more fitting to describe the European experience via a darker, more gothic (possibly Romanian) fairy tale of the kind that gives small children nightmares. This feeds into our expectation that we will see no more rate rises from the ECB, despite their attempts to scare us at Jackson Hole and their forecast that inflation will get nowhere near the 2% target until 2025.

Bear number three is China itself, and this is the bear that looms over all others. The travails of the Chinese real estate sector are by now well known, and the world seems to be waking up to the fact that the Chinese central government has a very different perspective on the morality of economic stimulus measures than we do here in the West. As Michael Every pointed out last week China values production, not consumption, and this is reflected in the reticence to target households with cash handouts that pose the sinister moral threat of perhaps being spent on blue jeans, Coca-Cola or Barbie dolls. Instead we have seen piecemeal stimulus efforts in the form of cuts to the reserve requirement ratio, the prime rate, the 7-day reverse repo rate and the 1-year MLF rate all aimed at increasing investment in new housing stock. There has also been confirmation recently that the central government has directed Chinese banks to pass interest rate cuts through to existing borrowers for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008, and conjecture that Chinese banks have been asked to loosen their definition of prime borrowers (that sounds like an idea borrowed from the West).

The focus on real production is welcome news to us here in China’s quarry (Australia), where our economic fortunes are heavily dictated by demand for bulk commodities. Chinese economic jitters have spread to this part of the world by way of substantial weakening in both the Australian and New Zealand dollars in the month of August. That raises risks of importing inflation, but we expect the RBA will gloss over this at outgoing Governor Phil Lowe’s final monetary policy meeting tomorrow, after which he will be saying “somebody has been sitting in MY chair”. The RBA will instead point to recent signs of softening in labor markets and timely inflation indicators as sufficient justification to remain on hold. With official rates of just 4.10% and the Bloomberg survey suggesting Q2 growth of 0.3% this week, it’s tempting to suggest that the RBA also may have engineered a soft landing, but beware the fourth bear, a bonus bear of sorts that we here in Australia call the Drop Bear. It is known to come out of nowhere…

President Joe Biden, who lied about graduating at the top of his class at law school (and later apologized), is most worried about being perceived as ‘stupid,’ according to his biographer, Franklin Foer.

During a Sunday discussion, Foer – an Atlantic staff writer who was allegedly a key disseminator of Russiagate propaganda, told NBC‘s “Meet the Press” that “one of the primary insecurities’ of the President ‘is that he does not want to be perceived as stupid.”

And when asked how he would react if Biden decided not to run in 2024, Foer said “It would be a surprise to me. But it wouldn’t be a total surprise.”

“When he talks about his life, he uses this word, fate, constantly,” Foer told host Chuck Todd. “Joe Biden is a very religious guy, and fate is a word loaded with religious meaning. And he always talks about, ‘He can’t say where fate goes.’ And so I always, when I hear that, to me, it’s the ellipses in the sentence when he’s talking about his own future.”

Watch:

WATCH: Biden has “insecurities” about being “perceived as stupid,” says @FranklinFoer, who wrote a book about the president’s first term.

“He has this plagiarism scandal back in the 1980s. So when he walks into an interview … he wants to have mastery of what he’s discussing pic.twitter.com/6oEXXE7vbm

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 3, 2023

More via the Daily Mail;

There are already two Democrats running longshot bids in the Democratic primary: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson. Both attended the Iowa State Fair last month in an attempt to drum up support for an alternative Democratic candidate.

A poll last week reveals that 77 percent of Americans are concerned about Biden’s age and ability to serve out a second term.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, 77, also faces questions over his age.

If either Biden or Trump were elected again in 2024, they would set a new record as the oldest-ever inaugurated U.S. President.

While a candidate must be 35-years-old to run for the White House, there is no cap. Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has suggested implementing an age limit of 75 to seek the presidency. She has also said required mental competency tests would be a good idea.

Foer’s book The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future provides a comprehensive inside account of the President’s thinking and the goings-on of the Biden administration.

“It doesn’t take Bob Woodward to understand that Joe Biden is old,” said Foer, adding “And I’m not a gerontologist and I can’t predict how the next couple of years will age Joe Biden.”

“I think what my book does is shows that… he’s buried in details. He’s somebody who is very technocratic, really obsessed with the intricacies of policy. He’s a very activist president in that he micromanages a lot of the dealings in the White House.”

Yes, Biden is micromanaging the White House. We’re sure.

Authored by Amaka Nwaokocha via CoinTelegraph.com,

In a recent X (formerly Twitter) post, Cathie Wood, the CEO of ARK Invest, expressed her optimistic view on the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence (AI).

In the post, Wood hinted at the transformative potential in the dynamic synergy between AI and Bitcoin, emphasizing the possibilities and positive implications the technologies hold for diverse industries and the overall economic landscape.

The convergence between Bitcoin – and AI could transform the way companies organize, causing a collapse in costs and an explosion in productivity. I was blown away by the possibilities these brilliant entrepreneurs are creating. Look for this podcast on Thursday! https://t.co/kPW92CuhFQ

— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) September 2, 2023

Backing Wood’s optimistic outlook is a research document published by ARK Invest titled “Investing In Artificial Intelligence: Where Will Equity Values Surface?,“ suggesting that both Wood and ARK Invest are assessing the significance of AI within investment strategies.

“…tech’s center of gravity is shifting dramatically. Large language models are presenting super-exponential growth opportunities that could leave mega-cap tech companies flat-footed.”

Throughout the years, Wood has allocated investments to various AI-related stocks, demonstrating her strong belief in the rising technology.

Wood’s well-known enthusiasm for Bitcoin is evident through ARK’s endeavors concerning a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). Furthermore, ARK is no stranger to digital asset sector investments, with substantial holdings in Coinbase and Robinhood.

The document also highlights ARK Invest’s strategies that have reaped rewards from investments in artificial intelligence tech stocks. The ARK Disruptive Innovation ETF, dedicated to AI and other pioneering technologies, outperformed the Nasdaq 100 Index, achieving a significant mid-year profit of 41.2%.

Wood’s post, along with ARK’s research, illustrates the growing influence of AI in the realm of investments. The fusion of Bitcoin and AI can potentially trigger a transformation in corporate operations, potentially reshaping productivity and cost dynamics. As investors explore fresh avenues for growth, Wood’s nod to Bitcoin and AI could see more investment flowing into the two technologies in the future.

After a burst of activity in the last week of August, and the summer, we start the first unofficial week of Fall with a slew of traders coming back from the Hamptons and a relatively muted calendar, which includes US factory orders (tomorrow) and more interestingly the ISM services and trade balance on Wednesday (economists expect the ISM gauge to drop to 52.5 from 52.7 in July). Consumer credit data on Friday will round out the week, and will be notable to watch after last month’s unexpected plunge in revolving credit, which turned negative for the first time since covid.

As DB’s Jim Reid notes, this week will be an interesting one for central banks. The RBA are expected to stay on hold tomorrow following recent softer data (Lowe’s final meeting) and then the BoC will now more likely stay on hold on Wednesday following a surprising -0.2% fall in Q2 GDP on Friday against expectations of +1.2%. Later on Wednesday the Fed’s Beige Book will show whether the strong start to Q3 US data is corroborated. Over in Europe, highlights include ECB’s consumer expectations survey and inflation expectations tomorrow. In addition, we will see the BoE’s Decision Maker Panel survey on Thursday as well as a long list of ECB speakers throughout the week, as there are with the Fed ahead of the coming quiet period. In Asia, two appearances from BoJ officials will also be of interest. That said, economists expects markets to be surprised if either emphasizes the need for policy normalization soon.

Back to economic data. Important releases for Germany include the trade balance on Monday and factory orders on Wednesday, followed by industrial production on Thursday. In France, similar indicators will be released, including the trade balance on Thursday and industrial production on Friday. Zooming out to the Eurozone-level data, the July PPI report tomorrow and retail sales on Wednesday will be among the highlights.

Trade data will be among the highlights in China this week, with the release due on Thursday. The Caixin services PMI release tomorrow will round out other PMI reports released last week that showed an improvement in manufacturing but a miss in the official non-manufacturing gauge.

Below is a day-by-day calendar of events

Monday September 4

• Data: Japan August monetary base, Germany July trade balance
• Central banks: ECB’s Elderson, Nagel and Lane speak

Tuesday September 5

• Data: US July factory orders, China August Caixin services PMI, UK August official reserves changes, new car registrations, Japan July household spending, Italy August services PMI, Eurozone July PPI
• Central banks: ECB’s Lagarde, Schnabel and Guindos chair panels, ECB’s Visco speaks, RBA decision, ECB CES inflation expectations data
• Earnings: Partners Group

Wednesday September 6

• Data: US August ISM services, July trade balance, UK August construction PMI, Germany August construction PMI, July factory orders, Eurozone July retail sales, Canada Q2 labor productivity, July international merchandise trade
• Central banks: Fed’s Beige book, BoC decision, Fed’s Collins and Logan speak, BoJ’s Takata speaks

Thursday September 7

• Data: US initial jobless claims, China August trade balance, foreign reserves, Japan July leading and coincident indices, Italy July retail sales, Germany July industrial production, France Q2 total payrolls, July trade balance, current account balance, Canada July building permits
• Central banks: Fed’s Bostic, Williams and Harker speak, BoJ’s Nakagawa speaks, ECB’s Wunsch, Villeroy, Holzmann,  Knot and Elderson speak, BoE’s DMP survey

Friday September 8

• Data: US Q2 household change in net worth, July wholesale trade sales, consumer credit, Japan August Economy Watchers survey, bank lending, July trade balance, labor cash earnings, BoP current account balance, France July industrial and manufacturing production, Canada Q2 capacity utilization rate, August jobs report
• Central banks: Fed’s Bostic and Logan speaks

Looking at just the US, Goldman writes that the key economic data release this week is the ISM services report on Wednesday. There are many speaking engagements from Fed officials this week, including governors Bowman and Barr, and presidents Williams, Collins, Logan, Harker, Goolsbee, and Bostic.

Monday, September 4

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled. The NYSE is closed for the US federal holiday.

Tuesday, September 5

• 10:00 AM Factory orders, July (GS -2.5%, consensus -2.5%, last +2.3%); Durable goods orders, July final (last -5.2%); Durable goods orders ex-transportation, July final (last +0.5%); Core capital goods orders, July final (last +0.1%); Core capital goods shipments, July final (last -0.2%)

Wednesday, September 6

• 08:30 AM Boston Fed President Collins (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Boston Fed President Susan Collins will discuss the economy and policy outlook at an event hosted by the New England Council in Boston. On August 24, Collins said, “I am not yet seeing the slowing that I think is going to be part of what we need for that sustainable trajectory to get back to 2% [inflation] in a reasonable amount of time…that resilience really does suggest we may have more to do.” She added, “We may be near, we could even be at a place where we would hold…But certainly additional increments are possible, and we need to look holistically and be really patient right now and not try to get ahead of what the data will tell us as it unfolds.”
• 08:30 AM Trade balance, July (GS -$68.0bn, consensus -$68.0bn, last -$65.5bn)
• 09:00 AM Ex-Fed official Bullard speaks: Former St. Louis Fed President James Bullard will participate in a live discussion with NABE President Julia Coronado. The hour-long webinar will include audience questions.
• 09:45 AM S&P Global US services PMI, August final (consensus 51.2, last 51.0)
• 10:00 AM ISM services index, August (GS 52.7, consensus 52.5, last 52.7): We estimate that the ISM services index was unchanged at 52.7 in August. Our forecast reflects net improvement in business surveys (services tracker +0.3pt to 52.7) but the pullback in the stock market and our GSAI.
• 02:00 PM Beige Book, September FOMC meeting period: The Fed’s Beige Book is a summary of regional economic anecdotes from the 12 Federal Reserve districts. The Beige Book for the July FOMC meeting period noted that overall economic activity increased slightly since late May. Consumer spending was mixed, manufacturing activity edged up in half the districts and declined in the other half, and demand for residential real estate remained steady. Overall expectations for the coming months continued to call for slow growth. In this month’s Beige book, we look for anecdotes related to growth, sentiment, and the evolution of labor market tightness and inflationary pressures.
• 03:00 PM Dallas Fed President Logan (FOMC voter) speaks: Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan will take part in a community listening session to explore economic issues facing the Lubbock area. On July 6, Logan said, “I remain very concerned about whether inflation will return to target in a sustainable and timely way…the continuing outlook for above-target inflation and a stronger-than-expected labor market calls for more restrictive monetary policy.”

Thursday, September 7

• 08:30 AM Nonfarm productivity, Q2 final (GS +3.2%, consensus +3.4%, last +3.7%); Unit labor costs, Q2 final (GS +2.0%, consensus +1.9%, last +1.6%): We expect a 0.5pp downward revision to nonfarm productivity growth to +3.2% (qoq saar) in the final Q2 reading. We expect growth in unit labor costs—compensation per hour divided by output per hour—to be revised up by 0.4pp to +2.0%.
• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended September 2 (GS 225k, consensus 234k, last 228k); Continuing jobless claims, week ended August 26 (consensus 1,715k, last 1,725k)
• 10:00 AM Philadelphia Fed President Harker (FOMC voter) speaks: Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker will discuss the future of fintech in a speech at the Philadelphia Fed’s seventh annual Fintech Conference. On August 24, Harker said, “Right now I think that we’ve probably done enough…We are in a restrictive stance, do we have to keep going even more and more restrictive?” He added, “What I’ve heard loud and clear through my summer travels is, ‘please, you’ve gone up very rapidly.’ We need to absorb that.”
• 11:45 AM Chicago Fed President Goolsbee (FOMC voter) speaks: Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee will deliver welcome remarks at the bank’s Fourth Annual Career Pathways in Economics and Related Fields Conference. On August 25, Goolsbee said, “I don’t know [if we’re done raising the fed funds rate] …It does feel like we’re in a period where if conditions keep going like what we’ve seen the last couple of months, our argument is going to revolve around how long should we keep rates at the level they are at rather than how much higher should the rates go.”
• 02:00 PM St. Louis Fed Hosts Public Engagement on Presidential Search
• 03:30 PM New York Fed President Williams (FOMC voter) speaks: New York Fed President John Williams will participate in a moderated discussion at the Bloomberg Market Forum. On August 2, Williams said, “Monetary policy is in a good place — we’ve got the policy where we need to be…Whether we need to adjust it in terms of that peak rate — but also how long we need to keep a restrictive stance — is going to depend on the data.” He added, “I expect that we will need to keep a restrictive stance for some time…Eventually, monetary policy will need over the next few years to get back to a more normal — whatever that normal is — a more normal setting of policy.”
• 03:45 PM Atlanta Fed President Bostic (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic will discuss the economic outlook in a moderated conversation with Broward College president Gregory Haile. An audience Q&A is expected. On August 31, Bostic said, “I feel policy is appropriately restrictive. We should be cautious and patient and let the restrictive policy continue to influence the economy, lest we risk tightening too much and inflicting unnecessary economic pain…that does not mean I am for easing policy any time soon.”
• 04:55 PM Governor Bowman speaks: Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman will participate in a panel discussion at the Philadelphia Fed’s annual fintech conference on the future of money and consumer protection. A moderated Q&A is expected. On August 5, Bowman said, “I also expect that additional rate increases will likely be needed to get inflation on a path down to the FOMC’s 2% target…We should remain willing to raise the federal funds rate at a future meeting if the incoming data indicate that progress on inflation has stalled.”
• 07:00 PM Atlanta Fed President Bostic (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic will deliver remarks at an event hosted by the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance. A Q&A with audience is expected.
• 07:05 PM Dallas Fed President Logan (FOMC voter) speaks: Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan will discuss monetary policy at an event hosted by the Dallas Business Club at Southern Methodist University. Speech text is expected.

Friday, September 8

• 09:00 AM Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Barr speaks: Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr will discuss payments innovation at the Philadelphia Fed’s annual fintech conference. Speech text and a moderated Q&A with audience are expected. Bloomberg reported last week that US regulators issued liquidity planning notices to regional lenders.
• 10:00 AM Wholesale inventories, July final (consensus -0.1%, last -0.1%)

Source: DB, Goldman, Barclays

The father of Elon Musk is worried for his son’s safety, after he says The New Yorker painted a target on his back with an article highlighting Elon’s influence on government decisions about the war in Ukraine, and implied that a conversation Musk had with Russian President Vladimir Putin means Kremliny things are afoot.

Errol Musk, 77, told The Sun that the article was “a hit job, a shadow government-sponsored opening salvo on Elon – with one Pentagon official telling The New Yorker that Elon was treated like an “unelected official.” The article also claims that Musk’s “influence is more brazen and expansive” than previous “meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations.”

When asked by the Sun whether he feared Elon’s assassination by the “shadow government,” he replied “Yes,” suggesting that the New Yorker article was “the artillery-like softening up of the enemy before the actual attack,” according.

Interestingly, The New Yorker article came out just days before the Biden DOJ sued Musk’s SpaceX for allegedly discriminating against non-US citizens (as all rocket companies and the US government tend not to do).

In July, President Joe ‘The Big Guy’ Biden suggested that Musk could be investigated for buying X, formerly Twitter, with the help of a Saudi Arabian conglomerate.

When asked if Musk was a threat to national security, Biden said “Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at.

“Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that.

“I’m suggesting they’re worth being looked at and that’s all I’ll say,” Biden continued, adding “There’s a lot of ways.”

Musk has also faced assault from censorship advocates, who have accused him of allowing a rise in hate speech and disinformation since he bought X. Musk’s supporters say he’s protecting freedom of speech, though many have claimed they’re still being suppressed by the social media giant.

The day before the DOJ sued SpaceX, the DOJ said: “We’re currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats.

“Our work is ongoing. These increased investments in people, policy and product will further ensure our communities have access to open, accurate and safe political discourse on X.”

In May, Musk’s mother scolded her son for joking about assassination.

That’s not funny😠😠 https://t.co/KgLAzY3F8s

— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) May 9, 2022

Musk getting it from all sides

Musk has previously joked to Joe Rogan that he could be assassinated after former Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin made a veiled threat over Musk supplying Ukraine with Starlink satellite service last May.

Elon and Errol are reportedly estranged, with Elon once calling his father a “terrible human being.” That said, earlier this year Errol said that his son is a “force for good.”

Authored by Ben Bartee via PJMedia.com,

Vivek Ramaswamy, as a ‘Person of Color’ who refuses to adhere to ‘Social Justice’ dogma by dutifully assuming the role of permanent victim, really pushes the Democrat Party/corporate state media (one and the same entity) buttons.

Here is MSNBC siccing its #1 racist attack dog, longtime race-grifter Al Sharpton – truly a one-trick pony – on Ramaswamy.

Similarly, here is possibly the dumbest member of Congress (arguably edging fellow top contender and astroturfed, pseudo-populist “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley) Jamaal Bowman (spelled with two A’s for presumably some extra ethnic flavor or whatever) attacking GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on the grounds that he (an Indian with brown skin) is something called a ‘White Supremacist’.

Keep black women’s name out of your mouf* [sic], first of all. That’s number one.

Number two, keep black people name [sic] out of your mouf [sic].

And instead of spewing hateful, disgusting ignorant, dumb**s rhetoric, how about you pay homage to the black people in this country that have fought and died for the freedoms you exercise today?

How about you pay homage to the black people historically that have continued to save the soul of America and move America forward?

How bout [sic] that? Instead of fitting it nicely into the pocket of the White Supremacists that you are…

Keep a black woman’s name out [sic] your mouf [sic]. Keep black people’s name out [sic] your mouf [sic]…

Have some respect, so that maybe you’ll be taken seriously one day.

Bowman is a darling of the corporate state media circuit, which is, of course, irrefutable proof that he is a fake populist and a sleazy grifter capitalizing on his skin color for clout and cash.

Here he is getting drooled over by former White House press secretary and current MSNBC propagandist (it’s the same job) Jen Psaki at the Rosa Parks Educational Campus.

Real hard-hitting journalism, there, Jen. Way to hold a government official’s feet to the fire.

Following several days of widespread reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to skip this week’s G20 summit in India, President Biden has voiced that he’s disappointed” Xi won’t be there.

“I am disappointed, but I am going to see him,” Biden responded to reporters Sunday during a trip to Delaware when asked about Xi’s likely absence at the annual major summit among leader’s of the globe’s top economies.

Biden did not speculate or offer any timeline on when he might meet with Xi in the future. After the reports of Xi’s expected absence, Biden’s words mark the highest level confirmation from a G20 country leader that the Chinese leader won’t be in attendance.

Last Friday, China’s foreign ministry once again lashed out over what it says has created the climate of current tensions and rivalry. “It accused the US of comprehensively ‘containing’ China through wars of tariffs, trade, tech, chips and rules,” noted South China Morning Post. 

Washington’s repeated calls for “de-risking, not decoupling” from China’s economy, has been a hard sell to Chinese leaders, analysts say after the two countries set up a mechanism this week to assess how they can jointly tackle sensitive trade and tech curbs in the coming months.

Hailing her “productive” China trip that marked “an important beginning” in managing bilateral tensions, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo relayed the message once again to her Chinese counterparts this week that the US does not seek to decouple, nor does it intend to hold back China’s economy.

Crucially, Xi hasn’t missed an in-person G20 summit since he became president in 2013. FT has cited Zhang Baohui, professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to point out that he “never missed a G20 meeting before because it’s a vital occasion for China to try to shape the global narrative.”

Connect the Dots

A. “Xi Jinping dominates Brics summit in S. Africa as leaders endorse a Beijing-led expansion.”

B. “Xi to skip G20 summit in India, China to send Li instead.”

C. ??

— Lawrence McDonald (@Convertbond) September 4, 2023

“G20 offers China that platform to outcompete the American messages,” Zhang added. Instead, Premier Li Qiang will represent China at the Indian capital where other heads of state will gather, including US President Joe Biden.

This is already being anticipated as a major setback for a summit beset by unity problems and is a deeply symbolic snub given Xi’s prominence at the BRICS summit in South Africa within a mere two weeks ago.