Following November’s unexpected collapse, analysts expected a big rebound in US durable goods orders in preliminary December data (despite Manufacturing survey data dismally deep in contraction). They were right but the scale of the rebound was almost unprecedented as Durable Goods New Orders roared 5.6% MoM (more than double the +2.5% expected)

Source: Bloomberg

That is the biggest jump since July 2020.

The big driver of the headline surge was a massive surge in non-defense aircraft orders (the biggest monthly jump since Boeing’s rip in Oct 2014)…

Source: Bloomberg

December’s durable-goods orders was boosted by aircraft after Boeing received 250 orders – up from 21 in November and 122 in October – according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That was the largest monthly gross order since December 2017.

Source: Bloomberg

Dow that look sustainable?

Which explains why the Durable Goods Orders Ex-Transports was so weak (down 0.1% MoM) and non-defense, ex-air orders tumbled 0.2% MoM…

Source: Bloomberg

Which left the YoY rise in Core Durable Goods Orders up only 3.33% (well below inflation) – the weakest since Jan 2021.

A mixed picture for hawks and doves, and remember, December’s ISM manufacturing survey showed factories facing weak demand. Most respondents in the survey were pessimistic, reporting that their companies and suppliers are uncertain about the course of the economy and are lowering forecasts for 2023.

Following last week’s unexpected plunge in initial and continuing claims – despite numerous layoff announcements – analysts expected a small rebound this week but they were wrong as the number of American filing for unemployment benefits for the first time tumbled to 186k (205k exp). Unadjusted claims crashed back to earth…

Source: Bloomberg

That is the lowest level for initial claims since April 2022.

Last week we saw an unusually large plunge in claims in NY state. This week the massive outlier is California…

While initial claims continued to slide, continuing claims rebounded (for the second week in a row) the prior week to 1.675mm…

Source: Bloomberg

This is not the picture that Powell is hoping for given the unprecedented tightening of monetary policy he has unleashed over the last year. There is nothing in this data that warrants a ‘pause’ by The Fed.

The headline claims data is completely decoupled from ISM Surveys’ jobs components…

Source: Bloomberg

Interestingly, however, the aggregate composite number of Americans claiming benefits is rising…

Source: Bloomberg

This looks a lot more like reality we would expected after 100bps of bps of rate-hikes.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.”

Correspondent J.D. read The Forgotten History of the 1970s and kindly added a graphic example of the remarkable transformation wrought by the federal Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations mandating the clean-up of the nation’s air and other public “commons”–the nation’s biosphere and resources that we all share as an essential part of the common good and the public trust.

The point of my previous post was to explain that measuring the economy by narrow measures of “growth” and “profits” grossly distorts what’s actually happening and what’s actually valuable–and despite economists’ delusional obsession with “growth” and “profits,” it isn’t “growth” or “profits.”

What’s actually valuable are advances in national well-being and security and the common good. These may be advanced by “growth” and “profits,” but they can also be diminished by “growth” and “profits.”

As Adam Smith took great pains to explain, open-market Capitalism can only function within a moral and ethical social structure. Stripped of moral constraints, “growth” and “profits” become fatal cancers in the economy and society. In and of themselves, “growth” and “profits” have no moral or ethical center; if those benefiting from “growth” and “profits” destroy the public commons and diminish the common good, those costs are ignored.

That’s the problem with proclaiming “markets solve all problems.” They don’t; in fact, left to their no-moral-compass ways, they create horrendous problems for the many subjected to the profiteering of the few, problems that destroy public “commons,” the common good and the public trust.

What better way to foster “growth” and boost “profits” than dump offal and carcasses in the public’s rivers, rather than bear the costs of proper disposal? This is one manifestation of The Tragedy of the Commons, a concept clarified by Garrett Hardin in his seminal 1968 essay of the same name: if a for-profit private enterprise can offload costs of its own production onto the public, that cost savings enables faster growth and higher profits.

But who benefits from this growth and higher profits? The few who own the private enterprise. Who bears the destruction and costs? The public. Laying waste to public resources is the “market solution,” and any corporate manager who dared slash profits and growth to fund proper disposal of offal will be quickly fired and sent to Corporate Siberia, as the howls of outrage from “shareholders” (a.k.a. the top 0.1%) deafen the ears of the management.

This is why America’s air and water became increasingly polluted, unhealthy and ugly: dumping private-sector waste into the nation’s air and water boosted “growth” and “profits.” I’ve put these words in quotes to denote that they aren’t actually expansions of anything remotely beneficial to the national interest or the American public; they were only beneficial to the few who owned and managed the for-profit private enterprises.

There are many ways for-profit private enterprises dump costs onto the public: profits are private but costs are public. Corporations can pay such low wages that their employees need publicly funded food stamps to get by. Financial companies take extraordinary risks to reap immense profits, knowing they’ll get to keep the profits and the Federal Reserve and Treasury will bail them out at the public’s expense.

Stripped of ethics enforced to defend the public’s interests, corporations routinely lie, cheat, defraud and embezzle to boost profits, knowing the fine will be modest: just the cost of boosting profits by any means available. Consider this data base of 6,300 major corporate fines and settlements from the early 1990s to 2015 compiled by Jon Morse. No CEO or other manager paid any personal fines or served any prison time for any of these thousands of violations.

So let’s be clear: the “market solution” without any regulations to defend the public’s interests is rotting carcasses floating in America’s rivers. The public’s interests–the nation’s commons and the common good–are defended by its representational government. To the degree this government is corrupted by private wealth, it fails its sacred duty to defend the public’s interests. When it does its job, then the meaning of growth and profit change.

When the public’s interests are defended, “growth” that benefits the few is redefined as advances in public well-being. “Profit” that benefits the few at the expense of the many is redefined as the public commons and resources profiting from wise management for the good of all rather than the few.

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.” This “stagflation” was the direct result of the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars (in today’s money) of private profits and government tax revenues to clean up the wanton destruction of the public commons.

As I pointed out in The Forgotten History of the 1970s, additional vast, sustained investments in re-engineering the nation’s industrial base to become more efficient and globally competitive eventually boosted the economy and private-sector profits.

The point here is structural transformations take time and require immense investments, time and investments that demand sacrifices of everyone–including the top 0.1% and “shareholders.” If we fail to undertake needed transformations, the result is stagnation and a death-spiral down the black hole of sclerosis, corruption, greed and exploitation.

Here are J.D.’s comments and the photos he submitted:

“Your article on the role of 70s rebuild in Stagflation really hit a note with me. I was born in ’58 and watched, and participated in, the transformation. I am a biologist and an environmental engineer and have worked over 34 years for a federal agency in Water Pollution.

You’re right, the unmeasured wealth of a cleaner environment is huge. Allow me a single example. Here in Kansas City, the Kansas River flows into the Missouri River draining a huge watershed. For nearly 100 years the slaughter houses of the “East Bottoms” in KSMO discharged with no treatment into the two rivers. KCMO and KCK had no treatment of municipal waste. The Missouri river was foul and had fish kills.

In the 70s and 80s treatment was brought online. I came on board in ’88 and have contributed to the rest of the work. Last fall we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act at Kaw Point, where the two rivers meet. Now a park. We showed a picture of the site from the Nov. 1971 issue of National Geographic. Yep, that is blood, floating fat, and a cow carcass.

For the past 15 years I have worked in a 340 mile kayak race (MR340) that starts at the point. We are up to 450 boats now and thousands participate.

KCMO is now building apartments and a huge women’s soccer stadium on the riverfront. None of that would have been considered before.”

Thank you, J.D. for the striking example. Somehow I doubt there would hundreds of kayakers and spectators anxious to participate in the Dead Carcass and Putrid Offal Regatta, nor many buyers for the Stench of Offal Condominiums.

What’s more valuable in the long run? Putrid offal in the river to boost private “profits” by offloading costs onto the public commons, or a clean river? In the long run, the clean river is more valuable by any measure.

Kansas City Sewer History (video presentation, 44 min)

*  *  *

My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.  Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Some European politicians and economists are breathing a sigh of relief after mild temperatures, increasing liquefied natural gas shipments, and above-average natural gas stockpiles have so far averted a worsening energy crisis this winter. Other politicians believe the energy crunch won’t be over for many years. 

“Gas storage is up and gas prices are down. Inflation is falling and uncertainty is declining,” Deutsche Bank AG wrote in a note this week, adding, “We can afford to be more optimistic.” 

As of late, Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, has seen an improvement in business outlook as recession fears recede, according to data from the Ifo Institute, a Munich-based economic researcher. 

Ifo President Clemens Fuest told Bloomberg TV:

“The most important risk for the German economy was a gas-rationing scenario … and that risk is off the table now.”

There’s a lot to be happy about in Europe: Dutch front-month NatGas, the continent’s benchmark, slid as much as 5% to 55 euros a megawatt-hour today, the lowest level since late 2021. Prices have collapsed by more than 83% since peaking at 311 euros a megawatt-hour last August. 

However, the optimism could be short-lived because Germany is years from entirely substituting Russian NatGas flows with LNG shipments. 

Last week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Bloomberg that German learned a hard lesson in its addiction for cheap Russian NatGas. He said the country is now rejiggering supply chains that will increase capacity for LNG imports at major ports. 

A new report via the country’s Economy Ministry shows Germany will install 56 billion cubic meters of domestic LNG import capacity by 2026. By 2030, capacities will increase to 76.5 billion cubic meters or about 80% of total German NatGas consumption in 2021. 

The ministry pointed out that even though current NatGas storage facilities are above normal levels, there are mounting risks later this year that storage could sink to dangerously low levels and result in shortages. 

“The truth is, there won’t be enough in the next three to four years of LNG production capacity in the world to meet the growing demand. So the unspoken strategy is that Germany will continue to pay crazy prices and other, less rich countries go empty-handed,” Christian Leye, a Bundestag Left Party representative, told Bloomberg.

Germany has reduced its dependence on Russian NatGas by importing LNG from other EU countries and increasing NatGas pipeline flows from Norway and the Netherlands. Germany didn’t have a choice after explosions rocked Nord Stream last year. An issue we see is that Germany’s NatGas storage was filled last summer when Russian NatGas was still flowing — not so much anymore. 

Deutsche Bank expects EU NatGas prices to fluctuate between 50 and 100 euros a megawatt-hour this year. It’s only a matter of time before the temporary relief evaporates and the energy crisis resurfaces. 

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

Some 35,000 PayPal user accounts have been hacked by “credential stuffing,” resulting in exposed names and Social Security numbers, according to a notification posted on a government website.

Through its lawyers, the California-based payment processor sent a notice to Maine’s attorney general. The company also sent a letter, dated Jan. 19, about the data breach to impacted users.

That letter said that the accounts were breached sometime between Dec. 6 and Dec. 8, 2022. The company said that it was able to deal with the attack soon after it occurred, according to the letter.

The notification to users said (pdf) that 34,942 users were impacted by the incident and that unauthorized third parties gained access to their accounts. Those third parties, which were not identified, could view full names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, and tax identification numbers.

“We have no information suggesting that any of your personal information was misused as a result of this incident, or that there are any unauthorized transactions on your account,” said PayPal’s letter.

Specifically, the hackers used a “credential stuffing” attack that involves automatically injecting login credentials that were found during previous data breaches.

“If you detect any suspicious activity on an account, change the password and security questions immediately, and promptly notify the company where the account is maintained,” PayPal said. “You may also add additional security for your PayPal account by enabling ‘2-step verification’ in your Account Settings. When links are present in an email, individuals should hover [their] mouse over the links to view the actual destination URL and should not click on the link if [they] are unsure of the destination URL or website.”

Furthermore, the company said it has reset passwords on the afflicted PayPal accounts. Impacted users will also get free identity monitoring services from Equifax, the consumer credit reporting company.

In a statement to PCMag, the company maintained that it was only a “small number of PayPal customer accounts” that were impacted by the breach. The Epoch Times has contacted PayPal for comment. It noted that neither its website nor its systems were hacked.

“PayPal’s payment systems were not impacted, and no financial information was accessed,” the firm said. “We have contacted affected customers directly to provide guidance on this matter to help them further protect their information. The security and privacy of our customers’ account information [remain] a top priority for PayPal, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

More Details

Sam Curry, the chief security officer at Cybereason, told Forbes magazine that what happened was that previous hacks “led to a large population’s passwords in use elsewhere being stolen, and because people often reuse passwords and have done so for a long time.” Elaborating, he added that “the hackers were able to brute slam PayPal accounts with these until they found 35,000 matches.”

“If a threat actor can access legitimate credentials–even if they’re dumped in a dark-web repository–they are only a few short, and in most cases, automated steps away from a successful intrusion,” Jasson Casey, the chief technology officer at Beyond Identity, told HackRead.

Read more here…

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

As of yesterday, a food additive made out of powdered crickets began appearing in foods from pizza, to pasta to cereals across the European Union.

Yes, really.

Defatted house crickets are on the menu for Europeans across the continent, without the vast majority of them knowing it is now in their food.

“This comes thanks to a European Commission ruling passed earlier this month,” reports RT.

“As per the decision, which cited the scientific opinion of the European Food Safety Authority, the additive is safe to use in a whole range of products, including but not limited to cereal bars, biscuits, pizza, pasta-based products, and whey powder.”

But don’t worry, because the crickets first have to be checked to make sure they “discard their bowel content” before being frozen.

Lovely stuff.

Critics suggested that once bugs become widely accepted as a food additive, their consumption will become normalized across the board.

“The Liberal World Order has decided that the little people must eat bugs to prevent the climate from fluctuating, in accordance with ruling class ideology,” writes Dave Blount.

“Yet rather than mindlessly obey The Experts as most did with Covid policy, people have resisted. So our moonbat overlords are furtively sneaking insects into food.”

“This will allow them to reveal in the near future that we have already been eating bugs, so there is no reason to object to them shutting down farms and imposing a new diet.”

The European Union also recently approved the use of Alphitobius diaperinus, otherwise known as the lesser mealworm, for human consumption.

As we have exhaustively documented, globalist technocrats and climate change activists have consistently lobbied for people to start eating bugs to fight global warming, despite the practice being linked to parasitic infections.

I somewhat doubt that elitist technocrats who recently visited Davos will be switching to the bug diet, no matter how much they browbeat us about man-made climate change.

Back in November, the Washington Post advised Americans that instead of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which now is unaffordable for a quarter of families, they should instead look to eating bugs.

While livestock farmers in the Netherlands are being climate change regulated out of existence, school children are being indoctrinated to eat bugs, while another German school has banned meat entirely.

*  *  *

Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behind the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”

– John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.

Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.

The internet has become the primary means of sexual predators targeting and selling young children for sex. “One in five kids online are sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media. And those, non-contact oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable, either.

According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”

“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking.

“They’re little girls.”

This is America’s dirty little secret.

But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.

America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—represent another facet of the problem: police have become both predators and pimps. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”

Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.

Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen. According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens.

For example, in California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.

A Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.

Two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.

The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”

And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Whether or not the Super Bowl is a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.

Finally, as I documented in an earlier column, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men.

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Unfortunately, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime, has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public while doing little to actually protect our children from sex predators.

That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

The border city of Yuma, Arizona is on the ‘brink of collapse’ as a flood of migrants have overloaded hospitals and food banks.

According to officials, some 5 million migrants have crossed into the US since President Biden took office in January 2021.

As a result, Yuma County’s Border Patrol has seen a rise in migrant crossings of 171%. According to County Supervisor Jonathan Lines, the county will ‘crumble’ if it can’t support the flow of migrants. Lines says that the situation will only get worse, according to the Fox News.

In a statement to Fox News, Lines said that “Policies need to be changed when you see an unprecedented amount of people coming across the border that even supersedes what we saw under any of the other presidents for the past 30 years,” adding that the surge in crossings is “ridiculous.”

“They’re coming because they said that Biden told them to come, that we have an open border.”

According to fifth-generation Yuma resident and farmer, Hank Auza, “The problem that we’re foreseeing right now is there’s a couple of big waves coming,” adding “Yuma can’t support that. It will overwhelm the system here.“

El Paso, Texas, another border town, declared a state of emergency as thousands of migrants camped in the streets during below-freezing temperatures in December. Many migrant shelters were over capacity, leading the city to use the local airport for temporary refuge. 

Lines, Auza and another Yuma farmer, Alex Muller, had shared concerns, starting with the fear around food security, since agricultural production makes up a large part of the town’s economy. 

“Our fields are monitored and audited and tested for different pathogens,” Muller, said. “You can’t have people walking through the field.” 

Auza said Yuma’s fields, which produce 93% of the nation’s leafy greens in the winter months, have faced a fair amount of migrant traffic, risking damage to their crops due to foodborne illness concerns. He also said many residents can’t get into the city’s only hospital.  -Fox News

“People have had a hard time getting into the hospital because the hospital has been so full of” migrants, said Auza.