The Midterms are over and so any pretense of a ‘strong as hell’ economy are out of the window, providing some ammo for folks to believe this morning’s ADP report (ahead of Friday’s payrolls print) may come in very ugly.

After a notable rise in October (despite an aggressively tightening Fed), expectations were for a smaller +200k print in November but instead ADP reports only 127k jobs were added in November – the lowest since Jan 2021

Source: Bloomberg

Service-providing jobs rose 213k while goods-producing jobs fell 86k with manufacturing job losses soaring… but fear not, we added 224k bartenders and waiters

*AMC NETWORKS TO LAY OFF ABOUT 20% OF ITS U.S. EMPLOYEES: DJ

As long as the US hires 5 million waiters and bartenders in November, all is well

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 29, 2022

Nela Richardson, ADP Chief Economist said:

“Turning points can be hard to capture in the labor market, but our data suggest that Federal Reserve tightening is having an impact on job creation and pay gains. In addition, companies are no longer in hyper-replacement mode. Fewer people are quitting and the post-pandemic recovery is stabilizing.”

Pay growth remained elevated even as it continued a modest but broad-based deceleration.

Job changers notched their fifth straight slowdown and the smallest increase in pay since January.

Pay growth for job stayers edged down, too, led by leisure and hospitality, which had a rapid run-up in 2021 but has been falling since March.

Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams, 

An Amnesty International campaigner on Tuesday led calls for “truth, justice, and compensation” after Qatar’s World Cup chief admitted that hundreds of migrant workers died during the construction of projects related to the FIFA tournament.

In an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan aired on TalkTV, Hassan Al-Thawadi, secretary general of the Qatar World Cup Supreme Committee, was asked how many migrant workers—who make up 90% of the nation’s workforce—have died during the construction of $300 billion worth of tournament-related infrastructure including stadiums, hotels, highways, railways, and an expanded international airport. “The estimate is around 400, between 400 and 500,” Al-Thawadi replied. “I don’t have the exact number, that’s something that’s been discussed. One death is too many, it’s as simple as that.”

World Cup boss Hassan Al-Thawadi tells Piers Morgan 400-500 migrant workers have died as a result of work done on projects connected to the tournament.

“Yes, improvements have to happen.”@piersmorgan | @TalkTV | #PMUQatar pic.twitter.com/Cf9bgKCFZe

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) November 28, 2022

Responding to Al-Thawadi’s remarks, Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of economic and social justice, said that “the continued debate around the number of workers who have died in the preparation of the World Cup exposes the stark reality that so many bereaved families are still waiting for truth and justice.”

“Over the last decade, thousands of workers have returned home in coffins, with no explanation given to their loved ones,” he noted. An analysis by The Guardian found that more than 6,500 workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka died in Qatar since the repressive Gulf monarchy was awarded soccer’s premier international tournament in late 2010. The Guardian‘s estimate, however, has been criticized for counting all foreign worker deaths in the country over the past decade.

“Qatar’s extreme heat and grueling working conditions are likely to have contributed to hundreds of these deaths, but without full investigations, the true scale of lives lost can never be known,” Cockburn continued. “Meanwhile, families are suffering the added anguish of severe financial insecurity that comes from losing the main wage earner.”

“There is nothing natural about this scale of loss and there can be no excuse for denying families truth, justice, and compensation any longer,” he added. “Until all abuses suffered by migrant workers in Qatar are remedied, the legacy of this World Cup will be severely tarnished by their mistreatment.”

Al-Thawadi asserted that conditions are improving for migrant workers in Qatar, noting the implementation of a 1,000 riyal, or about $275, minimum monthly wage and increased attention to safety. “I think every year the health and safety standards on the sites are improving, at least on our sites, the World Cup sites, the ones that we’re responsible for, most definitely,” he said.

A spokesperson for Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy appeared to backpedal Al-Thawadi’s remarks in a Tuesday statement reiterating the Qatari government’s claim of just three work-related and 37 non-work-related migrant worker deaths during the World Cup construction period.

“Separate quotes regarding figures refer to national statistics covering the period of 2014-2020 for all work-related fatalities (414) nationwide in Qatar, covering all sectors and nationalities,” the agency said.

Hari, a 27-year-old Nepalese builder who earned 700 riyals a month in a country where the average Qatari household makes more than 100 times more, described working conditions to CNN earlier this month:

It was too hot. The foreman was very demanding and used to complain a lot. The foreman used to threaten to reduce our salaries and overtime pay. I had to carry tiles on my shoulder to the top. It was very difficult going up through the scaffolding. In the pipeline work, there were 5-7 meters deep pits, we had to lay the stones and concrete, it was difficult due to the heat. It was difficult to breathe. We had to come upstairs using a ladder to drink water. At some places, they didn’t have water. Some places, they didn’t provide us water on time. At some places, we used to go to houses nearby asking for water.

It never happened to me, but I saw some workers fainting at work. I saw one Bengali, one Nepali… two to three people faint while working. They took the Bengali to medical services. I’m not sure what happened to him.

A 2019 study of 1,300 Nepali migrant worker deaths in Qatar published in Cardiology Journal found a “strong correlation” between toiling in extreme heat and dying from heart problems.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in a Tuesday press briefing issued an ultra-provocative statement telling Ukraine that “NATO’s door is open”. 

He pledged that one day the eastern European country which has for nine months been under Russian invasion will become a NATO member. This of course is a prime issue for Moscow which triggered Putin’s “special operation” in the first place. 

Stoltenberg issued the reaffirmation in the presence of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top diplomats of NATO countries, who are currently gathered in Romania to discuss continued support to Kiev headed into the harsh winter months. 

Stoltenberg further touted (and seemed to directly taunt Moscow) that Scandinavian countries Finland and Sweden are soon to be the next full members of the Western military alliance: 

“Russia does not have a veto” on countries joining, he said about the recent entry of North Macedonia and Montenegro into the security alliance. He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin “will get Finland and Sweden as NATO members” soon.

On this front, Turkey’s government has recently described “progress” made by Finland and Sweden regarding Ankara’s demands that they take more action against the Kurdish PKK and associated individuals living in their countries. 

Turkish foreign ministry officials assessed the following to come out of the latest talks: 

“We exchanged a series of ideas with the police and their colleagues in Türkiye to speed up the fight against the terrorist threat to Türkiye from the PKK,” Oscar Stenström told local radio after Turkish, Swedish and Finnish delegations met in Stockholm on Nov. 25.

…A joint statement issued by the three countries after the meeting stated that Türkiye had accepted that “NATO candidates had taken steps that fulfilled their commitments.”

“We had a very good tone, and for the first time in a joint statement, we signaled that progress was being made,” Stenström said.

Norway’s government has meanwhile seconded Stoltenberg’s call for eventual Ukraine admission into NATO: “We stand by that, too, on membership for Ukraine,” a Norwegian official said.

Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The so-called “golden era” of the Sino–British relationship is over, the UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Monday.

But Sunak dismissed what he said is “simplistic Cold War rhetoric,” saying he will stand up to the UK’s competitors with “robust pragmatism” instead of “grand rhetoric.”

Giving his first major foreign policy speech at the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet at Guildhall in London, Sunak also vowed to “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” promising to maintain or increase military support next year.

But the speech heavily focused on the communist-ruled China, which he said is “conspicuously competing for global influence using all the levers of state power.”

“Let’s be clear. The so-called golden era is over, along with a naive idea that trade would automatically lead to social and political reform,” Sunak said, adding, “But nor should we rely on simplistic Cold War rhetoric.”

The prime minister said he recognises the authoritarian regime poses “a systemic challenge to our values and interests,” citing the suppression of anti-zero-COVID protests and the arrest and beating of a BBC journalist on Sunday.

But he also said the UK “cannot simply ignore China’s significance” on world affairs, global economic stability, or issues like climate change.

‘Robust Pragmatism’

Sunak spoke against what he called “short termism or wishful thinking,” saying the UK’s adversaries and competitors plan for the long term.

He said the UK will “make an evolutionary leap in our approach,” including strengthening defence of “our values and the openness on which our prosperity depends” and the economy at home, and standing up to competitors “not with grand rhetoric, but with robust pragmatism.”

The prime minister said the government is “reinvigorating” the UK’s European relationships, “taking a longer-term view” on China, strengthening the UK’s resilience and economic security, and building relationships in the Indo–Pacific region.

Citing the government’s recent decision to order a Chinese-owned company to sell the UK’s biggest microchip company it had acquired, as well his recent visit to Indonesia, Sunak said the UK, the United States, Australia, Japan, and many others will “manage the sharpening competition” with diplomacy, engagement, and improving resilience, particularly economic security.

More details will be set out in the government’s updated Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development, and Foreign Policy, Sunak said.

The speech marks a clear softening of rhetoric since his leadership campaign when he said the Chinese regime poses “the largest threat to Britain and the world’s security and prosperity this century,” and his recent description of the regime as posing the “biggest state-based threat to our economic security.”

It’s also in contrast with his hawkish predecessor Liz Truss, who in April called for a “global NATO” to tackle international threats and warned the Chinese Communist Party against invading Taiwan.

Parts of Sunak’s speech were published earlier on Monday in a press release. Commenting on the prime minister’s approach of “robust pragmatism,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Alicia Kearns said she believes the UK should engage with China, but urged Sunak to draw “red lines” in the relationship.

Kearns agrees with a pragmatic approach, she told the BBC, adding engagement should mean “having those tough conversations” and “drawing red lines.”

“We don’t want to see illegal police stations operating on British soil. We don’t want to see their consul general beating up those who seek refuge in our country. And we don’t want to see our fantastic journalists like [Edward Lawrence] beaten on the streets of China, [and] that they have to recognize and respect human rights,” Kearns said.

On Sunday, BBC reporter Edward Lawrence was arrested and allegedly beaten by the Chinese police when he was reporting on protests in Shanghai.

It’s unclear what Sunak’s China policy will look like in practice, but the prime minister’s softened rhetoric was met with sharp criticism from former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who expressed his disappointment in Sunak’s tone towards Beijing.

“No idea if British [government] has any sense of irony, if not, they should,” the China hawk said on Twitter.

Read more here…

The era of easy money is now officially over.

For 15 years, policymakers have tried to stimulate the global economy through money creation, zero interest-rate policies, and more recently, aggressive COVID fiscal stimulus.

With capital at near-zero costs over this stretch, investors started to place more value on cash flows in the distant future. Assets inflated and balance sheets expanded, and money inevitably chased more speculative assets like NFTs, crypto, or unproven venture-backed startups.

But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins details below, the free money party has since ended, after persistent inflation prompted the sudden reversal of many of these policies. And as Warren Buffett says, it’s only when the tide goes out do you get to see “who’s been swimming naked.”

Measuring Money and Markets in 2022

Every time we publish this visualization, our common unit of measurement is a two-dimensional box with a value of $100 billion.

Even though you need many of these to convey the assets on the balance sheet of the U.S. Federal Reserve, or the private wealth held by the world’s billionaires, it’s quite amazing to think what actually fits within this tiny building block of measurement:

Our little unit of measurement is enough to pay for the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, while also buying every team in the NHL and digging FTX out of its financial hole several times over.

Here’s an overview of all the items we have listed in this year’s visualization:

Has the Dust Settled Yet?

Through previous editions of our All the World’s Money and Markets visualization, we’ve created snapshots of the world’s assets and markets at different points in time.

For example, in our 2017 edition of this visualization, Apple’s market capitalization was only $807 billion, and all crypto assets combined for $173 billion. The global debt total was at $215 trillion.

And in just five years, Apple nearly quadrupled in size (it peaked at $3 trillion in January 2022), and crypto also expanded into a multi-trillion dollar market until it was brought back to Earth through the 2022 crash and subsequent FTX implosion.

Meanwhile, global debt continues to accumulate—growing by $85 trillion in the five-year period.

With interest rates expected to continue to rise, companies making cost cuts, and policymakers reining in spending and borrowing, today is another unique snapshot in time.

Now that the easy money era is over, where do things go from here?

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Sometimes the internet being eternal works to our advantage. Recently, there’s been a dustup in European politics over a three-year old video of now Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stepping on the third rail of European politics.

In that video she openly explained that colonialism in Europe isn’t over and she tied it to African immigration into Europe, which Italy has born the brunt of thanks to the EU’s rules which force countries to accept anyone that shows up on their shores.

The mechanism for France’s dirty colonial secret is they still control fourteen West African nations through a French colonial currency (CFA Franc) issued by France.

Now, since Meloni’s rant, the CFA Franc has been slightly revised but the real source of its power over West Africa was not, more on this later.

What’s important is that this video has all of a sudden resurfaced at a time when Italy and France are involved in a major row over France’s (and Davos’) latest attempt to paint Meloni as some heartless Fascist for denying a French NGO boatload of migrants from North Africa into Italy.

The boat eventually wound up having to go to France as Meloni stuck to her guns. Remember, folks it was then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini who first tried to defy Davos on this and his reward was to be sued in Sicilian court over ‘human rights abuses.’ This began Salvini’s fall from political power in Rome as he didn’t have enough support from his then coalition partner, Five Star Movement (M5S).

Eventually, Salvini was forced out of power, M5S cut a deal with the Rome Mafia to betray its supporters and the rise of Meloni and the Brothers of Italy (FdI) was inevitable.

The lame attempt by France to attack Meloni on immigration was met with a much different result this time as she enjoys a far stronger political position than Salvini did in 2017-18. So, the boat went to France and all the French could do was fulminate about it.

Enemy at the NGO Gates

In fact, the French Foreign Minister Gérald Darmanin went so far as to call Italy France’s enemy over this issue. This level of histrionics over less than 250 migrants is both so predictably French and overblown it borders on the comical.

So much for European solidarity, I guess.

But it’s all part of the silly Davos PR campaign against Meloni. Nothing changes with these people. They have a pathological need to win every single little battle, because as psychopaths they know any sign of weakness is an invitation to the gallows as people see them for what they are.

As always, the timing on this video of Meloni coming out is interesting. It’s a clear counterattack on France’s theatrics.

My question, as always, is who did this? Obviously Meloni’s people are part of this but does it imply she has some other support?

Stick with me, because I have a theory on this.

Ultimately, this dustup fully highlights the mendacity and, frankly, evil of the former colonial powers of Europe.

The CFA Franc was something that you ‘just didn’t talk about’ as France continued to extract wealth from West Africa through monetary expropriation.

The very idea that the vestiges of colonialism are on the wane in Europe is not only fundamentally false it is intrinsically woven into the fabric of the EU itself in every way. The CFA Franc should be an anachronism, but France holds onto for its benefit, subsidizing its ridiculous government and failing social institutions.

Among first world nations France has the highest effective tax rate for upper income earners.  And yet, they still can’t keep things running effectively and have to extract wealth from north Africa.

How brutally inefficient and sickly is a French economy that derives nearly 50% of its electricity from a mostly-homegrown nuclear industry and has levels of taxation that make even a nineteenth-century slaveowner blush that it still needs to operate a colonial wealth extraction system in West Africa in the 21st century?

But it’s also a microcosm of the euro itself and even the corruption of the US dollar through national control over interest rates thanks to a monolithic central bank.

Like many of you, I had no idea the CFA Franc even existed and I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that in 2022 fourteen countries do not have monetary sovereignty, serfs to a feudal lord on a separate continent.

Again, just when I thought I’d plumbed the depths of Eurotrash globalist depravity, they make me look naïve.

But what’s been very clear is that the CFA Franc has been a no-go in international and inter-European political discussions for decades…. and someone close to Meloni just made it a global issue.

So much so, that no less than Le Monde had to put out a fire suppressor article.  It’s a laughably poor piece of apologia.  It’s a typical piece of ‘word parsing’ that picks out specific little exaggerations to discredit Meloni as stupid and uninformed while avoiding the basic problems of France running a wealth vacuum in 14 of the poorest countries in Africa.

Le Monde quickly switches to the ‘migrant’ issue to ‘debunk’ Meloni’s claims about African immigration as a result of the CFA Franc.  Sure the country of origin of most migrants are from countries on the shore of the Mediterranean, but where did they come from in the first place?

It’s like saying Hondurans who cross into the US from Mexico aren’t Hondurans and that policy in Honduras didn’t contribute to the migration. But, this is really a side issue. Meloni is fundamentally right that the CFA Franc keeps these countries poor through currency arbitrage and contributes directly to North Africa’s instability and lack of economic progress.

To think that doesn’t have spillover effects into Algeria, Morocco or anywhere else along the southern Mediterranean is simply laughable.

It’s the Currency, Stupid!!

The key to understanding the evil of the CFA Franc is no different than understanding the evil of the euro or the Fed Funds Rate. It’s mercantilism through currency arbitrage.

The CFA Franc is not just pegged to the euro (formerly the French Franc) it is also tied to the ECB’s monetary policy debt rate.  This is the part no one, especially the writer at Le Monde, wants to touch.  

So, as Le Monde states there are the two central banks in Africa that issue the two different CFA Francs. What they fail to state is that both currencies are still pegged to the euro, making local monetary policy a joke. France and the ECB still control their economies.

The ECB’s monetary policy is set by Germany for Germany’s benefit.  Having (up until now) the strongest economy in the EU, Germany gets an effective benefit from the euro trading at a single exchange rate.

If the euro were to collapse and the Deutschmark returned, it would rise dramatically versus the previous euro exchange rate. For Italy, the return of the lira would see it fall.

This is simply the value add/deficit of the labor in the aggregate of the country, represented by the exchange rate through the discounting mechanism.  

This is why the euro and the EU are nothing more than colonialist systems designed to do exactly what they have done, impoverish the European periphery, which includes Italy, and concentrate capital in the center, in Brussels’ political power.

As much as I’ve used the Hunger Games to describe the US, it is even more apropos for the EU.

California and New York have used the singular Fed Funds Rate in the same way Germany has used the euro to dominate US electoral politics, ensuring that for decades their populations stayed high, the capital flowed to them, trapping people there and grinding them out between the twin millstones of inflation and taxation, just like Lenin described.

So, now applying that same model to France and it’s former colonies, does anyone believe that the labor efficiency of the Ivory Coast is the same as Germany?  or even France?

Of course not. But that’s the situation for these countries. France is running the same mercantilist scam of any colonial power by keeping the home country’s currency weaker than it should be in exchange for real goods from abroad.

But we see this effect in the reverse from the colony’s perspective. By setting a peg for the CFA Franc, it is always stronger than it should be if allowed to float. Even if initially set weaker than it should be to attract capital, eventually the exchange rate will become an albatross around the colony’s neck, strangling economic growth while all the wealth is extracted back to the homeland, thanks to the ECB’s monetary policy.

While the CFA Franc was reformed slightly under Macron, the essential link between France’s banking system and these colonies remains key, using the ECB’s ruinous monetary policy to take the profit and leave misery behind. 

Now, the good news is that mercantilism only works for so long before the currency mismatches become so great that the whole scheme has to collapse. It is, after all just another Ponzi Scheme.

In the case of France and Germany running their wealth extraction system across not just the 17 other countries of the euro-zone but 14 African countries as well, we’re reaching that breaking point.

Pres. Macron Tear Down This Peg!

Italy needs to be let loose from the euro. The populists and everyone not on Herr Schwab’s payroll understand this. Davos will blow up the world before letting that happen.

Meloni knows this. And she also knows that France has real designs on annexing parts of northern Italy and will fight very dirty to win here.

Macron tried to marginalize her on immigration, tugging on heart strings about denying migrants. She stood her ground, forced France to take the boats and when France tried to publicly shame her, she trotted out the CFA Franc and put that issue right to bed.

But here’s the fun part. She just put out her budget proposal for the EU’s consideration. It’s a very crafty proposal, skirting the edges of the rules set out by the EU, violating the spirit of the rules while not actually violating many of them. See this article from Reuters on rescinding the limits of cash use.

Martin Armstrong has a quick overview of the budget where he pulls out some of the salient points (from his perspective).  His takeaway is that Meloni is putting real limits on Italy’s welfare state.  

So, this is how she can play the game of not radically increasing spending. She’ll increase spending to subsidize rising energy costs clearly imposed on Italy by Germany and Brussels through ruinous sanctions on Russian energy as a stop gap measure. Sound familiar? Because this is what cost Liz Truss her job in the UK.

But she is also reforming the entitlement system for the long term which will keep the overall budget deficit which will call Brussels’ bluff on whether they will maintain support of Italy’s bond market.

We know this is a bluff otherwise ECB President Christine Lagarde wouldn’t have created the Transmission Protection Instrument to maintain internal credit spreads at the July meeting.

She knew this day was coming the minute Mario Draghi walked away from his post as Prime Minister. The TPI was announced the next day.

It looks like, at first glance, that Meloni’s found a way to circumvent being forced to implement “German Austerity” — raising taxes and cutting spending to protect bondholders — by cutting long-term entitlement spending while at the same time cutting taxes where they are needed most.

If there is a budget proposal that could mollify credit markets over Italy’s fiscal situation it would look something like this. It puts the EU on their back foot in budget talks. Because this plan could actually work.

Part of the budget plans includes slashing taxes for the self-employed by extending the 15% single tax rate from an annual income of €65,000 to €85,000, slashing VAT on certain essential goods by half, and conditionally reducing the retirement age to 62, provided that individuals have paid in at least 41 years of contributions.

What’s funny about this is that this budget, which explicitly breaks the EU’s cap of a 3% of GDP budget deficit, pushing it to 4.5% thanks to energy subsidies to families, is being hailed by the European press as “More EU Friendly than expected.”

What were they expecting, for Meloni to introduce miniBOTs and a new domestic currency like Salvini talked about in 2018?  

No, this is clearly messaging that states Brussels isn’t in the position to fight her because she holds all the cards in the negotiations.  Remember, $640+ billion in TARGET2 liabilities are the Bundesbank’s problem, not Italy’s.

Having exposed France to the world over the CFA Franc and understanding exactly how vulnerable the ECB and the EU Commission actually are in the Eurodollar markets, Meloni has pushed Italy into a good position to begin reversing the colonial extraction system of the EU itself.

A quick look at the polls in Italy has her riding a big lead at 30% support and moving higher.  If she gets this budget past the EU Commission, that number will instantly jump to 40% or higher.  The worry that Salvini and Berlusconi will betray her then drop precipitously. 

The Ring Heads South

Remember, lurking in the background of all of this is Wall St., the Fed and patriots in the US military.

This is who I think is helping Meloni stand firm here. The Fed’s aggressive policy stance has the Eurodollar markets teetering and Lagarde is no longer talking about QEternity but QT and higher rates, albeit very grudgingly.

If the price cap on Russian oil fails and Ursula Von der Leyen cannot ride herd on a 9th sanctions package, then Italy will quickly move into the driver’s seat on energy imports into Europe.

Wall St. understands this. And with a grateful Meloni in Rome realigning EU policy or forcing a breakup it also paves the way for a new cycle of energy investment now beyond desperately needed.

Who wants in on that action? Well, pretty much everyone, especially Wall St.

Meloni just told France’s African colonies to stand up and follow Burkina Faso’s lead.  With countries like Algeria, Egypt and Morocco all looking to join the BRICS alliance, the end of France’s colonial control over North Africa could end very quickly and Italy then has massive leverage on the EU to turn back on the sanctioned energy supplies.

This is a fight for all the EU marbles folks, and Meloni, I believe knows this.  So, she’ll play the dutiful game of supporting Ukraine publicly.  But, there’s almost nothing Italy can do practically to do that. It’s an empty promise.  They have no money, no domestic military to speak of… what is that promise actually worth?

No, France and Germany, the mercantilist powerhouses, are the ones that have to foot this Ukraine bill. Meloni and Italy are happy to support them bankrupting themselves while she lays the groundwork for increasing Italy’s leverage over them.

The Fed is doing its job by forcing the euro down, bond yields up and taking options away from Christine Lagarde.  

You beat colonialists by taking away their money printing machine. It’s that simple.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you don’t want to be colonized

Authored by Dr. Sean Lin and Mingjia Jacky Guan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Recently, various health agencies around the world have approved and are actively pushing for another COVID booster shot, meant to enhance the vaccine efficacy against a COVD-19 infection.

However, many studies have found that the boosters do not make a significant  difference in protection, especially in terms of protection against reinfection. In fact, the latest data shows vaccine efficacy against the coronavirus tends to even drop into the negatives after just a few months.

What Does Negative Efficacy Mean?

It is a well known fact that COVID vaccine effectiveness wanes quickly as time goes on; this is confirmed by countless studies.

Although the official narrative for COVID-19 vaccines nowadays only emphasizes its efficacy on protection against ICU admission and death rates, it actually implies the indisputable fact that vaccines don’t protect, contrary to their design, against infection or even symptomatic infection, especially after the emergence of various Omicron variants.

Even the protection two shots offers against hospitalization drops to about 40 percent after less than a year. It’s actually looking worse for protection against severe symptoms, as efficacy rates seem to drop into the negatives about five months into full vaccination.

When a vaccine’s efficacy drops into the negatives, it means that vaccination actually elevates the risks of hospitalization and severe diseases rather than reducing the risks. In simple terms, it does more harm than good when the efficacy is negative.

During the time prior to the pandemic, any vaccine with an efficacy less than 50 percent would be regarded as a poor product.  When a product shows negative efficacy, it should be banned. It seems that the pandemic isn’t only bad for our health, but also is tugging at our common sense.

COVID Vaccines’ Declining Usefulness

It has been around three years since the first COVID-19 case was discovered in Wuhan, China. Since then, more than 600 million cases of the virus have been recorded, translating into a little less than 1 in 10 people around the world already being infected with the virus. In many countries, “living with COVID” has become the norm, along with getting “fully vaccinated” and getting those booster shots.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is recommended that everyone 6 months and older should receive a full vaccination and everyone 5 years and older should receive a booster shot. Booster shots are recommended as they “are an important part of protecting yourself from getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19” according to the CDC.

However, emerging data paints a different picture.

At its crux, the vaccines were developed with the earlier strains of the coronavirus, meaning developers primarily used the original Wuhan strain in their testing. The Delta strain that came along was particularly infamous as it was known to have a high death rate, but vaccines fared quite well against it. The results, however, went south as time went on and as the Omicron strain rolled out.

Trying to Outrun Nature

Making its debut in South Africa, the Omicron strain started to dominate the world by the beginning of 2022, which caused even more turmoil in terms of vaccine efficacy. The most shocking result is the extent it dragged down the vaccine’s efficacy against infection. Data shows that the vaccine used to be around 90 percent effective for weeks on end after vaccination.

After Omicron came along, infection prevention dropped to less than 50 percent after about a month after two shots and dived into the negatives four months later. It doesn’t seem to stop after that.

This clearly suggests that the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns should’ve been suspended as soon as the Omicron variant began to dominate over Delta.

In a study which analyzed COVID-19 cases from the beginning of this year in children that were previously infected, it was discovered that vaccine effectiveness wasn’t keeping up with pre-Omicron levels. The effects of a full vaccination against a second infection drops into the negatives within a few months, and it seems that the earlier one got the vaccination, the more likely it would lose its efficacy during the omicron waves.

The results from a September 2022 British Medical Journal study highlights again the fact that vaccine potency drops rapidly with time. It concluded that protection against severe symptoms drops well below half within a few weeks of administering the full two doses, or even after a third dose is administered. It also showed that in the immunocompromised, two doses never had an efficacy rate against hospitalization over 50 percent. Things do look a little better for three doses, but not by much.

Another study published data on the efficacy of the third dose relative to primary doses and found that the mean efficacy of three doses of the Moderna vaccine against the Omicron variants are, in fact, below 0.

It is interesting to note a logical assumption made by many, which is that the more you take the vaccine the better prepared you are against the virus, isn’t necessarily true.

Data published shows that neutralizing antibody count doesn’t necessarily correlate with the number of doses.

They found that people who took the fourth dose sometimes had higher, but mostly lower, antibody concentrations in the body compared with those who took the third dose.

Also, the hazard ratio calculated by researchers for the third and fourth vaccine doses provide us with mixed results. Sometimes, it seems like a good option to stick with the third dose, as the hazard ratio actually rises for taking the second booster compared with the first one.

One possible reason vaccine data is going downhill after Omicron appeared is that the new variant had a lot of changes in its spike protein composition.

This changes the way the virus enters the body and allows it to better “bypass” the security system set up by the old vaccines, which were developed from the very first SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain. One can understand it as if the variants have new toys to play with the old security guards.

Another potential mechanism that leads to the significant decline of vaccine efficacy is that repeated vaccination also damages people’s immunity via immune imprinting, a phenomenon in which an initial exposure to a virus–such as the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, by infection or vaccination–limits a person’s future immune response against variants.

Meanwhile, there are numerous underlying factors that would contribute to the disease’s progression from mild to severe, or even into fatal stages. Even if the vaccination groups during clinical trials were carefully chosen to have similar comorbid medical conditions as the control or unvaccinated group, there are still many other unknown factors that would dictate the outcome of the disease progression.

It is inconceivable and overtly overambitious that any pharmaceutical company would aim so high to design a vaccine which can protect against severe diseases from the onset of research, especially since the resulting vaccine can’t seem to keep up with preventing infection in the first place.

If a vaccine reaches negative efficacy, it means that people have higher chances to get infected than if you didn’t get the shot in the first place, meaning that not getting vaccinated might just reduce the chance of infection, unwanted symptoms, and severe disease. This is not just a vaccine failure or breakthrough infection issue, but a good time to halt COVID vaccines for good. Humans will never win in this cat-and-mouse game against nature.

Are Previous Infections Still Protective?

As time goes on, the likelihood of reinfection is quite high. Studies do show that in reinfected people the chances of death, hospitalization, and some form of sequela is much higher in those infected for the first time. It also seems like a logical conclusion for the CDC to recommend that everyone gets vaccinated.

However, the data we have is rather conflicting as the aforementioned study doesn’t show much of a difference between the unvaccinated, the half vaccinated, or the fully vaccinated. They all have just about the same values for cardiovascular, thrombotic, renal, or pulmonary sequelae post infection, or chances of getting a tough COVID-19 infection in the first place.

Data also shows that previously infected and unvaccinated children were better at preventing a second infection compared with children who were in the same age category but who were vaccinated. Generally speaking, vaccine induced immunity doesn’t seem to be quite as effective as that induced by a previous, natural infection.

What this essentially means is that the vaccines cannot keep up with the constantly emerging variants and that a waning efficacy was frankly inevitable. The only question left is, what is the driving force behind the Omicron variants, or SARS-CoV-2 variants on a broad scale? What accounts for variants emerging at the same time around the world?

Microevolution cannot explain everything.

Over the past 3 years, scientists have applied the theory of evolution to describe and explain the trajectory of SARS-CoV-2. Delta was the deadly variant and now Omicron is the road runner. In theory, the virus developed these strains to best adapt to the objective environment, yet scientists are still looking for more answers.

For example, when much of the world’s population was in different degrees of “lockdown” or restriction of movements, when international travel was severely impaired, how did the Alpha and Delta variants emerge and quickly spread widely, and even become dominant globally?

If the only factor that determines which variant to become dominant or not was its fitness, i.e., its transmissibility and replication efficiency, why were there not multiple variants with better fitness that emerged and all became dominant regionally, just like how divergent strains of flowers blossom at the same time in distinct locations? Why does it appear as if there is a coordinating force behind the virus such that one strain was able to uniformly retire the previous one?

In order to answer all these questions, I believe that there needs to be a more holistic evaluation of the current pandemic. At the same time, it’s important to note that viruses adapt to the vaccines, and not the other way around.

Read more here…

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported the latest National Instant Criminal Background System (NICS) checks on gun sales during Black Friday was one of the “Top 10” busiest days in history.

NSSF said NICS processed 711,372 background checks during the days leading up to and including Black Friday. FBI’s NICS recorded 192,749 background checks on Black Friday alone, a 2.8% increase from Black Friday 2021, when 187,585 background checks were completed. 

Below are the number of NICS checks leading up to Black Friday.

• Saturday, Nov. 20, 2022: 102,376

• Sunday, Nov. 21, 2022: 57,665

• Monday, Nov. 22, 2022: 103,543

• Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2022: 109,895

• Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2022: 116,033

• Thursday, Nov. 25, 2022: 29,111

• Friday, Nov. 26, 2022: 192,749

Third-highest Black Friday NICS checks on record since the system was established in 1998. 

When a person tries to buy a firearm at a gun shop, known as a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL), they’re required to fill out an ATF form, and the FFL forwards that information to the NICS electronically. NICS staff performs a background check on the buyer to ensure he/she does not have a criminal record or isn’t otherwise ineligible to purchase or own a firearm. 

Joe Bartozzi, NSSF President and CEO, commented on the large influx of law-abiding Americans buying guns last week and said:

“Background checks for firearm purchases were already trending to make 2022 the third strongest year on record, coming off of the outsized years of 2020 and 2021.

“These figures tell us that there is a continued strong appetite for lawful firearm ownership by law-abiding Americans and that firearm manufacturers across the country continue to deliver the quality firearms our customers have come to expect.”

What’s important to note is that NICS checks are a proxy for the number of guns sold and are not exact because the background checks are performed on the buyer rather than the gun. 

Elevated NICS checks imply a strong firearm appetite among law-abiding Americans. There was no explanation given why this trend remained red hot since the early pandemic days. 

What might have supercharged gun buying among law-abiding Americans is this summer’s US Supreme Court’s NYSRPA v. Bruen ruling affirmed the right-to-carry applies outside the home, which forces states to stop arbitrarily denying carry permits to applicants who didn’t meet specific requirements. Perhaps another reason is that under the Biden administration, violent crime has soared in some parts of the country — law-abiding Americans might want protection. 

Authored by Kyle Anzalone & Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute,

Washington and Seoul are reportedly discussing plans to ramp up anti-submarine military exercises set to begin next year. The talks came amid soaring tensions in the region, and just days before North Korea pledged to further develop its nuclear arsenal. 

While some details of the biannual ‘Silent Shark’ drills remain undecided, they are set to be “bigger than those of the past, given the North heightening tensions with its dozens of missile tests in recent months,” the Korea Times reported last week, citing an unnamed navy official.

Seoul has claimed the exercises are needed to contain the growing threat from Pyongyang, saying they will focus on anti-submarine warfare assets and are “designed to improve their capability to respond to increasing North Korean submarine threats, including its submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).”

In October, the DPRK said it had successfully fired a KN-23 SLBM – modeled on the Russian Iskander missile – as part of a flurry of weapon tests carried out in retaliation to joint US-South Korean war games. The nuclear-capable KN-23 was launched from a special underwater reservoir, prompting speculation that Pyongyang may have developed a new launch platform for the weapon.

Military activity on the Korean Peninsula has reached a multi-year high in 2022, with North Korea conducting a record number of missile tests, including two intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches this month alone. The US and South Korea, for their part, have deployed additional strategic assets to the region, and have carried out several rounds of live-fire military exercises, helping to drive a cycle of escalation with the North. 

Earlier this month, Washington flew nuclear-capable, long-range B-1B stealth bombers over Korea during its ‘Vigilant Storm’ drill as a show of force to Pyongyang. Though US Air Force Chief of Staff CQ Brown Jr. downplayed the maneuvers as “just part of an exercise,” the DPRK has repeatedly denounced such drills as provocative, viewing them as preparations for an attack.

In addition to continued missile, rocket and artillery tests, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has pledged to further develop his country’s nuclear capabilities in response to the growing tensions, saying the military would work to improve its nuclear forces at the “fastest possible speed” back in April. 

Kim Jong Un is still smoking near fueled liquid propellant ICBMs in 2022. https://t.co/9XbGFWWYMW

— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) November 18, 2022

More recently, Kim claimed North Korean scientists had made a “wonderful leap forward in the development of the technology of mounting nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles,” going on to say that Pyongyang would create “the world’s most powerful strategic force, the absolute force unprecedented in the century.”

Just when the automobile industry thought it was out of the clutches of the Covid-induced supply chain SNAFU that had taken place over the last several years, it looks as though China’s strict Covid policy threatens to pull them back in again. 

“At least three major automakers” are once again shuttering production, according to a new report from Bloomberg this week. Honda has shut down operations in Wuhan for the time being due to “limitations around movement” in the area, the report says.

The company also suspended operations at a lawnmower engine plant in Chongqing.

Yamaha has also been hit by the new Covid lockdowns, partially suspending operations at a motorcycle plant in Chongqing. Bloomberg reports that 8,721 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the area on Monday this week. 

VW also halted production at a joint venture plant that it has with China FAW Group on Monday of this week, the report continues. Volkswagen is attributing the shutdown to a shortage of components. It has also shut down two of five production lines at its factory in Changchun and has no date for resuming operations.

Nissan, Mazda and Mitsubishi told Bloomberg that their operations had not been affected. 

Recall, just last week we published on how China’s Covid restrictions were actually tightening when the country’s market had assumed they were easing. 

We published:

“More than a week after Beijing fine-tuned its Covid Zero strategy, local governments are struggling to balance the need to control the pandemic while also limit the economic damage. Shijiazhuang, a closely-watched city that had experimented with a version of “living with the virus,” has reversed course, suspending schools and asking residents to stay at home for five days. As infections multiplied, subway rides in some big cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing have tumbled.

The result is that Goldman Sachs’s Effective Lockdown Index has increased in recent weeks, despite Beijing’s new order to reduce the need for mass testing and citywide shutdowns.”