By Clarissa Hawes of FreightWaves

A former United Furniture Industries employee claims the furniture manufacturer, headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, violated federal law by failing to give 60 days’ notice of its abrupt shutdown to nearly 2,700 employees and truck drivers, who found themselves without jobs two days before Thanksgiving.

Former UFI employees, operating under the Lane Furniture brand name, were blindsided early Tuesday morning after receiving either an email or text message instructing them not to report to work that day because their jobs were being immediately terminated “due to unforeseen business circumstances.”

As of publication Wednesday, Todd Evans, CEO of UFI, failed to respond to FreightWaves’ requests seeking comment about what precipitated the mass firing.

Toria Neal, a resident of Lee County, Mississippi, who worked for UFI for more than eight years, alleges in her proposed class-action complaint that the company violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act and did not provide at least 60 days’ written notice of a pending closure.

In the suit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Neal claims she and potentially thousands of other United employees received an email and/or text message “that it was terminating all of its employees effective immediately” just minutes before midnight on Monday.

The message from UFI stated that the “terminations were expected to be permanent and that all benefits would be terminated without provision of COBRA.”

Langston & Lott, based in Booneville, Mississippi, filed the first class action against United Furniture Industries, Inc., alleging it violated the WARN Act when terminating all 2,700 of its employees.

“Under the WARN Act, the employees of United Furniture were entitled to either a 60-day notice or 60 days of severance pay — neither of those were provided,” Jack Simpson, attorney for Langston & Lott, told FreightWaves.  “If appointed class counsel, we look forward to vigorously investigating the actions of United Furniture and seeking as much compensation the terminated employees are legally entitled to.”

Thousands fired by email, text

“At the instruction of the board of directors of United Furniture Industries Inc. and all subsidiaries, we regret to inform you that due to unforeseen business circumstances, the company has been forced to make the difficult decision to terminate the employment of all its employees, effective immediately, on Nov. 21, 2022,” according to the statement to employees obtained by FreightWaves.

One former employee said generations of her family had worked for Lane Furniture before United Furniture Industries bought the furniture manufacturer from Heritage Home Group in 2017.

She said nothing prepared her and other family members who worked for the company that they would be fired via email or would no longer have health insurance.

“We would go over to our friends’ houses and say, ‘Hey, that chair or that piece of furniture was made at our plant,’” the former employee, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation, told FreightWaves. “We really took pride in our work — and this is how we are treated.”

Some employees questioned the timing of UFI’s mass firing just before Thanksgiving.

However, over-the-road truck drivers for furniture delivery division UFI Transportation who are currently making deliveries “will be paid for the balance of the week,”  the company stated in the letter to workers.

According to the UFI statement, it directs truckers with loads to “immediately return equipment, inventory and delivery documents for those deliveries that have been completed to one of the following locations: Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Verona, Mississippi; or Victorville, California.”

According to the Federal Motor Safety Administration’s SAFER website, UFI has 40 power units and 42 drivers. 

In July, Pitchbook listed that the company had nearly 3,000 employees working in its 18 plants and distribution centers in North Carolina, Mississippi and California, as well as in Vietnam.

Another former employee said she was aware the company was experiencing some difficulties but had no clue UFI would fire its entire workforce.

In late July, the furniture manufacturer closed its plants in Winston-Salem and High Point, North Carolina, resulting in more than 270 workers losing their jobs, according to WARN Act notices filed at the time with the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

Another 220 jobs were eliminated in late July at the company’s plant in Amory, Mississippi. “The new leadership had been working extremely hard to put new processes in place,” the former employee told FreightWaves. “There was too much effort being put in for anyone to really know they would close overnight.”

While there was no communication from UFI executives as to what led to its abrupt closure, former employees did receive an update message late Tuesday about retrieving their belongings. 

“As soon as the property manager can provide a safe and orderly process for former employees to come and gather their belongings, they will do so,” UFI/Lane Corporate Communications said in an email, which was obtained by FreightWaves. “We are not certain of the timeframe for this but will communicate proactively.”

Retrieving their belongings is the last thing on former workers’ minds, one former employee said.

“It is not fair to the laborers who seriously worked so hard to be blindsided like this,” the employee told FreightWaves. “It is not fair to the mom who just had a baby to wonder if she even has health insurance to cover it. It is not fair to the cancer patient in the midst of chemo about how to pay for her treatments.”

Authored by Thomas Woods via The Mises Institute,

It’s been [89] years since the federal government, on the spurious grounds of fighting the Great Depression, ordered the confiscation of all monetary gold from Americans, permitting trivial amounts for ornamental or industrial use. This happens to be one of the episodes Kevin Gutzman and I describe in detail in our new book, Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. From the point of view of the typical American classroom, on the other hand, the incident may as well not have occurred.

A key piece of legislation in this story is the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which Congress passed on March 9 without having read it and after only the most trivial debate. House Minority Leader Bertrand H. Snell (R-NY) generously conceded that it was “entirely out of the ordinary” to pass legislation that “is not even in print at the time it is offered.” He urged his colleagues to pass it all the same:

“The house is burning down, and the President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire. [Applause.] And to me at this time there is only one answer to this question, and that is to give the President what he demands and says is necessary to meet the situation.”

Among other things, the act retroactively approved the president’s closing of private banks throughout the country for several days the previous week, an act for which he had not bothered to provide a legal justification. It gave the secretary of the Treasury the power to require all individuals and corporations to hand over all their gold coin, gold bullion, or gold certificates if in his judgment “such action is necessary to protect the currency system of the United States.”

The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States. One provision of the act granted the president the power to regulate and even prohibit “under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe … any transactions in foreign exchange, export or earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency … by any person within the United States.” In 1918, the act was amended to extend its provisions two years beyond the conclusion of hostilities, and to allow the president to “investigate, regulate, or prohibit” even the “hoarding” of gold by an American.

After those two years elapsed, people generally assumed that the Trading with the Enemy Act had passed into desuetude. But the Supreme Court later explained that the act’s provisions were not limited merely to World War I and the two years that followed — it “stood ready to meet additional wars and additional enemies” and could be called into service once again under those circumstances. (Little did anyone suspect in 1917 that these “additional enemies” would turn out to be the American people themselves.) As amended by the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Trading with the Enemy Act no longer said that simply “during time of war” could the president prohibit the export of gold or take action against “hoarding” (i.e., holding on to one’s money). Now these actions could be taken during time of war or “during any other period of national emergency declared by the President.”

A month later, claiming authority from the Emergency Banking Act and its amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act, the president ordered all individuals and corporations in America to hand over their gold holdings to the federal government in exchange for an equivalent amount of paper currency. The paper currency they were receiving in exchange for the gold had always been redeemable in gold in the past, so few saw anything amiss in this coerced transaction, and most trusted the government’s assurances that this was somehow necessary in order to combat the Depression. Only later would they discover that they weren’t getting that gold back, and that the paper dollars they were being given in exchange would be devalued. Soon only foreign governments and central banks would be able to convert dollars into gold — and even that link to gold would be severed in 1971.

On June 5, 1933, at the behest of the president, Congress took the next step, passing a joint resolution making it illegal to “require payment in gold or a particular kind of coin or currency, or in an amount in money of the United States measured thereby.” Any provision in a private or public contract promising payment in gold was thereby nullified. Payment could be made in whatever the government declared to be legal tender, and gold could not be used even as a yardstick for determining how much paper money would be owed.

For the next six months President Roosevelt pursued an erratic monetary course. Every day a new gold price was declared, on a basis no one could figure out. Private lending in effect came to a halt, with the value of the dollar in constant flux amid the prospect of ongoing devaluation. As Senator Carter Glass (D-VA) put it, “No man outside of a lunatic asylum will loan his money today on a farm mortgage.” And thus the government could triumphantly announce that since the private sector was cruelly depriving Americans of credit, it would have to step in and provide relief.

Meanwhile, Senator William Borah was assuring his countrymen that when it came to the nation’s monetary system, “there is no limitation upon the power of Congress. It is not circumscribed in any respect whatever. It is given full and plenary power to deal with that subject; and therefore it is the same as if there were no Constitution whatever.” Borah also tried to argue that “when an individual takes an obligation payable in gold” he does so “with the full understanding that the Government may change its monetary policy at any time and that he must accept whatever the Congress says at a particular time shall constitute money.”

The general rule (to which there are occasional exceptions) that no senator should ever be listened to on anything holds here: the power of Congress over money is in fact very limited. It has the power to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”

Coining money simply refers to the process of taking a precious metal, converting it into coins, and stamping those coins with an indication of their metal content. The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering. Regulation of the value of money is a power of declaration and comparison, whereby some monetary standard is compared to other coins in circulation and an exchange rate for these various kinds of currency established according to the amounts of precious metals (with due allowance for the distinct values of different precious metals) in each. In other words, if Congress were to declare by statute what the prevailing market exchange rate between gold and silver was, and thus to “regulate” gold and silver coins vis-à-vis one another — or, more precisely, vis-à-vis the Spanish silver dollar that constituted the American monetary standard — then it would be properly exercising its constitutional power, which consists of nothing more than this.

That is why this power appears in the same clause with the power to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures,” which involves the measurement of fixed standards in order to assure uniformity throughout the nation. That power does not give Congress the power to declare that one-tenth of a pound shall now be declared a pound, but to take an already-existing standard and codify it. Every single monetary statute enacted from the ratification of the Constitution until the 1930s understood the congressional power to regulate the “value” of money not in the sense of declaring money to possess some arbitrary value that suits the whims of politicians or central bankers, but in the sense of establishing the relative values of gold and silver coins in terms of the ever-shifting relative values of those metals on the free market. (Needless to say, the market is perfectly capable of doing this on its own.)

Moreover, the “dollar” was not an arbitrary term at the time the Constitution was drafted. In the late 18th century, everyone knew what the “dollar” referred to: the silver Spanish milled dollar, which was in widespread use in the United States. The Constitution twice refers to the dollar — in Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 (a clause that everyone understood to involve a tax on the import of slaves), and in the Seventh Amendment (which protected the right to a jury trial in civil cases involving at least twenty dollars). If the dollar had been something that Congress could manipulate at will, or if “dollar” had been merely a generic term to refer to whatever Congress should arbitrarily choose to recognize as currency, the South would never have accepted that clause — or the Constitution itself. Congress might have manipulated the dollar so as to make the tax on slave imports prohibitively expensive. It could also have effectively abolished trial by jury in civil cases by making twenty “dollars” an astronomically high amount of money.

The Court never pronounced upon the constitutionality of the gold seizure (for reasons we speculate on in our book), the legality of which it simply took for granted. The cases it chose to hear involved the cancellation of gold clauses in public and private contracts. Known as the Gold Clause Cases, Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co., Nortz v. United States, and Perry v. United States were argued in January 1935 and decided the following month. In each case Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the opinion for the Court; Justice McReynolds composed a single dissent that he applied to all three.

The Court declared in the first two cases that the federal government had been entitled to cancel all private contracts in gold. The perpetuation of gold clauses would have amounted to the “attempted frustration” of “the constitutional power of the Congress over the monetary system of the country…. [T]hese clauses interfere with the exertion of the power granted to the Congress.” Not a stitch of evidence existed for any aspect of this argument.

Perry, the third case, involved a man who had purchased in gold a US bond that was payable in gold, and was seeking payment either in gold or in the equivalent in paper currency. Since the government intended to pay in depreciated dollars, he believed he was receiving far less than he was entitled to under the terms of the bond. The bond’s face value was $10,000 in gold. In the inflated dollars of post-gold-standard America, it would have taken nearly $17,000 in paper currency in order to satisfy what the government had contracted to pay him.

The Court declared that the plaintiff was indeed entitled to his gold, since the government had an obligation to live up to its promises. But in not paying him his gold, the government wasn’t really wronging him, since gold was now illegal to hold. In other words, if the government paid him in gold, it would then have to confiscate that gold from him anyway since holding gold was against the law.

Speaking for the minority, Justice McReynolds declared:

Just men regard repudiation and spoliation of citizens by their sovereign with abhorrence; but we are asked to affirm that the Constitution has granted power to accomplish both. No definite delegation of such a power exists; and we cannot believe that the farseeing framers, who labored with hope of establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty, intended that the expected government should have authority to annihilate its own obligations and destroy the very rights which they were endeavoring to protect. Not only is there no permission for such actions; they are inhibited. And no plenitude of words can conform them to our charter.

To the argument that the bondholder had suffered no damage in being denied payment in gold since it was now illegal for people to own gold, the dissent replied: “Obligations cannot be legally avoided by prohibiting the creditor from receiving the thing promised…. There would be no serious difficulty in estimating the value of 25.8 grains of gold in the currency now in circulation.” The contract to pay in gold having been broken, the holder was at least morally entitled to receive in currency not just the nominal amount of the bond but an amount in paper dollars equivalent to what he would have earned if the payment could have been made in gold. “For the government to say, we have violated our contract but have escaped the consequences through our own statute, would be monstrous. In matters of contractual obligation the government cannot legislate so as to excuse itself.” Suppose a private individual tried to do the same thing, “secreting or manipulating his assets with the intent to place them beyond the reach of creditors.” Any such attempt “would be denounced as fraudulent, wholly ineffective.”

“Loss of reputation for honorable dealing,” the dissent concluded, “will bring us unending humiliation; the impending legal and moral chaos is appalling.”

By the 1970s the federal government had once again permitted Americans to hold gold coins. But when it came time to actually mint them again, it made sure that gold coins could never circulate and displace the constantly depreciating paper currency printed by the US government: the law required that such coins could circulate with a face value only a tiny fraction of their market value.

The full story of the gold confiscation is actually much worse than this, and we tell it in Who Killed the Constitution? What this episode teaches us is not so much that we need to “return to the Constitution,” though that would be an improvement over what we have now, but rather that pieces of paper that governments themselves interpret cannot be expected to prevent governments from doing what they think they can get away with.

Lysander Spooner once said that he believed “that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize.” At the same time, he could not exonerate the Constitution, for it “has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” It is hard to argue with that.

[Originally published August 13, 2008]

Last week crypto investor Mike Novogratz took to CNBC in an attempt to help analyze the fallout from the FTX scandal. Speaking to Aaron Ross Sorkin, Novogratz – who suffered major losses (and humiliation himself) when Terra/Luna collapsed – laid out how trust has been lost in the asset class for the time being. 

“This is about transparency and disclosure in a lot of ways. Our industry has failed to self-regulate. I think the money side of crypto, companies like ours, are going to get regulated and should be,” he says to start the interview. 

“The tech side of crypto, the on-chain stuff, that has its own series of regulatory challenges. But that should be kept separately. Right now we’re in a deficit of trust – people think there’s a black swan around every corner,” he continues.

“Isn’t this an indictment of crypto? The entire premise of crypto was to create trust,” Aaron Ross Sorkin asks. 

“That still is the long-term goal. Why did companies like mine get set up? We are a bridge company to bridge people into this new economy. It accelerates the capital going in, it helps people understand it. All the capital that has moved into crypto has come from centralized companies. But just like a centralized company, they need to build trust…” Novogratz says.

“This is not really an indictment of crypto, its an indictment of FTX and other companies that were poorly run or fraudulently run,” he continues. 

“Do you feel like investors are going to take advantage of any crisis of confidence. Do we have a crisis of confidence in this market?”

“We certainly do have a crisis of confidence in the industry and we’re not out of the woods yet. FTX was a major player so it’s going to take a few weeks for people to even get their balance back. Bitcoin’s not going away,” he concludes. 

“I don’t think it’s going to be a ‘v’ recovery, it’s going to be a grind out of gaining trust.”

You can watch Novogratz’s full interview on CNBC here. 

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump suggests that Arizona redo its 2022 elections after a memo revealed widespread problems at voting sites in Maricopa County on Election Day.

“This Election was a disgrace,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Nov. 22. “They should at minimum redo the Arizona Election,” Trump added, pointing to the memo written by attorney Mark Sonnenklar, who was one of 11 roving attorneys working with the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Election Integrity program in Maricopa County.

According to the memo, 72 of the 115 voting centers the attorneys visited, or 62.61 percent, witnessed “material problems.”

The long lines negatively affected GOP candidates on election day, according to the memo.

“Because Republican voters significantly outnumbered Democrat voters in the county on election day, such voter suppression would necessarily impact the vote tallies for Republican candidates much more than the vote tallies for Democrat candidates,” Sonnenklar added.

Additionally, Sonnenklar disputed claims by county officials that printer/tabulator problems were resolved as of 3 p.m. local time and their impact was “insignificant.”

“Collectively, I and the other 10 roving attorneys also reported that voters had to wait in significant lines at 59 of the 115 vote centers we visited (51.3 percent). In many cases, voters had to wait 1-2 hours before they received a ballot for voting,” Sonnenklar wrote.

He added, “It is certainly safe to assume that many voters refused to wait in such lines, left the vote center, and did not return to vote later.”

In response to Trump’s comments, Arizona Republican governor’s candidate Kari Lake took to Twitter to thank the former president.

“It was nothing short of mass disenfranchisement for the entire Arizona First slate and the people of Arizona,” Lake added.

Arizona 

Lake currently trails Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,100 votes, 49.7 percent to 50.3 percent, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s office.

Last week, Hobbs declared victory in the race, but Lake has not conceded yet.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Elections Integrity Unit has sent a letter (pdf) to Maricopa County officials demanding answers to “myriad problems” that voters in the county had to deal with on Election Day.

“The Elections Integrity Unit of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has received hundreds of complaints since Election Day pertaining to issues related to the administration of the 2022 General Election in Maricopa County,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright wrote in the letter. “These complaints go beyond pure speculation, but include first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law.”

Wright is demanding a response from the county by Nov. 28.

After the letter was sent, Lake told the Daily Mail that she “will become governor.”

“The way they run elections in Maricopa County is worse than in banana republics around this world,” Lake told the outlet.

On Nov. 21, Lake posted a video on Twitter, saying that “whistleblowers are coming forward” about voting issues on election day in Maricopa County and her attorneys are “working diligently to gather information.”

Read more here…

Rival sets of Iranian protesters have been confronting each other at the World Cup in Qatar, and a moment anti-government demonstrations and unrest has been raging inside Iran for over the past two months.

Tensions spilled over in and outside the stadium for Iran’s 2-0 win over Wales on Friday. As the AP and ESPN reported, “fans supporting the Iranian government harassed those protesting against it and stadium security seized flags, T-shirts and other items expressing support for the protest movement that has gripped the Islamic Republic.”

Stadium security reportedly cracked down on any flags or symbols seen as undermining the officially recognized Iranian state, including preventing fans from carrying Persian pre-revolutionary flags into the venue, Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium.

In some cases pro-government supporters were seen trying to rip signs or imagery with protest slogans from the fans holding them. Some groups were heard chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” during the match.

Controversy was unleashed when during a previous game the Iranian team appeared not to participate in the singing of Iran’s national anthem, while during Friday’s game that changed as the players sang. 

The Associated Press observed further of Friday’s scenes in the stadium: 

Small mobs of men surrounded three different women giving interviews about the protests to foreign media outside the stadium, disrupting broadcasts as they angrily chanted, “The Islamic Republic of Iran!”

Many women fans appeared shaken as Iranian government supporters shouted at them in Farsi and filmed them close-up on their phones.

And according to more from the report:

Inside the stadium, a woman with dark red tears painted from her eyes held aloft a football jersey with “Mahsa Amini – 22” printed on the back — a reference to the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman whose death in police custody two months ago ignited the nationwide protests in Iran, a Reuters photo showed.

A CNN report from earlier this month cited a human rights monitor to say that at least 326 people have been killed since the start of what’s been dubbed the “anti-hijab” protests. 

Tehran says dozens of police and security services personnel have also been killed, and has accused “rioters” of being part of a foreign-backed plot to topple the government. 

Meanwhile, there have also been tensions more broadly between local Arabs and the presence of Israelis at the World Cup: 

A Saudi football fan confronting an Israeli journalist. The look on the journalist’s face should tell you everything about the situation. No amount of “Peace Deals” will normalize Israel in the region. It was, is and will forever be Palestine. pic.twitter.com/CgwDamLubL

— Hadi Nasrallah (@HadiNasrallah) November 26, 2022

By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com

Oil futures and swaps globally are increasingly showing signs of easing supply concerns and resurfaced concerns about further weakness in crude oil demand.

The prompt spreads in the U.S. benchmark, WTI Crude, are already in contango, signaling enough near-term supply. Brent Crude front-month to second-month futures prices also dipped into contango earlier this week.

Contango is the state of the market in which prices for delivery at later dates are higher than prompt prices—a market situation signaling oversupply and one which traders use to store oil for delivery at a later date. The opposite market situation—backwardation—typically occurs at times of market deficit and in it, prices for front-month contracts are higher than the ones further out in time.

Another oil market metric closely followed for signs of demand in the key oil-importing region, Asia, is the premium of Oman futures over Dubai swaps. That premium dropped on Thursday to below $1 per barrel – compared to a premium of over $15 a barrel in March this year – signaling much softer demand. The premium has fallen by around 80% in November alone, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.

So far this month, oil prices have dropped amid growing fears of economic slowdown and spiking Covid infections in China, where some forms of restriction on mobility have returned in nearly 50 large cities. 

China is registering near-record numbers of new Covid infections daily—close to the April 2022 peak when the financial center Shanghai was under lockdown for weeks—likely depressing fuel demand as 48 Chinese cities currently have some form of restrictions on movements. 

According to analysts at Nomura, as of Monday, areas accounting for almost 20% of China’s GDP were suffering from the latest Covid restrictions. China’s rising Covid cases and the return of restrictions have weighed on oil prices this month as the market fears another slowdown in Chinese economic growth and fuel demand, on top of global recession fears.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

People who have been reading my blog and listening to my podcast for years know that I hold a special disdain for the idea that markets can, and should, only go up. 

On more than one podcast, and in more than one article, I’ve noted that this fallacy is just one of many nefarious concepts that I believe do a major disservice to the average investor.

When these otherwise illogical concepts are dumbed down to be made digestible to the average investor, it casts a signal that the financial industry, and the media that peddles it, are simply too embarrassed or incapable of leveling with the American public about the innerworkings of monetary policy and markets.

Rather than take concepts like the market only going up – which, when observed casually, sound ridiculous to even the most uninitiated market participants – and deliver them with a straight face, they are instead broadcast with a zany, sensational, insulting ethos that the industry thinks resonates better with the American public.

This is how we wound up with Jim Cramer – and why Cramer’s deadpan admission of market manipulation, caught on video, has gone mostly unnoticed and without consequences – but his show where he routinely rings bells and whistles while screaming, panting loudly and sweating profusely, WWF-style, is celebrated.

In addition to giving us the poor man’s stock market infotainment, financial media has also given us an unlimited number of “easily digestible”, yet equally as inane and useless acronyms, which conveniently help do away with critical thinking about investing when employed.

For example, Jim Cramer coined the term “FANG” year ago, which was an acronym for “Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google”.

While Cramer was trying to just be cute for beginner investors, the acronym – eventually adopted by mainstream media – sent another message: stock market investing is so easy, we don’t even need to decouple these names from one another anymore.

After all, Cramer talked about these companies so much that it was just easier to refer to them by one name, saving him time whenever he wanted to recommend or talk about these securities, but not necessarily the entire NASDAQ (despite the fact that these are completely different companies with completely different valuations).

But when referred to by their acronym, which is easy to remember by retail investors, where they went one, they went all.

The market for retail investors has been so similarly dumbed down and gamified with acronyms like ESG, FOMO and BTFD and stock ticker symbols like YOLO, HERO, BOOM and FUN, it has never been easier for retail investors to dump their money into an overpriced flaming bag of dog shit with a clever name than it is now.

But one of the most odious examples of dumbing down already idiotic Wall Street Keynesian thinking to retail investors has been the annual tradition of rooting for a “Santa Claus Rally”. Once used to describe the rally at the end of December heading into the new year, this term is now used by the financial media to describe any stock market rally that happens, for any reason, at the end of the year, on any given year.

Rather than being used to describe a rally that is taking place for legitimate means, the term has now taken on a life of its own over the last decade and has gone from a label to a reason that markets rally. The tail, in other words, is wagging the dog, despite the fact that everybody knows there’s no really good reason to buy stocks just because it’s the end of the year.

Everybody knows that companies are cyclical and everybody knows that holidays result in more sales for many companies. It’s safe to say that this century-old tradition has already been priced into stock markets.

So what, exactly, is a “Santa Claus Rally”?

In reality, it’s nothing – it’s a gimmick, like “FANG” – or to quote Chasing Amy – “a figment of your f*cking imagination!”

The “Santa Claus Rally” is nothing more than an easily understood analogic vessel that Keynesians in the financial media use to continue to implant the idea that the market should always go up into the minds of novice investors. It’s the anti-fundamental analysis, and it’s all wrapped up with images of everybody’s favorite holiday – a time of joy, cheer, prosperity, family and friends: Christmas.

That’s right: it’s a gimmick so nefarious, it invokes the time of year when people feel most complete. I mean, what do people look for from an investment? They look for financial security so as to live comfortably. And when do most people feel the most comfortable and secure? Around the holidays.

Get 50% off: If you enjoy this article, would like to support my work and have the means, I would love to have you as a subscriber and can offer you 50% off for life: Get 50% off forever

But this year I’m calling it the “Santa Pause Rally” – not just because of how toxic the saying is to begin with, but because, as we have been figuring out the hard way for the last 9 months, there really is no reason for random celebration in markets right now.

Markets, and our economy, are in absolutely unprecedented waters right now, with our central bank stuck in a minefield of catch-22s that they can’t get out of without collapsing the economy or letting inflation run rampant. Thus, new paradigms in how investing and markets work are being written daily – and none of them include random stock rallies just because the financial media says so. That shit may have flown when volatility was at all time lows and the world financial and geopolitical order wasn’t in disarray – but that’s hardly the case today.

If 2018 wasn’t a stark enough reminder that the “Santa Claus Rally” is complete and total bullshit (recall, markets collapsed after slow and steady 25 bps rate hikes totaling barely 3%), this year should be.

Above: 2018’s “Santa Claus Rally”

I’m not saying that the market won’t rally at the end of the year, but what I am saying is that any rally we undergo will more than likely be a bear market rally and be short lived. I am sticking by my analysis that, as we speak, there is a 400 basis point pipe bomb making its way through the economic plumbing of the nation, just waiting to blow up and tank markets on any given day.

At the very least, hopefully this reminder of the idiocy not only of monetary policy, but of Wall Street naming conventions used to feed the hogs, serves to arrest any remaining mindless optimism mainstream media-watchers have heading into the end of the year.

There’s no way to say it without playing into the criticisms that I’m nothing but a fear mongering permabear, but I honestly believe there isn’t really anything to look forward to heading into the end of 2022 with markets or the economy.

All this market wants for Christmas is a soft landing, but instead, it’s almost certainly going to be getting a lump of coal over the next six months.

When that happens – or the next time some lobotomized television anchor uses the “Santa Claus Rally” notion – I beg of you to return to this piece and read the following paragraph, provided in bold font for your visual convenience.

Using cute names and anecdotal slogans does nothing to help educate mom and pop investors about monetary policy, which is the main driving force behind the nation’s current inflationary crisis. This dumbing down of markets and the economy will also be the reason behind any forthcoming panic in markets or economic depression for our country, as shock will be amplified due to investors believing things are better than they actually are. These terms are used as vessels in order to further an extremely misguided policy agenda that has gotten us into this mess to begin with – they put exceptional looking gift wrap on financial lumps of coal.

For more on how I’m positioned heading into 2023, you can read my latest update here.

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Apple’s top manufacturing partner, Foxconn Technology Group, is set to see November iPhone shipments from a massive factory in Zhengzhou, China, known as iPhone City, plunge after a week of unrest, Reuters said, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. 

They said iPhone production would be slashed by more than 30% at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in November versus an earlier estimate of up to 30% when problems at the factory began in late October. 

Most of the 200,000-person workforce has been living in isolation since last month. New hires were brought in recently as management wanted to keep churning premium iPhone models, including the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro. 

But Foxconn failed to live up to its promises of higher pay for new hires, which sparked a riot across the world’s largest iPhone factory earlier this week. To squash the violence, Foxconn began distributing 10,000 yuan ($1,400) to newly recruited workers to leave by Thursday.

“The source said more than 20,000 workers, mostly new hires not yet working on production lines, took the money and left,” Reuters said. 

The Zhengzhou plant accounts for 70% of global iPhone shipments, and a reduction in production will ripple through the supply chain. Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, is Apple’s top supplier, which means any manufacturing disruption in China could leave AT&T, Best Buy, and Verizon stores without iPhones.  

Another source said it’s “impossible” for Apple to resume full iPhone production by the end of the month. 

ODDO BHF, a Franco-German financial services group, said even if Apple shifts production to other plants, “the impact will probably be significant, as long as these protests are continuing in Zhengzhou, with significant delays to be expected for the iPhone 14.” 

Foxconn acknowledged it made errors in managing new hires while blaming local officials for unpredictable health policies that impacted meal delivery and made maintenance nearly impossible, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the company.  

“You see cases like Foxconn, and every company is now asking themselves, ‘Will that happen to me?’

“Any company that depends on manufacturing has to consider alternatives. It will be costly, but it will be less costly than only relying on China and then China doesn’t open up,” Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis, said. 

In early November, Foxconn revised its earning expectations down for Q4 on zero Covid disruptions at the assembly facility, while Apple warned iPhone capacity would be reduced. After chaos this week, more downward revisions could be ahead. 

Update(1355ET): On Saturday the White House unveiled a monumental shift in its Venezuela policy, given only a short time ago Washington didn’t even officially recognize Nicolás Maduro as the socialist Latin American country’s legitimate ruler, announcing the easing of oil sanctions which allows Chevron to pump Venezuelan crude and export it to the United States.

Chevron was forced to halt all drilling there just under three years ago due to Trump administration sanctions, also amid a US policy that recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as “interim president”. 

Bloomberg confirms following the fresh White House statement, “Chevron received a six-month license that authorizes the company to produce petroleum or petroleum products in Venezuela, according to a general license from the US Treasury Department. The San Ramon, California-based driller is also allowed to resume exports of crude oil that had been been halted since 2019, when the US ratcheted up sanctions against the OPEC producer.”

OIL MARKET: Washington eases its oil sanctions on Venezuela, allowing Chevron (for the next 6 months) to pump crude in the Latin American nation and export it into the United States. A major shift in the White House policy | #OOTT #Venezuela $CVX 🇻🇪 ⛽️ 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/fM1F6lOtJ2

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) November 26, 2022

It was in April 2020 that Chevron was ordered by then President Trump to “wind down” its oil fields in Venezuela, which also meant withdrawing or decommissioning its extensive machinery and infrastructure there.

For this reason Chevron’s CEO Mike Wirth recently estimated it would take “months and years in order to begin to maintain and refurbish fields and equipment and change any investment activity.” For this reason many are seeing the White House’s conditional six month license as a completely unrealistic timetable and constraint.

Deal is a joke
1. Need billions and a lot more time than 6 mos to squeeze more oil out of that country due to neglected infrustructure
2. VZ govt will get no proceeds under deal. Maduro will not be pleased. US is hoping for “free and fair elections” for this acc. to NY Times.

— Tracy (𝒞𝒽𝒾 ) (@chigrl) November 26, 2022

Chevron as the last major US oil company to operate there had before the oil embargo invested in Venezuela’s oil fields and machinery over the last century to the tune of an estimated $2.6 billion.

* * *

As Dave DeCamp of AntiWar.com previewed earlier, the US might soon grant Chevron a license to pump oil in Venezuela in a move that would ease crippling sanctions that were imposed on the South American country by the Trump administration.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the easing of sanctions is contingent on the implementation of a $3 billion humanitarian project that is expected to be announced by President Nicolas Maduro and his opposition this weekend. The project would be paid for with Venezuelan funds that have been seized by the US.

The license Chevron would be granted would still be limited as it would allow the oil company to regain partial control of its oil production in Venezuela, but it won’t be able to build new facilities until debts are repaid.

The Trump administration began imposing harsh sanctions on Venezuela in 2017 and really ramped them up in 2019 when the US recognized opposition figure Juan Guaido as “interim president” and backed a failed coup attempt against Maduro.

The US continued to increase sanctions on Venezuela following the failed coup and the country is essentially under an economic embargo.

The Journal report said that the license for Chevron would put the company under a framework of sanctions similar to the ones that went into effect in 2019.

This paragraph is remarkable. This Chevron license will yield no income for Venezuela, yet it’s supposed to be a “plum” for the Maduro govt? Plus notice the headline “Chevron to boost Vzla’s output” like the corporate overlords will be doing Venezuela a favor! pic.twitter.com/qrBWcarv9x

— venezuelanalysis.com (@venanalysis) November 24, 2022

US sanctions on Venezuela have had a devastating impact on the civilian population, but the Biden administration’s steps to ease sanctions are likely an effort to keep global oil prices down.

The move comes as the US and its allies are planning to implement a price cap on Russian oil that could backfire and cause Russia to significantly cut production.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Dr. Anthony Fauci said he could not recall key details about his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to one of the officials who questioned him on Nov. 23.

Fauci, the director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, was deposed by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, both Republicans.

“It was amazing, literally, that we spent seven hours with Dr. Fauci—this is a man who single-handedly wrecked the U.S. economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science.’ And over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry told The Epoch Times after leaving the deposition. “He just said, ‘I can’t recall, I haven’t seen that. And I think we need to put these documents into context,’” Landry added.

“It was extremely troubling to realize that this is a man who advises presidents of the United States and yet couldn’t recall information he put out, information he discussed, press conferences he held dealing with the COVID-19 response,” Landry added later.

Fauci and NIAID did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Landry declined to provide more details about the deposition until it is made public, which will happen at a future date. But he said officials would be able to take some of what they learned to advance their case.

Landry and Schmitt sued the U.S. government in May, alleging it violated people’s First Amendment rights by pressuring big tech companies to censor speech. Documents produced by the government in response bolstered the claims. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered Fauci and seven other officials to testify under oath about their knowledge of the censorship.

Doughty concluded that plaintiffs showed Fauci “has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to COVID-19 and ancillary issues of COVID-19.”

While Fauci qualified as a high-ranking official, the burden of him being deposed was outweighed by the court’s need for information before ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction, Doughty said.

Wednesday was the first time Fauci testified under oath about his interactions with big tech firms, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Before the deposition, Landry said in a statement, “We all deserve to know how involved Dr. Fauci was in the censorship of the American people during the COVID pandemic; tomorrow, I hope to find out.”

“We’re going to follow the evidence everywhere it goes to get down to exactly what has happened, to get down to the fact that our government used private entities to suppress the speech of Americans,” Landry told The Epoch Times.

Great Barrington Declaration

Jenin Younes with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, another lawyer representing plaintiffs in the case, said that Fauci claimed he did not worry about a document called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Penned in October 2020, the document called for focused protection on people most at-risk from COVID-19 while rescinding the harsh restrictions that had been imposed on children and others at little risk from the disease. Two of its authors, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are plaintiffs in the case.

“I have a very busy day job running a six billion dollar institute. I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration,” Fauci said, according to Younes.

Fauci, though, has spoken multiple times about the declaration.

In internal emails that were later published, Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, Fauci’s former boss, both criticized the declaration. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” Collins wrote, prompting Fauci to send him a Wired magazine article he claimed “debunks this theory.”

In another missive, obtained by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request, Fauci said the declaration reminded him of AIDS denialism.

Fauci also talked about the declaration in public, including defending his criticism during a congressional hearing in May.

“I have come out very strongly publicly against the Great Barrington Declaration,” Fauci wrote to Dr. Deborah Birx in another email.

Other Depositions

The government moved to block some of the depositions, but not Fauci’s. It just won an order blocking the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to Biden.

Similar efforts to block the depositions of former White House press secretary Jen Psaki and FBI official Elvis Chan have been unsuccessful.

Chan is scheduled to answer questions next week. Psaki is scheduled to be deposed on Dec. 8.

Chan was involved in communicating with Facebook, LinkedIn, and other big tech firms about content moderation, according to evidence developed in the case and public statements he’s made. Psaki publicly said while still in the White House that platforms should step up against alleged mis- and disinformation.

Plaintiffs have already deposed several officials including Daniel Kimmage, an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

That center worked with Easterly’s agency to create a coalition of nonprofits called the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed social media companies to censor speech.

Kimmage was also responsible for meetings during which censorship was discussed, with State Department official Samaruddin Stewart acting on his orders, according to documents produced by LinkedIn.

Read more here…