Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Devin Nunes subpoenaed the DOJ and FBI for documents related to their involvement with the Russia collusion hoax when he was a congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee. In response, the DOJ engaged in “reverse spying” to try and stop the investigation, Nunes alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 21.

“It’s all common knowledge now that the FBI, DOJ, the Democrat National Party, they were all in cahoots together, taking made-up, phony dirt and taking it before a FISA court,” said Nunes, who was chair of the intelligence committee from 2015–2019.

But, at the time, the general public didn’t know about that collusion.

“At that time, nobody knew that publicly. We knew that. The FBI and the DOJ knew that we knew that. They knew that they were under investigation by [Nunes’ team]. So, what do they do? … They target my lawyers so they can try and figure out what we knew, when we knew it, and what we were going to do with the information.”

Nunes stated that to suppress the investigation, the FBI and the DOJ purposefully tried to find “blackmail” to use against Nunes’ staff.

“It wasn’t like they were in search of some crime. What they were really after was intelligence, and potentially blackmail, to figure out how they could stop the information,” Nunes alleged.

But ultimately, the DOJ’s reverse spying was unsuccessful, Nunes stated, and he was able to openly shed light on the cooperation between the DOJ, the FBI, and the Democrat National Party to bring down then-President Donald Trump.

No Valid Predicate

According to Nunes, if the DOJ was acting in compliance with the law, it should have informed Nunes when it demanded Google turn over personal email and phone data from at least two senior intelligence members of Nunes’ team. Nunes specified that the team members were working on the congressional probe into the Russia hoax.

“Look, it’s a serious issue if I’ve got staff that work for me that are handling the nation’s highest secrets. If I have staff that are somehow doing something wrong, [the DOJ] should have come to me and told me.”

Nunes said that the only way for the DOJ to get around that requirement is to use the National Security Division and “essentially accuse” Nunes and his team of being “agents of Putin.”

“There’s no other way around [informing me]. They have a duty and a responsibility if there are staffers that are involved in some shenanigans or nefarious activity, they should have come to me immediately,” Nunes states.

But, Nunes said, the DOJ never informed him of a potential issue with his staffers. And the reason is the DOJ was acting outside of a “valid predicate” and instead acting on a “lie.” Nunes stated unequivocally that there was never evidence to suggest that his staff were Russian agents.

As such, Nunes claimed, there are only two possible reasons for the subpoenas against Nunes’ staff.

“The only two logical reasons: They were there to grab intelligence on us as we were conducting our investigation, and two, to look for anything they could possibly do to find blackmail so they could stop this information from coming out and their involvement from coming out.”

Read more here…

After a week of total silence, New York Representative-elect George Santos admitted to a laundry list of lies, ranging from his education, professional background, property ownership, and religion.

And he’s still going to take the oath of office on Jan. 3, joining the House majority.

Santos, who was elected in November to represent residents from north Long Island and northeast Queens, was confronted by the New York Times with several falsehoods.

“My sins here are embellishing my résumé,” he told the NY Post in a Monday interview.

The lies include;

• Graduating from college
• Claiming he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs
• That his family owns a real estate portfolio of 13 properties (he admitted Monday he’s not a landlord)
• That he’s Jewish

“I never claimed to be Jewish,” he told the Post, adding “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’“

Santos also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and, despite being openly gay, a yearslong marriage he never revealed.

“I dated women in the past. I married a woman. It’s personal stuff,” he told the Post, adding that he is “OK with my sexuality. People change.”

Mr. Santos acknowledged that a string of financial difficulties had left him owing thousands to landlords and creditors. But he failed to fully explain in the interviews how his fortunes reversed so significantly that, by 2022, he was able to lend $700,000 to his congressional campaign.

Mr. Santos also firmly denied committing a crime anywhere in the world, even though The Times had uncovered Brazilian court records showing that Mr. Santos had been charged with fraud as a young man after he was caught writing checks with a stolen checkbook. –NY Times

“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told the Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”

Except, court records show that he confessed to the crime and was charged, but the case was unable to move forward because authorities were unable to locate him.

Santos also said he graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before working for Citigroup, and then went on to Goldman Sachs – which made its way to a biography on the National Republican Congressional Committee website (which also included a degree from NY University).

The colleges and companies told the Times they have no record of Santos.

“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé,” later said, adding “We do stupid things in life.”

He also admitted that he never worked directly for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, blaming a “poor choice of words” for creating the impression that he had.

Past statements of Mr. Santos are relatively clear however: An archived version of Mr. Santos’s former campaign website preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine says he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm.”

Instead, he told The Post on Monday, he dealt with both firms through his work at another company, LinkBridge Investors, which connects investors with potential clients. LinkBridge, he said, had “limited partnerships” with the two Wall Street firms. -NY Times

The Times was unable to confirm his employment with LinkBridge. 

What he did confirm was that he worked at a call center in Queens in late 2011 and early 2012.

And while Santos could face ethics investigations once seated, legal experts say the House can only prevent candidates from office of they violate the Constitution’s age, citizenship or state residency requirements.

Questions do remain, however – such as how he was able to reportedly earn millions of dollars from his company, the Devolder Organization.

“I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress,” said Santos, adding “There’s nothing wrong with that — no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort,” he told City & State.

In short, he’s perfect for Congress.

Authored by Michael Maharrey via SchiffGold.com,

Just before Christmas, Congress passed a massive omnibus spending bill. This is yet another blow to the Federal Reserve’s feckless fight against inflation.

The $1.7 trillion bill will fund government operations for the remainder of fiscal 2023. It includes some $800 billion in domestic spending, a 9.3% increase over fiscal 2022. It also includes $858 billion in military spending, a 10% increase over last year’s levels.

Overall, the omnibus bill authorized about $1.5 trillion more than last year’s budget.

“Yes, indeed the goose is getting fat – we have a big bill here because we had big needs for our country,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

Of course, this is only one component of federal expenditures. In March 2021, Congress approved $1.9 trillion in spending to address the pandemic, and earlier this year, it passed the euphemistically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” All of that spending will pile on top of this most recent allocation of funding.

Of course, all of this spending will only increase inflation.

And it’s a big problem for the Federal Reserve as it attempts to stem the tide of rising prices.

In fact, it is impossible for the central bank to get a handle on inflation when the government keeps running bigger and bigger deficits that can only be sustained by more inflation.

The Fed’s Problem

The Federal Reserve has primarily relied on interest rate cuts to battle inflation. But it can’t slay the inflation dragon with monetary policy alone. A paper published by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank even acknowledged that fact. In a nutshell, the authors argue that the Fed can’t control inflation alone. US government fiscal policy contributes to inflationary pressure and makes it impossible for the Fed to do its job.

Trend inflation is fully controlled by the monetary authority only when public debt can be successfully stabilized by credible future fiscal plans. When the fiscal authority is not perceived as fully responsible for covering the existing fiscal imbalances, the private sector expects that inflation will rise to ensure sustainability of national debt. As a result, a large fiscal imbalance combined with a weakening fiscal credibility may lead trend inflation to drift away from the long-run target chosen by the monetary authority.” [Emphasis added]

And why does the private sector expect more inflation in order to sustain the debt? Because ultimately the central bank has to monetize that debt. That means money printing in order to buy US debt. Without the Fed intervening in the bond market, the US Treasury cannot sell enough bonds with a low enough interest rate to keep the borrowing and spending going.

Even with pandemic-era spending winding down, the US government ran a $1.38 trillion budget deficit in fiscal 2022. This despite government receipts at near-record levels. Revenues are expected to decline in the months ahead and spending clearly isn’t coming down. That means bigger deficits. And bigger deficits mean more borrowing.

The Federal Reserve enables the US government’s borrowing and spending spree. During the pandemic, the Fed bought trillions in US Treasury bonds. This artificial demand kept bond prices higher than they otherwise would have been and interest rates lower. Without the Fed’s big fat thumb on the bond market, all of the borrowing would have driven interest rates to unsustainable levels.

But in order to fight inflation, the Fed has to shrink its balance sheet. That means it is no longer buying bonds. This is a huge problem for the US Treasury as it tries to find willing buyers for its debt.

On the other side of the equation, the Fed pays for bonds with money it creates out of thin air and the banks inject that new money into the economy. That is, by definition, inflation.

The question is how will the government finance these massive deficits that will only get bigger with this new spending bill when the Fed is on the sideline?

The answer is it won’t. Not in over the long term. If the Fed doesn’t go back to quantitative easing (bond buying), interest rates will rise much higher and crush the federal government under interest payments.

In fact, the US government is already having trouble with rising interest rates.

In fiscal 2022, the US Treasury forked out $475 billion just to fund the government’s interest payments. That was up about 30% from fiscal 2021. Interest expense already ranks as the sixth largest budget expense category, about $250 billion below Medicare.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest expense is about to balloon. It projects interest payments will triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal 2022 to $1.2 trillion in 2032. And it’s worse than that. The CBO made this estimate in May. Interest rates are already higher than those used in its analysis.

If interest rates remain elevated or continue rising, interest expenses could climb rapidly into the top three federal expenses. (You can read a more in-depth analysis of the national debt HERE.)

The bottom line is the Fed can’t slay inflation while the federal government is spending itself deeper and deeper into debt. Given that there is no end in sight to the spending, we should expect inflation to remain with us for the indefinite future.

Having promised that it would reveal its response to the recently implemented by the G7 price cap on Russian oil exports, moments ago the Kremlin did not disappoint, and as the WSJ reports, Russian President Vladimir Putin banned the supply of Russian oil and oil products to countries that impose a price cap, allowing deliveries to those nations only on the basis of a special permission from the Kremlin leader.

According to the decree, the retaliatory measures are scheduled to come into effect Feb. 1 and last through July 1, 2023.

Russia’s actions are a response to what the decree described as unfriendly actions of the U.S., foreign states and international organizations that contradict international law, and are designed “to protect the national interests of the Russian Federation,” the decree said.

The European Union and the U.K. earlier this month banned the import of seaborne Russian crude, while the Group of Seven nations put a ceiling on other sales by barring Western companies from insuring, financing or shipping Russian crude at above $60 a barrel.

And now, Russia has flipped the story on its head, saying the not only will it not sell below $60, but it has banned the sale outright to all countries that engaged in this most glaring virtue-signaling exercise, one which paradoxically was not meant to punish Putin but to keep Russian oil flowing.

While the price cap has not seen a major impact on pricing so far, that will likely change soon: As shown below, Urals oil is trading with a generous discount to spot Brent, and was last seen around $50.

In other words, those nations buying Urals – mostly China and India – are not violating the G-7 pact… yet. However, once Urals follows Brent higher, and its price rises above $60/barrel that will change, and at that point it will be interesting to see how the G7 responds to the two fastest growing economies and two most populous nations openly defying the G7’s Russian oil price floor.

The news, which was largely as expected, has not had an impact on the price of oil with WTI and Brent both trading at three week highs following news that China was ending zero-covid policies and reopening its economy.

As for the US stepping in a providing emergency cover to nations who may be caught in the crossfire, sorry – Joe already drained a third of the SPR to get Democrats reelected.

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a prominent epidemiologist and biostatistician and former Harvard School of Medicine professor, said he was “not surprised” after seeing concrete evidence that a post he shared on Twitter was flagged and prevented from wider dissemination.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

He expressed disapproval and said that the social media giant’s overall censorship actions have stifled free debate on COVID-19 topics and undermined trust in science.

In the latest installment of the Elon Musk-endorsed “Twitter Files” published early on Dec. 26, journalist David Zweig shared how posts from Kulldorff and several others about COVID-19, including about vaccines, were flagged and censored in various ways by Twitter.

It marked the first trove of direct evidence from the “Twitter Files” showing how Twitter censored scientists, potentially at the behest of the U.S. government, ever since journalist Bari Weiss revealed in early December that Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been put on a blacklist due to his views on COVID-19-related lockdowns and school closures.

While Kulldorff said he was not surprised by evidence showing how he and others were censored, he said Twitter should not be the arbiter of which scientists have valid views, and that such censorship shouldn’t happen.

“There should be an open discussion. You can’t expect people to trust public health and trust the scientific community if you don’t have that open communication and open debate,” Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.

In the Twitter post of concern, dated March 26, 2021, Kulldorff said that children and those who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 do not need to be vaccinated, but that vaccines were important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. The post was flagged by a Twitter moderator as having violated the company’s COVID-19 “misinformation policy.”

An internal email shared by Zweig showed that the moderator claimed Kulldorff had shared “false information regarding the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which goes against CDC guidelines.” Twitter subsequently labeled the post as “misleading” and turned off all likes and replies.

“But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed ‘false information’ by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines,” Zweig wrote.

“After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a ‘Misleading’ label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by many people, the ostensible core function of the platform.”

A child receives a dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 5, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Kulldorff reiterated his views on COVID-19 vaccination in children, telling The Epoch Times late Monday: “We know and we’ve known ever since the very beginning of the pandemic, and the data from Wuhan, that children are at minuscule risk … from dying from COVID-19.”

“So the benefit of the vaccine, therefore, is almost nothing, because it doesn’t prevent [transmission]. [And] the risk of death and hospitalization [with children] is very low. The benefit is very, very small. We know that,” he added.

“So then the question is, what are the potential harms? And we know there are potential harms, with myocarditis, for example. I think the benefit is so tiny it’s not worth taking the risks of adverse reactions, which we know there is myocarditis, but we don’t know the full extent of adverse reactions yet.”

Kulldorff also dismissed the view that had been promulgated incessantly by health officials and media outlets that COVID-19 vaccination is “safe and effective” at large.

“I think for many people, they only heard one voice. And when they heard alternative voices, [those voices] were sort of dismissed as cranks. But that’s not how medicine or science works,” he said.

“There are many vaccines and many drugs that are important for some people, but unnecessary for others. So to say that everybody should get a vaccine, that’s not very scientific way of thinking about things,” he said.

“Just like saying that nobody should ever be vaccinated is equally unscientific,” he added.

“But we get sort of a polarizing view between the anti-vaxxers and vaccine fanatics,” Kulldorff observed, adding that in his opinion, “the vaccine fanatics have done much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else with pushing vaccine mandates based on flawed scientific thinking.”

“I think that [the push for vaccine mandates] has had consequences not only for the COVID-19 vaccine but also for childhood vaccines—important childhood vaccines like polio, for example,” he said.

“So vaccine fanatics who have been pushing for mandates—that everybody should get vaccinated—they have done a lot of damage to vaccine confidence in the U.S. and other parts of the world as well.”

Amid emerging evidence that U.S. government officials have exerted influence on social media companies with regard to the sharing of views on COVID-19, Kulldorff expressed that the government “should not at all be involved” in any such influence.

While various examples have now come to light with regard to Twitter’s censorship of scientists, Kulldorff said he hopes to see the full extent of this censorship one day, such as “a summary of how many were censored, how many were blacklisted, for how long, and so on.”

He said it would also be important to know which person or people were behind the decisions to censor and whether there were people who were reporting posts to Twitter to be censored.

“Were other scientists involved in urging Twitter to censor their fellow scientists who had a different opinion?” he pondered. “And if so, to what extent, and who were those scientists?”

“I have never sent in a report to Twitter, asking them to censor a scientist with a different opinion of mine. I don’t think scientists should engage in such activity.”

The headline Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey disappointed in December, falling to -18.8 (from -14.4 and expected to rise very modestly to -13.5)

Interestingly the outlook for six-months ahead improved (but remains negative), but you wouldn’t know it judging by the responses that The Dallas Fed decided to release for publication… notice a pattern?

Food Manufacturing

• Business has picked up from a lull in October/November. We’re expecting a strong first quarter 2023.

• Late-year seasonality affects our business. We generally see a slowdown from Thanksgiving through the end of the year.

• The combination of increased costs of raw ingredients, illiquid consumers and the need to retain employees via increasing benefits has created a difficult environment. Couple that with the Biden political mentality of things, and it is unhealthy for business.

Paper Manufacturing

• We’re now dialing in the very increased forecast of a significant downturn. Recession is now being planned for and acted upon.

Printing and Related Support Activities

• We can feel things slowing down. Estimating activity is really down from previous months, and incoming orders have dropped off as well. It seems that our material vendors are getting items out faster, and all talk about how the activity level has slowed down from earlier in the year.

Nonmetallic Mineral Product Manufacturing

• Our products are sold to homebuilders. [When] interest rates go up, home construction goes down and will continue to go down in the next six months.

Fabricated Metal Product Manufacturing

• Demand is decreasing.

Machinery Manufacturing

• I think we are experiencing a year-end lull in business activity. We actually have no idea what to expect for 2023.

• We are seeing more and bigger orders recently. Oil companies are spending money on projects that they have held back on this past year. We expect 2023 to be a very good year. Our backlog of orders is growing to a record.

• Never doubt the ability of the Federal Reserve to crush the economy when they intervene to stop inflation.

Computer and Electronic Product Manufacturing

• We’re plowing ahead as our market changes.

• We have seen a small decrease in new orders, but wages and other costs continue to increase. We are investing in more automation to reduce the labor cost.

Transportation Equipment Manufacturing

• There is nothing positive in the economic outlook. The Federal Reserve should pause and let prior rate increases filter through before implementing further increases or they [will] overdo the contraction and make it harder to recover.

Miscellaneous Manufacturing

• The rapid pace of wage growth is putting significant pressure on the business to outsource manufacturing outside the U.S.

Not exactly a picture of the ‘strong as hell’ economy we hear from The White House?

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times,

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are unable to locate any records of illegal immigrants taken into custody and placed in a federal program to “ensure non-detained non-citizen compliance with release conditions, court hearings, and final orders of removal,” according to a nonprofit government transparency advocacy group.

“ICE has conducted a search of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for records responsive to your request and no records responsive to your request were found,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in a Dec. 22 letter.

The ICE letter cautioned that the failure to locate records sought by TRAC isn’t evidence that the documents do or don’t exist. The inability of ICE to locate the requested records was described by TRAC in a Dec. 23 statement as a “very troubling development.”

Nearly 378,000 individuals are currently covered by the program, according to federal officials.

The ICE letter was in response to TRAC’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for “the latest alien-by-alien, anonymous data covering all individuals who were taken into custody by ICE and entered (or transferred to) ICE ATD custody from the beginning of Fiscal Year 2019 through August 2022 (or date of search, whichever later).”

The ICE Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, according to ICE, “allows for closer monitoring of non-detained noncitizens at varying levels of supervision, using several different monitoring technologies. ATD effectively increases court appearance rates, compliance with release conditions, and helps the participants meet basic needs and understand immigration obligations.”

Individuals who fail to report “are subject to arrest and potential removal. To be eligible for ATD, noncitizens must be 18 years of age or older, effectively removable from the United States, and in some stage of the immigration process,” according to ICE.

“According to ICE’s posted numbers, persons being monitored by its Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program grew by 20,000 in just the last two weeks to a total of 377,980 individuals,” TRAC said in its statement.

“However, TRAC is still urging caution in interpreting these latest numbers. As we announced earlier, ICE has informed TRAC that Alternatives to Detention (ATD) data the agency posted previously was inaccurate. TRAC has requested but not yet received underlying source documents from ICE. Thus, it has not yet been able to validate and correct the ICE ATD data being posted.”

The Epoch Times has requested comment from an ICE spokesman regarding the fact that the agency appears to be telling TRAC that it’s unable to locate data, even as the government publicly reports what it presents as accurate information.

Questions about the accuracy of government immigration data come as the country approaches a third consecutive year of what’s expected to be record totals of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States at the southern border with Mexico.

Since President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, more than 2 million illegal immigrants are known to have entered the country, as well as hundreds of thousands of “gotaways,” who are individuals pursued by border officials but not apprehended.

Illegal immigration surged to record levels following Biden’s inauguration and decisions shortly thereafter to repeal the tight enforcement policies of his predecessor, President Donald Trump, especially the “Remain in Mexico” program that required staying in Mexico while awaiting disposition of asylum requests and other legal matters.

Earlier this month, TRAC announced that “the data ICE has been posting for months showed that use of GPS ankle monitors had been increasing, which TRAC previously reported. ICE now reports this is incorrect, that ankle monitor usage is in fact, down significantly. Adding to the confusion, ICE frequently posts data, replaces it, and replaces it again without any indication that changes have taken place, or which set are the ‘correct’ numbers.”

But the problems uncovered by TRAC with the ICE data are more extensive than the flaws regarding ankle monitor usage, according to the transparency group:

“ICE data reporting problems extend beyond the GPS ankle monitor usage. ICE’s new data for FY 2022 significantly revised the previous numbers for every single one of the ATD reported technologies—not only GPS, but also SmartLINK, and VoiceID, as well. Not only did the use of GPS monitors drop, but the public now learned that 1 in 9 (11 percent) were not being monitored with the use of any technology at all!”

“It’s a really straightforward example of a lack of transparency and compliance with the disclosure requirements of the FOIA,” TRAC co-founder Susan Long told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview on Dec. 26.

“To say there are no records, this is classic ICE. They have in the past after long delays and redactions released some updated data, but it is not uncommon to get this kind of response. Clearly, the data exists, their contracts require the information be kept and that ICE have access to it,” Long said.

“The question comes, what do you believe, and so part of our role is to get the underlying data to check it out. If we can’t get the underlying data, I mean we aren’t talking about something that is national defense secrets,” she continued.

As an example of problems created by the inability to verify the underlying data for immigration data, Long said ICE officials were “very embarrassed because their data was showing that the use of these ankle monitors, GPS monitors, were increasing when that was exactly the opposite of what the head of the agency was saying.”

Long stressed that she is confident that the underlying data behind the numbers published by ICE is credible.

“But if you look at the posted data at some of the links we’ve published is just unbelievably bad,” she said.

Long also pointed out that ICE publishes its data on immigration programs such as ATD because of a congressional mandate.

Just hours after we wrote this weekend about Nio CEO William Li’s less than optimistic comments about starting off the 2023 year for EVs, the company was out to adjust its delivery outlook for Q4 2022.

And, surprise, surprise, the “adjustment” wasn’t to the upside…and Nio shares aren’t liking the news – joining Tesla this morning in plunging more than 6%. 

In a press release out Tuesday morning, Nio said it “has been facing challenges in deliveries and productions, together with certain supply chain constraints, caused by the outbreak of the Omicron coronavirus variant in major cities in China.”

“While our teams have strived to maintain continuous operations on all fronts, we were not able to reach our full capacities, particularly when there have been disruptions on delivery and registration procedures involving users. The Company now expects to deliver 38,500 to 39,500 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2022, adjusted from previously released outlook of 43,000 to 48,000 vehicles,” the press release said. 

Recall, Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Chief Executive Officer William Li said this week that the company could “face a challenging first half as a cut in government subsidies and the broader economic slowdown erode local demand in the world’s largest new-energy vehicle market”. 

Li said that demand could be pulled forward to the end of 2022 as customers look to try and place vehicle orders before national subsidies run out. He made the comments in Hefei, Central China this week, also noting that that the residual effects of the pandemic continue to mire the company. 

“It will also take time for both the supply chain and consumer confidence to recover from the pandemic,” he said.

Though Li says he expects a “full recovery” by May or June, we’re not so sure. The industry looks bleak. For example, Tesla also announced last week it would be halting production for slightly longer than expected at its Shanghai plant this month.

Additionally, just days ago we published commentary from an auto industry insider who said that a “massive wave” of car repossessions and loans defaults would soon be on the horizon in the United States. 

As we noted in early December, for almost a year now, we have been dutifully tracking several key datasets within the auto sector to find the critical inflection point in this perhaps most leading of economic indicators which will presage not only a crushing auto loan crisis, but also signal the arrival of a full-blown recession, one which even the NBER won’t be able to ignore, as the US consumers are once again tapped out. We believe that moment has now arrived.

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The COVID-19 antiviral drug Molnupiravir helps speed up recovery from the virus but does not reduce the hospitalization or death rate in higher-risk vaccinated adults, a new study has found.

Molnupiravir, from Ridgeback Biotherapeutics and Merck & Co. is used to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 and can be taken at home, twice a day for five days, within five days of symptoms onset.

It works by stopping the virus from replicating, keeping levels low in the body, thus reducing its severity.

The study was published in The Lancet on Dec. 22 and has been peer reviewed.

Between Dec. 8, 2021 and April 27, 2022, more than 25,700 eligible participants in the UK aged 50 or older—or 18 or older with relevant comorbidities—who had been unwell with confirmed COVID-19 for five days or less took part in the study, which was conducted when the Omicron variant was dominant.

Half of the participants were randomly assigned to receive an 800 milligram dose of Molnupiravir twice daily for five days and the other half were assigned to receive usual hospital care only.

The mean age of participants was 56.6 years and 94 percent had received at least three doses of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

Doesn’t Reduce Hospital Admissions or Death

Researchers conducted a follow-up of the participants either via an online diary or a telephone call within 28 days. They found that hospitalizations or deaths were recorded in 105 (1 percent) of the 12,529 participants who received Molnupiravir, versus 98 hospitalizations or deaths (1 percent) recorded in the 12,525 participants who were given usual care.

The study did, however, find that participants who received Molnupiravir recovered faster than those who received usual care, had a higher rate of early sustained recovery, saw a reduced viral load, and sought fewer general practitioner consultations. Twenty percent of the Molnupiravir patients sought GP consultations compared to 24 percent of those who received usual care, a slight difference.

Participants who received Molnupiravir reported a median recovery time of nine days compared with 15 days for those only receiving usual care, the study found, with researchers stating that further analysis suggested that Molnupiravir sped up recovery by 4.2 days on average.

“This analysis of the largest randomized trial involving people vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 infection who are at increased risk of adverse outcomes in the community and unwell with COVID-19 showed that the early addition of Molnupiravir to usual care did not reduce hospital admissions or death (which were low in both treatment groups),” the study authors noted.

“However, participants in the Molnupiravir plus usual care group recovered faster than those in the usual care group, had a higher rate of early sustained recovery, and had fewer general practitioner consultations,” they added.

NICE Says Molnupiravir Not Cost-Effective

In November 2021, Merck said results of its MOVe-OUT study of Molnupiravir showed that the oral antiviral medicine was 30 percent effective in reducing hospitalizations. However, that study was conducted among unvaccinated adults.

Shortly after, the UK became the first country to approve Molnupiravir for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in those with other risk factors, such as obesity, diabetes, or those over 60 years old.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care in the UK, has recommended individuals stop using five COVID-19 treatments, including Merck’s antiviral pill, to treat the virus, stating that “while there is some clinical evidence that they are effective at treating COVID-19 they were not found to be cost-effective.”

Chris Butler, professor of primary care in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at Oxford University and co-chief investigator, said at a Science Media Centre briefing following the publication of the study that the results indicate that Molnupiravir could help ease the burden of UK health services which are under pressure and could also be used to help get key workers back to work quicker, as it aids with speeding up recovery from COVID-19.

However, Richard Hobbs, Nuffield professor of primary care at Oxford and co-investigator, noted the high price associated with the antiviral drug, which is estimated to cost several hundred pounds for a five-day course.

“Molnupiravir is a high-cost antiviral. Its deployment will depend on how much a mean four days’ improvement in symptoms will benefit the country,” Hobbs told the briefing.

Molnupiravir made nearly $5 billion in sales for Merck in the first three quarters of 2022.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Economic conditions just keep getting worse.  As we prepare to enter 2023, we find ourselves in a high inflation environment at the same time that economic activity is really slowing down.  And just like we witnessed in 2008, employers are conducting mass layoffs as a horrifying housing crash sweeps across the nation.  Those that have been waiting for the U.S. economy to implode can stop waiting, because an economic implosion has officially arrived. 

The following are 15 facts that prove that a massive economic meltdown is already happening right now…

#1 Existing home sales have now fallen for 10 consecutive months.

#2 Existing home sales are down 35.4 percent over the last 12 months.  That is the largest year over year decline in existing home sales since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

#3 Homebuilder sentiment has now dropped for 12 consecutive months.

#4 Home construction costs have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2022.

#5 The number of single-family housing unit permits has fallen for nine months in a row.

#6 The Empire State Manufacturing Index has plunged “to a reading of negative 11.2 in December”.  That figure was way, way below expectations.

#7 In November, we witnessed the largest decline in retail sales that we have seen all year long.

#8 Even the biggest names on Wall Street are starting to let workers go.  In fact, it is being reported that Goldman Sachs will soon lay off approximately 4,000 employees.

#9 The Federal Reserve is admitting that the number of actual jobs in the United States has been overstated by over a million.

#10 U.S. job cuts were 417 percent higher in November than they were during the same month a year ago.

#11 A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that approximately two-thirds of all Americans expect the economy to get even worse next year.

#12 A newly released Bloomberg survey has discovered that 70 percent of U.S. economists believe that a recession is coming in 2023.

#13 Inflation continues to spiral wildly out of control.  At this point, a head of lettuce now costs 11 dollars at one grocery store in California.

#14 Overall, vegetable prices in the United States are more than 80 percent higher than they were at this same time last year.

#15 Thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, 63 percent of the U.S. population is now living paycheck to paycheck.

In a desperate attempt to get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been dramatically increasing interest rates.

Those interest rate hikes are what has caused the housing market to crash, but Fed officials insist that such short-term pain is necessary in order to tame inflation.

But meanwhile our politicians in Washington are busy creating more inflation by borrowing and spending money at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented in our entire history.

This week, an abominable 1.7 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill is being rammed through Congress, but not a single member of Congress has read it.

The bill is 4,155 pages long, and U.S. Senator Rand Paul just held a press briefing during which he wheeled it out on a trolley…

After the grossly bloated $1.7 trillion Omnibus spending bill advanced in the Senate by a vote of 70-25, GOP Senator Rand Paul held a press briefing during which he wheeled in the “abomination” on a trolley and demanded to know how anyone would be able to read it before the end of the week.

Paul, along with the only other dissenting Senate Republicans Mike Braun, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott highlighted how ludicrous the fast tracking of the bill has been.

Unfortunately, this absurd spending bill has broad support on both sides of the aisle, and that just shows how broken Washington has become.

Our system of government has failed time after time, and our politicians continue to spend money on some of the most ridiculous things imaginable.

The following examples that were pulled out of the 1.7 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill were discovered by the Heritage Foundation…

• $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers”

• $1.2 million for “services for DACA recipients” (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College.

• $477k for the Equity Institute in RI to indoctrinate teachers with “antiracism virtual labs.”

• $1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a “coworking and community space” for “women and gender-expansive people of color.”

• $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.

• $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.

• $750k for the for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing” in Albany, New York.

• $856k for the “LGBT Center” in New York.

And have you noticed that our politicians often prefer to push these types of bills through just before major holidays when hardly anyone is paying attention?

No matter who we send to Washington, the story remains the same.

As long as our politicians are borrowing and spending trillions of dollars that we do not have, Fed officials won’t be able to win their war against inflation.

The Fed can send interest rates into the stratosphere, but inflation will continue to remain high because our politicians insist on showering the nation with giant mountains of cash.

We should all be deeply, deeply offended by what is happening, but most Americans simply do not know enough to care.

But once economic conditions get even worse than they were in 2008 and 2009, the majority of the U.S. population will become extremely angry.

Of course things could have turned out much differently if we had made better decisions during the years leading up to this crisis.

Unfortunately, we have run out of time to change course, and that means that a tremendous amount of pain is ahead for all of us.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.