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Fourth Turning 2022: Bad-Moon Rising, Part 2

Fourth Turning 2022: Bad-Moon Rising, Part 2

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Read Part 1 here…

In Part 1 of this article I laid out how the global elite have used this covid flu to manipulate the weak minded into…

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Fourth Turning 2022: Bad-Moon Rising, Part 2

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Read Part 1 here...

In Part 1 of this article I laid out how the global elite have used this covid flu to manipulate the weak minded into a fear induced mass psychosis as a key element in their Great Reset plan to control the world and keep you technologically enslaved under lock and key. Now I will try to decipher how this mass hysteria might play out over the course of 2022 and beyond.

“Americans today fear that linearism (alias the American Dream) has run its course. Many would welcome some enlightenment about history’s patterns and rhythms, but today’s intellectual elites offer little that’s useful. Caught between the entropy of the chaoticists and the hubris of the linearists, the American people have lost their moorings.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell

The American Dream, where all Americans, no matter the circumstances of their birth, had a legitimate opportunity to live a better life than their parents, based upon their own intelligence, work ethic, and good fortune, is an illusion in today’s world. The ruling elite have stolen the wealth of the nation and its citizens. This was not an accident, but a plan implemented over many decades, accelerating after Nixon closed the gold window and opened the door to unlimited amounts of debt being created out of thin air and backed by nothing.

One of the Fed’s only mandates was to maintain a stable currency. Since its inception in 1913 to 2020, the USD had lost 96% of its purchasing power. The USD has lost 7.5% of its purchasing power since 2020, as Powell and his cronies have lost control of inflation.

It is not a coincidence this Fourth Turning was launched due to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street bankers blowing the largest debt bubble in history (until now), issuing fraudulent mortgage loans to millions of willing and able dupes who could never pay them back, packaging the loans into toxic derivative debt time bombs, bullying and paying off the spineless rating agencies to rate these worthless derivatives AAA, and then selling them to oblivious pension plans and innocent little old ladies. But they eventually ran out of greater fools and clueless suckers. The entire control fraud blew sky high in September 2008, representing the debt catalyst for this Fourth Turning.

For the past thirteen years of this Crisis, the puppets at the Federal Reserve have done as instructed by the Wall Street cabal and globalist billionaire oligarchs. They have papered over an unpayable debt problem by creating $8 trillion more debt and shoveling the proceeds into the pockets of the ruling billionaire oligarchy. The billionaire oligarchs and Wall Street bankers aren’t on the hook for the $30 trillion national debt and the other $100 trillion of unfunded social welfare and pension liabilities.

You, your kids, your grandkids, and unborn generations of hard-working citizens are on the hook. Our standard of living had been in a gradual decline since the 1970s, but we have entered the suddenly stage referenced by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises – “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

The Fed’s balance sheet stood at $800 billion at the start of this Fourth Turning, and now is $8.8 trillion and rising every day. The Repo crisis in September 2019 revealed a systemic glitch in the Fed’s well-oiled machine to pump up stock markets and guarantee unlimited profits for Wall Street. Coincidentally, a pandemic that had been simulated (Event 201) in October by Gates and his WEF cronies, conveniently struck in March 2020, with its very own multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign, and fear propaganda spouted 24/7 from the Big Pharma captured corporate media.

After a faux crash in the markets, the Fed rode to the rescue and has proceeded to print $4.8 trillion in the last two years. Meanwhile, the national debt, which stood at $9 trillion at the start of this Fourth Turning, reached $23 trillion prior to the Covid pandemic, will reach $30 trillion in the next month.

The question that might come to mind for the average person is, “how did the Fed’s actions in the last two years benefit me?”. Well, if you are a billionaire, you did fantastic. The ten richest men in America more than doubled their net worth since the March 2020 launch of their plandemic. Do you think this was an accident? Gates made $36.5 billion off the most heavily marketed flu in history, and he was the lowest among the ten. While your local family-owned hardware store went out of business, Bezos and his Amazon empire got further enriched, with Jeff’s net worth soaring by $75 billion, as his Washington Post did their darndest pumping fear porn propaganda to the ignorant masses.

These ten men added roughly $1 billion per day to their net worth. Compare that to what you earn per day at your job. When ten people rake in $736 billion during a “health crisis”, in which millions of workers were forced out of work or fired, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses were bankrupted, you know the fix was in from the beginning. The Fed’s job was to protect and enhance the wealth of the richest people on earth, while 80-year-old grandmothers got 0.1% on the money market account if they weren’t murdered by a Democratic governor in their nursing home.

America, where a multi-millionaire can achieve the dream of becoming a billionaire by just letting the Fed do their job – pumping stocks. America created 116 new billionaires in less than two years during a “terrible pandemic”, a 19% increase. The American Dream achieved by knowing the right central bankers. Are you paying attention?

If you had any doubt all this “emergency” debt being created and bought by the Fed doesn’t have one sole purpose – to enrich their oligarch benefactors and banker bosses – just take a gander at this chart comparing the S&P 500 to the increase in the Fed’s balance sheet over the last 13 months. We’ve had 13 consecutive new highs on the S&P 500, matching the 13 new highs in the Fed balance sheet. I’m sure this is just a non-correlated coincidence. Right?

And it hasn’t just been the Fed. Since this entire scamdemic was created and fostered by the Davos globalist elite as their Build Back Better Great Reset scheme to allow you to live while owning nothing, the ECB had to do their part. While the Fed has added $5 trillion to their balance sheet since 2019, the ECB hasn’t been a slouch, as they’ve added $4.5 trillion.

They have bought mortgage bonds, junk bonds, Treasuries, and just about any crap derivative on the planet, driving interest rates to the lowest in history, and blowing bubbles in housing, the stock market, bond market, commercial real estate, collectibles, bitcoin, and NFTs (whatever the hell they are). It’s an Everything Bubble. When they all burst simultaneously, it will again be the average American worker who will get screwed.

Powell and his fellow apparatchiks at the Fed thought they could talk their way out of any predicament their massive printing created, because the Wall Street market makers and corrupt corporate media pretended debt doesn’t matter and the paper wealth creation was proof the economy was great. The illusion of recovery built on delusions of debt based faux wealth may have had something to do with the Fed creating 75% of all the money in U.S. history since the start of this Fourth Turning.

This coincides with 70% of all U.S. debt in history being created in the last fourteen years. Does any of this seem sustainable? Does any of it make sense from a fiscal perspective? Are those in control attempting to crash our economic system on purpose, in order to usher in their Great Reset plan? It sure appears so.

So far, 2022 is looking a little dicey for the markets. The millions of twenty and thirty something investment gurus have never experienced a bear market, as Uncle Jerome and the academic troll Yellen have guaranteed their unbeatable buy the dip “investment strategy” for the last decade. The markets are puking with just Fed jawboning about ending QE to infinity (until they restart it again) and possibly increasing interest rates by .25%.

NASDAQ high-fliers are tanking. Bitcoin has lost 50% in two months. The 10 Year Treasury yield has more than tripled in two years. Whenever the markets began to tank since 2009, the Fed came to the rescue with QE or slashing rates. That is why stock valuations have reached stratospheric levels exceeding the 2000 Dot.com bubble. They are now exceeding that historic bubble by 70%.

I’ve been expecting a market crash every year for the last twelve years, but the Fed has fended it off with their perpetual liquidity engine. But it appears they have fully shot their load and have backed themselves into a corner. There are no possible positive outcomes from any path they choose. Despite months of denying the inflationary tsunami sweeping the world is not transitory, but created by their reckless perfidy, the Fed and other central bankers around the world are trapped.

With the Biden administration wrecking the supply chain with their insane incompetence, driving energy prices sky high with their green new deal absurdities, trillions of new unfunded Federal spending, and trillions more of Covid related cash sloshing around the economic system, inflation is raging out of control.

Even the manipulated, massaged, engineered, and government sanctioned CPI is being reported as 7%, which means the savings accounts of senior citizens are providing a NEGATIVE 6.9% per year, and real wages for real people are in free-fall as food and energy costs keep surging higher. But it is far worse than official figures reveal. The Fed and government have methodically adjusted CPI downwards over the last forty years.

They created a fake calculation in order to suppress home price increases and ridiculous hedonic adjustments for car improvements that say automobile prices have barely risen over decades, even though the average price of a new car in 2000 was $22,000 versus $47,000 today.

Inflation headlines reference the highest rate in 3 or 4 decades, but the reality is if inflation was measured exactly as it was in 1980, it would be 15%, just as it was in 1980. One slight difference. Volcker had jacked the Federal Funds rate to 20% in order to crush the raging inflation. Spineless Powell still has the Federal Funds rate anchored at 0%. Our economic system is so saturated with debt, a 3% Feds Fund rate would result in a full-scale economic implosion and collapse of our financial system.

It looks like 2022 can go one of two ways – raging inflation, while markets surge higher, enriching the richest and impoverishing the middle class or a recession and market crash after the richest short the market, while the working class sees their 401ks obliterated once again. It’s almost as if this is being engineered for a crash landing, designed to produce maximum damage to the most people. Is it just part of the Great Reset master plan?

Just as the Event 201 simulation of a pandemic a few months before a pandemic was rolled out, a “war game” called Collective Strength was run by international bankers, the IMF, and BIS in Israel during December to simulate a global financial catastrophe caused by a cyber-attack. Last week the Fed issued their report on a central bank digital currency. If these two events don’t cause you concern, you aren’t paying attention.

During the pandemic, the government flogged fake coin shortage propaganda and told the ignorant masses covid lurked on their dollar bills. There are no coincidences. The ruling oligarchs are proceeding with their master plan of owning everything and enslaving you in a technological gulag controlled by the government surveillance state and policed by the social media tyrants, mega-corporation collaborators, fake news propaganda media, and crooked financial institutions.

They want every aspect of your life digitized, so they can control you, force you to get vaccinated, create your social credit score, monitor every financial transaction, and guarantee they get a piece of every transaction. If you disobey their commands, they will destroy your ability to work, buy food, enjoy entertainment, or transact any business. Sounds overly ominous, except it is already happening in New Zealand, Australia, France, Austria, and numerous other authoritarian regimes throughout the world. They really do want you to own nothing, and be happy with nothing, or else.

As we enter the fourteenth year of this Fourth Turning it appears all hell is about to break loose financially, domestically, and internationally. Will the three drivers of this Crisis – debt, civic decay, and global disorder - merge into one super-storm of destruction, destined to wipe the existing social order away and replace it with something far worse and Orwellian? Strauss and Howe perfectly captured what is happening today in their 1997 warning about an unavoidable generational Crisis.

Societal trust is imploding as the initial financial collapse catalyst is poised for a second more horrendous encore in 2022. Interconnected global financial systems, built on an unstable foundation of bad debt, will crumble as the approaching storms crash ashore. It is time to move to higher ground, batten down the hatches, deleverage, and do your best to distance yourself from this arbitraged, tentacled, corrupt financial system.

“As the Crisis catalyzes, these fears will rush to the surface, jagged and exposed. Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things. This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust. If so, this implosion will strike financial markets—and, with that, the economy. But as the Crisis mood congeals, people will come to the jarring realization that they have grown helplessly dependent on a teetering edifice of anonymous transactions and paper guarantees. Many Americans won’t know where their savings are, who their employer is, what their pension is, or how their government works. The era will have left the financial world arbitraged and tentacled: Debtors won’t know who holds their notes, homeowners who owns their mortgages, and shareholders who runs their equities—and vice versa.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

During the fourteenth year of the last Fourth Turning, the Battle of Midway turned the tide in the Pacific and Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad by the Russians turned the tide in Europe. Italy surrendered to the Allies and plans for the D-Day invasion were already underway. By the fourteenth year of the American Revolution Crisis the Treaty of Paris ending the war had been signed and the U.S. Constitution was written. The Civil War crisis was long over, as twenty years of animosity was jammed into five years of extreme bloodshed and tragedy.

I fear when future historians document the events of this era of deception, delusion, debt, and decay, 2022 will go down as a turning point in U.S. history, for good or for bad. The forces of evil appear to have the upper hand, but threat of living under the boot of globalist totalitarians has awakened a tireless minority of patriotic citizens, willing to fight these demonic, vile quislings of humanity to the death.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

In Part Three of this article, I will examine how civic decay and global disorder will interconnect and provide the impetus for the next bloody chapter of this Fourth Turning. When your leaders are far more concerned about the border of a country 6,000 miles from U.S. shores than our own southern border, you can clearly see the plan is to create civic decay in the U.S. and further enrich the oligarchs by waging war in the Ukraine. Those pushing the Great Reset scheme are relentless and evil. The only way to defeat them is through force.

*  *  *

The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

Tyler Durden Mon, 01/24/2022 - 16:24

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Economic Earthquake Ahead? The Cracks Are Spreading Fast

Economic Earthquake Ahead? The Cracks Are Spreading Fast

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

One of my favorite false narratives…

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Economic Earthquake Ahead? The Cracks Are Spreading Fast

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

One of my favorite false narratives floating around corporate media platforms has been the argument that the American people “just don’t seem to understand how good the economy really is right now.” If only they would look at the stats, they would realize that we are in the middle of a financial renaissance, right? It must be that people have been brainwashed by negative press from conservative sources…

I have to laugh at this notion because it’s a very common one throughout history – it’s an assertion made by almost every single political regime right before a major collapse. These people always say the same things, and when you study economics as long as I have you can’t help but throw up your hands and marvel at their dedication to the propaganda.

One example that comes to mind immediately is the delusional optimism of the “roaring” 1920s and the lead up to the Great Depression. At the time around 60% of the U.S. population was living in poverty conditions (according to the metrics of the decade) earning less than $2000 a year. However, in the years after WWI ravaged Europe, America’s economic power was considered unrivaled.

The 1920s was an era of mass production and rampant consumerism but it was all fueled by easy access to debt, a condition which had not really existed before in America. It was this illusion of prosperity created by the unchecked application of credit that eventually led to the massive stock market bubble and the crash of 1929. This implosion, along with the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising interest rates into economic weakness, created a black hole in the U.S. financial system for over a decade.

There are two primary tools that various failing regimes will often use to distort the true conditions of the economy: Debt and inflation. In the case of America today, we are experiencing BOTH problems simultaneously and this has made certain economic indicators appear healthy when they are, in fact, highly unstable. The average American knows this is the case because they see the effects everyday. They see the damage to their wallets, to their buying power, in the jobs market and in their quality of life. This is why public faith in the economy has been stuck in the dregs since 2021.

The establishment can flash out-of-context stats in people’s faces, but they can’t force the populace to see a recovery that simply does not exist. Let’s go through a short list of the most faulty indicators and the real reasons why the fiscal picture is not a rosy as the media would like us to believe…

The “miracle” labor market recovery

In the case of the U.S. labor market, we have a clear example of distortion through inflation. The $8 trillion+ dropped on the economy in the first 18 months of the pandemic response sent the system over the edge into stagflation land. Helicopter money has a habit of doing two things very well: Blowing up a bubble in stock markets and blowing up a bubble in retail. Hence, the massive rush by Americans to go out and buy, followed by the sudden labor shortage and the race to hire (mostly for low wage part-time jobs).

The problem with this “miracle” is that inflation leads to price explosions, which we have already experienced. The average American is spending around 30% more for goods, services and housing compared to what they were spending in 2020. This is what happens when you have too much money chasing too few goods and limited production.

The jobs market looks great on paper, but the majority of jobs generated in the past few years are jobs that returned after the covid lockdowns ended. The rest are jobs created through monetary stimulus and the artificial retail rush. Part time low wage service sector jobs are not going to keep the country rolling for very long in a stagflation environment. The question is, what happens now that the stimulus punch bowl has been removed?

Just as we witnessed in the 1920s, Americans have turned to debt to make up for higher prices and stagnant wages by maxing out their credit cards. With the central bank keeping interest rates high, the credit safety net will soon falter. This condition also goes for businesses; the same businesses that will jump headlong into mass layoffs when they realize the party is over. It happened during the Great Depression and it will happen again today.

Cracks in the foundation

We saw cracks in the narrative of the financial structure in 2023 with the banking crisis, and without the Federal Reserve backstop policy many more small and medium banks would have dropped dead. The weakness of U.S. banks is offset by the relative strength of the U.S. dollar, which lures in foreign investors hoping to protect their wealth using dollar denominated assets.

But something is amiss. Gold and bitcoin have rocketed higher along with economically sensitive assets and the dollar. This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. Gold and BTC are supposed to be hedges against a weak dollar and a weak economy, right? If global faith in the dollar and in the U.S. economy is so high, why are investors diving into protective assets like gold?

Again, as noted above, inflation distorts everything.

Tens of trillions of extra dollars printed by the Fed are floating around and it’s no surprise that much of that cash is flooding into the economy which simply pushes higher right along with prices on the shelf. But, gold and bitcoin are telling us a more honest story about what’s really happening.

Right now, the U.S. government is adding around $600 billion per month to the national debt as the Fed holds rates higher to fight inflation. This debt is going to crush America’s financial standing for global investors who will eventually ask HOW the U.S. is going to handle that growing millstone? As I predicted years ago, the Fed has created a perfect Catch-22 scenario in which the U.S. must either return to rampant inflation, or, face a debt crisis. In either case, U.S. dollar-denominated assets will lose their appeal and their prices will plummet.

“Healthy” GDP is a complete farce

GDP is the most common out-of-context stat used by governments to convince the citizenry that all is well. It is yet another stat that is entirely manipulated by inflation. It is also manipulated by the way in which modern governments define “economic activity.”

GDP is primarily driven by spending. Meaning, the higher inflation goes, the higher prices go, and the higher GDP climbs (to a point). Eventually prices go too high, credit cards tap out and spending ceases. But, for a short time inflation makes GDP (as well as retail sales) look good.

Another factor that creates a bubble is the fact that government spending is actually included in the calculation of GDP. That’s right, every dollar of your tax money that the government wastes helps the establishment by propping up GDP numbers. This is why government spending increases will never stop – It’s too valuable for them to spend as a way to make the economy appear healthier than it is.

The REAL economy is eclipsing the fake economy

The bottom line is that Americans used to be able to ignore the warning signs because their bank accounts were not being directly affected. This is over. Now, every person in the country is dealing with a massive decline in buying power and higher prices across the board on everything – from food and fuel to housing and financial assets alike. Even the wealthy are seeing a compression to their profit and many are struggling to keep their businesses in the black.

The unfortunate truth is that the elections of 2024 will probably be the turning point at which the whole edifice comes tumbling down. Even if the public votes for change, the system is already broken and cannot be repaired without a complete overhaul.

We have consistently avoided taking our medicine and our disease has gotten worse and worse.

People have lost faith in the economy because they have not faced this kind of uncertainty since the 1930s. Even the stagflation crisis of the 1970s will likely pale in comparison to what is about to happen. On the bright side, at least a large number of Americans are aware of the threat, as opposed to the 1920s when the vast majority of people were utterly conned by the government, the banks and the media into thinking all was well. Knowing is the first step to preparing.

The second step is securing your own financial future – that’s where physical precious metals can play a role. Diversifying your savings with inflation-resistant, uninflatable assets whose intrinsic value doesn’t rely on a counterparty’s promise to pay adds resilience to your savings. That’s the main reason physical gold and silver have been the safe haven store-of-value assets of choice for centuries (among both the elite and the everyday citizen).

*  *  *

As the world moves away from dollars and toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), is your 401(k) or IRA really safe? A smart and conservative move is to diversify into a physical gold IRA. That way your savings will be in something solid and enduring. Get your FREE info kit on Gold IRAs from Birch Gold Group. No strings attached, just peace of mind. Click here to secure your future today.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 17:00

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Wendy’s teases new $3 offer for upcoming holiday

The Daylight Savings Time promotion slashes prices on breakfast.

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Daylight Savings Time, or the practice of advancing clocks an hour in the spring to maximize natural daylight, is a controversial practice because of the way it leaves many feeling off-sync and tired on the second Sunday in March when the change is made and one has one less hour to sleep in.

Despite annual "Abolish Daylight Savings Time" think pieces and online arguments that crop up with unwavering regularity, Daylight Savings in North America begins on March 10 this year.

Related: Coca-Cola has a new soda for Diet Coke fans

Tapping into some people's very vocal dislike of Daylight Savings Time, fast-food chain Wendy's  (WEN)  is launching a daylight savings promotion that is jokingly designed to make losing an hour of sleep less painful and encourage fans to order breakfast anyway.

Wendy's has recently made a big push to expand its breakfast menu.

Image source: Wendy's.

Promotion wants you to compensate for lost sleep with cheaper breakfast

As it is also meant to drive traffic to the Wendy's app, the promotion allows anyone who makes a purchase of $3 or more through the platform to get a free hot coffee, cold coffee or Frosty Cream Cold Brew.

More Food + Dining:

Available during the Wendy's breakfast hours of 6 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. (which, naturally, will feel even earlier due to Daylight Savings), the deal also allows customers to buy any of its breakfast sandwiches for $3. Items like the Sausage, Egg and Cheese Biscuit, Breakfast Baconator and Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant normally range in price between $4.50 and $7.

The choice of the latter is quite wide since, in the years following the pandemic, Wendy's has made a concerted effort to expand its breakfast menu with a range of new sandwiches with egg in them and sweet items such as the French Toast Sticks. The goal was both to stand out from competitors with a wider breakfast menu and increase traffic to its stores during early-morning hours.

Wendy's deal comes after controversy over 'dynamic pricing'

But last month, the chain known for the square shape of its burger patties ignited controversy after saying that it wanted to introduce "dynamic pricing" in which the cost of many of the items on its menu will vary depending on the time of day. In an earnings call, chief executive Kirk Tanner said that electronic billboards would allow restaurants to display various deals and promotions during slower times in the early morning and late at night.

Outcry was swift and Wendy's ended up walking back its plans with words that they were "misconstrued" as an intent to surge prices during its most popular periods.

While the company issued a statement saying that any changes were meant as "discounts and value offers" during quiet periods rather than raised prices during busy ones, the reputational damage was already done since many saw the clarification as another way to obfuscate its pricing model.

"We said these menuboards would give us more flexibility to change the display of featured items," Wendy's said in its statement. "This was misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest at our restaurants."

The Daylight Savings Time promotion, in turn, is also a way to demonstrate the kinds of deals Wendy's wants to promote in its stores without putting up full-sized advertising or posters for what is only relevant for a few days.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the…

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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