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Our Global Inflation Tour Chock Full of Normal

It really is about abnormality. What I mean by that is, contrary to popular imagination fed by the Fed and other central banks, ever since 2008 the inflation paradigm has changed. The first global financial crisis (GFC1) has proven time and again how…

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It really is about abnormality. What I mean by that is, contrary to popular imagination fed by the Fed and other central banks, ever since 2008 the inflation paradigm has changed. The first global financial crisis (GFC1) has proven time and again how it wasn’t a one-off, and since it was a monetary breakdown (global dollar shortage) that’s been permanent the entire global economy involuntarily transformed from modestly inflationary to durably disinflationary (and at times and in some places outright deflationary) where it has remained.

That is now normal, to the eternal consternation of the so-called monetary stewards professing powers they don’t possess who long ago gave up on the concept of money. Money, legitimate economic growth, and ultimately inflation all go together.

These things actually do make a lot of sense when you contemplate the background.

What this further means is that if the world has been removed from 2008-20 normal of disinflation toward or even achieving some new condition of inflation – by whichever means you prefer: fiscal recklessness adding a few more zeroes to prior reckless attempts at rescues; or their non-money monetary counterparts who have done the same thing to their own interventions – we would see these things as clearly becoming abnormal.

We should be able to easily find evidence that this time is different (M2 is just not enough by itself).

We’ll start our inflation tour in China where, also contrary to recent imagination, the Communists aren’t using the neo-Keynesian top-down textbook any longer. They remain focused top-down, sure, but reading from their original Mao rather than the second edition Deng.

Even so, much of the rest of the world has said, hey, look at China booming and find in it the very start of the inflationary reset! Just a few days ago, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported that the country’s producer price index (PPI) as well as the purchaser price index for industrial sector firms (factory gate) each gained the most year-over-year in 27 months; the fastest industrial and producer inflation in more than two years.

Good start, right?



In many places around the internet, that’s how this is being described; here cometh Mr. Inflation (with Chinese Characteristics).

China’s factory gate inflation accelerated to the fastest pace since 2018 in February, official data showed on Wednesday, in line with a sharp pickup in exports and bolstering expectations for robust growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

Fine. However, taking a closer look at Chinese prices we therefore expect to find that this is somehow different to qualify up to “robust”; prices in that sense rising in a manner unlike the way they had during at least the last decade in China. After all, over the past ten years the Chinese economy has only underperformed and failed to contribute “expectations for robust growth” every single time.



Not even close. In fact, when the NBS published its PPI and purchaser index figures it also released estimates for broad consumer prices in China, too. While commodities have clearly boosted the price trend on the production side of everything, though to a much smaller degree here than is being hyped up, consumer prices only exhibit mild yet outright deflation; their CPI fell 0.2% year-over-year in February 2021, in what had been the third decline over the past four months.

Even more remarkable, this also is nothing new. Going back to Reflation #3 (absurdly glorified globally synchronized growth), back then the commodity rebound from the preceding Euro$ #3 likewise had pushed producer prices seemingly skyward also because of commodities only for consumer prices to seriously lag indicating the near opposite possibility from “bolstering expectations for robust growth.”


So far as China is concerned nothing is different, or even close to different. Even producer prices, boosted by surging commodities, aren’t really rising all that quickly in comparison to just recent history.

The same can be said over here in the United States even as its Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reports “scorching” producer prices. Always the hype, this “blistering” inflationary base can only be derived from – like China – the narrowest of possible comparisons:



Rising 6% year-over-year last month, the commodity PPI index in February gained the most in 111 months dating back all the way to November 2011. This at least seems different (until you realize how 2011’s inflationary flirtation ended).

But outside of the commodity contribution (also realizing the supply rather than demand factors behind it), producer prices everywhere else aren’t exhibiting anything unusual. Producer prices for finished goods (final demand) increased by 2.47% year-over-year in February, which is only the highest since January 2020. The core PPI rate (finished goods) rose 2.54% year-over-year, the best since January 2019.

Those are not impressive months to be compared to; suggesting that commodity prices are not representative of the overall inflationary environment on the producer side of the economy (we’ve already covered the consumer side of the US system). And even commodity prices at the producer level aren’t threatening to move out of line with the post-2008 paradigm.

Nothing different here, either.



Given these facts and data, it would follow that US consumer expectations for inflation – like consumer prices themselves – haven’t really moved much. According to the University of Michigan’s latest consumer survey, specifically asking about anticipated inflation levels one and five years ahead, expectations in the short run have been somewhat higher than they had been certainly compared to last year as Uncle Sam’s helicopter drops and gasoline prices leave their short-term impressions upon the consumer mind.

And even then, these aren’t exactly blistering nor scorching their economic feelings.

Beyond that, however, long run inflation expectations haven’t really moved at all. They remain firmly rooted in the same disinflationary (sometimes deflationary) mindset (to borrow the Japanese excuse) even as gasoline prices jump.



We could keep going on and on, surveying the entire world, but we’ll make just one final stop on our tour this time in Europe. This place, more than anywhere else, has been visited by the combined largesse of fiscal profligacy alongside an ECB acting like it has been asked to win a race of central bank balance sheet expansions.

And the numbers, the balance sheet figures, anyway, support the narrative – if ultimately fall short in data and evidence. In other words, the monetary policies clearly are different and huge, truly staggering: as of yesterday, March 11, “excess liquidity” has piled up to €3.69 trillion due to the ECB’s mostly dual QE’s PEPP and PSPP (the former, the pandemic version, has purchased €879 billion while the latter, the original QE, is up to €2.37 trillion leaving other purchase programs contributing the rest, all of them adding up on the central bank balance sheet’s opposite side in the form of offsetting bank reserves created as the byproduct of these combined policies).

The inflation numbers, on the contrary, are not different. Like the US and China, commodities show up in Europe’s PPI, too, though as it only hit zero for the first time since the middle of 2019. Consumer inflation, after being boosted by January’s VAT tax return, stalled in February with the headline rate just 0.9% (despite oil) for the second straight month while the core rate dropped from 1.4% (a multi-year high) back to just 1.1% (very much like the last decade).



Our price expedition throughout the world’s largest economies shows that, no, there isn’t any indication anywhere that what’s going on is anything more than the usual, tepid, ultimately unsatisfying and too timid rebound or reflation. Commodity prices have risen sharply before, so that’s really nothing new, either.

Along with them, albeit to a lesser extent, producer and consumer prices rebound as it looks like the world is getting better, because it is. But then everything falls short of anything more than this reflationary rebound simply due to the fact that it can never get better enough to reach full recovery let alone the excessively inflationary. The real money drag, unseen worldwide, remains visible anyway in the form of these non-inflationary destinations and datapoints.

Having seen all these things time and again before, let’s not get carried away – even the BOND ROUT!!!!, and even after today’s blood-letting, is normal.

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Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

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

People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.

A medical worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination center in Ancenis-Saint-Gereon, France, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Stephane Mahe//Reuters)

Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.

Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.

People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.

The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.

Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.

The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.

Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.

There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.

The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.

Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.

Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.

Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.

“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.

The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.

The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”

Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”

Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.

She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.

The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.

No authors declared conflicts of interest.

Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.

Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.

Another New Study

In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.

The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.

The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.

Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.

Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.

Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.

Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 05:00

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‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded…

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'Excess Mortality Skyrocketed': Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack 'Criminal' COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded experimental vaccines were hastily developed for a virus which primarily killed the old and fat (and those with other obvious comorbidities), and an aggressive, global campaign to coerce billions into injecting them ensued.

Then there were the lockdowns - with some countries (New Zealand, for example) building internment camps for those who tested positive for Covid-19, and others such as China welding entire apartment buildings shut to trap people inside.

It was an egregious and unnecessary response to a virus that, while highly virulent, was survivable by the vast majority of the general population.

Oh, and the vaccines, which governments are still pushing, didn't work as advertised to the point where health officials changed the definition of "vaccine" multiple times.

Tucker Carlson recently sat down with Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist and vocal critic of vaccines. The two had a wide-ranging discussion, which included vaccine safety and efficacy, excess mortality, demographic impacts of the virus, big pharma, and the professional price Kory has paid for speaking out.

Keep reading below, or if you have roughly 50 minutes, watch it in its entirety for free on X:

"Do we have any real sense of what the cost, the physical cost to the country and world has been of those vaccines?" Carlson asked, kicking off the interview.

"I do think we have some understanding of the cost. I mean, I think, you know, you're aware of the work of of Ed Dowd, who's put together a team and looked, analytically at a lot of the epidemiologic data," Kory replied. "I mean, time with that vaccination rollout is when all of the numbers started going sideways, the excess mortality started to skyrocket."

When asked "what kind of death toll are we looking at?", Kory responded "...in 2023 alone, in the first nine months, we had what's called an excess mortality of 158,000 Americans," adding "But this is in 2023. I mean, we've  had Omicron now for two years, which is a mild variant. Not that many go to the hospital."

'Safe and Effective'

Tucker also asked Kory why the people who claimed the vaccine were "safe and effective" aren't being held criminally liable for abetting the "killing of all these Americans," to which Kory replied: "It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and effective] was a predetermined conclusion. There was no data to support that, but it was agreed upon that it would be presented as safe and effective."

Carlson and Kory then discussed the different segments of the population that experienced vaccine side effects, with Kory noting an "explosion in dying in the youngest and healthiest sectors of society," adding "And why did the employed fare far worse than those that weren't? And this particularly white collar, white collar, more than gray collar, more than blue collar."

Kory also said that Big Pharma is 'terrified' of Vitamin D because it "threatens the disease model." As journalist The Vigilant Fox notes on X, "Vitamin D showed about a 60% effectiveness against the incidence of COVID-19 in randomized control trials," and "showed about 40-50% effectiveness in reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in observational studies."

Professional costs

Kory - while risking professional suicide by speaking out, has undoubtedly helped save countless lives by advocating for alternate treatments such as Ivermectin.

Kory shared his own experiences of job loss and censorship, highlighting the challenges of advocating for a more nuanced understanding of vaccine safety in an environment often resistant to dissenting voices.

"I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin and the the genesis of that book," he said, adding "Not only is my expertise on Ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but and I tell the story before, but I got an email, during this journey from a guy named William B Grant, who's a professor out in California, and he wrote to me this email just one day, my life was going totally sideways because our protocols focused on Ivermectin. I was using a lot in my practice, as were tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefits. And I was getting attacked, hit jobs in the media, and he wrote me this email on and he said, Dear Dr. Kory, what they're doing to Ivermectin, they've been doing to vitamin D for decades..."

"And it's got five tactics. And these are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges, that's inconvenient to their interests. And so I'm just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, it threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that, that everything, all the propaganda censorship was literally going after something called vaccine hesitancy."

Money makes the world go 'round

Carlson then hit on perhaps the most devious aspect of the relationship between drug companies and the medical establishment, and how special interests completely taint science to the point where public distrust of institutions has spiked in recent years.

"I think all of it starts at the level the medical journals," said Kory. "Because once you have something established in the medical journals as a, let's say, a proven fact or a generally accepted consensus, consensus comes out of the journals."

"I have dozens of rejection letters from investigators around the world who did good trials on ivermectin, tried to publish it. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you. And then the ones that do get in all purportedly prove that ivermectin didn't work," Kory continued.

"So and then when you look at the ones that actually got in and this is where like probably my biggest estrangement and why I don't recognize science and don't trust it anymore, is the trials that flew to publication in the top journals in the world were so brazenly manipulated and corrupted in the design and conduct in, many of us wrote about it. But they flew to publication, and then every time they were published, you saw these huge PR campaigns in the media. New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. times, ivermectin doesn't work. Latest high quality, rigorous study says. I'm sitting here in my office watching these lies just ripple throughout the media sphere based on fraudulent studies published in the top journals. And that's that's that has changed. Now that's why I say I'm estranged and I don't know what to trust anymore."

Vaccine Injuries

Carlson asked Kory about his clinical experience with vaccine injuries.

"So how this is how I divide, this is just kind of my perception of vaccine injury is that when I use the term vaccine injury, I'm usually referring to what I call a single organ problem, like pericarditis, myocarditis, stroke, something like that. An autoimmune disease," he replied.

"What I specialize in my practice, is I treat patients with what we call a long Covid long vaxx. It's the same disease, just different triggers, right? One is triggered by Covid, the other one is triggered by the spike protein from the vaccine. Much more common is long vax. The only real differences between the two conditions is that the vaccinated are, on average, sicker and more disabled than the long Covids, with some pretty prominent exceptions to that."

Watch the entire interview above, and you can support Tucker Carlson's endeavors by joining the Tucker Carlson Network here...

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/14/2024 - 16:20

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