Today’s elites are caught in a dilemma: nobody wants what they’re selling.
They promised a world where under their expert management, the economy would function unfailingly, there would be peace in our time, and when the pandemic hit they had it all under control (anybody remember “Two weeks to flatten the curve?”). They even tease us with transhumanist visions of perpetual bliss in a metaverse and the abolition of death itself.
All we have to do in exchange for these trappings of an AI driven post-singularity bliss is cede our sovereignty and our individual free will. Sure, we get decide the little things for ourselves. iOS or Android. Pfizer or Moderna. But for really big issues, like “how will we ratchet down the living standards of every plebeian on Earth in order to deal with this debt bubble climate change, all of this has already been decided. You’ll get to choose how you want to follow the rules, not whether the rules are fair or even make any sense (it’s called “subsidiarity”).
But there’s a problem. A big one.
It threatens the bring down the elites and even the idea of globalism itself:
The problem that is none of their policies are working. In fact they’re actually causing even more damage to the global economy and unleashing greater havoc on the social fabric:
Supply chains are failing because of second-order effects of lockdowns.
Energy crises are unfolding due to delusional ESG narratives and platitudes.
The global economy is imploding because of a super-sized credit bubble and central bank interventions.
To top it all off, looking at the data coming out now it would not surprise me if we figure out that the vaccines are doing more damage than COVID ever did.
The elite response has included incessant rebranding, from “The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better”, to “Stakeholder Capitalism”, or so called “Woke Capitalism”, and then (the short lived and lame) “The Great Narrative”.
The “Liberal World Order” is the latest incarnation of this branding exercise. This is the new name for the hill the peasants are expected to die on…
CNN: "What do you say to those families that say, 'listen, we can't afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?’"
BIDEN ADVISOR BRIAN DEESE: "This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm." pic.twitter.com/LWilWSo72S
To understand what the ruling elites are trying to achieve, it helps to look at the worldview of one of the high priests of globalism: Henry Kissinger and his book, simply titled “World Order”.
The era we have been in since a group of treaties were signed in the mid-1600’s that ended The Thirty Years War is defined as The Peace of Westphalia. It codifies the nation state as supreme sovereign within its borders. It conferred legitimacy to rule on each sovereign, be it a monarch, or a democracy or some kind of hybrid.
The supreme objective of the Westphalian system was to achieve world order through balance of power. No more total wars, like the Thirty Years War. Just limited ones to fine tune (“recalibrate”, in Kissinger’s terms) power shifts between nations.
One characteristic of the Westphalian system was that there was indeed an undeclared, albeit widely acknowledged, hegemon, who acted as the guarantor of “the rules based order” of the day. It used to be the United Kingdom, but after World War II became the United States.
However make no mistake, the Westphalian system was not democratic, even if some of its building blocks were nominally democracies. It was
“a new era of Enlightenment governance by benevolent despotism which was legitimized by its effectiveness, not ideology”.
Kissinger was referring specifically to Frederick II of Prussia in that passage, but it accurately encompasses his overall approach to statesmanship. (I’ve heard it said that the difference between Machiavelli and Kissinger was that Machiavelli was an idealist, but that Kissinger is a Machiavellian – the source eludes me, sorry)
To its credit, the Westphalian system enabled human flourishing, not seen since before the Dark Ages. The developments we call the Enlightenment and Renaissance became unstoppable waves of change, under which the level of intellectual abstraction and socio-economic decentralization undertook a quantum leap, and with it, the living standards of the masses.
Make no mistake, the machinations of rival states and ever-shifting alliances required a lubricant, and that was an elite class that could inject congruent agendas across all spheres:
“International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honour and duty in the same way and agreed upon fundamentals. They represented a single elite society who spoke the same language… a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct.”
The big loser, was the Catholic Church. Since the Fall of Rome, they had inexorably centralized all the power, inserted themselves as sole arbiter of spiritual truth, became the largest land owner in the world, and who basically decided and enforced the “social contract” for most of the known world.
They too, were the guarantors of a world order of sorts in their day. Arguably less effectively than what was achieved under the Westphalian framework.
The Catholic Church’s hegemony was doomed, because it was attempting to maintain its order on an increasingly obsolete worldview. Settled science of the day included that the heavens revolved around the earth and the Bubonic Plague was caused by Jews.
Like the preceding order before it, the Westphalian system is started to break down over a century ago, disrupted by revelations on par with “the world is not flat” (like the discovery of quantum mechanics that consciousness precedes matter) not to mention self-inflicted follies like the advent of central banking and fiat money.
It’s no surprise that the Westphalian Peace was economically supported by large periods of gold backed money and only started to breakdown in earnest when combatants abandoned sound money to fight the world wars of the 20th century.
What we have today is the the transition of the Westphalian System to whatever comes next, and its still a little early define what that next phase is (In my old podcasts with Charles and Jesse we used to call it “The Network State”. That phrase turned out to be coined earlier by Balaji Srinivasan who’s new book by that name just came out).
When the Catholic Church entered its long descent, they fought it tooth and nail. The Holy Inquisition, which lasted centuries and inflicted untold misery, can be seen as the last, frantic clinging to relevancy and power by a system that was being outrun by history.
So too, the elite class that lords over the Westphalian System (known in our time as “globalism”), will not go easily into that good night. Via technocratic authoritarianism, promulgated under harmless sounding platitudes (“recalibrating” your rights, “reset” the system, “re-imagining” your future), it will cause immeasurable harm and destruction, only to ultimately fail for the sole reason of trying to shoehorn outdated modes of organization (top-down force of the state) on a new, incompatible reality (decentralized networks secured by public-key cryptography).
The silver lining of pandemic is that it has acted as a catalyst, pulling forward decades of creeping totalitarianism and compressing it into 18 months, has resulted in a quickening of this transition. The Liberal World Order’s manipulations to manage the pandemic and to control this wider transition are simply accelerating it, into something foreign to legacy institutions and beyond their control.
These machinations include these incessant and frantic rebranding exercises. The aspiration behind all of these labels is that they are trying to condition into your psyche, as if it were objective fact, that the natural order of things is that they get to set the rules and we get to follow them.
However the growing perception among the public, is that with every policy failure and each rebranding iteration, these elites are conceding that they are, in fact, losing control, losing relevance …and scared.
Each renaming emphasizes their aloofness, showing how their obsessions with models and nomenclature in their minds trump results and reality. By enacting draconian, one-sided arbitrary dictums that have backfired catastrophically, they’ve produced untold misery and destruction. Now they want to double down and keep running the show.
The biggest difference between the shift half a millennia ago and this one is the speed with which it is happening. Where entire generations were born, lived and died without ever experiencing any noticeable change in the order of things, today we see it changing in realtime.
The New Order is Emergent
As Kissinger ruminates near the end of ‘World Order’, we’re in the Twilight of the Westphalian system:
“In the world of geopolitics, the order established and proclaimed by Western countries stands at a turning point. It’s nostrums are understood globally, but there is no consensus about their application; indeed concepts such as democracy, human rights, and international law are given such divergent interpretations that warring parties regularly invoke them against each other as battle cries”
What humanity is gradually figuring out is that true order is emergent. Market signals traverse the medium of individual experience in a way that often defies institutionalized understanding, especially when those institutions insist on being informed by outdated modes of thinking.
For example, why in Canada, where 85% of the population took two doses of vaccines in order to become “fully vaxxed” are we now the lowest uptake of third shot boosters in the G7?
Could it be because many have had more friends, family and acquaintances die "suddenly" and "unexpectedly" in the last year, than they had die of COVID? https://t.co/Q7ZzeywDfC
— Mark Jeftovic, The C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) July 8, 2022
In decentralized, multi-polar architectures, understanding signal is more of an art than science, especially given the incessant distortions inflicted by legions of corporate media “fact checkers”.
In this coming era of network states and legions of sovereign individuals (empowered by holding unseizable, frictionless capital in form of Bitcoin and other digital assets), formalized top-down frameworks are doomed not only to fail, but to exacerbate problems.
Kissinger, again:
“Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies challenging its cohesion: either a redefinition of legitimacy or a significant shift in the balance of power”
It was Jan. 11, 2024 when software giant Microsoft (MSFT) briefly passed Apple (AAPL) as the most valuable company in the world.
Microsoft's stock closed 0.5% higher, giving it a market valuation of $2.859 trillion.
It rose as much as 2% during the session and the company was briefly worth $2.903 trillion. Apple closed 0.3% lower, giving the company a market capitalization of $2.886 trillion.
"It was inevitable that Microsoft would overtake Apple since Microsoft is growing faster and has more to benefit from the generative AI revolution," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said at the time, according to Reuters.
The two tech titans have jostled for top spot over the years and Microsoft was ahead at last check, with a market cap of $3.085 trillion, compared with Apple's value of $2.684 trillion.
Analysts noted that Apple had been dealing with weakening demand, including for the iPhone, the company’s main source of revenue.
Demand in China, a major market, has slumped as the country's economy makes a slow recovery from the pandemic and competition from Huawei.
Sales in China of Apple's iPhone fell by 24% in the first six weeks of 2024 compared with a year earlier, according to research firm Counterpoint, as the company contended with stiff competition from a resurgent Huawei "while getting squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi," said senior Analyst Mengmeng Zhang.
“Although the iPhone 15 is a great device, it has no significant upgrades from the previous version, so consumers feel fine holding on to the older-generation iPhones for now," he said.
Big plans for China
Counterpoint said that the first six weeks of 2023 saw abnormally high numbers with significant unit sales being deferred from December 2022 due to production issues.
Apple is planning to open its eighth store in Shanghai – and its 47th across China – on March 21.
The company also plans to expand its research centre in Shanghai to support all of its product lines and open a new lab in southern tech hub Shenzhen later this year, according to the South China Morning Post.
Meanwhile, over in Europe, Apple announced changes to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into effect last week, Reuters reported on March 12.
Beginning this spring, software developers operating in Europe will be able to distribute apps to EU customers directly from their own websites instead of through the App Store.
"To reflect the DMA’s changes, users in the EU can install apps from alternative app marketplaces in iOS 17.4 and later," Apple said on its website, referring to the software platform that runs iPhones and iPads.
"Users will be able to download an alternative marketplace app from the marketplace developer’s website," the company said.
Apple has also said it will appeal a $2 billion EU antitrust fine for thwarting competition from Spotify (SPOT) and other music streaming rivals via restrictions on the App Store.
The company's shares have suffered amid all this upheaval, but some analysts still see good things in Apple's future.
Bank of America Securities confirmed its positive stance on Apple, maintaining a buy rating with a steady price target of $225, according to Investing.com.
The firm's analysis highlighted Apple's pricing strategy evolution since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, with initial prices set at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model.
BofA said that Apple has consistently launched new iPhone models, including the Pro/Pro Max versions, to target the premium market.
Analyst says Apple selloff 'overdone'
Concurrently, prices for previous models are typically reduced by about $100 with each new release.
This strategy, coupled with installment plans from Apple and carriers, has contributed to the iPhone's installed base reaching a record 1.2 billion in 2023, the firm said.
Apple has effectively shifted its sales mix toward higher-value units despite experiencing slower unit sales, BofA said.
This trend is expected to persist and could help mitigate potential unit sales weaknesses, particularly in China.
BofA also noted Apple's dominance in the high-end market, maintaining a market share of over 90% in the $1,000 and above price band for the past three years.
The firm also cited the anticipation of a multi-year iPhone cycle propelled by next-generation AI technology, robust services growth, and the potential for margin expansion.
On Monday, Evercore ISI analysts said they believed that the sell-off in the iPhone maker’s shares may be “overdone.”
The firm said that investors' growing preference for AI-focused stocks like Nvidia (NVDA) has led to a reallocation of funds away from Apple.
In addition, Evercore said concerns over weakening demand in China, where Apple may be losing market share in the smartphone segment, have affected investor sentiment.
And then ongoing regulatory issues continue to have an impact on investor confidence in the world's second-biggest company.
“We think the sell-off is rather overdone, while we suspect there is strong valuation support at current levels to down 10%, there are three distinct drivers that could unlock upside on the stock from here – a) Cap allocation, b) AI inferencing, and c) Risk-off/defensive shift," the firm said in a research note.
Major typhoid fever surveillance study in sub-Saharan Africa indicates need for the introduction of typhoid conjugate vaccines in endemic countries
There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high…
There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high burden combined with the threat of typhoid strains resistant to antibiotic treatment calls for stronger prevention strategies, including the use and implementation of typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) in endemic settings along with improvements in access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Credit: IVI
There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high burden combined with the threat of typhoid strains resistant to antibiotic treatment calls for stronger prevention strategies, including the use and implementation of typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) in endemic settings along with improvements in access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
The findings from this 4-year study, the Severe Typhoid in Africa (SETA) program, offers new typhoid fever burden estimates from six countries: Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, and Nigeria, with four countries recording more than 100 cases for every 100,000 person-years of observation, which is considered a high burden. The highest incidence of typhoid was found in DRC with 315 cases per 100,000 people while children between 2-14 years of age were shown to be at highest risk across all 25 study sites.
There are an estimated 12.5 to 16.3 million cases of typhoid every year with 140,000 deaths. However, with generic symptoms such as fever, fatigue, and abdominal pain, and the need for blood culture sampling to make a definitive diagnosis, it is difficult for governments to capture the true burden of typhoid in their countries.
“Our goal through SETA was to address these gaps in typhoid disease burden data,” said lead author Dr. Florian Marks, Deputy Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI). “Our estimates indicate that introduction of TCV in endemic settings would go to lengths in protecting communities, especially school-aged children, against this potentially deadly—but preventable—disease.”
In addition to disease incidence, this study also showed that the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Salmonella Typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, has led to more reliance beyond the traditional first line of antibiotic treatment. If left untreated, severe cases of the disease can lead to intestinal perforation and even death. This suggests that prevention through vaccination may play a critical role in not only protecting against typhoid fever but reducing the spread of drug-resistant strains of the bacteria.
There are two TCVs prequalified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and available through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. In February 2024, IVI and SK bioscience announced that a third TCV, SKYTyphoid™, also achieved WHO PQ, paving the way for public procurement and increasing the global supply.
Alongside the SETA disease burden study, IVI has been working with colleagues in three African countries to show the real-world impact of TCV vaccination. These studies include a cluster-randomized trial in Agogo, Ghana and two effectiveness studies following mass vaccination in Kisantu, DRC and Imerintsiatosika, Madagascar.
Dr. Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse, Associate Director General at IVI and Head of the Real-World Evidence Department, explains, “Through these vaccine effectiveness studies, we aim to show the full public health value of TCV in settings that are directly impacted by a high burden of typhoid fever.” He adds, “Our final objective of course is to eliminate typhoid or to at least reduce the burden to low incidence levels, and that’s what we are attempting in Fiji with an island-wide vaccination campaign.”
As more countries in typhoid endemic countries, namely in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, consider TCV in national immunization programs, these data will help inform evidence-based policy decisions around typhoid prevention and control.
###
About the International Vaccine Institute (IVI)
The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) is a non-profit international organization established in 1997 at the initiative of the United Nations Development Programme with a mission to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for global health.
IVI’s current portfolio includes vaccines at all stages of pre-clinical and clinical development for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, such as cholera, typhoid, chikungunya, shigella, salmonella, schistosomiasis, hepatitis E, HPV, COVID-19, and more. IVI developed the world’s first low-cost oral cholera vaccine, pre-qualified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and developed a new-generation typhoid conjugate vaccine that is recently pre-qualified by WHO.
IVI is headquartered in Seoul, Republic of Korea with a Europe Regional Office in Sweden, a Country Office in Austria, and Collaborating Centers in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. 39 countries and the WHO are members of IVI, and the governments of the Republic of Korea, Sweden, India, Finland, and Thailand provide state funding. For more information, please visit https://www.ivi.int.
Incidence of typhoid fever in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, and Nigeria (the Severe Typhoid in Africa programme): a population-based study
We’ve added 60% to national debt since 2018. Germany - a country with major economic woes - added ‘just’ 32%.
Maybe it will never matter. Maybe MMT is real. Maybe we just cancel or inflate it out. Maybe career real estate borrowers or career politicians aren’t the answer.
I have no idea. Only time will tell. But it’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out.
He is right: it will be fascinating, and the latest budget deficit data simply confirmed that the day of reckoning will come very soon, certainly sooner than the two years that One River's Eric Peters predicted this weekend for the coming "US debt sustainability crisis."
According to the US Treasury, in February, the US collected $271 billion in various tax receipts, and spent $567 billion, more than double what it collected.
The two charts below show the divergence in US tax receipts which have flatlined (on a trailing 6M basis) since the covid pandemic in 2020 (with occasional stimmy-driven surges)...
... and spending which is about 50% higher compared to where it was in 2020.
The end result is that in February, the budget deficit rose to $296.3 billion, up 12.9% from a year prior, and the second highest February deficit on record.
And the punchline: on a cumulative basis, the budget deficit in fiscal 2024 which began on October 1, 2023 is now $828 billion, the second largest cumulative deficit through February on record, surpassed only by the peak covid year of 2021.
But wait there's more: because in a world where the US is spending more than twice what it is collecting, the endgame is clear: debt collapse, and while it won't be tomorrow, or the week after, it is coming... and it's also why the US is now selling $1 trillion in debt every 100 days just to keep operating (and absorbing all those millions of illegal immigrants who will keep voting democrat to preserve the socialist system of the US, so beloved by the Soros clan).
... having already surpassed total US defense spending and soon to surpass total health spending and, finally all social security spending, the largest spending category of all, which means that US debt will now rise exponentially higher until the inevitable moment when the US dollar loses its reserve status and it all comes crashing down.
We conclude with another observation by CNBC's Brian Sullivan, who quotes an email by a DC strategist...
.. which lays out the proposed Biden budget as follows:
The budget deficit will growth another $16 TRILLION over next 10 years. Thats *with* the proposed massive tax hikes.
Without them the deficit will grow $19 trillion.
That's why you will hear the "deficit is being reduced by $3 trillion" over the decade.
No family budget or business could exist with this kind of math.
Of course, in the long run, neither can the US... and since neither party will ever cut the spending which everyone by now is so addicted to, the best anyone can do is start planning for the endgame.
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