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The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error

The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Back in 2018 leading up to Christmas the Federal Reserve began publicly flirting with the notion of ending asset purchases, reducing their.

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The Fed's Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Back in 2018 leading up to Christmas the Federal Reserve began publicly flirting with the notion of ending asset purchases, reducing their balance sheet and committing to an all around taper of stimulus. I wrote about it extensively at the time along with my position that the Fed could and would taper, at least for a short period, which would lead to an accelerated crash of stocks. This did in fact happen, but as we all know the Fed reversed course not long after.

This reversal was seen by many as proof that the Fed would “never” actually pursue a full blown taper and that stimulus measures would go on forever. I believed it could be a dry run for a more aggressive taper event down the road. I argued that the fed would continue stimulus until stagflation became evident to the public, and then a careful game of scapegoating would have to be played and another taper would commence.

It is also important to understand that there were many in the economic media that also argued that because the dollar is the preeminent world reserve currency the central bank could print dollars perpetually without inflationary consequences. This notion became a basic fundamental of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

Of course, MMT is utter nonsense. There are ALWAYS consequences for overt money creation even for world reserve currencies. It doesn’t matter if you try to price your national currency without comparisons to foreign currencies; under globalism and economic interdependency the velocity of money matters. If a country is printing with wild abandon, those dollars are going to buy less labor, less production and less goods overseas. Nothing defeats the laws of supply and demand, not even strategic debt creation.

We are now at that stage again where price inflation tied to money printing is clashing with the stock market’s complete reliance on stimulus to stay afloat. There are some that continue to claim the Fed will never sacrifice the markets by tapering. I say the Fed does not actually care, it is only waiting for the right time to pull the plug on the US economy.

In previous articles I have described the Federal Reserve as an “ideological suicide bomber.” There are some people out there that still do not grasp this concept and it boggles my mind to see how they rationalize many of the fed’s actions, as if the people running the fed are “oblivious” to the damage they are doing.

First and foremost, no, the Fed is not motivated by profits, at least not primarily. The Fed is able to print wealth at will, they don’t care about profits – They care about power and centralization. Would they sacrifice “the golden goose” of US markets in order to gain more power and full bore globalism? Absolutely. Would central bankers sacrifice the dollar and blow up the Fed as an institution in order to force a global currency system on the masses? There is no doubt; they’ve put the US economy at risk in the past in order to get more centralization.

At the onset of the Great Depression, the Fed increased interest rates into weakness after years of artificially stimulating markets with low cost debt. This prolonged the deflationary crash for many years. It was not until many decades later when former Fed chair Ben Bernanke gave a speech celebrating economist Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday that a central bank official finally admitted that the organization was culpable for the Depression debacle.

In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn.

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” – Ben Bernanke, 2002

What Ben Bernanke did not admit to was that the engineered deflationary crisis greatly benefited the allies of the Fed – The international corporate bankers. Companies like JP Morgan and Chase National were suddenly in a prime position to seize unlimited power in the US. But how?

Not many Americans today realize that a hundred years ago banking was highly decentralized. In fact, there were thousands of smaller community banks all across the country back then that were not attached to titanic banks like JP Morgan. One of the biggest coups of the Great Depression was that at least 9000 of these small banks were destroyed by the crash or absorbed by the international banks. There was no longer any local competition to the major corporations, they now dominated all lending markets.

If you wanted a loan or if you wanted to open a savings account after the depression, you would have to go through a small handful of mega-conglomerates. Complete centralization of finance had been achieved and the Fed helped to make this happen. Was this purely coincidence and negligence on the part of the Fed, or, did they know exactly what they were doing?

To be clear, the Catch-22 of taper vs stimulus and stagflation vs deflationary collapse is only a trap for the American public, it is NOT a trap for the Fed.

Again, they don’t ultimately care about the survival of the US economy. They’ve been destroying our financial system and currency slowly for over 100 years and they have been speeding up the process ever since the crash of 2008; why would they suddenly want to save it now? The Fed may taper or they may not. I predict they will once again officially taper at least for a time. Whether they continue to hold to that taper and for how long is a separate question. In either case, the dollar’s purchasing power still comes under threat and price inflation will still be the result.

If the Fed sticks with asset purchases and ultra-low interest rates, then the current stagflationary crisis will continue to grow. If Biden gets his “Build Back Better Plan” then expect even more price inflation as infrastructure projects turn into helicopter money much like the covid lockdowns turned into months of covid checks. This stimulus only served to undermine the labor market (To this day many states still have some covid welfare programs in place on top of regular unemployment benefits, which has fueled worker shortages – Only in the past month are all benefits starting to run out).

Helicopter money also leads to an explosion in demand for goods which then leads to higher prices as manufacturing cannot keep up. That is to say, more dollars chasing less goods leads to higher prices.

Furthermore, the central bank is the largest investor in US bonds. If the Fed raises interest rates into weakness and tapers asset purchases, then we may see a repeat of 2018 when the yield curve started to flatten. This means that short term treasury bonds will end up with the same yield as long term bonds and investment in long term bonds will fall. A dumping of long term bonds causes a decline in currency value and a flood of dollars back to the US. Result? Inflation.

No matter what the Fed does the consequence will be inflationary/stagflationary. The only difference is that if they taper there will also be an immediate decline in stocks and the overall crash will happen faster. The presumption by some is that a reversal in stocks will lure more money into the dollar, and this might happen for a short period of time. However, as mentioned if the yield curve flattens or there is instability in Treasury bonds there will be no saving the dollar either.

The bigger question is, why would the central bank trigger this crisis deliberately?

The Fed does not serve the purposes of the US, it serves the purposes of international banks and the agenda of globalism. It is openly admitted that national central banks take their marching orders from an entity called the Bank for International Settlements, and this includes the Fed. The BIS is a consortium of central banks from around the world that dictate overall central bank policy. If you have ever wondered how it’s possible for most national central banks to change policy in unison the way they tend to do instead of all of them reacting differently to economic problems, this is how.

There is a very interesting article published by Harpers Magazine in 1983 called ‘Ruling The World Of Money’ which I recommend people read if they want more insight into how the BIS operates and controls the decisions of regular central banks.

Everything the Fed does is to further globalist goals, not American goals or the American economy. The Fed will do as it’s ordered to do. And how do globalists benefit from America’s decline? Let’s not forget about the “Great Reset” agenda which the World Economic Forum, the IMF and other institutions have been so vocal about since the beginning of the pandemic. What the globalists want is to force the public to accept a completely centralized one world system based on socialist ideals, and this will include a one world currency that supplants the dollar. They will use any means at their disposal to get it, whether it be a pandemic crisis or an economic crisis. In fact, they are perfectly willing to engineer both.

It should be noted that the IMF and World bank recently held a “simulation” (war game) of just such a crisis. The game involved a cyber attack on global financial institutions which would then lead to economic collapse. I warned about the propensity for globalist simulations to play out in real life in my article ‘Cyberpolygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?’ Even the covid pandemic seems to have been simulated only a couple of months before the real thing happened, as we saw with Event 201 held by the WEF and the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation.

The covid panic that the establishment has tried to create is waning, at least in the US. I continue to see evidence of their plan failing in America as almost half of all states are now blocking the mandates and Biden’s executive orders are meeting stiff resistance in the courts. Any attempt to actually enforce vax passports or forced vaccination here will lead to a war that the covid cult will lose, it’s that simple. So, the globalists are going to need a different crisis to create further “opportunities”, and an economic crisis would definitely fit the bill.

It’s time for alternative economists to STOP looking at the Fed as a self serving institution struggling to keep the US economy propped up. This is not reality. It is also time to stop pretending as if the Fed is bumbling about and doesn’t have a clue. These people are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing. The Fed will destroy our economy if they believe the timing is right to create a new world order out of the chaos. When they pull the plug (and they will one way or the other), they need to be held accountable as conspirators seeking to sabotage, not as dunces that “made mistakes.”

Isn’t it strange that no matter how many financial catastrophes central bankers have their hands in they never seem to face any consequences and always seem to enjoy more power afterwards instead of less? Even when the institutions they operate collapse, the bankers themselves always land on their feet with the goals of globalism intact. This needs to end, and the the only way to make that happen is to visit punishment on the people behind the banks for their treachery and conspiracy instead of chalking it all up to gullibility or simple greed.

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Tyler Durden Sun, 12/26/2021 - 11:30

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Government

Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…

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Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

Credit: source: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.

The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.

Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.

“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”

Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.

Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.

The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.

Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.

“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”

The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.

Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”

Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.

“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”


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International

There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

More Travel:

According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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International

The next pandemic? It’s already here for Earth’s wildlife

Bird flu is decimating species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss.

I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.

This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

H5N1 originated on a Chinese poultry farm in 1997. ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

A colony of king penguins.
Remote penguin colonies are already threatened by climate change. AndreAnita/Shutterstock

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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