Month: October 2021

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Stagflation from the 1970’s returns

‘Stagflation is here,’ following months of rising prices, BofA analysts say

“…Stagflation is a word that conjures up images of 1970’s era double-digit inflation and long gasoline lines, so analysts have been loathe to use it. It’s a scenario that’s basically the worst of all worlds for the average person because it causes real incomes to stagnate or decline while destroying purchasing power.

The scenario currently being articulated by various banks like BofA is more of a stagflation-lite outcome, where inflation doesn’t need to necessarily shoot up much higher from here but lingers for far longer than previously thought.

Vamvakidis says he envisions a scenario where U.S. inflation keeps surprising to the upside and economic growth surprises to the downside, relative to expectations. The core PCE index could stay above 3% into 2022, he says, leaving inflation high enough that the Fed and other central banks might need to tighten monetary policy more than expected at a time when output is weaker and risk asset prices may be volatile. Meanwhile, analysts at in London see an era of higher inflation in the U.S. that lasts for a decade.

“We could easily see inflation at 3% to 4% for a while,” said Gang Hu, managing partner of New York hedge fund WinShore Capital Partners, who trades global inflation-protected securities. “We are not at the end of this supply-side destruction and are entering a period where nobody knows what transitory inflation means.”

“Once this episode passes, I don’t rule out a chance of a prolonged period of deflation” as policy makers “overshoot on the other side,” Hu told MarketWatch Friday. “For now, the market has not lost its confidence in the central bank’s ability to control inflation.”…”

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Vaccine hesitancy can, in part, be laid at the feet of experts who betrayed the public’s trust.

Public Health Officials Blew Up Their Credibility, and We’re Paying the Price

“…With COVID-19 still sickening and killing people even though effective vaccines have been widely available for all since the spring, it’s frustrating to see vaccination rates creep up only slowly against a head-wind of widespread resistance. It’s even more frustrating that much of that resistance can be attributed to self-inflicted wounds on the part of public health experts and government officials. Having effectively discarded their own credibility since the beginning of the pandemic, the powers-that-be find that much of the population no longer places faith in what they have to say.

“Why aren’t tens of millions of eligible Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19?” The Economist and YouGov asked in a recent poll. “Most who haven’t started the vaccination process say it’s a matter of trust.”

“Americans who are sure they will not get the vaccine are especially likely to say their lack of trust in the government is their major reason for rejecting the vaccine,” the polling firm adds, with 22 percent of respondents giving that as their reason for refusing vaccination, second to concerns about side effects.

Critics are certain to wave off the findings as the unfounded concerns of low-information knuckle-draggers who need to be poked and prodded into compliance. But, while such dismissal may confer a warm and fuzzy feeling of superiority, it doesn’t explain why health professionals also have lost faith in public-health officials.

“Trust in the CDC and FDA has decreased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic among health care professionals,” WebMD/Medscape noted in June. “Out of nearly 2,000 U.S. nurses surveyed on Medscape (WebMD’s sister site for health care professionals) between May 25 and June 3, 77% said their trust in the CDC has decreased since the start of the pandemic, and 51% said their trust in the FDA has decreased. Similarly, out of nearly 450 U.S. doctors surveyed in the same time period, 77% said their trust in the CDC has decreased and 48% said their trust in the FDA has decreased.”

Respondents to the WebMD/Medscape poll cited concerns about politics affecting public health decisions as well as contradictory messaging about masks, vaccination, and proper conduct to avoid infection. Both of those concerns were on display last year when public health officials went from condemning anti-lockdown protests to promoting protests against police brutality and racial injustice.

“Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What,” The New York Times headlined an article on the whiplash-inducing change in messaging over the potential health risks of public gatherings.

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, conceded to the Times. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

“It’s one thing to protest what day nail salons are opening, and it’s another to come out in peaceful protest, overwhelmingly, about somebody who was murdered right before our eyes,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy huffed in an open assertion that only protests with which he agreed were acceptable.

To large numbers of Americans, it’s obvious that many of the people issuing public health dictates base their proclamations not on science but on their personal biases. Those seeking actual medical guidance, or who entertain different values, might feel perfectly justified in ignoring public health officials who reveal themselves as just another class of activists…”

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Democrat Bennie Thompson

Jan. 6 commission chairman once sympathized with black secessionist group that killed cops

House Select Panel to investigate January 6 chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)

“…Fifty years ago as a Mississippi alderman, Bennie Thompson defended the Republic of New Africa and participated in a news conference blaming cops for the group’s violence even as FBI saw group as waging “guerrilla warfare.”

Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, has been a vocal critic of an event he deems an insurrection and offered his sympathy to the police officers injured that day. He’s even gone as far as to sue former President Donald Trump for responsibility for the melee.

But as a young African-American alderman in a small Mississippi community in 1971, Thompson placed himself on the opposite side, openly sympathizing with a secessionist group known as the Republic of New Africa and participating in a news conference blaming law enforcement for instigating clashes with the group that led to the killings of a police officer and the wounding of an FBI agent. Thompson’s official biography makes no reference to the separatist RNA.

Thompson’s affection for the RNA and its members — which FBI counterintelligence memos from the 1970s warned were threatening “guerrilla warfare” against the United States — was still intact as recently as 2013, when he openly campaigned on behalf of the group’s former vice president to be mayor of Mississippi’s largest city.

The congressman’s advocacy on behalf of RNA — captured in documents, newspaper clippings and video footage retrieved from state, FBI and local law enforcement agency archives — is a pointed reminder that some of the far-left figures of a half century ago are now the Democratic Party’s establishment leaders, their pasts now a fleeting footnote in the frenzied vitriol of modern-day Washington…”

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AG Garland mobilizes FBI against parents that reject Critical Race theory

Government goons to enforce police state policies. If you leave your kids in public schools its on you.

Doug Santo