Big Tech is Fascist.
Welcome Twitter people!
As you may be aware, I am unsuspended (for now) on the Twitter.
Since Substack has been good to me so far, I will continue to mainly focus here, saving Twitter for bashing the Fed, the warmongers and others in my pinned tweet, and for short, funny stuff (Notes isn’t quite the same yet).
You’ll see here that there is a paid subscriber option, which is nice because it’s a little beer money after all these years, but I still have plenty of free stuff too, so don’t get all Che Guevara on me.
Substack and Twitter are different, but I’m not.
“…the press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors, and publishers of the papers they read.”
Bernard Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy, 1963
We know without a doubt that the Federal government actively - and illegally - tries to get individuals censored or removed from social media sites.
The Biden administration is using Big Tech as its private censorship arm, and that violates what the Supreme Court, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), called an “axiomatic” principle: The government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
This should scare the hell out of you, Left and Right:
I am non-violent, so apparently I am just a Domestic Extremist (DE), for things like my "opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies," as well as "perceived government overreach."
Plus I'm not a fan of "corporate globalization." And I even support the First and Second Amendments. Really nutty stuff.
(They don’t mention that the thing they really hate is anyone who is anti-war.)
Missouri v. Biden
CISA is working with Department of Treasury to address misinformation that undermines “public confidence” in “financial services” and “financial systems.”
(CISA is the federal government's censorship hub within the DHS)
Now the U.S. Treasury Department is involved in censorship.
I wonder if making fun of Janet Yellen or Jay Powell qualifies as a threat to “public confidence” in “financial services” and “financial systems.”
Pot, meet kettle:
“Zoom executives knew about key elements of plan to censor Chinese activists”
Zoom rolled over for Chinese officials and promised to comply with Beijing’s demands to suppress speech on the platform, according to court documents…
An updated criminal complaint unsealed last month detailed the company’s efforts to comply with Beijing’s censorship demands.
Twitter and Facebook do the same thing, under pressure from U.S. officials.
Big Tech is fascist.
People on the Left should be just as angered as “conservatives” by what the FBI and the White House and National Security State in general are doing, because if you think this is only going to be used against people you disagree with, you're dangerously naïve.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
Cicero
American Officials Erase US Role in Empowering Their New Number One Enemy China
As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.
Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.
One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.
The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process.
"Whether you're Fink or Schwarzman, or Adelson or Wynn, or Ray Dalio, they're evangelical about the greatness of China because all they see is their pocketbook growing bigger because they have a special access deal with China."
Kyle Bass, 2020
Take it away, Ross Perot (9 years before China joined the WTO):
Q: Yes, I'd like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided I was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out.
Shrinkflation of the Day
Results for the RV Industry Association’s April 2023 survey of manufacturers determined that total RV shipments ended the month with 31,216 units, a decrease of (-45.4%) compared to the 57,192 units shipped in April 2022. Through April, RV shipments are down (-52.1%) with 109,816 units.
The majority of investors who took on mortgages in 2022 to pay for new Toronto condos have been losing money every month, a shift that could discourage future building in what is already one of North America’s tightest rental markets.
Lemme get this straight - “investors” - who paid peak mania prices at all-time low mortgage rates - made a mistake, and, what? This will be the reason for more homelessness or something in the future? Come on.
The thinking was, rents would inevitably outstrip costs by the time they had to pay the bulk of the price. But for those who closed on purchases last year, the economics have changed.
So what? Let prices drop, these investors lose their a**, and other people - maybe even actual homeowners - may get a shot at the units.
Case-Shiller: National House Price Index increased 0.7% year-over-year in March I suppose in real terms that’s a decline, but nobody normal thinks like that.
Boo!
Then again…
FHFA House Price Index Reaches Record High in March
As for commercial real estate: “CoStar Commercial Repeat Sale Indices (CCRSI) provides the market's first look at commercial real estate pricing trends through April 2023. Based on 961 repeat sale pairs in April 2023 and 290,181 repeat sales since 1996, the CCRSI offers the broadest measure of commercial real estate repeat sales activity.”
Oxy gives really good disclosures of capital expenditure and production for each basin in its earnings release. We notice that in the Permian, which is their most important basin, capex was up 75% year-over-year with BOEs produced up only 23% and actual barrels of oil up only 20%.
Then, on the Q1 conference call, Oxy talked about how they drilled the longest DJ Basin well ever (25k ft), set a lateral length record (18k ft), and set a record for continuous pumping time (28 hours vs 22.5) in the Delaware in the Permian. Are we supposed to be excited that oil wells now require five miles of steel pipe when a century ago you just had to poke a hole in the ground to get a gusher?
…The shale companies are spinning the treadmill harder and harder to stay in the same place, and the winners at the end of the day are going to be the royalty owners. The number one operator on Texas Pacific land is... Oxy. (Texas Pacific is not "cheap" at 6% FCF/EV, however that was at $75 oil and $3.60 gas.)
From a royalty owner's perspective, oil and gas executives are people who get to live in nice houses in Houston in exchange for bringing their investors' money to you.We are considering a hypothesis that peak oil is right, but it was delayed 15 years by producing oil in a way that has very low EROEI. Which is why all the shalecos went bankrupt and no other country fracks its shale basins. Only the country with a reserve currency seems to be able to do it.
“Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.”
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
Beginning to wonder about the “greatest jobs market in history” narrative.
Return to pandemic hunger levels could signal economic fragility
“Inflation is a major factor”
“Food banks have been around for 50 years, but this is the first time we are seeing unprecedented high food demand combined with historically low unemployment rates”
“two in five people seeking food assistance in the Atlanta region this year have not done so before.”
“More than 11.4 million households collected free groceries in early April, up 15% from a year ago”
“The fact that we have a lot of first time users who are no longer concerned about the stigma of going to a food pantry – and actually see value in it because they can no longer afford retail food – is a reasonable proxy for the health of the economy and consumers”
“The Mid-Ohio Food Collective, which operates in 20 counties, reported a roughly 45% increase in household pantry visits in the first three months of this year, compared to last year”
No accountability, ever:
Another example of why the CPI is nonsense:
I’ve showed this chart before, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: New Vehicles in U.S. City Average, from the BLS:
What this chart is telling us is that new car prices essentially didn’t rise from 1996 to 2020. People use charts like this all the time. They’re complete nonsense.
Of course new car prices rose - a lot - between 1996 and 2020. So why is the red line flat for 24 years?
Because of hedonic-quality adjustments.
Now look at this chart:
Kelley Blue Book is used for the orange line and the BLS is used for the dotted gold line. Just in this example, between 2012 and 2020, Kelley Blue Book has new car prices rising fifty-seven percent (57%)!
So what does the BLS say if you use their new car CPI? To them, prices only rose 22%, and that’s what went into the CPI.
Keep this in mind whenever you see any CPI numbers - they’re entirely subjective and bogus. This is how economists actually think, and why CPI is way below the actual "cost of living."
For kicks, print this out and take it with you next time you go men's shirt shopping:
I’m not much of a trader, and I don’t have a “system.” I tend to buy a few things for various reasons, and hold them a long time (or else sell things quickly if I get a bad feeling). I don’t short. I have a very undiversified portfolio, and hate bonds. Somehow this has worked for me, but do not purchase my trading course.
One indicator I watch for to see extremes in bearishness is the “Bullish Percent Index,” which you can find on Stockcharts.com1 and various other sites. At the end of September 2022 I noted that the indicator was getting historically quite low, around the 11-12 range (I think the $SPX fell another 70 points after I noticed this before bottoming):
You can see that in recent years when the index gets around that range it’s a great time to buy (tops are much harder to pick.) Even if you go back 25 years or so, once the $BPSPX gets under, say 15, it seems like an extreme that can be bought (or average in a little every day).
Of course, since crashes usually seem to happen in oversold markets, it’s likely you won’t catch the bottom, and may be underwater for a while if you’re too early, but as long as you’re not levered up and don’t have clients screaming at you, I think it’s a pretty good, simple timing device. When to sell is a completely different issue, and I have no worthwhile opinions on that. That’s up to you. Right now the $BPSPX is sitting around 45, basically no man’s land.
They have a number of bullish percent symbols you can find on Stockcharts, for example for the S&P Technology Sector ($BPINFO).
You can see that this has ranged from 0% to 95% since 1996. Today it’s at 75, which to me isn’t unusual or actionable.
As always, this is not investment advice. If you listen to me you will lose all your money.
The Bullish Percent Index, or BPI, is a breadth indicator that shows the percentage of stocks on Point & Figure Buy Signals. There is no ambiguity on P&F charts because a stock is either on a P&F Buy Signal or P&F Sell Signal. The Bullish Percent Index fluctuates between 0% and 100%. In its most basic form, the Bullish Percent Index favors the bulls when above 50% and the bears when below 50%. BPI is also considered overbought when above 70% and oversold when below 30%.
As I said on twitter this is the best day ever. Just finished going through Ray Dalio hotdog thread and it is confirmed one of the best pieces of comedy I've ever seen!
GoRozen.com wrote extensively about having reached Hubbert's Peak worldwide. Buckle up!