Did you know that stocks are falling like a rock? One graph of the S&P below shows this is indisputably a hard-fact truth and no wonder: US Factory orders are unexpectedly shrinking. Morgan Stanley just forecast US earnings to decline by 16% this year. The Baltic Dry Bulk Index, a measure of bulk transoceanic shipments of resources, is rapidly falling. And Adam Taggart affirms what I’ve been warning about over the past few weeks — that the debt-ceiling deal that just passed will hasten our decline into recession by devastating the bond market and interest rates.
How does this fact about the S&P’s plunge square with the S&P’s soaring rise that has taken Apple back up to its record high and that has dominated the news? Well, that question almost answers itself, and one headline to a simple graph below explains why that is so. The bottom line is, though, stocks are falling hard and falling broadly. That, however, is to be expected in an economy that Charles Hugh Smith describes in the stories below as a stimulus-speculation economy now that the stimulus that drove the speculation is all being sucked away by the nation’s central planners.
And why is that great sucking sound being heard? Well, it’s the one thing the mainstream financial media doesn’t spend much time talking about (or any). That’s why you have The Daily Doom and other alternative-press publications of its kind to square the news up with realty. Let me provide a few examples from today’s news stories:
Today’s lead story asks if China is headed for Japan-like stagnation, but it claims economists say the worst for China is likely behind it. I doubt that economist can predict much of anything right. Many of them can’t even understand the past right. The article blames the stagnation on China being too quick to remove stimulus, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room that the article and its establishment economists avoid completely:
Why did China need stimulus in the first place? Well, too much government interference, too much ignorant central planning that thinks it knows more than it does are the overarching answers. To be more specific, China’s government engineered a virus that it, then, released on itself. That is “fake news” that became fact — you know, the kind CNN refuses to carry and even counters until reality breaks out of the bondage they seek to keep it in just like the virus broke out in Wuhan.
Now, China knew the virus could be serious because they engineered it. That is clearly why their response was so overwhelming right from the beginning. Government overreacts when it tries to solve the huge problems it created. You can see that all over today’s news, and I’ll spell some of it out for you.
Like most central planners, China’s attempts to save their own world made it worse. They responded to their self-created Covid contagion in the most ham-fisted way of all governments. We will long remember the images of people trapped in an apartment that was on fire because the Chinese government screwed the doors and windows shut on all apartments from the outside in order to save the people from Covid contamination via containment of people, not viruses. So, the people died in the fire. We will remember how China closed down entire metropolitan cities and ports to force containment of the disease they created.
It became politically impossible to continue with their policies because they were about to face a peasant revolt from people who didn’t want to burn to death in their apartments. So, the government then suddenly ended its zero-Covid policy with no rational explanation for why it was so necessary for months but was instantly not necessary at all, and, of course, Covid, in a population that had developed no natural immunity, surged! So, their economy took more damage.
The upshot is that all these brute attempts to force humanity into apartment prisons, as well as prisons of the mind, destroyed the Chinese economy to where it needs stimulus (artificial life support) in order to continue and still needs it. The US did the same thing in Trump’s final year, locking down the whole economy, under forced-Fauci, mandating massive changes in human behavior and creating huge economic turmoil that still cripples the labor market, causing the continued shortages mentioned in some of today’s other stories, but particularly the unending tightness in the labor market that lowers production.
Let’s note that, at the end of the day, all the self-righteous vaccine Nazis who thought they had the right to force-fire people, not caring in the least about destroying their livelihoods or sending them to early retirement — the people who banned the Great Unwashed from public places and who thought they had to right to force experimental medicine into the veins of anyone they wanted to — all of them did not do one bit better in the fight in the end against Covid than those who remained unvaccinated. In fact, those who got vaccinated four times did worse!
Let’s not stop with attacking Chinese central planners who destroyed China’s boom from the inside out with their own know-it-all machinations nor stop with ridiculing the Covid commies who ran Amerika; let’s talk about America’s own economic central planners — the central bank, which has powers it should never have been given to steer the economy. They are the ones who created a nation of stimulus junkies and who energized and fueled the speculative market bubbles throughout the economy with the most massive money printing ever known to mankind as their central plan for saving us from the economic ruin our leaders brought upon us with their Covid lockdowns! They kept creating money in massive quantities even when it was clear inflation was rising. They did this month after month as inflation got hotter, telling us all we didn’t know what we were seeing — that inflation was transitory and would take care of itself. All fake news. Government news. Bankster news.
Now, we have the head of the International Monetary Fund telling us the US central bank will likely have to try harder to create more economic destruction if it wants to get the inflation it created under control. Of course, being a central bankster, herself, she doesn’t use those gloomy words. And, of course, the mainstream financial media doesn’t either. She says they need to “tighten” more in order to help save us from inflation. She doesn't say they are saving us from their inflation that they entirely foisted upon us with their massive money printing.
She uses nice words like “tighten,” instead of “forced economic destruction,” but when she is talking about the labor market being too strong, she really means the central bankers must cripple labor more — decimated as the work force already is — in order to get job openings down to match our self-destroyed labor force just so scarce labor loses its leverage for better wages. Surely all those shareholders hoarding much higher dividends, aren’t fueling inflation with all the money they have to spend, nor the overpaid, overstocked executive tier. It must be the lowly workers who need to be pounded back down.
That is the reality of it. About 4,000,000 people exited the labor force for good during Covid, whether due to saying “to heck with it” because they got vaccine-fired or due to retiring early or getting long Covid or dying from Covid (whether vaccinated or not), or dying from the vaccine, or whatever the reasons were … they’re GONE! They didn’t come back.
The combination of a human-engineered disease and a grossly over-reacting human-engineered response, literally decimated the global economy. However, you won’t see the mainstream media talking about the Fed being responsible for creating the inflation in the first place by printing SO MUCH money in a time of true scarcity, and you won’t see them call “tightening” “economic destruction,” but that is what it is. It is an attempt at controlled demolition of the economy. Yet, when all their bubbles burst, you will hear them all saying, “No one could have seen that coming!” Of course not. The mainstream press glossed over all the bad stuff they didn’t want you to hear.
Except that someone did see it coming … just not anyone in the mainstream “watchdog” press!
In one final example of central-planning self-destruction, a few financial writers may be finally getting smart enough to start asking, “What are we going to do with all of these solar panels when they die?” Billions of them will fill cavernous pit mines because they are not easily recyclable. Did anyone stop to evaluate whether the landfill solution would be better or worse than the CO2 pollution they were supposed to offset? Did anyone bother to evaluate whether the hundreds of thousands of acres that got buried under those glaring solar shields might have reduced CO2 more if they had simply remained forests? Pretty sure plants and animals don’t live all that well under a thousand-acre solar farm. I am not against the technology; I’ve even used it, but our central planners rush headlong into these things as broad solutions and rarely do honest math to evaluate the costs — both economically and ecologically. And the press never questions it either.
And did you know (probably, yes, since you read publications like The Daily Doom) that the earth absolutely loves, LOVES, LOVES! CO2? It literally IS the oxygen plants breathe. More CO2 equals faster growing plant life, which brings a reduction in CO2. Plants, as it turns out, also LOVE greenhouses, too. They like more humidity and more heat. It’s humans who don’t like it. Cold-blooded reptiles once thrived in it and grew to become giants that roamed the earth and ate the abundant foliage that eventually got trapped as fossils fuels. Humans are not trying to save the earth FROM humans; they are trying to save the earth FOR THEMSELVES, to keep it at the temperature and humidity THEY like. Let’s be honest about that, too.
That is why I chose an honest name for this publication, The Daily Doom. Let’s just call it what it is. Let’s say what the mainstream doesn’t say, even though we all know they love to publish bad news all the time anyway … but not if it runs against the establishment party line. I just call it what it is, hence the name of this publication. Some will appreciate the tongue-in-cheek humor.
Some may just say “How gloomy!” However, the news they read on CNN hasn’t taken them to a good understanding of truth by glossing over the darker truths about Covid and Nazi tactics adopted by “civilized” people. Nor did it help them create a less gloomy world. Pretending things were not as they really were left us all with a worse world — just as the media did with the Fed when it pretended the Fed was right about inflation being transitory and all simply parroted the narrative they were force-Fed. The world actually became MORE gloomy because it tried to whitewash all the truly bad stuff that was happening by the orders of the government in order to keep people feeling good about what was happening.
(The headlines in boldface type below carry the stories that went into the editorial.)
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