This week was about inflation; first the PPI (PPIACO) hit on Tuesday: headline +2.04% m/m [24% annualized!], and then the CPI (CPIAUCSL) landed on Wednesday: headline +0.94% m/m [11.28% annualized!] Both numbers were absurd, multi-decade highs.
Hey so about that “transitory inflation” thing – how’s that working again? Inflation expectations still under control? Chair Powell appears desperate to retain his job. Good luck with that. I’m guessing he’ll be replaced with a fellow who likes to print even more.
I suspect that whole “transitory” framing will not age well at all. Fourth Turning – loss of confidence in institutions. First up: NIH/CDC/FDA and “No Treatments For You!” Now its the Fed’s turn at bat: “how we destroyed the middle class by continuing to print money even when inflation jumped to 20%, all the while telling you it was TRANSITORY!”
Wolf has an article on what has happened to prices of used vehicles. It is just insane.
Used Vehicle Wholesale Prices Spiked by the Most Ever in October. Retail Prices to Follow
Here is Wolf’s first chart – he provides a lot more detail in his article. While the PPI is academically interesting, somehow things are more real when you talk about used van prices rising 49.5% y/y.
So how did this mini-torrent of high-inflation news affect prices?
Gold rose +47.83 [+2.63%], breaking out to a new 5-month high. Gold rallied 5 days out of 5 this week. You can see the open interest shot higher also – the banksters are loading up short as price breaks out. Is that the Fed trying to put the breaks on the annoying goldbugs, or is this just an impending wash-and-rinse cycle? Either or both could be true. Gold is in a reasonably strong uptrend at this point. The break above the previous high was a bullish signal too.
Interestingly, gold/Euros [+3.61% – not shown] rallied even harder this week – it broke out to a new 12-month high. Gold/euros uptrend is substantially stronger as well.
While silver did well too [+1.18 +4.81%], just in looking at the chart, silver continues to lag gold. Silver also broke above a previous high. One bright spot is the relative lack of open interest increase. The banksters are not leaning on silver in the same way they are leaning on gold.
The good news is – once silver decides to really start to catch up, it will move very rapidly. A buck a day. Maybe more. But we are not there just yet. Of course if the inflation thing continues – which I suspect it will due to the Fed’s unwillingness to act – this will happen.
Miners were up +6.17% on the week [juniors rose +7.08%]; juniors outperformed seniors, miners did better than both silver & gold. All these are bullish signs for PM overall. Miners are also back above the 200 MA. Finally. Miners have resumed their uptrend.
The master resource fell -0.92%; crude has now moved into a gentle downtrend. Is crude just staging a brief correction prior to making new highs? That’s my guess: a few weeks of decline after which we move even higher. Just a guess.
The 10-year fell fairly sharply this week – rates rose +11 bp to 1.56%. Trend for rates is now pointing higher. Looks like the market is predicting higher long rates ahead.
And last: the buck jumped +0.86% this week, breaking out to a new post-pandemic high. This is why gold/Euros looks so strong – the rally in the buck off the June lows hasn’t seemed to hurt the move higher in gold – at least not much anyway – over that period. And this week, gold rose 5 days out of 5, in spite of the dollar rally. That really underscores gold’s strong performance. Money is flowing both into the buck, and into gold too.
So money is moving into the buck, but out of the 10-year. This is unusual. So US rates may be going higher, but something is wrong in Europe. That’s why money has been leaving since late June. And this week the process accelerated.
PM has also moved back into an uptrend – all the metrics are now positive (gold/silver ratio, GDX/gold, GDXJ/GDX).
Finally, food prices. It was a bad month for food prices: biggest moves – vs last month – were:
- Oils: +9.65% – a new all time high
- Cereals: +3.24%
- Dairy: +2.20%
- Total: +3.10%
Note this is m/m data. If you annualize these moves – the numbers are huge. Larger than PPIACO, at last for some components.
Here’s what that looks like:
Mostly the bad news is in the “oils” section. Overall, the numbers continue to climb higher, but I don’t think the sky-high price of oils by themselves will cause revolution. That probably requires “cereals” to break out too. Still – terrible news for the working class around the world. Of course if you own a private jet, you may not even notice.
News That Caught My Eye
Distractions:
- Kyle Rittenhouse – Headline: Kyle is a racist! Crossed state lines with a firearm! Background: all involved in the event were white. Kyle worked in Kenosha – lived a short-commute away from Kenosha – dad, grandma, aunt, uncle, and cousins live in Kenosha.
- Insurrection! Bannon indicted for contempt of Congress! Orange Man Bad! We’re gonna get Bad Orange Man for real this time!
- Poor Harry; boy is it tough to be a woke ex-royal with a netflix deal worth 100 million bucks!
“We’ll manufacture any story we can to stop people from thinking about inflation – or Afghanistan – or the unfolding vax mandate disaster.”
Delhi shuts schools as government considers ‘pollution lockdown’
New Delhi authorities announced Saturday a one-week closure of schools and said they would consider a “pollution lockdown” to protect citizens from toxic smog.
Kejriwal said his government would consider the court’s suggestion after consulting with stakeholders.
“Pollution lockdown has never happened before. It will be an extreme step,” he said.
Kejriwal said that construction activity would be halted for four days to cut down dust from vast, open sites.
Call it “Four Days to Slow The Spread.”
Next up: COP26 Climate Change Lockdowns (*)
(*) exception for private jets, which (it turns out) don’t emit carbon.
Musk sells nearly $7 bln worth of Tesla shares this week
Does Musk’s sale mark the top for the whole market? He sold 3% of his holdings. This is his first sale in many years. Significant or not? I’m not sure. Maybe not the top just yet.
Capturing Regulators = Fantastic ROI:
Controversial Alzheimer’s drug accounts for half of Medicare B premium hike
The new Part B premium will be $170.10 a month for 2022, officials said. The jump of $21.60 [per month!] is the biggest increase ever in dollar terms, although not percentage-wise. As recently as August, the Medicare Trustees’ report had projected a smaller increase of $10 from the current $148.50.
The agency is probing whether officials in the agency met with representatives of Biogen, which makes Aduhelm, before the approval. The drug generated $1.6 million revenue for the Swiss drug maker in June alone, but is projected to bring in billions as more doctors prescribe the drug.
Another captured-regulator Oligarchy win, paid for by You and Me! Does the drug work? Of course not! Yay FDA!
Inflation is surging and people are hopping mad
Heating oil prices have soared 59% in the last year.
“Before, you’d go to the store, and if you had $100, you could buy four bags of groceries and be happy,” says Nick Apodiakos. “Now, you’re lucky to get a bag. Milk, orange juice, eggs. Plus the oil for the house, the water bills. It’s just crazy. It’s so much money. How is somebody supposed to survive?”
Nick Apodiakos wonders why the Biden administration isn’t doing more, even if the White House’s options are limited.
“I think that the White House is not focused as much on the things that the people need,” he says.
“I understand that climate change is an important thing,” he says, nodding to another administration priority. “Focus on climate change but also focus on price change.”
Of course, if you can fly your private jet to COP26, you don’t need to worry about “inflation.” Unlike middle class wage-earners or pensioners, the private-jet-equipped Oligarchy own assets (property, equities, collectibles) that will keep pace with the rising prices without difficulty. So they don’t care. They don’t have to!
And in fact – first lockdowns, and now inflation appear to be wealth transfer mechanisms from the middle class to the trans-national asset-owning Oligarchy. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.
You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy! “Climate Change!” Yay private jets & wealth transfers!
So it turns out, parts of Europe are having a massive new COVID outbreak. What is going on?
Horowitz: Is Europe getting crushed by variant completely immune to COVID shots?
…according to a new study, Europe is likely experiencing a wave of a new variant that is completely immune to all the shots, a wave that will make anyone in the U.S. who has not experienced prior infection and does not have a plan for early treatment susceptible to serious illness.
Ironically, Austria’s Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg threatened the unvaccinated with a lockdown if cases continue to rise, even though they are likely rising because the vaccine created viral immune escape….
Austria plans to approve lockdown for the unvaccinated on Sunday
Latvia bans unvaccinated lawmakers from voting, docks pay
The ban on unvaccinated MPs in parliament was necessary to promote public confidence in the government’s policies to control COVID-19 infections, the legislation’s sponsor, lawmaker Janis Rancans, was cited as saying by the parliamentary press service.
So is this new variant really “completely immune to all the shots?” Here’s the study referred to by Horowitz:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.01.21265749v1.full.pdf
The study is a masterpiece of technical jargon and deliberately understated presentation. The authors appear to go out of their way to downplay the elephant in the room. There are a few key lines. This one: “These experiments showed a decrease of neutralization sensitivity for B.1.1.7_S+, which carries two extra spike mutations D138Y and A701V, compared to the other two B.1.1.7 variants B.1.1.7_O and B.1.1.7_S of around 3.2-fold (Fig. 5B)”
They even used a log scale to make the results look visually less significant.
I’ll try to translate:
When the authors applied spike antibodies from Pfizer-double-vaxxed people onto cells infected by the 3 different variants, the cells infected by the B117_S+ variant required 3.2x more antibodies (or 3.2x less dilution) to neutralize the variant (that’s “ID50” – “serum dilution required for 50% virus inhibition”) relative to the other 2 variants. This highly technical description would seem to suggest a vaccine-antibody efficacy drop of – a factor of 3.2 vs B117_S+.
So maybe the new variant is not “completely immune” to vax-generated antibodies as Horowitz suggests, but – B117_S+ sure does appear (in vitro) to be able to substantially (3.2x) evade Pfizer-vax generated antibodies. In vitro.
So what does this all mean? My guess:
- Europe will probably have a difficult low-vitamin-D season.
- This (probably) explains the dollar rally/Euro decline in the face of massive US inflation numbers. Money is fleeing Europe in anticipation. Big Money doesn’t give two shits about MSM propaganda. They follow facts & data. Who wants to lose real money? Not them.
- Europe is going to try to force-vaccinate its way out of a SC2 wave dominated by vaccine-escape variant B117_S+. Because, “science!!”
- This B117_S+ variant will reach the US at some point, and it will infect the vaxxed-but-not-yet-infected US population that did not get a “top-up” infection from Delta. During low-vitamin-d season, perhaps? I’m not sure. A clue: the US just resumed travel from “vaccinated” European travelers this week. What perfect timing – it is almost as if they want to drive sales of – say – paxlovid/molnupiravir. Or something.
“It’s the pills’ turn at bat?”
And the official US response: it appears as though the CDC is starting to tiptoe quietly away from “herd immunity via vaccination.”
CDC shifts pandemic goals away from reaching herd immunity
…experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have set aside herd immunity as a national goal.
The prospects for meeting a clear herd-immunity target are “very complicated,” said Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.
“Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” Jones acknowledged last week to members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.
Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, Jones noted. Recent evidence has also made clear that the immunity provided by vaccines can wane in a matter of months.
The result is that even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread.
“We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” he said.
Note this is from the CDC, via the LA Times, talking about shots not blocking transmission, along with the waning of immunity “in a matter of months!”
What was “horrid vaccine disinformation” that got you removed from Twitter last week, is now “science from the Trusted News Initiative” this week.
And for those who prefer a one-minute video:
Byram Bridle – 60 seconds on why vaccinating our way to herd immunity with these vaccines is impossible.
Just in time for the Unity Project to appear on the scene:
IRVINE, Calif. (Nov. 12, 2021) – A coalition of concerned parents, business leaders, teachers and other professionals throughout California have founded The Unity Project in opposition to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the state’s K-12 students once the Federal Drug Administration fully authorizes vaccines for this age group.
The Unity Project stands in opposition to:
- Forcing children as young as five-years-old to effectively become human shields, assuming vaccine-injury-risk despite having statistically zero risk of COVID-19 to those who are healthy, just so adults with comorbidities can feel safer — what kind of a society does that? At no time in history have we put children in harm’s way to protect adults.
- Stripping risk/benefit discretion from parents with a novel vaccine for children, which, if healthy, are at statistically greater risk of the seasonal flu than COVID-19.
- Illogical, unscientific, top-down, one-size-fits-all carte blanche mandates for healthy children that directly contradict the current body of evidence and data.
Now that’s pretty good timing.
Some of you might have seen my forum post on how the 5th Circuit upheld the stay on President Grandpa’s OSHA Vax Mandate; if not – according to the 5th circuit, the mandate was assessed as “staggeringly overbroad”:
https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/appeals-court-stay-upheld-mandate-staggeringly-overbroad/
Robert Malone takes the next step, and sees a monster windfall coming for independent lawyers:
I predict that the failure of the Biden vax mandates will eventually lead to huge legal liability for companies and academic institutions – illegal termination, vaccine damages, etc. This will also be a major financial windfall for independent lawyers.
What does this have to do with Biden’s mandates? Because if they fail in the courts, then the legal topcover for the academic institutions, hospitals, and businesses vanish. Government and Pharma are indemnified. So then the organizations become the bagholders for liability. [emphasis added]
This would be a very, very big deal – generational wealth earned by the lucky independent attorneys. Biggest liability overhang in the history of the world. Makes the Big Tobacco cases look penny-ante. The Round-Up cases – a rounding error. So to speak.
And the big firms have taken themselves out of the fight, since they’re all working for Pharma so they’re conflicted out. Big Firm gets their hourly rate, while the independent attorneys get contingency fees from the biggest cases in generations.
And finally, the Big Picture, from two perspectives:
First, Robert Malone again:
In “following the money” back to the massive pool of extra-national capital controlled by the four main interlaced investment funds, I think/hypothesize we can now better understand the last few US presidencies, and Biden in particular. US Presidents are effectively emasculated.
US Presidents and other western “leaders” are basically “owned” by the large funds. They are beholden to their financial masters, and those masters represent blocks of capital which are decoupled from the historic nation state. Basically, the “nation state” is now obsolete.
These funds select the “leaders” that are then spoon fed to us via legacy media which is controlled by the funds. They are able to find people for whom “power” and status are more important than integrity, and then successfully market them to us.
And they treat us like cattle or sheep because that is how we behave. Sorry to be so negative, but this is what the current situation is revealing and teaching me.
Please wake up. It is our only hope. Stop being a sheep. Get the facts. Think for yourself.
Malone calls the problem “extra-national capital.” I call the problem The Oligarchy. We both want everyone to wake up.
Free at last, Britney Spears calls end of conservatorship ‘best day ever’
The 39-year-old “Piece of Me” singer had begged the court for months to terminate the conservatorship that has governed her personal life and $60 million estate since 2008.
Britney has her freedom. Now we need to do the same thing for Western Civilization – terminate the sociopathic “Oligarchy Conservatorship” that has effectively enslaved humanity for the past … 100 years at least. If not longer.
Looking forward to Western Civ’s “best day ever.” Thanks for showing us the way, Britney.
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