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WHAT WOULD JOSEY WALES DO?

“Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” – Josey Wales

“To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.” – Josey Wales

As our political, economic, civic, and social structures continue to degrade, dissolve, and disintegrate before our very eyes, it is easy to become apathetic and surrender to hopelessness. There are relentless powerful forces actively trying to destroy the fabric of our society and force the masses into economic servitude while caged in an electronic gulag, controlled by an oligarchy of evil totalitarian minded billionaires and their lackeys in key governmental, political, banking, military, media, and corporate positions of power. We are in the same situation as Josey Wales in Clint Eastwood’s epic 1976 film – The Outlaw Josey Wales.

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TBP AS AN ECONOMIC INDICATOR

Based upon the results of TBP as we approach the halfway mark of this year, I would say the economy is in the toilet.

Oddly, page views are up dramatically versus last year, while advertising revenue and donations are in the shitter compared to last year. The charts below are a little hard to read, but show page views year to date are up 16% and are tracking to get back to near the 12 million mark we achieved in 2021 and 2022. In case you’re curious, the month in green was the denial of service attack month when TMWNN rode to the rescue and kept TBP alive. Otherwise this place would not have been around for the last ten years.

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Powell Admits The Biden Admin Is “Overstating” Jobs

Via ZeroHedge

Every first Friday of this year (here, here and here) we have spent hours deconstructing the glaring propaganda peddled by Biden’s Labor Department, meant to show just one thing – how “strong” the economy is under the current administration – and exposing just how ugly the underlying labor data truly is. Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls was the most recent case in point: for those who didn’t read our extended analysis titled “Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Years“, which dissected the laughable claim that the US added 272K payrolls (more than the highest estimate), here is what we found.

While the Establishment Survey did indeed report that 272K “jobs” were added, this number also included multiple job holders; stripping those out, we get that the actual number of “employed” workers plunged by 408K…

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How Many Millennials Will Be Rich Enough To Buy The Boomers’ Millions Of Unaffordable Bungalows?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Absent demand from tens of millions of wealthy, high-income buyers, asset valuations will fall as Boomers sell off assets to fund their retirement.

There’s a peculiarly flawed logic behind the widely held view that the Baby Boomers will seamlessly transfer tens of trillions of dollars of their wealth to the Gen-X and Millennial generations as they exit stage left. This is flawed for a very basic reason: the extremely overvalued assets that will be transferred–real estate and stocks–only reached such extreme overvaluation because there is a surplus of buyers who are sufficiently wealthy (and willing) to pay bubble-inflated prices.

Since the ownership of both real estate and stocks is concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10% who tend to be older, how many Gen-Xers and Millennials have the means to buy million-dollar bungalows and overpriced portfolios? If buyers are scarce due to entrenched wealth-income inequality, then once Boomers start selling their vast holdings of stocks and millions of overpriced homes, prices will plummet if sellers outnumber qualified and willing buyers.

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How Did a Small Group Do This?

Guest Post by Jeffrey Tucker

A very interesting study appeared last week by two researchers looking into the pandemic policy response around the world. They are Drs. Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel of Stanford and Harvard, respectively. Their ambition was straightforward. They wanted to examine the effects of government policy on the virus.

In this ambition, after all, researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of information. We have global data on strategies and stringencies. We have global data on infections and mortality. We can look at it all according to the timeline. We have precise dating of stay-at-home orders, business closures, meeting bans, masking, and every other physical intervention you can imagine.

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Fed’s $1 trillion pile of paper losses are turning into actual losses — with more in sight

Via Marketwatch

The Federal Reserve’s roughly $1 trillion pile of paper losses stemming from its underwater securities holdings have begun to turn into more than $100 billion in actual losses, with no relief in sight.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell is expected on Wednesday to say that easing inflation still isn’t yet near enough to the central bank’s 2% yearly target for interest rates to be lowered from a two-decade high.

The longer rates stay high, however, the harder it will be for the Fed to repair its balance sheet. Importantly, restrictive rates also could end up costing the Fed around $100 billion a year well into the next decade, according to Ali Meli, chief investment officer of Monachil Capital Partners, a credit fund he founded in 2019.

Meli arrived at that estimate by digging through the Fed’s financial statements, which showed a $948.4 billion unrealized loss at the end of 2023 on assets bought on the open market, compared with more than $1 trillion of unrealized losses at the end of 2022.

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Short vs. Long-Term Thinking

Guest Post by Eric Peters

One of the reasons why the car industry is in trouble hasn’t got to do with politics – the mortifying effect of slow, regulatory strangulation of the car industry – although that’s a big one.

The other one is one the car industry has done to itself. It has alienated its future, which is the rising generation of drivers – a great many of whom cannot afford a car and so have never developed interest in driving one. That, in turn, means little-to-no-interest in buying one – because what’s the point in wanting something you know you can’t have?

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Merrick Garland Threatens To Arrest Anyone Who Says His DOJ Is Corrupt

Via The Babylon Bee

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As accusations continue to mount regarding the impartiality of the American justice system, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to arrest anyone who said his Department of Justice was corrupt.

Though clear evidence was presented by many on the right of DOJ targeting political opponents with questionable charges and harsh sentences while ignoring illegal activity from people on the left, Garland vowed to bring the full weight of the federal government on anyone who dares to question his fairness.

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Will the Fed “Pivot”?

Guest Post by Jim Rickards

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) is meeting today and tomorrow for the purpose of discussing the economy and setting monetary policy going forward.

Today I’m going to preview the meeting, forecast Fed policy and assess what it means for the economy going forward.

On Wednesday, the Fed will leave its target rate for fed funds unchanged.

That decision will keep the federal funds target at 5.50% as set at the July 26, 2023, FOMC meeting. Over the course of 18 FOMC meetings beginning March 16, 2022, I’ve been correct in all of my forecasts including the policy rate pause that began last September. I’m confident I’ll be correct on Wednesday also.

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Are you an outsider?

I am an Outsider: A Story of Freedom

by 

Tessa Lena

I am an outsider, and here’s my story of freedom.

To keep my humanity, I consistently ran away from systems. Early on, I ran away from the academia even though I was promised a very bright and secure career. I then ran away from the corporate labyrinth because my soul was dying in there. I kept my heart, and because I did, I have immediate and vibrant answers to some of the big questions that Systems People are asking in their high-end keynote speeches. I have peasant senses that make it very easy to grasp the degree of murder that modern systems bring upon the soul – and it’s a Catch 22.

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T-Bill and Chill? Naw Bro, We Got Gold…

Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:

“Bonds are certificates of guaranteed confiscation.” ~ Franz Pick

In an inflation-driven world, new money is always the best money.

That’s why when a bond matured you were getting a good thing.

You got paid out with new money at its current valuation.

But it’s not looking that way any more…

Government spending is out-of-control. It’s about the same, if not more than it was during World War II. US Government spending is at 44% as a percentage of GDP.

Yet, the government keeps issuing bonds less people want.

More, in fact, then the amount spent when Bernanke came up with the Quantitative Easing(QE) solution.

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WAYBACK WEDNESDAY: 30 BLOCKS OF STENCH & SECURITY MEASURES

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, many old 30 Blocks of Squalor articles have been recovered. Below is one from December 2012 for your enjoyment. I can assure you, West Philly has only gotten worse in the 12 years since I wrote this.

The summer months generally lead to my best commuting months of the year. With school out and people on vacation, I generally make it to and from work in about 45 minutes. Except, of course, on Friday night when it took me 1 hour and 48 minutes to get home for no good reason. I had gone over a month without having to experience the 30 Blocks of Squalor, until last Tuesday. An accident on the Schuykill on this sweltering 100 degree day forced me to dodge the potholes and stray bullets along the Squalor.

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Here’s how Russia can prevent WW3

Guest Post by Dmitry Trenin

For 80 years, the Atom bomb has prevented a repeat of the horrors of the 1940s – Russia needs to leverage it again to stop American aggression

Nuclear deterrence is not a myth. It kept the world safe during the Cold War. Deterrence is a psychological concept. You have to convince a nuclear-armed adversary that it will not achieve its objectives by attacking you, and that if it goes to war its own annihilation is assured. The mutual nuclear deterrence between the USSR and the US during their confrontation was reinforced by the reality of mutually assured destruction in the event of a massive exchange of nuclear strikes. Incidentally, the abbreviation for Mutually Assured Destruction is MAD. And that’s very apt.

There are several reasons for ‘mythologising’ nuclear deterrence. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a widespread belief that every conceivable reason for nuclear war has disappeared. A new era of globalisation, with its emphasis on economic cooperation, has dawned. For the first time in history, the hegemony of a single power, the US, has been established globally. Nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the great powers – though fewer than at the height of the confrontation – but the fear of their use has faded. More dangerously, a new generation of politicians has come to the fore, unburdened either by the memory of decades of confrontation or by a sense of responsibility.

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Doug Casey on How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living

Via International Man

International Man: The carbon hysteria extends far beyond oil and gas companies.

One overlooked area is household appliances.

Politicians are implementing increasingly stringent regulations for dishwashers, washing machines, and other appliances. There have even been reports of a desire to phase out gas stoves.

What’s your take on all of this?

Doug Casey: As Der Schwabenklaus of the World Economic Forum boldly said some years ago, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

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THE TRAIN HAS LEFT THE STATION

POLITICAL PRISONER BANNON