RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-who-saw-the-economic-crises-coming-paul-singer-banking-signature-svb-financial-downturn-asset-hyperinflation-recession-debt-federal-reserve-cd2638fe?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

New York

“Men and nations behave wisely,” the Israeli statesman Abba Eban observed, “when they have exhausted all other resources.” Imagine if our economic policy makers listened to Paul Singer instead. Mr. Singer, 78, is founder of Elliott Management and one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund proprietors. Before the financial crisis of 2008, he tried to alert investors and public officials about the dangers of subprime mortgages. In the 15 years since, he’s repeatedly warned that the landmark Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, and the expansive monetary policies along the way, were inviting disaster.

Will policy makers finally start listening? He isn’t betting on it. “I think that this is an extraordinarily dangerous and confusing period,” he says at the Manhattan office of his charitable foundation. (Elliott’s headquarters moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2020.) Mr. Singer is dressed casually and appears relaxed, but his message won’t put investors at ease.

“Valuations are still very high,” he says. “There’s a significant chance of recession. We see the possibility of a lengthy period of low returns in financial assets, low returns in real estate, corporate profits, unemployment rates higher than exist now and lots of inflation in the next round.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/george-soros-son-alexander-visits-biden-white-house-disclosures

A son of left-wing billionaire and philanthropist George Soros has scored several recent visits to President Joe Biden’s White House as he showers Democrats with campaign donations and promotes his meetings with top lawmakers, records show.

Alexander Soros, chairman of the Open Society Foundations grantmaking network that his father founded in 1993 to influence left-leaning politics and culture matters, has increasingly posted images on social media of himself with Democratic lawmakers whose campaigns he has bankrolled. The 37-year-old, who the Washington Examiner reported has met with top Biden administration officials since at least 2021, spent more time at the White House in December 2022, according to federal visitor logs released Thursday.

“Alexander Soros is poised to lead his family’s multi billion-dollar political and philanthropic network,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “Like his father, he cozies up to White House and congressional leaders willing to do the family’s bidding on such issues as crime, immigration, election policy, and more, as the Soroses exploit every type of giving: money to parties, independent expenditure groups, and so-called ‘charities.'”

Walter added: “No wonder former staffers and grantees of their foundations, donor groups, and lobbying shops are found throughout the Biden administration, from the State Department to the Domestic Policy Council.”

https://asiatimes.com/2023/04/the-great-re-shoring-charade/

China’s position in global supply chains strengthens as US pretends to ‘friend-shore’ its imports

Moving factories from China to Mexico is one of the few hot topics in an otherwise listless market, US investment bankers say.

As American hostility to China rises, US corporations scramble to assure the public as well as inquisitive congressional committees that they are moving operations out of the Middle Kingdom to friendlier venues.

It’s all a pantomime for political consumption. US imports from Mexico, Vietnam, India and other “friend-shoring” venues depend on imports of Chinese components, according to an Asia Times study of international trade data. China’s exports to non-Japan Asia and Latin America are booming, and Chinese companies are investing billions of dollars in Mexico.

The charade permits American politicians to flaunt success in decoupling from China, and gives corporate leaders a chance to display their patriotism – while America’s indirect dependence on China’s industrial power increases.

“Friend-shoring” venues including India, Vietnam and Mexico show a lockstep relationship between imports from China and exports to the United States. Econometric analysis confirms that this relationship isn’t simply the result of a rising trend in both measures.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3939238-as-recession-looms-who-will-biden-blame/

It’s the economy, stupid.

Those famous words from Democratic strategist James Carville must be haunting President Biden’s White House as the economy begins to slow — and just as the 2024 election moves into view.

Most recently, the job market appears to be faltering, with March gains pegged at 236,000, way down from February’s 311,000 and the 334,000 recorded on average over the past six months.

This is challenging for Biden, who hopes to run for reelection and has relied on solid employment gains to prove that his “economic plan is working.” It’s been a tough sell, seeing that inflation has caused real wages to decline for two years in a row; writing last fall, the Dallas Fed noted that the hit from inflation was “the most severe faced by employed workers over the past 25 years.”

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy, according to Real Clear Politics’ average of polls, is a disastrous 37 percent.

Of course, the downturn in growth – we are not yet in recession – has been engineered by and will be welcomed by the Federal Reserve, which slammed on the brakes a year ago as inflation soared to 40-year highs. Having dithered for more than a year as price increases gained steam, Chair Jerome Powell then jacked up rates at a historically aggressive pace and has also been reducing the size of the Fed balance sheet.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19570/trump-trials

Red lights have to be flashing for the current administration and its supporters: “danger ahead.”

Inflation continues threatening to turn into a crushing recession. Iran is reportedly days away from a nuclear-weapons breakout. A Chinese spy balloon just spent a week doing figure-eights over America’s most sensitive nuclear sights while transmitting information back to Beijing in real time. Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping is telling his people to prepare for war. And the House Oversight Committee keeps finding more bank evidence that the Biden family appears compromised by foreign payments.

What do the current administration and its supporters do, then? Revert to the tried-and-true playbook of the Trump era and launch the latest “Trump trial” to distract from the administration’s challenges. The pattern has been consistent – create a false narrative that is more favorable to themselves and more problematic for whoever is challenging them.

After seeing multiple high-level Democrat operatives from candidate Hillary Clinton herself approving a disinformation operation against then-candidate Trump, her campaign and the DNC reportedly financing the Steele dossier, DNI James Clapper reportedly leaking info on the Steel dossier to the media, Adam Schiff misleading his colleagues about information leading to the first Trump impeachment, and 51 former intelligence officials signing a bogus letter about the Hunter Biden laptop, there should be little surprise that New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg — whose campaign was indirectly supported by a million dollars from George Soros while Bragg “promised to put Trump behind bars” — decided to move forward with what ended up a totally fabricated, politically-motivated indictment of Trump. It did not even fulfill the constitutional requirement for Trump “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” – meaning: Bragg did not even name the supposed federal crime.

Those now in charge will seemingly do almost anything to make the narrative leading up to the election once again about allegations against Trump instead of the geopolitical and economic shortcomings of Biden’s policies. If a presidential candidate, a Director of National Intelligence, and a Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will engage in hyper-partisan political activities under the guise of legitimate government activities, why should we be surprised that a local prosecutor might do the same thing?

The bottom line is that every Republican potential candidate will have to address the “Trump issue,” probably multiple times during the upcoming weeks and months, rather than discussing their solutions and proposals to address the economic and national security concerns gripping Americans today. For the current administration, that is “mission accomplished.”

What’s a politician to do? Going into a presidential election year, the incumbent president looks to be facing a difficult reelection campaign. Persistently high inflation numbers remain a problem. Energy prices are still up. America’s southern border is being overrun with illegal border-crossers and fentanyl. Major bank failures have raised the specter of a banking crisis. There are multiple House of Representatives investigations covering Biden family finances, the weaponization of government agencies, China, and the origins of COVID. For the current administration and its supporters, the answer is as easy as it is familiar: change the subject to Donald Trump. It has been an oppositional go-to foil since Trump dared step onto the political stage in 2016.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/06/national-institute-of-standards-and-technology-forces-race-and-gender-speech-codes-on-scientists/

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal agency for the study of science and technology, is now enforcing race- and gender-based speech codes on its scientists, having made a top priority out of the language-policing efforts.

As reported by Just The News, the guidance documents issued by NIST orders its federal employees to not use words such as “blacklist” or “whitelist,” allegedly due to these words carrying racial connotations. The document also forbids employees from “using terms that assign a gender to inanimate objects, such as male/female connectors.”

Other directives from the document include orders to “avoid terms such as master/slave that perpetuate negative stereotypes or unequal power relationships,” and “avoid descriptive terms that are condescending or reductive in favor of language that the groups being described would prefer.”

The guidance was largely implemented on the advice of Steven Lipner, chair of the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Lipner sent a letter to NIST back in 2020 specifically demanding that the agency ban the use of the words “blacklist” and “whitelist,” as well as banning the use of the words “slave” and “master.”

“Many technology and security standards contain racially insensitive language that is both offensive to many of our colleagues and is also, in many respects, ambiguous – technically and culturally,” Lipner said in his letter. “Examples of such language include using the terms blacklist and whitelist instead of block-list and allow-list and using the terms master and slave.”

Jennifer Huergo, a spokeswoman for the NIST, defended the guidance by claiming that it “was created primarily for the benefit of NIST staff experts who participate in the development of documentary standards as expert collaborators and leaders.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/06/the-gathering-storm/

The first grand jury indictment against Donald Trump, like so many highly-anticipated gotcha moments involving the former president, landed with a thud this week.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34-count bill of goods failed to impress legal and political observers across the spectrum. Even Ruth Marcus, associate editor for the Washington Post, admitted the legal basis for the charges is “unnervingly flimsy at worst.”

News coverage of Bragg’s faceplant is quickly disappearing from the front pages as all desperate eyes now turn to Jack Smith, the mysterious figure appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland last year ostensibly to take over the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s culpability for January 6 and alleged mishandling of classified documents. As I explained here, Smith is special counsel in name only; the team of investigators and prosecutors who initiated the first set of inquiries simply changed letterhead.

Given the targets of Smith’s recent subpoenas, we can surmise there is nothing independent or impartial about his behind-the-scenes work. In rapid succession, Smith has successfully sought testimony from Trump’s inner circle, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House lawyer Evan Corcoran. 

For the first time in history, a vice president will testify before a grand jury considering evidence of crimes committed by his former boss. Mike Pence, after winning partial immunity, reportedly will answer questions about his exchanges with Trump in the weeks leading up to the protest at the Capitol. Oddly, Pence will not be compelled to discuss what he did on January 6—a dubious protection considering his key presence throughout the day and into the next morning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-nation-divided-and-a-world-in-turmoil/

A happy, upbeat friend does not watch television news, whether national or local, does not read a newspaper and avoids discussing politics, religion or even sports. Self-employed, he found out about something called the coronavirus while driving to work the day the California lockdown mandate began. That morning he encountered no traffic on the normally busy streets of Los Angeles and said, “What’s going on?!” It seems unthinkable that someone in his mid-to-late 30s could erect news blinders, especially when he, like most everyone else, uses a smartphone for personal and business matters. He even maintains a Facebook page to keep up with friends and family.

He does not know that since Joe Biden became president, five million illegal aliens entered the U.S. from over 100 foreign countries, their whereabouts now mostly unknown. Border patrol arrested dozens of border crossers on the terror watch list, with no telling how many entered undetected.

He does not know that America faces a crisis of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more potent than heroin by as much as a factor of 50, and morphine by as much as a factor of 100, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. China supplies the precursor chemicals and Mexican cartels process, manufacture and bring the fentanyl into the United States. At 64,000 deaths among those aged 18 to 49 in 2021, fentanyl killed more than those who died from COVID-19, cancer and car accidents combined.

He knows nothing about a Donald Trump-hating Manhattan district attorney who might arrest and indict the former president under a legal theory that even The New York Times called “untested.” He does not know about the “weaponization” and collusion of the DOJ and Big Tech social media platforms to attack conservatives, stifle dissent about vaccine and mask mandates and suppress the cost-benefit debate about COVID-19 lockdowns. Among other things, the student learning loss suffered due to virtual versus in-school learning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-mystery/

On Monday, March 27, as the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance” approached, Audrey Hale, a woman who thinks she’s a man, shot open a locked door and entered the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 14 minutes, Hale fired 152 rounds from an AR-15–style rifle and 9mm Kel-Tec SUB2000. Hale shot dead Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs. That nine-year-old was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, senior pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, on the same site as the school.

With six people dead, including three children, Hale’s attack qualifies as a mass murder, and in any murder case, the question of motive is paramount. Hale left clues in a manifesto, but trans-friendly activists sought to suppress its release. For example, Charles Moran, of Log Cabin Republicans, advocates for equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, warned of “serious consequences” if the manifesto was released to the public.

Enter Nashville city councilman Robert Swope, who worked as Tennessee state director for Donald Trump in 2016 and now heads the city council’s Public Safety, Beer and Regulated Beverages Committee. Swope told the New York Post that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is working “in tandem” with the Metro Nashville Police Department to complete “a very in-depth analysis of certain aspects of the shooter’s life.”

According to the councilman, “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when. There are some incredibly brilliant psychological minds and psychological analysts combing through her entire life.” While revelations await, one fact is perfectly clear.

The FBI, supposed on guard 24/7 against domestic terrorism and violent extremism, failed to prevent Audrey Hale’s attack. Relatives of the victims have reason to wonder what the FBI knew and when they knew it.