A consistent, unambiguously stated policy of a strong dollar will result in lower global energy, specifically oil.

This is a morally sound tradeoff, even if it comes at the expense of America’s domestic oil and gas industry. You can’t delink the cost of fossil fuels, specifically oil and natural gas, and the cost of global food production. Think fertilizer.

Sure, a weak dollar results in some cheaper American goods, making trade-deficit bugs happy. Still, it also results in more expensive global commodity prices resulting in higher inputs, including and especially in the agricultural sector. Think natural gas. That means higher food costs and, inevitably, when supply chains are disrupted, food shortages and global starvation. Not in Martha’s Vineyard; think Bangladesh, countries in Africa, and Latin America.

What’s better? a weak dollar, expensive oil, a few more jobs in the oil and gas sector, but more war revenues for Putin and Iran? Or a strong dollar, cheaper oil, fewer domestic jobs in the oil and gas sector, and lower global food prices resulting in less worldwide poverty and starvation?

A sound U.S. dollar policy is a moral and ethical policy for America and the rest of the industrialized and developing world and will result in more peace and prosperity. //

A strong dollar with low oil prices means lower overall energy and food costs, less poverty, especially in the developing world, and perhaps more importantly, less financial resources for tyrants and terrorists, resulting in fewer wars and rumors of wars, and fewer people freezing to death in the winter and sweltering to death in the summer…

Some experts are embracing the notion of a soft landing, the belief that recent interest rate hikes will translate into a modest decline in growth. However, such claims lack evidence. The history of the Federal Reserve and its monetary management doesn’t lend much credence to any soft-landing optimism.

The latest proof of that comes from economists Alex Domash and Lawrence Summers, who addressed these claims in a recent paper analyzing rate hikes since 1955. The scholars found there has never been a time in which high nominal wage growth and very low unemployment weren’t followed by a recession. Similarly, they looked at supposed soft landings (interest rate hikes that weren’t followed by a recession) in 1965, 1984, and 1994 and found these periods lacked the tight employment market we’re seeing today, making them hard to compare to the current economy.

Since the publication of that research in April 2022, the conditions discussed have taken a turn for the worse. Inflation has risen even more sharply despite recent rate hikes.

“Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Half a century after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’ still evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world quite the same again.” ~ Lawrence W. Reed

Hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages continue to enjoy this simple and beautiful explanation of the miracle of the “invisible hand” by following the production of an ordinary pencil. Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.

Sen. Joe Biden wanted a sweetheart deal for the banks that stripped student loans of bankruptcy protections, and it created a train wreck. //

In general, borrowers burdened by too much debt and unable to pay their loans can usually discharge them in a personal bankruptcy case. Some debts, particularly those owed to the government, are not dischargeable. But consumer loans and credit card debts generally are dischargeable. //

Why did Biden staunchly back this change — even as Democrats like Teddy Kennedy denounced it for “sacrific[ing] Americans to the rampant greed of the credit card industry”? Because Biden was a long-time water carrier for the credit card and banking industries. And both he and his family profited from that arrangement.

Energy costs are expected to rise 80 percent in the UK this winter. //

Cologne’s [Germany] magnificent cathedral — normally lit throughout the night — now goes dark over night. Public buildings, museums and other landmarks — such as the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin — will no longer be illuminated overnight either….
The southern city of Augsburg decided to turn off traffic lights.

Spain: Congress agreed to temperature limitations — air conditioning no cooler than 27 degrees Celsius, or nearly 81 degrees Fahrenheit.
After 10 p.m. shop windows and unoccupied public buildings won’t be lit.

Italy: Air conditioning in schools and public buildings has already been limited in what the government labeled “Operation Thermostat,” starting in May.
Italy is one of the European countries most reliant on Russian energy.

France: While roughly 70% of its energy comes from nuclear power, France has committed to cutting natural gas consumption as well.
Shopkeepers will now be fined for keeping doors open and air conditioning running, a common practice.
Illuminated signs will be banned between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. //

Russia meanwhile is so confident in its position that it’s burning an estimated $10 million in natural gas every day rather than sending it to the European Union. Putin’s antics have caused alarm among Europeans as they prepare for the annual cold spell that is not caused by global warming, but is actually caused by the tilt of our planet’s axis: //

Fox News host Tucker Carlson took notice, and came with his usual fire on his Monday show:

Last year, only about 6% of Germans used wood to heat their homes, but that has changed dramatically. Demand for firewood in Germany has risen so fast that there is none left to buy. You can’t get it, so desperate Germans are now cutting their own wood, scouring the forests like their ancestors for sources of heat. //

Europe is descending into poverty. Did you know that? Had someone told you that?

We have saved Europe over and over again, with our military forces in WWI and WWII, and with our financial might with the 1948’s Marshall Plan. I don’t have confidence that we can do it again.

At a high level of abstraction, here's how any blockchain works: Someone on the network proposes a block containing a list of recent transactions. Then other network participants verify that the block follows the network's rules. If a sufficient number of other network participants accept the block, it becomes the "official" next block in the chain. As long as most network participants are honest, users can have confidence that transactions accepted by a majority of the network won't be removed or modified later.

The big challenge for any blockchain project is preventing a malicious party from creating many sock puppet accounts to "stuff the ballot box," outvote the honest participants and thereby tamper with past transactions. Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto's big insight—the one that made bitcoin possible—was that this problem could be solved using the principle of "one hash, one vote." On the bitcoin network, whoever has the most computing power—specifically, the capacity to compute SHA-256 hashes—has the most influence over which blocks get added to the blockchain. As long as honest miners have more hash power than malicious miners, users can be confident in the integrity of the blockchain—and hence in the integrity of payments made using the bitcoin network. (Check out our in-depth bitcoin explainer for details on how this works.)

When Vitalik Buterin launched Ethereum in 2015, he used a variant of Nakamoto's scheme. By that point, bitcoin mining was already dominated by specialized silicon optimized for computing huge numbers of SHA-256 hashes, locking ordinary bitcoiners out of the mining game. So Buterin developed a new mining algorithm designed to be "memory-hard"—and therefore difficult to accelerate with custom hardware. As a result, Ethereum mining is still largely performed using off-the-shelf graphics cards, allowing ordinary Ethereum users to participate. //

Buterin has long recognized the environmental downsides of proof-of-work mining. Several years ago, he announced plans to transition Ethereum to proof-of-stake, which has been pioneered by several lesser-known cryptocurrencies.

While proof-of-work mining operates on the principle of "one hash, one vote," proof-of-stake is based on "one coin, one vote." Anyone who wants to participate in Ethereum's validation process must post ether as collateral, a process known as "staking." The more ether someone stakes, the more influence they have over which blocks get added to the Ethereum blockchain.

Every 12 seconds, a pseudorandom number generator selects a subset of stakers to form a committee to decide on the next block. One of them is designated to propose the next block, while the rest, called validators, verify that the new block follows all the rules of the Ethereum network. For example, if the block contains a payment transaction, the validators check that the source address has the required funds, that the transaction has the correct digital signatures, and so forth. If two-thirds of validators approve a block, it becomes part of the official blockchain.

Validators that faithfully follow these rules earn additional ether as a reward for their efforts, with the size of their reward proportional to the ether they've staked. On the other hand, if a validator tries to cheat—for example, by validating two different, incompatible blocks for the same blockchain "slot"—they will face financial penalties. If another validator posts evidence of such a cheating attempt, some of the cheater's collateral will be destroyed ("slashed," in Ethereum jargon), and the whistleblower will get a reward.

Charles V Payne @cvpayne
·
Household Survey
Full Time -71,000
Part Time +384,000
Multiple Jobs +92,000
Robert Luther @RobertLutherFL
Replying to @cvpayne and @PressSec
how is it possible we “added” 528,000 jobs, but 136,000 fewer are employed than in May?
9:03 AM · Aug 5, 2022 //

Labor participation is still lower than it was before the pandemic. It likely means things like retired people having to take a part-time job and other people having to take a second job to keep up with the rising prices in the crush of Bidenflation. If you’ve looked around when you’ve gone out, you may see some evidence of this — retired-age people working jobs that you might generally see teenagers working to supplement Social Security. That’s not exactly a sign of a healthy economy, no matter how the Biden people want to slice it.

The number of people holding two full-time jobs is also at a record high. That’s also not a good thing. //

Frog Capital @FrogNews
·
433,000 Americans now working 2 full time jobs.
That is an all time high.
12:35 PM · Aug 5, 2022 //

Charles V Payne @cvpayne
·
You have to ask @PressSec while you are at it ask why Black Americans are sinking in the midst of the jobs boom?

July
-39,000 out labor force
-68,000 fewer employed

I get this stuff is only newsworthy when GOP in WH but some care all the time. Thanks
Jeffrey L. O'Malley @icebergdad
Replying to @cvpayne
Oh, 528,000, not 150,000? Care to comment?
8:19 AM · Aug 5, 2022

The liberals in the West need to face the reality that not only does the world primarily run on fossil fuels, but energy has also become a powerful weapon in this new Cold War. The West cannot win this new Cold War with its self-defeating anti-carbon energy policies.

Klaus Schwab and a growing list of powerful global economic and political elites, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink[1] and President Joe Biden,[2] have recently committed to a global “reset” of the prevailing school of economic thought. They seek to supplant the entrenched “shareholder doctrine” of capitalism, which—as Milton Friedman famously espoused over 50 years ago—holds that the only purpose of a corporate executive is to maximize profits on behalf of company shareholders.[3]

To replace shareholder capitalism, Schwab, Fink, Biden, and a legion of their peers have promulgated a nouveau “stakeholder doctrine,” commonly referred to as “stakeholder capitalism.” This approach, which aims to harness the growing clamor for more socially conscious corporate decision-making, authorizes, incentivizes, and even coerces corporate executives and directors to work on behalf of social objectives deemed by elites to be desirable for all corporate stakeholders—including communities, workers, executives, and suppliers.[4]
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores—a social credit framework for sustainability reporting—are being used as the primary mechanism to achieve the shift to a stakeholder model. They measure both financial and non-financial impacts of investments and companies and serve to formally institutionalize corporate social responsibility in global economic infrastructure.[5]

Environment, social, and governance scores are theoretically supposed to incentivize “responsible investing” by “screening out” companies that do not possess high ESG scores while favorably rating those companies and funds that make positive contributions to ESG’s three overarching categories. A company’s ESG score has become a primary component of its risk profile.[6]

Rather than confront the energy crisis head on, Biden and his administration have apparently decided to a) demand censorship of their critics, b) scapegoat the only people who can end the energy crisis, and c) lie about their own role in creating the crisis. It is a transparently counterproductive strategy, one which is antagonizing the energy industry, worsening investor confidence, and alienating voters.

Biden’s is a strategy that makes him look like a child and oil and gas executives like grown-ups. Wrote Wirth, “we need an honest dialogue… We can only meet these challenges by working together.”

But if Biden’s strategy is so counterproductive, why does he keep pursuing it?

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

Switching to renewables will only happen if gas prices remain expensive.

The paper found changes to the way the federal government measures inflation understate the current scope of the problem.

The headline CBO numbers make for bracing reading, and illustrate the work our country needs to undertake—sooner rather than later—to get our fiscal house in order. //

The CBO analysis shows the cumulative effects of the federal government spending far too much:

Except for a shortfall of “only” $984 billion in 2023, federal deficits will exceed $1 trillion throughout the decade, and well into the future.
Deficits will rise from roughly 4 percent of GDP to more than 6 percent of GDP by the end of the decade—well in excess of any potential economic growth rate, creating an unsustainable fiscal scenario.
Net interest costs will more than triple, from $352 billion in 2021 to an estimated $1.2 trillion the federal government will spend just on interest in 2032.
Publicly held debt will rise to 110 percent of GDP by 2032—“higher than it has ever been.”
Lest anyone believe these budgetary woes stem primarily from “the rich” not “paying their fair share” in taxes, CBO also projected that in 2022, revenues will reach their highest share as a percentage of the economy since the dot-com boom of 2000. Moreover, the CBO report assumes that the President Trump tax cuts expire as scheduled at the end of 2025.

In other words, this document assumes record revenue in the short term and a major tax increase in a few years’ time, and still results in massive debt and deficits over the coming decade. //

A mere ten months ago, in July 2021, CBO estimated the federal government would run deficits of $12.1 trillion over the coming decade. That number sounds bad enough, but the updated forecast now shows $14.5 trillion of red ink.

A Chevron station in the coastal village of Mendocino about 175 miles north of San Francisco was charging $9.60 a gallon for regular on Friday afternoon.

The Menocino station, Schlafer’s Auto Body & Repair, is the only one in the tourist haven — described on the county website as “an enchanted place filled with real, unspoiled California opportunities” — and is routinely considered the most expensive in the nation.

Owner Judy Schlafer told SFGate.com she paid $50,000 for an 8,880-gallon delivery this week, which she has 10 days to pay for. Three months ago, the same load would have been about $30,000.

Schlafer said that if she didn’t charge $9.60, she’d be out of business. //

Dorien Grey
14h ago

Why has the media remained silent even the Post here and Fox on the fact that Under Biden 5 refineries were shut down by the EPA which is part of the driving factor here? That pretty big news since there are not replacement refineries in the works!

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk.

Kirk’s problem is that he is telling the truth, one contrary to the central tenet of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — which holds that it is the duty of finance and business to save the world from a planetary catastrophe. In his presentation, Kirk complained about his team being buried in an avalanche of climate-risk reporting.

Article 2 of the 2015 Paris climate agreement has the objective of “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low” emissions. As a result, central banks and financial regulators are using every regulatory weapon in their armories to suppress investment in fossil fuels and direct capital flows toward renewables like wind and solar.

Their weapon of choice is the spurious but plausible-sounding notion of climate-related financial risk. In reality, modern economies are remarkably resilient against extreme weather. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” a November 2021 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff asked. The answer: “Not very.” Federal Emergency Management Agency-level disasters over the last quarter-century had insignificant or small impact on banks’ performance.

In a rational world, this finding would be welcomed. But that would be to miss the point. It is not the reality of climate resiliency that matters but the use of climate risk to push financing flows in the direction of net zero. “There’s a lot to like about climate stress tests,” Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell exclaimed at a Green Swan conference of central bankers and regulators last year. //

The need to hype up climate alarm to drive investment flows to net zero comes at a bigger cost than Stuart Kirk’s job. Painfully high oil and natural-gas prices are hurting consumers and businesses and pushing up the cost of food. Normally, high prices would trigger more investment and more output that would help bring prices down. Not this time. Wall Street — with the full support of the Fed and bank regulators — is stomping down on investment in oil and gas. That’s not just hurting the little guy. It’s hurting the Biden administration and the Democrats.

Two months ago, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was begging oil executives to invest. “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply,” Granholm told them. “Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

It could well be that woke bankers on Wall Street — backed to the hilt by purveyors of scary climate scenarios in the Fed, financial regulators and the media — help sink Democrats’ election hopes in the November midterms.

inflation’s causes are to be found in the government increasing the supply of money and credit to fuel general demand for goods and services—to an extent that exceeds the economy's productive capacities. This is the culprit. This is why it feels like we’re paying more for less. //

All of which underscores the all-important point that neither businesses nor the Russian president nor greedy hedge-fund managers nor greedy tech barons nor greedy CEOs nor mean, politically incorrect people who don’t employ the correct hashtags print money. The federal government does that.

So let’s be clear: politicians, who are not very good at much, are supremely good at deflecting blame. And that’s what this is. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The same people who underreport inflation’s impact on Americans shouldn’t be expected to acknowledge that it was their decisions that landed us in hot water in the first place. Unfortunately, it is those people—the policymaking failures who run the government—who are now charged with getting us out of it.

Know-nothing pundits and politicians have been communicating to Americans that inflation is, like the weather, a mystery they can’t control. That’s simply not true, write three economic commentators in a soon-published book, “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, And How to Fix It.” On the contrary: inflation is a direct result of governments cheating their people, and solving it is pretty simple, if politically difficult.

In the book, businessman Steve Forbes, economist Nathan Lewis, and business journalist Elizabeth Ames give laypeople a concise, readable introduction to monetary policy. They also lay out easy-to-understand policy and personal prescriptions for responding to an inflationary economy such as today’s. The book is short and immensely useful for those of us who are not economic experts or finance minds and just want politicians to stop stealing our hard-earned money and endangering our nation’s security. //

In an inflationary economy, the winners are the rich, the well-connected, and the corrupt. The losers are the poor, the middle-class, and those who work hard and play by the rules. Thus, an inflationary economy is inherently an unjust system. This is the top reason it should be combatted.

Not surprisingly, then, the rich and powerful often insist some inflation is a good thing. Maintaining a consistent level of inflation is in fact the Federal Reserve’s open policy goal. But even a “low” level of inflation such as The Fed’s (often wildly missed) target of 2 percent a year effectively steals significant income from especially the working and middle class. For someone earning $50,000 a year, 2 percent annual inflation is a $1,000 pay cut every year. That can be the difference between saving and not saving.

Making it harder to put money aside essentially forces middle and working-class people to depend on welfare rather than their own industry. Inflation thus erodes the middle class that is the bulwark of all free societies. So when it increases, societies tend to experience chaos. More people stop working and creating, and start trying to steal from others, either through government or through crime.

It should go without saying that an unstable society and economic chaos are threats to national security. These invite aggression from foreign enemies and hinders a nation’s ability to respond. This should make policymakers take inflation seriously, but like usual, so far politicians are mostly playing the blame game instead of solving the problem. //

Today, the Federal Reserve essentially passes on federal debts and deficit spending to American consumers by creating more money without also creating new value. It is now one of many Western central banks that “effectively financ[es] their [government] deficits by buying their debt.”

In very simple terms, inflation is the result of governments spending far more than they can openly tax from citizens, then attempting to hide their shenanigans with financial gimmicks. So it is absolutely fair to think of inflation as a tax, and as the direct fault of shady government behavior: “Moderate inflation results from short-term ‘stimulus;’ hyperinflation comes from regular money printing to pay the government’s bills…The United States has not begun directly financing itself with large-scale money printing. Unfortunately, that may already be changing.”

The doomsday prophets obscure the phenomenal progress of the human species to feed itself, cure its diseases, and shape its world to improve the lives of all humans.

Washington Examiner:

Deaths from hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, food and energy shortages, severe heat and cold, and other disruptions from Mother Earth have fallen sharply over the past century. The property damage from acts of nature as a share of our GDP continues to drop yearly.

For example, more accurate weather reporting prepares people for deadly weather events. Building technologies make mankind smarter about weather and earthquake-proofing homes, buildings, bridges, and other structures to protect against collapse and rubble. The real “green revolution” on agriculture output has dropped rates of famine and hunger to all-time lows. My mentor, the late, great economist Julian Simon, taught us that the “ultimate resource” to save us from Armageddon is the human mind.

Indeed, Simon’s 1980 wager with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, holds lessons for the climate change debate today.

Ehrlich wrote in 1980 that if he were a betting man, he would bet that England would not exist in the year 2000 due to a catastrophic rise in sea levels and unaffordable raw materials due to scarcity. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date sometime in the future. Simon said he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing.

Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten, and 1990 as the payoff date. Erlich lost as all five commodities declined in price from 1980 through 1990. //

We have the supposed greatest minds in the world who have allegedly come to a solution to save the planet dramatically by hitting a “reset” button on energy by turning to some of the most inefficient sources. That’s the best they’ve got?

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And the consistently stupid “solutions” to any supposed climate crisis are advanced by little minds that don’t have the vision to see what the rest of us can see.

The overuse of financial sanctions risks much of the world losing confidence in the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.