Is This Real?
JS sent this to me last week. It’s almost hard to believe. If it’s a hoax, it’s a funny one. But I think it’s real. Click here.
Latest Count From the Southern Border
The Department of Homeland Security reported that the US Border patrol detained 221,303 illegal immigrants on the southern border in March, the highest number in two decades. During the same month, there were 123,304 expulsions of noncitizens under Title 42, and 80,116 people were let into the country.
Frank James: The Name You Have Already Forgotten
Who was Frank James?
No, I don’t mean the confederate soldier. Or the brother of Jesse James. I’m talking about the NYC subway “spree shooter” that tried to kill a bunch of people a few weeks ago. Do you remember him?
If you haven’t heard of him, or did but have forgotten his name, it’s not your fault. His terrorist attack was reported on – but just barely – by the mainstream media immediately after it happened. And then all but disappeared. You have to wonder: Why didn’t Frank James get his 15 minutes of fame?
And why didn’t the Department of Homeland Security jump on his bandwagon. By any and all criteria, he qualifies as a full-fledged domestic terrorist. He was a racist, a racial nationalist whose stated goal was to start a “race war.” And he announced his intentions over a period of months leading up to his attack. Here are some of his lines:
* “Kill all whiteys.”
* “I’m wantin’ to kill everything in sight.”
* “Asians are slant-eyed fucking pieces of shit.”
* “Spanish-speaking motherfuckers are crimes against fucking nature.”
And what about our social media guardians? The enlightened outposts that guard against “hate speech”? No, they did not cancel him. They did not banish him. They did not even remove a single one of his posts until 48 hours AFTER he went on his shooting spree.
Yikes: Inflation Hikes
* The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5%, year over year. That’s the biggest inflation jump since December 1981.
* Airfare is up 20% compared to pre-pandemic prices.
* The Producer Price Index (PPI) jumped 11.02%, year over year. That’s the biggest leap since data keeping began in 2010.
* Since the beginning of March, about 30% of baby formula products have been out of stock in the US. Walgreens is limiting purchases to three per customer.
* And finally: The average American is expected to need an extra $5,000 this year to purchase the same quantity of goods and services as he did last year.
Jerome Powell is in trouble.
In a recent issue of Bonner Private Research, Bill Bonner wrote about the problems facing Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve:
“Inflation has already returned to levels not seen since the 1970s. The Fed needs to stop printing; everybody says so. But if Powell fights inflation, the economy will collapse; it depends on ultra-low interest rates and free-flowing credit. If, on the other hand, he lets inflation rip, the dollar will die… bringing with it financial, social, and political chaos…. In order to escape his trap, Jerome Powell needs to cut away 14 years’ worth of bad policy….
“The COVID Crisis caused the Fed to do a lot more of what it never should have been doing in the first place – printing money. In the last two years, its balance sheet… rose by more than it had in the entire 107 years since it was founded – by over $4 trillion.”
Bill foresees difficult times ahead. He suspects that Powell and the Fed will fail in trying to manage with the $50 trillion in fake wealth created since 2007. What they are dealing with, he says, is “a credit-addled economy, including trillion-dollar federal deficits, meme stocks, buyback programs, NFTs, zombie corporations, million-dollar shacks… and much, much more.”
Toothless: The Real Effect of the Economic Sanctions on Russia
Earlier this month, the Central Bank of Russia raised its benchmark rate from 9.5% to 20% – the highest in almost 20 years. The purpose: defending the ruble against international sanctions, which have knocked it down to its lowest point in more than 20 years.
The Biden administration is touting this as a win. The problem with that: Russia is also demanding that its customers (which include most of Europe) pay for its oil in rubles. That means the French and Germans that depend so heavily on Russian oil will have to exchange their euros at the new rate. It makes the cost to them the same as it was prior to the Ukraine invasion, and the profit to Russia roughly the same as well.
From Bloomberg: “What’s become clear is that despite an incredibly wide-ranging package of sanctions on the Russian government and its oligarchs, and an exodus of foreign businesses, the actions are largely toothless if foreigners keep guzzling Russian oil and natural gas – supporting the ruble by stocking Putin’s coffers.”
A Quick Look at the Current Real Estate Market US-Wide
Thanks to a perfect storm of Fed-directed low interest rates, rising crime, and escalating taxes in states like New York, New Jersey, and California, property values in Florida and Texas are surging. Along the coast, from Miami to Delray Beach (where I live) and all the way to Jupiter, prices are as high or even higher than they were in the early 2000s.
From Bill Bonner’s Diary:
“Rents in Miami have been rising at the fastest pace in the nation. The South Florida Business Journal reports that landlords, in neighborhoods such as Delray Beach, are ‘making a killing.’ They’re raising rents by 30% a year… and more.”
As for sales, Norada Real Estate reports:
“It is a seller’s market with many sellers getting top dollar…. The Miami real estate market continues to break records due to pent-up demand and low mortgage rates which continue to fuel real estate transactions.
“Miami’s hot housing market, fueled by domestic and international homebuyers, ended 2021 with 39,394 existing total home sales, up 49.5% from the 26,345 transactions in 2020 and 31.1% from the previous annual record of 30,041 transactions in 2013. Miami’s dollar volume of sales will reach $30.3 billion in 2021, a 103.4% annual increase.”
If, like me, you are an income investor, rising property values is a not an automatic win. It’s nice to see your net worth grow due to increasing real estate valuations. But if rents don’t increase as well, your current ROI in terms of your current assets is a diminishing percentage.
That’s what happened before the crash of 2008. This time, for several good reasons, things are different. The most important are these: (1) Banks are not making completely frivolous loans any more. (2) Rent rolls are rising, too.
What this means is that my son Patrick (who manages the family’s real estate) and I are not worried about the rental properties we currently own. We aren’t worried about another 2008-like collapse. Even if there is a correction, these properties carry little debt. And because rents are also on the rise, we can gradually adjust our rents to compensate for rising maintenance and management costs. That will ensure a healthy bottom line.
But we aren’t able to find any more properties to buy in the area. The prices are prohibitive. So, in partnership with my brother Justin, I have been looking at properties outside of Florida, where the numbers are better.
CIA Officers Defend Their Conspiracy Theory
John Sipher is not apologizing for his conduct. He’s proud of it.
He was one of 50 former CIA officials that published a letter just before the 2020 election alleging that the New York Poststory about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
In a recent Twitter post, Sipher said, “I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump.”
Former DNI James Clapper is also comfortable with promoting the Russian Conspiracy Theory. “I think sounding such a cautionary note at that time was appropriate,” he said.
And Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, added, pathetically, “The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts.”
Despite Demand for Workers, US Unemployment Is Still High
The night before I got my ass beat at the IBJJF, [LINK 4/13]two of my BJJ instructors and I went out for a light bite. Every restaurant we went to had long waiting lines. The problem was not demand. The problem was supply. Supply of waiters and kitchen help. At least half of the tables were and remained empty all night.
Fact: Currently, for every unemployed worker, 1.8 jobs are available. Meanwhile, 166,000 Americans filed initial unemployment claims the week ending Apr. 2, down from about 5,000 claims the previous week and better than industry experts predicted. This was the lowest figure since Nov. 1968, and the second-lowest since weekly reporting began in Jan. 1967.
What does that mean? Three things:
COVID Update: DeSantis Did It Right
The most comprehensive comparative study of the effects of COVID regulations was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) earlier this month. One of the conclusions: Governor DeSantis did it right.
The researchers compared COVID outcomes in 50 states based on three variables: the economy, education, and mortality. The top 10 states were Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota, Florida, New Hampshire, Maine, Arkansas, and Idaho. The bottom 10 were New Jersey, DC, New York, New Mexico, California, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
Most of the top 10 are states with low population density. The one exception is Florida. In terms of mortality, Florida was in the middle of the pack, ranking 28th, whereas California, which had much tougher lockdowns (and thus more deleterious effects on the economy and education) ranked 27th. California ranked 47th overall because its shutdowns crushed the economy (40th) and in-person schooling (50th).
The bottom 10 are dominated by states that had the most stringent lockdowns and were among the last to open up schools. New York, which was early praised for former Governor Cuomo’s severe lockdown policies, ranked 49th, with New Jersey coming in last.
“The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero,” said the authors of the study, “which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so.”
Hillary Clinton Fined
Click here.
Biden’s Billionaire Tax Proposal
Warren Buffett has famously said that he pays, in percentage terms, less taxes than his secretary. And on Mar. 28, the Biden administration attempted to do something about that. The proposed fiscal budget for 2023 includes a new 20% minimum tax on billionaires. Being promoted as a plan that “rewards work, not wealth,” it also promises to reduce the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
This proposal is the definition of specious. It sounds reasonable. Only 20%. Only billionaires. And reducing the federal deficit by a trillion dollars? Who could object to that?
Well…
* It’s not just billionaires, but all households with a net worth of $100 million. (The Nancy Pelosi household is included!)
* The arithmetic was fact-checked. And the reduction in the federal deficit won’t be $1 trillion in 10 years, but more like $240 billion.
* The inclusion of “unrealized investment income” is a big problem. It refers to the profits you have in your stock market portfolio at the end of the year. But what happens if you take a loss the next year? The bill attempts to deal with this by allowing for rollovers, but it looks like a mess waiting to happen.
Are COVID deaths coming down? Or were they always higher than they should have been?
* A county in Northern California opted to revise its COVID-19 death totals in July 2021 after refining its data-reporting systems. Upon using the new approach, officials in Santa Clara County reported that deaths dropped 22%. Click here.
* The CDC removed 72,277 COVID deaths (including 416 among children) from its website last week because, it said, it “was mistakenly counting deaths not related to COVID-19.” The CDC had not announced when the change was made. On its website, the agency described the update as the resolution of a “coding logic error.”