^ Why are interest payments suddenly spiking? Because the bill for QE is coming due. Either die by high inflation or high rates. Or both.
Why is the country issuing debt at emergency levels, without acknowledging it’s an emergency? Because that’s the only thing that can keep this fake economy afloat through the 2024 election.
^ Why is China the world’s #1 trade partner on just about every physical good? Because the US only exports (a) printed money and (b) technology. Anyway, I could keep going, with literally dozens of graphs like this. But X only allows four per post.
3) On the topic of whether it’s a country with a “turbulent history of…violence”, the level of drug addiction, violent crime, homeless encampments, squatters, road blockages, and massive BLM/Hamas mobs swarming the streets has obviously spiked in recent years.
2020 didn’t represent a one-off, it’s a preview of what is to come, particularly in Blue America. Crime statistics are systematically faked — in San Francisco, you can actually see some dashboards where things like car ticketing have gone to zero — so we don’t have an accurate picture.
Until you see undeniable things like stores closing and people moving out of blue states. And then blue politicians yell at those companies, and try to stop them from moving out. This is systematic: blues always disable the warning lights that tell you we’re crashing into the ground, just like the mortgages labeled AAA in 2008, just as a mosquito anesthetizes you before drinking your blood, just as a snake evolves to employ camouflage before it strikes. Alongside lawfare, faking the stats is a core competency of both communist reds and woke blues.
From the Baltimore bridge collapse to chaos at Boeing, what look like discrete problems are in fact part of a wider dysfunction. The case in point here is Boeing, which was allowed to purchase the only other US domestic producer of commercial aircraft, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. As United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby recently noted, innovation and quality have been on the decline ever since. Research and development budgets have gone down relative to Airbus, while share buybacks have gone up. Massive outsourcing resulted in highly complex and vulnerable supply chains. Workforce training languished, as labour was tallied as a cost not an asset.
Meanwhile, as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan pointed out in a March speech warning against the dangers associated with promoting national champions, concentration and financialisation in the airline industry have not only led to safety issues — they have also cost US taxpayers a bundle, and created economic vulnerability rather than stability or security. One could say the same thing about America’s inability to build its own ships, or figure out how to work with allies to do so. Likewise the failure to understand all the domestic and foreign policy levers that must be pulled in order to accomplish the clean energy transition.
“The sickest thing of all, we had a key guy on the Trade Commission leave and go to the other side in the middle of negotiation. He knew the plans, the strategy, the details. As far as I’m concerned, that’s economic treason.”