Steve Bull's Blog, page 22
June 11, 2024
Retail Bloodbath: More Than 2,600 Store Closings Have Been Announced So Far In 2024
Retail stores are being shut down at a staggering rate all over the country. If we stay on the pace that we are on, the total number of stores closed in 2024 will be nearly 40 percent higher than the total number of stores closed in 2023. That is what you call a crisis! Meanwhile, banks are shuttering hundreds of branches from coast to coast, and a “restaurant apocalypse” is sweeping across the nation. Everywhere around us, “space available” signs are going up on buildings that were once considered to be prime commercial real estate. If someone tries to convince you that the U.S. economy is in good shape, just show them this article and ask them why so many once prosperous businesses are closing. Needless to say, they will not be able to win the argument after that.
According to the Daily Mail, nearly 2,600 store closings were announced during the first four months of 2024…
US retailers have announced the closure of almost 2,600 stores in 2024 – just four months into the year.
Big names including Macy’s, Walmart, Walgreens, Foot Locker and 7-Eleven have all said they are closing shops.
But discount stores like Family Dollar and bankrupt 99 Cents Only have been worst hit, as have drugstores like CVS and Rite Aid.
If the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction, why are many of the largest retail chains in the U.S. shutting down stores?
That wouldn’t make any sense at all.
If this pace remains constant throughout the rest of this year, we would hit a grand total of approximately 7,800 store closing announcements by the end of 2024…
If the closures were to continue at the same rate for the rest of the year they would total 7,800 in 2024 – almost 40 percent more than the total in 2023.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Trudeau Pushes Online Censorship Bill To “Protect” People From “Misinformation”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week complained that governments have allegedly been left without the necessary tools to “protect people from misinformation.”
This “dire” warning came as part of Trudeau’s effort to have the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) – one of the most controversial of its kind pieces of censorship legislation in Canada of late – pushed across the finish line in the country’s parliament.
C-63 has gained notoriety among civil rights and privacy advocates because of some of its provisions around “hate speech,” “hate propaganda,” and “hate crime.”
Under the first two, people would be punished before they commit any transgression, but also retroactively.
However, in a podcast interview for the New York Times, Trudeau defended C-63 as a solution to the “hate speech” problem, and clearly, a necessary “tool,” since according to this politician, other avenues to battle real or imagined hate speech and crimes resulting from it online have been exhausted.
Not one to balk at speaking out of both sides of his mouth, Trudeau at one point essentially admits that the more control governments have (and the bill is all about control, critics say, regardless of how its sponsors try to sugarcoat it) the more likely they are to abuse it.
He nevertheless goes on to declare that new legislative methods of “protecting people from misinformation” are needed and, in line with this, talk up C-63 as some sort of balanced approach to the problem.
But it’s difficult to see that “balance” in C-63, which is currently debated in the House of Commons. If it becomes law, it will allow the authorities to keep people under house arrest should they decide these people could somewhere down the line commit “hate crime or hate propaganda” – a chilling application of the concept of “pre-crime.”
…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…
If Wishes Were Fishes — a Teachable Intermezzo
“Together we can finish the job.” — “Joe Biden”
This is the most significant reality of the world picture now: the wishes of the manager class are going in one direction while the actual dynamics of economy and politics go in the opposite direction. The managers wish for their management of systems to become as centralized and top-down as possible; but the very systems they manage are breaking down and seeking to reorganize at smaller scale, distributed locally. The tension entailed is explosive.
Forgive me for reiterating a basic principle driving this moment in history: everything organized at the gigantic scale is steaming toward failure: big governments, giant companies, the huge capital investment firms, global shipping, energy production, chain retailing, mass motoring, big electricity, big medicine, big education, big anything. They are all fixing to fail while our politicians and economists make plans based on consolidating them into one super-gigantic mega-system that will run flawlessly on computer tech magic.
The failures of each giant system will only amplify and ramify the failures in all the other systems. Take that as axiomatic. For instance, the fantastic failures in higher education now on display, largely due to the Marxian defeat of excellence, will implant a generation of incompetents in all hierarchies of management. That will result in an insidious matrix of bad decision-making. The Pareto 80-20 principle will ensure that 80-percent of all institutional energy will focus on propping up failing institutions with bad decisions that add up to broken business models (while 20-percent goes into actually carrying-out the bad decisions as policy). That explains how Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation spent $7.5-billion to build seven electric car charging stations.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…Banking Crisis, Stage Two
Banking Crisis, Stage TwoI’m sure you recall the banking crisis of March to May 2023.
It began with the collapse of the little-known Silvergate Bank on March 8. This was followed the next day by the collapse of the much larger Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 9. SVB had over $120 billion in uninsured deposits.
Bank deposits over $250,000 each are not covered by FDIC insurance. Those depositors stood to lose all their money over the insured amount. This would have led to the collapse of hundreds of startup tech businesses in Silicon Valley that had placed their working capital on deposit at SVB.
There were also much larger businesses such as Cisco and at least one large cryptocurrency exchange that had billions of dollars on deposit there. Those businesses would have taken huge write-downs based on the size of their uninsured deposits.
On March 9, the FDIC said that indeed the excess deposits were uninsured, and depositors would get “receivership certificates” of uncertain value and zero liquidity instead.
By March 11, the FDIC reversed course and said all deposits would be insured. The Federal Reserve intervened and said they would take any U.S. Treasury securities from member banks in exchange for par value in cash even if the bonds were only worth 80% of par (which most were).
The Mother of All Bailouts
That Sunday night they also closed Signature Bank, a New York-based bank with crypto links. The damage wasn’t done. On March 19, the Swiss National Bank forced a merge of UBS and Credit Suisse, one of the largest banks in the world. Credit Suisse was on the edge of insolvency.
Finally, on May 1, First Republic Bank, with over $225 billion in assets, was ordered closed by the government and sold to JPMorgan.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Whiff After Whiff
Image by Anne and Saturnino Miranda from Pixabay
The word “whiff” is used in baseball to describe when the batter swings and makes no contact with the pitched ball. The term presumably derives from the sound of hitting nothing but air.
This off-sequence post acts as a brief update that I wanted to present, without making a full-fledged blog post out of it (in hindsight, I may have failed). In the last two posts (here and here), I noted that recent rapid drops in child birth around the world could conceivably put us on track for an earlier population peak than previously anticipated—possibly as early as 2040 vs. the 2080–2090 timeframe.
That would be big news, and makes me continually ask myself: where is the disconnect? Is it possible that demography models are that wrong? I have discussed already (and will revisit in the next post) some of the potential blind spots for how this century develops. But here I look backwards to see if the recent drop in child births was itself a surprise to the demographers. If so, then it speaks to dynamics at play not captured in demography models, and that’s important.
I used the 2022 United Nations World Population Prospects (WPP) data (public) to build a list of countries that had the largest fractional declines in total fertility rate (TFR) from 2010 to 2019 (pre-COVID), and that also had projections in previous U.N. WPP products back to 2010. I show how (not) well the U.N. expectations match the actual story for these cases. I also throw in a few other countries of interest, including the three most populous ones.
The Top Drops
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
June 9, 2024
Bird Flu Triggers Supply Chain Snarls In Dairy Industry As “Farmers Increasingly Culled Cows”
The latest US Department of Agriculture data shows bird flu has infected at least 80 dairy herds across ten states. There are growing concerns about rising cow mortalities from the virus and the risk of farmers culling cows to stop the spread. This could ignite economic stress across the farm belt and unleash a supply shock.
Reuters spoke with a USDA spokesperson who was aware of H5N1 virus-related deaths among cow herds but said that most cows recovered. No official figures have been provided on the number of cow mortalities in South Dakota, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado.
Here’s more on the cow deaths:
In South Dakota, a 1,700-cow dairy sent a dozen of the animals to slaughter after they did not recover from the virus, and killed another dozen that contracted secondary infections, said Russ Daly, a professor with South Dakota State University and veterinarian for the state extension office who spoke with the farm.
“You get sick cows from one disease, then that creates a domino effect for other things, like routine pneumonia and digestive issues,” Daly said.
A farm in Michigan killed about 10% of its 200 infected cows after they too failed to recover from the virus, said Phil Durst, an educator with Michigan State University Extension who spoke with that farm.
Michigan has more confirmed infections in cattle than any state as well as two of three confirmed cases of US dairy workers who contracted bird flu.
In Colorado, some dairies reported culling cows with avian flu because they did not return to milk production , said Olga Robak, spokesperson for the state Department of Agriculture.
Ohio Department of Agriculture spokesperson Meghan Harshbarger said infected cows have died in Ohio and other affected states, mostly due to secondary infections .
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Are They TRYING to Start a Nuclear War?
Are They TRYING to Start a Nuclear War?The steady path toward World War III continues. U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in the war with Russia has been one long failure, but that hasn’t stopped them from escalating the war with new weapons and tactics.
Russia has met the escalation with its own escalation every step of the way. At what point do rational leaders in the West (if there are any left) pause, consider that the war is lost in Ukraine, deescalate and seek a treaty to end the war?
There’s no sign of that yet. In fact, all of the signs point to further escalation, which is a sure path to nuclear war. What good has escalation accomplished?
The West supplied Ukraine with HIMARS precision-guided artillery, but that largely failed because the Russians quickly learned how to jam the GPS guidance systems, so the missiles went off course.
That doesn’t mean the Russians shoot down or jam every HIMARS rocket Ukraine launches. Some will always get through. But overall, their effectiveness has been limited compared with expectations.
The U.S. and NATO also supplied Ukraine with Abrams, Leopard and Challenger tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that have been left burning on the battlefield. They also require intensive maintenance Ukraine can’t necessarily provide, and are often unsuited for the battlefield conditions in Ukraine. Many Ukrainian soldiers have actually expressed a preference for Russian-made equipment over NATO’s.
Not Wonder Weapons
Meanwhile, the Patriot anti-missiles systems cannot shoot down Russian hypersonic missiles and have been destroyed one-by-one at a cost of $1 billion each. F-16s are the next wonder weapon promised. But Russia fields the most sophisticated air defense system in the world. Many planes will be shot down by Russian S-400 anti-aircraft batteries and other systems.
….click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Have We Gotten Done?
Or at least, what has this blog gotten done?
Perhaps the most important thing this blog has accomplished is to help its readers understand – or at least get them arguing about! – the need for a movement that is more than merely political: a movement that is philosophically and theologically capable of defeating progressive postmodernism, physicalism, and nihilism; with new economics that can be defended against both communism and neo-liberalism; with new leadership that can effectuate change; and with cadres organized to do it.
My calls to action have been spread out over the last three years. I’ve assembled them here:
Conservatism is Dead (Oct 03, 2021)Why We Must Lay a New Foundation (Oct 18, 2021)Why Has Our World Gone So Crazy (Jul 28, 2022)The Physiocratic Platform (Nov 08, 2022)What is to Be Done (May 10, 2024)No, Really – What is to Be Done (May 17, 2024)Reenchantment, Rectification, Reckoning (May 24, 2024)Having spent the last few weeks furthering those calls to action, this week I wanted to take a step back and consider what else – if anything – I’ve gotten done so far.
Those of you who have been with me since the beginning of my contemplations will hopefully find this a helpful summary of all that has come before. Those who have only recently joined me in suffering on the Tree of Woe can consider this essay my table of contents or greatest hits compilation.
I’ve presented my accomplishments in what I consider their order of importance.
A Defense Against PostmodernismAbout ten years ago, I read Stephen Hicks’ book Explaining Postmodernism. The book ends with the following paragraphs, which for many years preoccupied my mind:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Second-Quarter Recession This Year Looks Increasingly Likely
As I watch the evolution of consumer spending, housing starts, new home sales, and GDPNow trends, it appears the economy has peaked. Warning: I tend to be early.
GDPNow forecast from the Atlanta Fed as of 2024-06-03. Chart by MishThe GDPNow forecast has been weakening since a peak of 4.2 percent on May 8, 2024.
The best number to follow is not the overall forecast but rather Real Final Sales (RFS). The rest is inventory adjustment that nets to zero over time.
A steep plunge occurred in the base forecast from 3.5 to 2.7 then to 1.8 on May 1 and June 3. Importantly, RFS fell from 2.9 to 2.1 to 1.8 on the same dates.
Balance of Trade
I made that call on May 30.
On June 1, I commented Soaring US Trade Deficit Smacks the Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast
On June 3, the GDPNow forecast took another dive.
The following table that shows both moves.
GDPnow Contributions
Advance Economic Indicators, specifically import-export data took the Net Exports contribution to GDP from -0.06 to -0.60 on May 31.
Also on May 31, Personal Income and Outlays took the contribution for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) from 2.28 to 1.75.
It’s not always easy to assign the numbers to specific buckets, but the plunge in net exports is clear.
ISM Manufacturing New Orders and Backlogs in Steep Contraction
ISM chart and excerpts below by permission from the Institute for Supply Management® ISM®On June 3, I commented ISM Manufacturing New Orders and Backlogs in Steep Contraction
The Manufacturing ISM was in contraction for 16 months went positive for a month and is contracting again for two months with order backlogs falling for 20 months.
June 3 Impact to GDPNow
On June 3, the ISM and construction spending reports clobbered PCE with lesser negative impacts on Residential Investments, Equipment, and Net Exports.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Putin warns West over Ukraine armaments, nuclear arsenal
Russian president reiterates in news conference that attacking NATO countries is a ‘crazy’ idea but warns against Ukraine interference.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that his country would not rule out using nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or territory were threatened.
On Wednesday, Putin met in person with senior editors from international news agencies for the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
He answered questions ranging from the threat of nuclear war to possible repercussions for countries that support Ukraine’s efforts to launch attacks within Russian territory.
When asked about the prospect of using Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the president said it was not out of the question.
“For some reason, the West believes that Russia will never use it,” Putin responded, pointing towards the country’s 2020 nuclear doctrine.
It authorises the Russian government to consider nuclear options if a weapon of mass destruction is used against the country or if “the very existence of the state is put under threat”.
“We have a nuclear doctrine. Look what it says. If someone’s actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible for us to use all means at our disposal. This should not be taken lightly, superficially.”
Attack on NATO ‘rubbish’
Putin also took the opportunity once again to brush aside fears that Russia could attack countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“You should not make Russia out to be the enemy. You’re only hurting yourself with this, you know?” Putin said at the news conference.
Article 5 of the treaty establishes that an attack against one country in the organisation is considered an attack against all members.
Putin has repeatedly dismissed the idea of launching an attack on NATO, despite tensions with its member states.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
