You know something is dark when they had to make it exactly the infamous number 420k. For those who say "California has always had some satanic/dark element to it", they might be onto something huh?
Reality on the ground is: US has been amassing troops in tens of thousands. Their mercenary IDF is claiming territory like a field day. Market has barely capitulated (which is the only thing this admin care about).
I expect this is just Trump buying time until he launches ground invasion after two weeks of failed negotiation. You don't spend millions sending tens of thousands of soldiers and billion dollar worth of hardware to just call them back to base.
Trump will "negotiate" and then in the middle of negotiation start a ground invasion just like they did in the past while they map all the military targets for ground invasion (which is hard to when missiles flying all the time). Possibly also replenish their interceptor stocks from other regions which has been running low.
If you follow the kind of people advising him and have his ears (Witkoff, Kushner, Loomer, Levin) they are all for ground invasion.
But yeah, win for US. Oil prices will rebound giving economy the breathing time. Possibly also time to arm the insurgents to regroup for regime change.
I am a big proponent and teach my children pay as little taxes as you possibly can. Use all means available that are not fraud. So this article is a delight.
Our government in my generation failed me and my kids, they are busy in fighting wars, manufacturing crises abroad, and doing other nefarious things.
Question: can I use the means in this article to avoid my last year's tax? What asset categories are available to invest to defer my taxes, where can I learn more?
The question is there is no other place for money to go. Liquidity is still in abundance and no other market can capture that liquidity. Eurozone is a total mess, ECB is doing one reckless thing after another which will inevitably lead to Germany leaving Eurozone at some point. Japan market is a joke, Asia and emerging market has huge governance issues. Bond market has penalized the investors and only more pain is in sight. All in all, there is a lot of doom and gloom out there. But I don't see a viable alternative.
Sure, Mark Carney gave his little speech in Davos. The same Mark Carney, that led Brookfield while its finance arms operating out of US.
But realistically, how is opening up to China more even considered as the alternative? When has any deal with China worked at a strategic advantage for the other side? Is not the whole reason the so called globalization project failed was because players like China did not play by the same rule or did not even have to play by the same rule? What gives they will when you open up the market more to them? All it takes is for them to take your product, copy it and sell it 20x cheaper and flood the market everywhere else.
Stock market is different from bond market, but bond market everywhere is showing stress signal. Just look at Japan. But yeah, eventually it will spill in stocks.
Eurozone has a looming debt crisis. ECB is actively capping the yields for countries bonds from Spain and Portugal which are showing stress signals. This will not end well for ECB this time around if they end up something like 2012.
> As applied to the United States, the current account version of Triffin runs as follows. The global accumulation of dollar reserves requires the United States to run a current account deficit. Since desired reserves rise with world nominal GDP, which is growing faster than US nominal GDP, the growth of dollar reserves will raise US external indebtedness unsustainably. Either the United States will not run the current account deficits, leading to an insufficiency of global reserves. Or US indebtedness will rise without limit, undermining the value of the dollar and the reserves denominated in it.
While this entire spectacle is just nauseating, I am not going to shed a tear for Jerome Powell. This is a man that headed one of the most incompetent bunch in my lifetime. I remember the whole 2020/1 euphoria where things were just supposed to be "transitory" according to multiple Fed minutes. Lo and behold, until it was not. They had to tighten FAST, lot of layoffs happened because of that. You could argue the software industry never really recovered, AI is just a cope.
Reality is, these institutions have failed for a long time. It gave me a chuckle when I read the line "maximum unemployment and price stability". The official fed numbers for those are way off, you tell Americans spending >50% on their groceries compared to 2-3yrs ago that the inflation is 4%. Or unemployment rates for that matter. All the numbers are garbage, nothing means anything anymore.
If congress and Fed had a spine to enforce meritocracy, Jerome and all the "transitory" shenanigans would have been out long ago. And so there you have it. Officials with 10 years terms with zero accountability for their decisions with revolving doors to follow having big bucks consulting gigs for big banks awaiting moment they retire will say and do anything to preserve the self-serving institutions. Not its mandate. And cherry on top, if they are lucky to play out well, on their way out will get the glory of "serving the people and protecting the institutions".
My ancestors are from Asia. Over there, a saying goes something like this if I can translate it without the color of the language: "Give a man a solid breakfast and he will not make noise around the kitchen rest of the day". Even less colorful way to say it is if you want to be healthy, start with a healthy breakfast.
As much as there are all the science around low carb diet and optimizing calories, macros and what not, I think there are some wisdom to it in the long game view.
Someone that had a good nutritious breakfast (you will notice every major culture has its variant of breakfast akin to "English breakfast"), would have less difficulty resisting food with empty calories and doing frequent snacking. Contrary, if you had packaged "cereal" with questionable ingredients and nutrition density, no wonder by 11 you will feel the need to snack. And then if you happen to have a lunch in one of the typical take out restaurants optimized for cost at the expense of quality, a 3pm snacking is more likely than not.
By the end of the day, you had racked up calories intake with bunch of empty calories from those snacking episodes that could be entirely prevented with a solid dense breakfast.
Immunotherapies on the other hand seems to work wonders for many who respond to it. I regret for not trying it.