Author: Zero Hedge

Via Doomberg substack,

“Speculation on the stock exchange has spread to all ranks of the population and shares rise like air balloons to limitless heights…. The population was now engaged in evading taxation and devoting their money to speculative purchases…. Shares in respectable concerns which had paid a 20% dividend, were pushed higher and higher till the final holders could not expect a return of even 1%.”

– Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies

How quaint.

I am an avid consumer of written history. As a doom-oriented pattern recognizer, the written chronology of historically

As a team of researchers fears the number of deaths reported in India could double in the coming weeks as the country’s brutal second wave intensifies, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing growing pressure to reimpose the type of strict national lockdown that he used to suppress COVID-19 cases last year in what was hailed as a successful campaign to stamp out the virus.

Many medical experts, opposition leaders and even Supreme Court judges are calling for national restrictions, arguing that

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday all but announced that she plans to step down next year. 

“I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job, in a year from now or about a year from now,” she told longtime Democratic operative David Axelrod on his CNN podcast, “The Axe Files.”

This, despite being hit with nothing but scripted softball questions when she can avoid Fox News’ Peter Doocy, comes on the heels of remarks she made earlier this

Update (1055ET): Right on cue, just after Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari admitted that expanded unemployment insurance was keeping workers out of the labor market, contributing to Friday’s disappointing employment number, the US Chamber of Commerce released a statement calling for ending the $300 weekly supplemental benefit.

Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley released the following as a statement, saying that while there might have been a time when the benefit was needed, that time has now

Elon Musk said in January of this year that he was “highly confident [a Tesla] will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year.”

To many of us, we knew it was nonsense. Musk has been crowing about Full Self Driving in Tesla vehicles – a feature that neither exists, per what its name claims, nor has been proven to be reliably safe – for years. On top of that, Tesla has sold billions of dollars in vehicles

It goes without saying: today’s massive jobs report miss – the biggest since 1998 and the second biggest in history – was not pretty: with just 266K jobs added, this was a nearly 4-sigma miss to expectations of a 1 million print.

The reality is that the number could have been even worse: had it not been for some 187,000 workers added in food service and drinking places (i.e. waiters and bartenders) as well as 72,700 gambling, amusements and recreation workers (i.e., card dealers), the

After Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan spooked stocks by repeatedly suggesting that it was time to start discussing tapering of the Fed’s asset purchases, Friday’s job number offered doves on the Fed just the ammunition they needed to push back.

So we weren’t surprised to see Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari appear on Bloomberg TV Friday morning just minutes later to defend the Fed’s dovish approach, while implying that hawks like Kaplan and Kashkari’s other “critics” on Wall Street may secretly be trying to sabotage the recovery.

After the 3.7-sigma

The Biden DOJ has indicted former police officer Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers on federal civil rights charges for their roles in the death of George Floyd.

The indictment alleges that Chauvin, along with J. Alexander Kueng, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane violated Floyd’s rights when they saw him lying on the ground “in clear need” of medical attention, but instead “willfully failed to aid Floyd, thereby acting with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of harm.”

Via SchiffGold.com,

Inflation is the word of the day.

We’ve been talking about inflation for months, but now the mainstream is starting to pay attention to rising prices. In corporate board rooms, board members are talking about passing along their increased costs to their customers. Consumers are trying to tighten budgets. But the Federal Reserve keeps telling us there isn’t a problem. Inflation – so we’re told – is transitory. In his podcast, Peter Schiff said the central bankers at the Fed have to tell us that because they can’t

2018 was not a good year for bitcoin, and for cryptos in general: after hitting an all time high of (only) $20,000 in December of 2017, much of the remainder of 2018 was spent with the crypto bubble deflating, with early crypto investors first casually than fervently taking profits and dragging the price of cryptos ever lower. The punchline came in September, when as we reported at the time Goldman – clearly disappointed with the lack of upside momentum – suspended its fledgling crypto trading desk plans…

… sending bitcoin tumbling