h/t Melinda Romanoff
Mortgage Market Blowup?
I’ve been expecting an implosion in the mortgage market for some time given the rise in interest rates relative to the debt that has to be supported, but so far that isn’t happening. It seems our friend Ron Butler has become privy to information that indicates a black swan event may not be far off, however.
Mortgage Investment Fund Blowing Up Soon: What Investors Need To Know About Mortgage Related Funds
We will read about a multi-million dollar Mortgage & Promissory Note Fund blowing up in the coming days & weeks
I will let big media with lots of lawyers name names
2/
— Ron Butler (@ronmortgageguy) January 30, 2024
Don’t Worry, It’s Transitory
The workforce reductions will save the company about $1 billion in costs, CEO Carol Tomé said on a company earnings call.
“2023 was a unique, and quite candidly, difficult and disappointing year. We experienced declines in volume, revenue and operating profits and all three of our business segments,” Tomé said.
Shares of the package giant dipped nearly 6% in premarket trading.
Bidenomics: Last week, in a campaign stop at a Pennsylvania coffee shop, President Biden seemed shocked at the $6.00 price of his smoothie.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
‘Oumuamua Is at the Heart of an Ongoing Battle Raging Within the Scientific Community… Again
The Blowout Economy
Since GDP simply adds up all the borrowing and spending in an economy regardless of who did the borrowing and spending and for what purpose, it’s no shock that recent GDP numbers are higher than expected. Peter St. Onge notes that we are actually getting a whole lot less bang for every borrowed buck.
Fresh GDP numbers came in and it was a blowout.
The kind of blowout only $2.7 trillion of deficit can buy. While the real economy crumbles.
To see why, in the past 12 months the federal deficit increased by $1.3 trillion. Yet we only got half that in GDP. In other words,… pic.twitter.com/0YTtXvWRrO
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) January 26, 2024
Don’t Mess With Texas
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a defiant statement on Wednesday pushing back against President Joe Biden’s attempts to stop Texas from securing its borders against the millions of illegal aliens pouring into the state thanks to Biden’s reckless border policies.
Abbott’s statement comes after the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration earlier this week, ruling that it could remove or cut through razor wire the state has deployed to stop illegal aliens from crossing the Rio Grande into the state.
“The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” reads the statement. “President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants. The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”
Universal Basic Insolvency
If our experience with pandemic “emergency benefits” is any guide, when you pay people not to work, then lo and behold they are unlikely to…work. It will be no different if the magical non-concept of Universal Basic Income ever sees the light of day.
As for the notion that under UBI people will be free to become “care givers” to loved ones, I can foresee a whole lot of youngsters becoming “care givers” to their PlayStation instead.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer produced an analysis in 2021 that concluded that a national guaranteed basic income using parameters of Ontario’s 2017 pilot project could cut Canada’s poverty rate by half in just one year, but at a hefty cost of $91 billion in 2024–25 and $93 billion in 2025–26. That’s nearly double what Ottawa spends, for example, on health transfers to the provinces.
Blind Faith
These days, South Africa is starting to look like a real-life enactment of the last few chapters of Atlas Shrugged.
Rampant cable theft has damaged South Africa’s railway signalling systems to the extent that train operators are effectively forced to operate “blindly”, necessitating frequent stops at railway transfer stations and manual phone-ins to avoid train collisions.
Pereira said a trip between Ermelo in Mpumalanga and Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal that typically lasted nine hours would now take over double that time.
That is because each stop can take about 20 minutes, provided the machinist has cellphone signal.
On the rare occasion that they are unable to communicate to the CTC due to no reception, the stop could add another two to three hours to the total trip time.
DEI in the Friendly Skies
View From The Wing- Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has “Enormous Volume Of Defects” Bolts On MAX 9 Weren’t Installed
The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
Update- United Airlines CEO: Boeing’s 737 Max-9 grounding is ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ for us
What the teachers strike is really about
This Saskatchewan teachers strike is about something no one wants to say openly.
Passing kids who should have failed, mainstreaming everyone, overcrowding and not enough ESL are all part of “classroom complexity.” But we’ve had ample warning this was going to happen, from a guy I’ve known for 30 years. He wrote a book about this in 2010.
Believe it or not, I used to write opinion columns for 28 years on everything under the sun before launching Pipeline Online. And this teachers strike in Saskatchewan got under my skin enough that I had to write about it.
A Revolutionary Culture
South Africa made some strides in cleaning up rampant criminality when it hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010 but that all seems to be a distant memory now. The reality is that the ANC is returning to its ideological roots, where anarchy and lawlessness play a role in cultivating the ground for a revolution that they hope to cash in on. The end goal: make society so chaotic that a traumatized citizenry will accept a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Security vans carrying money are rammed off busy daytime roads by deliberate attacks with vehicles, with guards set upon by heavily armed men who use bombs to blow open safes.
Robberies can last extended periods, with motorway traffic continuing normally on the other side of the road while gangs prime their explosives and rove about with automatic weapons, sometimes filmed by onlookers.
The murder rate fell in the years after the end of apartheid, reaching a low point around a decade ago. Since then, it has increased 77% to the current level – back to where it was 20 years ago.
Detection rates have fallen in tandem, down more than 60% since 2012, leading to the situation where so few murders are solved.
“Safe” Supply
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Alex Berenson- Yet again, the better we get at “harm reduction,” the more people overdose and die
British Columbia’s “Safer Opioid Supply” program included lenient rules to encourage users to join. Doctors could write prescriptions even for people at high risk of overdose. Addicts did not have to enter treatment or even agree to counseling to participate. Canada’s national health insurance program even paid for the drugs.
Jama- British Columbia’s Safer Opioid Supply Policy and Opioid Outcomes
Sun- Drug users prompt Tim Hortons in Oshawa to shut down in-store dining
Honk Honk!
It’s a Trap!
Globe and Mail- An immigration system that’s lowering national wealth? Yes, the Liberals did that
Ottawa has put the country into a bind known as a “population trap.” That’s the conclusion of National Bank of Canada chief economist Stéfane Marion. A population trap is an unhappy state of affairs familiar to poor countries with very high birth rates. It’s unheard of in the developed world. Yet it’s what is happening in Canada today.
Canada’s population growth through immigration has been so high that it has outpaced the country’s savings, and its ability to invest in new capital stock. In plain English, the number of forks in the economic pie is growing faster than the pie, and faster than our capacity to invest in more ovens to bake more pie. The result is less pie per Canadian – declining GDP per capita, and declining living standards.
Bidenomics
Peter St Onge- Inflation is back.
Time To Leave?
If I were a resident of the Western Cape province in South Africa, I’d currently be supporting separation from the rest of the country. Failing that, I’d be looking for another country to move to.
In a post on X on Sunday, Nazier Paulsen, a Cape-based MP for the EFF, called for the execution of Cape independence supporters.
This followed a call by Paulsen for his followers to find the IP addresses of secessionists and locate where they live.
You can find this thug’s Twitter feed here. Warning: it’s all very nauseating stuff.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
We’re all gonna D.I.E!!!!
“The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. “
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states.”
“They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
Honk, Honk!
“They neither sow nor harvest, but they always know better.”
Don’t Bump That Sparky Car!
It’s going to take some time to accumulate actuarial data, but a showdown between EV makers and insurance companies seems to be on the horizon.
The main reason that EVs are being scrapped is due to the fact that there is no viable way to repair even slightly damaged batteries which are turning out to be a disaster for insurance companies whilst also increasing motor insurance for drivers across the board.
Even when it is possible to repair a battery, insurance companies are still wary of doing so as they fear litigation cases if the car happens to be involved in another accident.
DEI The Friendly Skies
Robert: Link fixed – thanks to ‘scf’