As if there wasn't enough uncertainty and chaos in the world.

The past 18 months have seen a global pandemic that has taken the lives of millions and created hardship and misery for many more. Add to that the rising tensions among the world's superpowers and political instability across the developed world, capped off by ugly scenes at the centre of the world's biggest democracy as hordes of angry protesters stormed the Capitol.

At all levels of society, it seems revolution is in the air and traditional power bases are under threat.

And now this.

In the past fortnight, and especially last week, global money markets have cratered and interest rates have soared. For many, it's a shrug-your-shoulders incident, an obscure and esoteric event that has little bearing on everyday life.

Except it isn't. What has just occurred could have a profound impact on our future. It has the potential to delay and possibly derail the economic recovery now underway across the developed world. And, if it continues, it will wreak havoc with global stock markets during the next few months.

It also is a direct assault on the power and authority of central banks, including our own Reserve Bank. For the past year, across the globe, they've acted in unison, throwing everything at their disposal at an unseen enemy in a desperate effort to stave off the most serious economic collapse in more than a century.

Suddenly, they've been left bruised and bloodied, run down by a growing mob that has flagrantly ignored their predictions and overturned their view of the world and our future.

Hands up all those who thought the Reserve Bank of Australia set interest rates.

If that's you, you're in good company. It's a common misconception and one our monetary mandarins have been keen to perpetuate.

Every month, we read the breathless reports of the ruminating inside the boardroom at Martin Place and how the decision, even if there wasn't one, was arrived at. A mere hint that a change may be in the wind usually sends markets into a tizz.

When our banks raise rates on their own or refuse to pass on an official cut, there are cries of foul play from the media, along with business and consumer groups.

Central banks, however, don't have absolute control. An interest rate is merely the price of money. It's determined by supply and demand for cash on global money markets and occasionally other unexpected factors override central-bank controls.

Central banks are the feudal lords of money markets. They're big players and they almost always get what they want. And they employ a range of powerful weapons to ensure they do.

They not only set an official cash rate — the rate they charge commercial banks for loans — but in more recent times have waded directly into bond markets to buy up huge amounts of government debt and even mortgage and corporate debt to muscle rates down. They've conjured up that cash and poured it into the system, lifting supply and depressing the price.

America's central bank, the US Federal Reserve, has bought around $US7.5 trillion ($9.73 trillion) worth of debt in recent years, in a wild and unorthodox attempt to depress interest rates. With such enormous reserves, for the past 20 years most investors have adopted the age-old adage, don't fight the Fed.

They've now taken the fight to the Fed.

Central bankers like America's Jerome Powell, our very own Philip Lowe and their counterparts from Japan, Europe, Canada and the UK have for the past month been on message.

Interest rates would not rise for years, they've decreed in unison. The economy is in the early stage of recovery but we have a long way to go.

But money market traders, who buy and sell the $US90 trillion odd worth of government debt swirling around on global markets, decided they were wrong. All of them.

As new US President Joe Biden finalised his plan to splash around $US1.9 trillion on a stimulus package — the biggest on record — the market decided that all this stimulus, both monetary and fiscal, could only lead to one thing; inflation.

And that meant central banks would have to abandon their ultra-loose interest rate policies earlier than expected. The trickle of selling on bond markets suddenly swelled. By late last week, it was a tsunami. Bond prices collapsed forcing the yields — market interest rates — to soar.

The battle was on.

Last November, if you bought an Australian government 10-year bond (essentially a government IOU) on the open market, you'd have been lucky to get an interest rate of 0.8 per cent.

A fortnight ago, you could get a touch above 1.2 per cent. By Friday, it was just shy of 2 per cent. To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of almost five official RBA interest rate hikes in four months, with two and a bit just last week.

You'd expect rates to move higher as the economy recovered. But it was the speed and the severity of the movements, the likes of which haven't occurred for decades, that stunned onlookers.

If sustained, it will lead to higher borrowing costs because banks will have no option but to pass those rate hikes on. And should Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg need to raise more debt, to extend JobKeeper for instance, he'll suddenly be confronted with a much higher bill.

Then there are the follow-on effects. Stock markets hate higher interest rates. Suddenly, the boom that has been underway ever since central banks cut rates to zero last year has been knocked sideways.

Our market hit the skids on Friday as Wall Street tumbled Thursday and took another hit Friday night.

Companies such as Tesla which produce little profit now but promise big returns down the track are the ones most at risk from a rise in longer-term interest rates. Tesla has lost a quarter of its value in the past month. The other big tech stocks also are reeling, although there was some respite Friday.

On our market, any company that has not lived up to earnings expectations has been smashed. A2 Milk last Thursday dropped 16 per cent following a disappointing half-year result.

Buckle up for that turmoil is about to get a whole lot worse if money markets continue their rampage.

Not yet. And maybe it won't be. That's the crux of the fight between central banks and financial markets.

It's true that prices are rising now, particularly commodities such as oil, copper and iron ore. But we are coming out of a terrible recession. And what financial traders are ignoring, or forgetting, is that prior to the pandemic, it was a lack of inflation that was the major economic scourge of the developed world.

Our own RBA failed to fire up inflation for four years and it cut rates three times in the months before the COVID crisis.

True, asset prices such as real estate have been soaring. But they are funded by debt and, with rates at zero, buyers have flocked back into the market because they can afford the repayments.

It's consumer prices that are the problem. They are funded by wages. And wages are growing at around the slowest pace in history. Casualisation of the workforce and the shift of entire industries from the developed world to countries like China have left millions either unemployed or underemployed.

That won't change any time soon, regardless of Biden's stimulus package.

But can central banks convince money market traders of this? So far, they've opted to pull back and let the looters run wild rather than risk the potential humiliation of a head-on confrontation and coming off second best.

This week, however, will be crucial.

America's February job numbers are out this Friday night. They were horrible in January, with more than 10 million out of work, which cemented Powell's resolve to maintain rock-bottom interest rates.

Traders, however, remain determined to push them even higher if there is any sign of an improved labour market, much to the horror of stockbrokers.

Absent any sense of irony, or humanity, came this line from one Wall Street commentator on Friday night.

"Without an ugly set of numbers, growth stocks are in trouble."

Signs of life: are the masses awakening from COVID psychosis?

The vaccine rug pull attempt is not going as smoothly as expected. 

Over the course of the past year, a coalition including the corporate media, international “health” institutions, a maniacal mega billionaire, Big Pharma oligarchs, and power drunk governments consumed massive amounts of power left and right, with little to no observed resistance in sight.

By Jordan Schachtel

With COVID mania in full swing, they moved the goalposts as they pleased. Free of any science, data, or logical reasoning, the ruling class had the terrified masses completely under their thumb. Under the spell of a mass social psychosis, we willingly surrendered our liberties and even happily enforced draconian edicts on our own peers, despite the global trampling of our basic rights.

The ruling class moved seamlessly from “15 days to stop the spread” to “30 days to stop the spread” to “Zero COVID.”

From “everyone needs to wear a mask” to “everyone needs to wear two masks” to “maybe we should wear three masks.”

From “lockdown to preserve healthcare capacity” to “lockdown to slow/stop the spread” to “lockdown until we have a vaccine.”

All of these aforementioned restrictions and guidelines were abided by without resistance. Across the globe, citizens remained firmly trapped in perhaps the most self-destructive mass social psychosis in human history, convinced that a respiratory virus (that causes a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate) was responsible for their economic and societal devastation. The authoritarians did as they wished, without a hint of pushback. 

However, it seems we have finally reached one particular narrative that has been met with firm resistance.

People are rightfully outraged by another ongoing narrative shift attempt led by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, countless government health bureaucracies, and other leaders of the corona hysteria movement. We’re now being told that the vaccine is not in fact a ticket to normalcy. Instead, we’ve been told that even with the vaccine, people still need to wear a mask, social distance, and act as if fellow human beings are nothing more than mere vectors of disease.

They initially told us lockdowns would solve our COVID problem. They then told us masks would end the pandemic. Soon after, the “experts” went all in on the vaccine narrative. It seems that the new narrative is one of “forever COVID,” or a permanent safety regime that stresses prioritizing avoidance of a virus over anything else in life. Fauci and the gang is now demoting the vaccine’s status as no longer a way out, but just another tool to help you mitigate the threat posed by the "deadly virus.”

And many finally seem to be pushing back against the ruling class plan for a permanent COVID state.

Will the vaccine rug pull attempt awaken the masses to the reality that they’ve been conned for an entire year? That is too soon to tell, but we are finally seeing signs of widespread pushback against the latest demands from the ruling class. Many of us wished this hopeful revival of rational thought had occurred a full year ago, but it’s more important right now to build a coalition around restoring our rights and quashing the power grab, even if that coalition includes the same individuals and groups that were once on the side of the totalitarians.

Read more:

https://dossier.substack.com/p/signs-of-life-are-the-masses-awakening

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The Factory of Ignorance - Arte

Available from 02/16/2021 to 04/23/2021

How, from the ravages of tobacco to the denial of climate change, we use science to deny… science. A dizzying investigation into research and information black holes.

Why did it take decades to officially admit that tobacco was dangerous for your health? How can we explain that a large part of the population still believes that human activities have no impact on climate change? Are neonicotinoid pesticides really responsible for the excess mortality of bees?

Why has the recognition of bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor prompted only half-hearted bans? Through these "textbook cases" which, from laboratories to social networks, all result from battles planned with millions of dollars and euros, this investigation straddling Europe and the United States reveals the outlines a little-known offensive, yet launched in the 1950s, when research revealed that tobacco was a factor in cancer and cardiovascular accidents.

To counter a disturbing truth, because it could lead to increased regulation at the cost of heavy financial losses, the industry then secretly imagines a particular form of disinformation, which is becoming widespread today: to arouse, by financing, among other things, abundantly competing scientific studies, a thick cloud of doubt that feeds controversies and misleads public opinion.

Agnotology

This instrumentalization of science for deceptive purposes has generated a new discipline of research: agnotology, literally, the science of "producing ignorance." In addition to some of its recognized representatives, including the American historian of science Naomi Oreskes, this investigation gives voice to leading players in the fight between "good" and "bad" science, including the fascinating "discoverers" of misdeeds. bisphenol A.

It thus exposes the hidden mechanisms which contribute to delay, sometimes of several decades, of the vital decisions, like the rigging of the protocols, even the ad hoc manufacture of transgenic rats to guarantee the desired results. Finally, it explains, as closely as possible to research, why our so-called "information" societies adapt so well to collective inertia which, in doubt, favors business as usual and unbridled consumption.

Director: Franck Cuvelier, Pascal Vasselin - 2020

See more:

https://www.les-crises.fr/la-fabrique-de-l-ignorance-arte/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsk6w6aAJL0

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