The Market Ticker - Cancelled ®
What 'They' Don't Want Published
Login or register to improve your experience
Main Navigation
Sarah's Resources You Should See
Sarah's Blog
Full-Text Search & Archives
Leverage, the book
Legal Disclaimer

The content on this site is provided without any warranty, express or implied. All opinions expressed on this site are those of the author and may contain errors or omissions. For investment, legal or other professional advice specific to your situation contact a licensed professional in your jurisdiction.

NO MATERIAL HERE CONSTITUTES "INVESTMENT ADVICE" NOR IS IT A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL ANY FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO STOCKS, OPTIONS, BONDS OR FUTURES.

Actions you undertake as a consequence of any analysis, opinion or advertisement on this site are your sole responsibility; author(s) may have positions in any firm or security discussed here, and have no duty to disclose same.

Market charts, when present, used with permission of TD Ameritrade/ThinkOrSwim Inc. Neither TD Ameritrade or ThinkOrSwim have reviewed, approved or disapproved any content herein.

The Market Ticker content may be sent unmodified to lawmakers via print or electronic means or excerpted online for non-commercial purposes provided full attribution is given and the original article source is linked to. Please contact Karl Denninger for reprint permission in other media, to republish full articles, or for any commercial use (which includes any site where advertising is displayed.)

Submissions or tips on matters of economic or political interest may be sent "over the transom" to The Editor at any time. To be considered for publication your submission must be complete (NOT a "pitch"), include full and correct contact information and be related to an economic or political matter of the day. Pitch emails missing the above will be silently deleted. All submissions become the property of The Market Ticker.

Considering sending spam? Read this first.

2024-03-18 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Musings , 289 references
[Comments enabled]  
Category thumbnail

... the biggest criminal act ever perpetrated upon the American people, which led directly and indirectly to over one million deaths and still counting, by the way, originated.  The persons originating it knew they were lying; they have admitted that in fact they had zero objective evidence to support their position and were angling for time to manufacture said support.

I am talking about, of course, "Two weeks to slow the spread".

The damage done to our society here in the United States is literally worthy of the death penalty for every single person involved in it.  Four years on not one criminal charge has been laid by anyone making quite-clear that if there is to actually be accountability it will have to come through the individual actions of persons who are willing to take the person risk of prosecution (or worse.)  Our society has proved itself in the four years since of literally being full of simpering wimps without a single pair of balls between all of those who were either personally harmed or had a loved one harmed or killed.

The damage to children's education alone is worthy of mass-executions.  Sixty million children were irrevocably damaged in their educational process; each to some varying degree, but all to some extent.  None will ever "fully recover" from this and the economic impact of that damage will extend out for the next five or more decades.

Speaking of economic damage the federal budget was permanently increased by 47% immediately.  That Covid was a pure pretext to do this and it had nothing to do with a virus is proved by the fact that four years later that has not been retracted and in fact less than 7% of the FY2020 spending has been removed.  Here are the final spending figures through the end of Fiscal 2023:

FY 2019: $4.447 trillion
FY 2020: $6.552 trillion
FY 2021: $6.818 trillion
FY 2022: $6.272 trillion
FY 2023: $6.134 trillion

Five months into FY 2024 at present run rates we will spend $6.441 trillion.

This is a cumulative addition of roughly $10 trillion which is about 50% of one year's GDP and, big shock, accounts for roughly a 50% cumulative inflation rate which is about what people have experienced.  In some parts of expense profiles (e.g. housing) its even worse, being close to or in some cases more than a double.  Car and homeowners insurance, for example, is coming up with 20% increases in most areas of the country this year alone and some, such as Florida, are much worse.  Stealing $10 trillion which cannot be recovered is arguably responsible on a direct and indirect basis for additional mortality and morbidity hitting millions of Americans and, over the last four years, more deaths in total than the alleged 6 million slaughtered by the Nazis.

Now Biden wants a budget of more than seven trillion.

It is not, of course, just the Federal budget that has gone vertical.  Consumer debt has as well -- specifically credit cards -- has gone basically straight up since the middle of 2021.  This has occurred into rapidly increasing interest rates as well which of course means that the payment requirement for said debt has risen dramatically.

Whatever set of beliefs you have about the virus itself what is not in question is that the fiscal response and government profligacy was wildly unreasonable and covid was a mere pretext.  Whether you happen to be a Trump or Biden supporter the fact remains that both were and are happy to ruin both the nation's finances and those of every single citizen in an orgy of debt-fueled lies.

Who's going to stop this?

Certainly not our existing political class; there is no political opposition to this path of action nor its causes, including illegal immigration, exporting of jobs, crazed claims of "climate emergencies" and "sustainable energy" that produces nutjob-level cost spikes and the literal insanity of our so-called "health care" system which is better-characterized as nothing more than using fear to financially rape you straight into a hole 6' deep.

View this entry with comments (opens new window)
 

2024-03-16 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Podcasts , 176 references
[Comments enabled]  
Category thumbnail

Come and get it!

View this entry with comments (opens new window)
 

2024-03-15 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Foreign Policy , 287 references
[Comments enabled]  

Looking at who is screaming about the TikTok situation tells you much.

Let's take Elon Musk.  He thinks it sets a "dangerous" precedent.

What's his problem with it?  Well, I can think of a few.  "X" is full of "ads" from companies that appear to be drop-shipping things you can get on Alibaba -- a Chinese Amazon, if you will.  What if the retaliation for this is they pull the ads?  Or worse, what if they ban Tesla sales or battery and component production for Tesla?  China could, you know -- its not like they don't have their own EV manufacturers....

How about Congress?  Who's actually getting buttered by Xi?  Why does Thomas Massie have a problem with this?

Let me be clear: The bill is extremely explicit on the gating factors required to be deemed dangerous.  A requirement -- not one of many in an "or" fashion, but a requirement that must be met -- is that 20% or more control must be in one a set of nations listed under Title 10 that are barred from defense-related purchases and sales.  Those nations are Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

To add another nation you'd have to add them to Title 10.  If another nation deserves to be added to Title 10, so be it, but that's the gating factor and adding them also adds them to being barred from a wide variety of defense and dual-use related purchases and sales.

Can the President override this?  No.  Not only must that gating requirement be met but in addition the listing of such a firm and its product(s) are subject to judicial review; this does not enable pure executive action, and beyond ownership of firms controlled or domiciled in those four nations you can't go after an app, web or otherwise, at all.

Those arguing this is like the "Patriot Act" are lying.  The Patriot Act was one was chock full of loopholes, such as "second and third association" games and thus could be used against Americans.  This bill has explicit prohibitions against any attempt to extend its punitive measures beyond the firm(s) involved in the actual issue which all must be domiciled in a nation listed as "antagonists" under a separate defense-related law.

Would it bar a US firm from providing services to such a deemed violator?  Yes; ByteDance cannot get around the constraint by buying Internet services from a US domiciled company.  That's good, not bad.

We should be divesting far more from China, not just blocking a service.  But let's cut the crap -- this company is directly targeting influence at minors.  It is abusing First Amendment rights that exist only on US soil through and to US persons; no person or US company gets the same rights in China!  China routinely demands censorship of US firms operating there, including information providers and even movie studios in order to distribute things to their population.

Ask yourself why all the so-called "TikTok" challenges to do stupid things like eat Tide Pods aren't on Facebook?  Probably because Facebook knows damn well that if such a thing started happening on a routine basis Congress would come after them -- potentially including revoking Section 230, especially when said kids start getting seriously injured or killed.

Never mind the data mining.  There's plenty of that sort of abusive crap that goes on right here in America.  Just because we refuse to hold people accountable for that crap here doesn't mean we should sponsor and allow children to be exploited across national borders.

China is an adversary, and a dangerous one.  We damn well ought to revoke MFN status and hit them with wage, environmental parity and currency parity tariffs (so they cannot play debt-based games to evade the other two) such that it makes no sense to try to arbitrage labor and environmental damage for US concerns.  Of course everyone who currently is abusing Americans via that, and who donate heavily to political campaigns, would scream -- but we must do it before China decides to do it the other way and we find ourselves in a situation where they choose to take some territory and we have no choice but to let them.

If we do not cut this crap out that day is coming and when it arrives it will be ruinously bad for the US.

Yes, it would be very challenging for us to do it now -- but now beats tomorrow, and thus we should do it right here, right now, and today.

View this entry with comments (opens new window)
 

2024-03-14 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Corruption , 227 references
[Comments enabled]  
Category thumbnail

This sounds "hard" to fix....

Last year, the British photographer spent a month in the capital Hanoi documenting some of the shadowy enterprises that help clients artificially boost online traffic and social media engagement in the hope of manipulating algorithms and user perceptions. The resulting images, which feature in his new book “Beggar’s Honey,” provide rare insight into the workshops that hire low-paid workers to cultivate likes, comments and shares for businesses and individuals globally.

The problem isn't people who want more likes; nobody is going to pay a click farm like this just to stroke their own ego.

No, this "industry" exists for two reasons: To manufacture consent, that is, apparent agreement with a position, and equally pernicious to defraud advertisers for the benefit of the site operators.

Clearly an "ad" shown against content that has been "boosted" in this way, which has to be viewed to be boosted, is an impression paid for under false pretense.  The dude in Vietnam or wherever that is running the equivalent of 100, 1,000 or 10,000 "users" through these mechanisms is never going to buy anything that is advertised and thus the entire metric of "targeting advertising" is turned on its ear.  As noted in the article this sort of "boosting" is also wildly effective.

The bottom line in both cases is that the content isn't "inauthentic" -- it is that the amount of interaction and approval it receives is fraudulent, and this both induces people to act in and agreement with it in broader society but it also directly screws advertisers and makes the site owners huge amounts of money.

In other words both the sites and advertisers are in fact operating directly adverse to your interest as an authentic human being and worse, while they're doing it you are getting fucked in that you're led to believe that something which is not true actually is, even if the "truth" being falsely promoted is that lots of other people "like" or "believe" said content.

Humans are herd animals and while we can resist such influences there's a subconscious level to this that is almost-impossible to entirely remove from our human experience when it is present.

I will note for the record that it is not hard for a platform to figure out this is happening and stop it.  In other words they're not being duped, they're willing, able and direct accessories after the fact to these deceptions -- all of them.

How do I know this?

Because this blog, right here, has (like most) a comment section and it is defensively coded to detect and block such attempts automatically, without any human (mine) interaction.  It does not "get it wrong" because it is not hard to figure out that its happening with extremely high degrees of certainty and when it detects this it banhammers the accounts or origins involved.

If I could figure out how to correlate and block this fifteen years ago so could any of these sites if they wanted to.

They don't, and while the financial reason to not do so (e.g. "clicks" or "ad impressions" they get paid for) is obvious what's less-obvious is that this also suits those who would "shape opinion" via outright falsehoods as to acceptance among the population is part and parcel of "social media's" true purpose, whether their annual reports and public statements claim so or not.

This sort of concentrated power to bend minds, which inevitably results in actions following the mind being bent, is outrageously dangerous, particularly when the particulars of that which is amplified in this fashion and that which is suppressed is not fairly, openly and prominently disclosed.

The question thus becomes "what do we do about it?"

View this entry with comments (opens new window)
 

2024-03-13 08:18 by Karl Denninger
in Foreign Policy , 380 references
[Comments enabled]  

It's not, of course, but is called that.

Here's the text by the way.

To protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications, such as TikTok and any successor application or service and any other application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Ltd. or an entity under the control of ByteDance Ltd.

Note the common thing that is missing: "and for other purposes."

That's because its not.

This bill applies:

(2) APPLICABILITY.—Subsection (a) shall apply—

(A) in the case of an application that satisfies the definition of a foreign adversary controlled application pursuant to subsection (g)(3)(A), beginning on the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act; and
(B) in the case of an application that satisfies the definition of a foreign adversary controlled application pursuant to subsection (g)(3)(B), beginning on the date that is 180 days after the date of the relevant determination of the President under such subsection.

For those who say it can be "broadened under interpretation" no, it cannot:

(f) Rule Of Construction.—Nothing in this Act may be construed—

(1) to authorize the Attorney General to pursue enforcement, under this section, other than enforcement of subsection (a) or (b);
(2) to authorize the Attorney General to pursue enforcement, under this section, against an individual user of a foreign adversary controlled application; or
(3) except as expressly provided herein, to alter or affect any other authority provided by or established under another provision of Federal law.

And for those who claim this could potentially be used against, say, a firm in Britain, no, once again, that is a lie:

(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—

(A) any of—

(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;


(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—

(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
(4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term “foreign adversary country” means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.

Title 10 4872 lists said nations and refers specifically to barring defense products from them; said nations are North Korea, China, Russia and Iran.  Period.

So why is Elon Musk and so others, including people like Massie, simping around and lying about this Bill and what it will do?

I don't know, but it is a reasonable assumption everyone speaking against this is sucking Communist Xi's DICK and if they are running a firm perhaps they themselves are, covertly, controlled by China, Russia, North Korea or Iran.

Why else would any of them think this bill is a bad thing eh?

View this entry with comments (opens new window)