This Is Why The US...

 ... is in deep trouble. People posted here hilarious rankings by Ray Dalio (whose actual degree from Harvard is obscured). 

I want to stress here, that if we discount a hard copium and butt-hurt behind this sheer delirium, it exposes the main problem--Dalio has no clue what he is talking about, as do most people at Wall Street and US financial industry, namely the products of the US Ivy League degree mills for "economists" and other useless humanities credentialed morons. These are precisely the types who, apart from lobbies such as AIPAC, buy US Congress and influence US foreign and domestic policies. 

I have no reasons to like Heritage Foundation--these are themselves a bunch of ideologues and BSers--but the state of the US education, as is the case with economy, is a complete collapse in progress. 

And here they are certainly correct. Especially when it comes down to educational backgrounds required for running actual economies and states well. Needless to say--most of those backgrounds are in the STEM, natural science and medical fields, and those are hard. Very hard. Stand alone here is the issue of geopolitical analysis (real one, not BS such as Dalio's "rankings") which REQUIRES military-intelligence backgrounds, especially so for the 21st century, and, even more so, for the technological paradigm of the 21st century warfare. If not, we have Russia barely topping Singapore in "strength", while the US with its exemplary dismal war record being number one. Hey, what do I know, I don't run hedge funds. Somebody somehow also loved Bernie Madoff's returns. We know how it all ended. Dalio should think really hard what he is going to do when the whole bubble bursts and it is about to. 

When I Hear (Read) Term "Analyst".

Especially in the context of fraudulent Western "economics", my hand automatically reaches for a gun, so to speak. As I said it many times, financial "analyst" occupation should be one of the first to disappear as a viable occupation. It is down right fascinating when all those "analysts" (such as from Bloomberg, among others) begin to discover reality which was around for a while. 

(Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has the U.S. Treasury Department to thank for helping his country prepare for a global economic crisis. A steady deluge of economic sanctions and the constant threat of more to come has pushed Russia’s authorities to boost reserves and strip back debt over the past five years. As governments across the globe prepare for what’s set to be the worst economic slump since 2008, the fortress approach that had been pushing Russia’s economy into stagnation is starting to look like good foresight. S&P Global Ratings maintained Russia’s credit rating at BBB- with a stable outlook on Thursday, even as it downgraded a raft of emerging markets due to a plunge in commodity prices. “Previous crises have taught Russia’s Finance Ministry and central bank how to prepare for this one,” said Karen Vartapetov, an analyst at S&P Global Ratings. “They have a lot of crisis experience.”

The title of the article itself, Putin’s Economic Isolation Suddenly Doesn’t Look So Bad, should be changed to "Duh!" It is obvious that all those fraudulent credit ratings are absolutely meaningless because they cannot account for the most important principle which economic activity of any modern large country is based upon: "a  belief that a nation should be generally self-supporting…" Obviously, for globalist girls and boys "educated" in the pseudo-economic white-board theories detached from real life, the whole notion that real national interests may, and often do, come into contradiction with profit or bottom line is inconceivable. They are simply not taught like this, in fact, most of them have no clue what nation is, how it forms and how it operates. Nor, most of them, understand what REAL economic growth, not some books' cooking, is. How can they--most of them never work a day in a productive sphere and do not understand even basic principles of industrial operations and management which require a combination of meta competencies which are not taught in MBA programs. You remember Mishustin's excellent observation recently, do you?

That is why for many in the West facts like this come as "sudden" and, often, shocking:  

One of Russia’s responses to sanctions in 2014 was to place restrictions on imports of certain foodstuffs from the U.S. and Europe. While the measure led to a sharp rise in domestic prices, it also increased farm production, leaving Russia more resilient to distruptions in global trade. “Russia is well prepared for this very new phase of closed borders and closure of international trade and financial processes,” said Sofya Donets, a Moscow-based economist at Renaissance Capital. “It has abundant state buffers and a higher share of local products than it had previously for many consumer goods.”

Yeah, what a concept--to be self-supporting. And then, of course, what is known today (wrongly, I may add) as geopolitics begins to factor in and this geopolitical thingy is altogether beyond the grasp of most Western "analysts" who are taught to think within only one framework, Wall Street framework that is. In this sense, Covid-19 pandemic does all of us a very good service--it exposes a complete incompetence of the globalist financial, managerial, military, academic and other institutions and the so called "elites". No really, would anyone entrust your lawn to be mowed by Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron? Being a night-guard at some storage facility? Well, even that requires some skills. Peter Van Buren decries the change which already came:

Only two weeks ago, I had an hourly paid, part-time job. That made me a lot like the 60 percent of the American workforce who are also hourly employees, not to mention independent contractors, adjuncts, and the massive undocumented labor force behind our farms, hotels, and restaurants. The government ordered us to stop working and we did. Nobody is entirely sure if they can just do that, but they did. Now we wait like baby birds for that same government to drop checks into our mouths. Overnight we went from workers to dependent on handouts. The balance of power between Americans and their government just changed dramatically.

Van Buren may decry it whatever he wants and he may criticize Orwell for not giving us a detailed account of how 1984's society of IngSoc sprung into existence, but the question he is supposed to be asking is this: why it took a completely rigged and wasteful economic system to last this long? The question is really simple and the one which most in American "elites" dread to answer publicly-- World War Two and the extended lease on life this War gave the system which was able to recover primarily by US government's interference in the systemic decline stock exchange was generating since 1929. Going to war was also a government decision. As for balance of power between "Americans and their government", it should be clearly stated that now "government" is the ONLY institution which holds this country from disintegrating completely, even if "shifting" this balance, which was inevitable and was ongoing in a less dramatic form anyway before Covid-19 struck. Could then, as Van Buren worries, US society degenerate into some version of Orwell's dystopia--well, it already did to a degree by denying, thorough its utterly corrupt media, political class and Wall Street simple truths about reality. Russiagate damaged what's left of the Republic in a much more profound and lasting way than any government check could ever do. Economically, the Unites States is bankrupt and is facing reality no "analyst" could have predicted.

The Fed announced Tuesday morning that it would be establishing a repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities (FIMA) that have accounts at the central bank’s New York branch. Through the FIMA repo facility, other central banks and monetary authorities unable to make smooth trades in the open market will be able to temporarily liquidate their positions in Treasuries. “Stabilizing foreign dollar markets, in turn, will support foreign economic conditions and thereby benefit the U.S. economy through many channels, including confidence and trade,” the Fed said in a statement.

In other words, putting it bluntly, Fed will be buying back its paper junk nobody in the world wants. I like the term "temporarily", but as we know, hope dies last.