1/ The media isn’t reporting it but the Biden administration appears to be going into full Hitler-in-the-bunker mode and trying to destroy global energy markets to crush the EU economy and lower American living standards through more inflation to hurt Trump. 🧵
2/ It started with a new sanctions package quietly rolled out on Nov 21st a few weeks after the election. Most didn’t pay attention as the Russian sanctions have been seen as redundant by smart people for over a year now.
3/ But these sanctions were different. They used sanctions on Gazprombank - which the EU buys gas through - to try to interfere with EU energy supplies.
4/ After over 2 years of failed sanctions Russia is still the EU’s 2nd largest gas provider. We now know that there is simply no choice for Europe. They tried everything.
5/ In response to the new sanctions, the Russians have tried to accommodate by making the financial system more flexible. But at this stage short-term disruptions seem inevitable.
6/ This week German electricity prices went up higher than they were even at the peak of the post-war increase.
7/ Germany is already deindustrialising. It cannot take more pain. The US surely knows Russia will shrug this off. We can only conclude the Biden administration is trying to damage Europe.
8/ But the feral Biden administration isn’t content with just hitting their “allies”. Now they’re aiming to disrupt global oil markets. We can only assume this is to hurt US consumers and generate inflation for Trump to deal with.
9/ The plan is to sanction tankers carrying Russian oil. As Bloomberg states, the Biden administration avoided this in the past because of the damage it would do to the US economy.
10/ Will it work? We don’t know. But oil markets are paying attention and prices are rising.
11/ Biden himself has become a deeply cynical and sinister figure having discredited himself even within his own party by pardoning his own son.
12/ It is truly scary to have such an unscrupulous and seemingly confused person wield such power over the world with no political constraints. In his orgy of economic destruction Biden is only undermining the credibility of the office that he holds.
END/
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1/ 🚨☢️ The reality of the Iran War is that there are zero victory conditions for the United States. Given the new timelines being released by the Pentagon, if the US could “win” the war it would merely result in Washington DC being attacked with nuclear weapons. 🧵
2/ At the beginning of the war Iran did not have nuclear weapons. The time horizon for a win ranged from one day to two weeks. In this time horizon America could have, in theory, achieved a victory without annihilation.
3/ Iran is a nuclear threshold state. They have done this strategically. They wanted to adhere to agreements not to go nuclear while keeping the option to go nuclear in their back pocket in case of emergency. What is happening now is the emergency.
🚨‼️@Szazadveg has run an enormous “politically incorrect” EU-wide poll across 30 countries. The results are damning. Europeans are sick of war. They have lost confidence in Brussels. And they increasingly want to elect more nationalist parties. Brussels won’t show you this!🧵
2/ Majority support for sending arms is no longer present in Europe. People realise now that the war is not winnable and that sending weapons just results in more killing.
2/ 69% of Europeans are against sending their own troops to Ukraine. The only country with a majority in favour of sending troops is Sweden.
1/ On the @MultipolarPod Substack I have just posted the definitive analysis of how the USD has now entered its terminal phase of decline as the hegemonic currency. Here is a brief thread summarising, but if you're interested read the entire post.
CC @Brad_Setser.
2/ The domestic situation with USD is already bad. Larry Summers and his co-authors showed that measured properly as a cost-of-living jolt, inflation peaked above 18%, not the 9% of the official CPI.
3/ Using these numbers we see that real wages in the US have fallen around 15%. Living standards in America have already fallen dramatically.
1/ There is now strong reason to think that British people are starting to aggressively curtail their own reproduction. At the same time the government is increasing immigration to prevent the country from bankruptcy. Britain is in a phase of self-euthanisation. 🧵
2/ The abortion and birth data tell the story. Since 2022 overall conceptions are roughly the same as in previous years but the British people are opting for abortions. There is a massive reluctance to carry the babies to term.
3/ The 2022 data is official, but the 2023 and 2024 is based on bottom up estimates from Percuity. The data seems robust to me. But so long as the 2022 jump remains, as it has in Scottish data, the self-euthanisation interpretation holds.
☢️🚨☢️ 1/ Russia announced the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile is now active. The world is now one conventional strike on Russia away from nuclear war. Burevestnik’s deployment is part of a new defensive posture by Russia that seems misunderstood in the West. 🧵
2/ The key to understanding the novelty is twofold. First, its power source: a nuclear-powered ramjet engine. The mini nuclear reactor produces enormous amounts of heat. This heats the air and propels the missile.
3/ Because it’s powered by a mini nuclear reactor, just like a nuclear-powered submarine the engine can run indefinitely. This means that the Burevestnik can fly indefinitely.
1/ Central bank independence is probably coming to an end. In the short-term, this is due to radical and somewhat political moves made by the Trump administration. But in the long-term it is a failure of the ideas that were used to justify independence in the first place. 🧵
2/ Central bank independence is a technocratic competency that came out of the new model of "stakeholder democracy" especially associated with Clintonism and Blairism. Basically this is a euphemism for "rule by experts".
3/ More specifically central bank independence became popular because policymakers became convinced that central banks had used technocratic wizardry to solve the inflationary problems of the 1970s and early-1980s.