Monthly Archives: August 2024

It Needn’t, Though

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The Wall Street Journal headline makes a prediction, and the subheadline adds to it:

Market Selloff Upends Fed Rate-Cut Calculus
A further slowdown in the labor market could lead to a larger half-point rate cut next month

It needn’t, though, and if Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his Board of Governors make such a move, they’ll be ignoring history.

Inflation is right next door to the Fed’s goal of 2%\yr; the delta between today’s inflation and that target is in the region of noise around the signal.

The stock market is down a bit, even if sharply: for all the steepness of the drop over the last few days, it’s still only down 6-ish percent, not even a correction level.  The market also is irrelevant.

Historically—and history did not begin with the dot com bubble burst—Fed benchmark interest rates that have been consistent with 2% inflation have been in the 5% region. That’s where the Fed is now, and that’s where our economy’s inflation is now.

But wait—unemployment has risen to 4.3%. I say, so what. That level, and the increase over the prior month and especially the past year, plus, certainly bear watching. However, the increase is off historic lows for unemployment, and the present level remains consistent with full employment, which is another of the Fed’s statutory goals.

It’s time for the Fed—for Powell and his BoG members—to say so on both matters, and to say they’re now going to sit down, be quiet, and let market forces—this time, meaning private economy forces—do their trick unfettered by artificially, and arbitrarily, set government-managed interest rates. Who wins then? Our private economy, with both stable pricing and stable business cost of money—interest rates.

Other major winners would include the stereotypical widows and orphans, and old folks, and anyone else who depends in significant part on fixed income, which is to say interest-driven, instruments.

I repeat myself, but this bears repeating.

Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Begging Iran

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The subheadline tells the tale:

Biden administration mounts last-ditch appeal to Tehran, while also pushing to keep cease-fire talks alive

And this from Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock with a very simple message: all parties must refrain from escalation. It’s also critical that we break this cycle by reaching a cease-fire in Gaza.

And this from a carefully unidentified US official:

We’re preparing to defend Israel in an April-like manner[.]

This timidity by our government is only leading to continued deaths of Israeli citizens at the hands of Iran and its terrorist surrogates, and the continued deaths of those Palestinians about whom the Biden-Harris administration pretends so shrilly to be worried, as Iran’s terrorist surrogate Hamas continues to hold Palestinians as shields.

Equating Israel’s struggle to defend itself in a war for its survival against its terrorist attackers with those terrorist attackers is disgustingly, deeply immoral. Defending Israel in an April-like manner, wherein American forces, along with Jordanian and British forces, shot down an important number of the 300+ missiles, rockets, and cruise missiles Iran fired at Israel that April, was sufficiently inadequate that Israel finds itself in a similar strait today.

Purely defensive efforts are wholly inadequate.  Without further second-guessing the Biden-Harris effort last April, what will be necessary today are Rules Two and Three. The US must destroy Hezbollah and Houthi launching facilities, whether or not they’re preparing to launch, along with those terrorists’ missile and rocket storage sites and their ammunition and fuel dumps. The US must go further: our forces must sink the Iranian navy afloat and destroy Iran’s air defense sites and its launch facilities and associated missile and rocket storage sites.

That will leave Israel free to deal with the close-in threats: those rockets, missiles, and cruise missiles that do get through to range of Israel’s defenses, and to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist forces.

In the meantime, though, Hezbollah is firing rockets into northern Israel, killing tens of Israeli men, women, and children, all with no response from the US.

Israel is a critical ally of ours. Either we are a critical ally of Israel, or we are not. The Biden-Harris administration’s activities are not encouraging.

Here’s a Thought

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I do get them on occasion.  The Five Eyes Alliance, consisting of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have issued a report delineating the utter dependence of those nations (and the Western world at large, I add) on the People’s Republic of China for supplies of rare earth elements, elements that are Critical Items in producing a nation’s modern weapons and that are Critic Items in national economies dependent on computers, communications, and infrastructure distribution nodes. That report, DECREASING RARE EARTHS DEPENDENCY: HOW THE FIVE EYES ALLIANCE CAN MINIMISE RARE EARTHS TRADING RISK WITH CHINA (all caps in the original) can be read here.

The report recommended diversify[ing] away from China for the importing of rare earth elements (REEs). The authors proposed this be achieved through “two key policies:”

  • broadening the scope of the Five Eyes Alliance to include increased trade and cooperation on REEs and REEs-dependent goods and services
  • actively seeking alternative sources, whether through new import sources or substitutes for REEs

My thought concerns that last. The Five Eyes, along with the nations rimming the South China Sea, particularly Viet Nam, the Philippines, and the Republic of China, also along with the Republic of Korea and Japan—all of which are even more dependent on rare earth acquisition—should begin actively mining the South China Sea floor, which is rich with rare earth nodules just lying around on the surface of the floor. In support of those mining operations, the Five Eyes’ navies should be prepared to sink PLAN shipping that attempts to interfere with this mining of the sea floor underlying these international waters. If those additional interested nations choose not to participate, the Five Eyes should proceed anyway.

That might seem more confrontational than heretofore, but that’s what we need instead of backpedaling all the time or constantly seeking to accommodate the PRC.

Kamala Harris and a Smattering of History

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proud of her record as California’s Attorney General. Here’s an example from that proud record of hers, against the backdrop of the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s lawfare campaign against their political opponent, former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As AG, Harris demanded nonprofits in her jurisdiction hand over their federal IRS Forms 990 Schedule B so she could pretend to be investigating self-dealing and improper loans involving those organizations and their donors. Her office then promptly “leaked” 2,000 Conservative cause-supporting organizations’ Schedules B to the public via Harris’ Attorney General Web site. Those organizations and their donors then began receiving threats of retaliation and death threats.

It won’t matter that the Supreme Court blew up her California AG case in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v Bonta. She’s already shown her disdain of the Court and complete disregard for its rulings; her demand for those Schedules B (much less her release of so many submittals) was in complete disregard of a much earlier, already long-standing Supreme Court NAACP v Alabama ruling which had held that similar demands violated the 1st Amendment’s right freely to associate as a critical aspect of the Amendment’s explicit Free Speech Clause.

Harris will continue Party’s lawfare campaigns against those of whom Party elite personally disapprove. This is the empirical practice and view of “law” that the highly experienced, and proud of that experience, Harris will bring to her administration, including the Department of Justice that she will build during her term.

That’s if we average Americans are foolish enough to elect her.