The Democrats who think they rule the world are having a bad week. Their control over what is happening in the financial markets is evaporating. They need a war to distract the public from the incredible mess they have made of the economy. From my perspective this mess appears to be deliberate. They are trying to collapse the economy so that people will be dependent on the government.
The problem right now is the mid-term elections. Things are going into the toilet faster than they anticipated. The last thing that the administration and congressional Democrats running for re-election want right now is a big rise in gasoline prices just as voters head to the polls. And that is what OPEC has just made inevitable, with its announcement. Production will be cut by 2 million barrels a day. This will “protect” OPEC’s prices. At the same time, it will undoubtedly lead to significant increases in the cost of energy around the world.
In arriving at this cut, the Saudis rebuffed pleas from the Biden administration to maintain the status quo. Are the Saudis signaling Biden is a dangerous moron and they prefer the stability of a strong US leader that isn’t a warmonger?
The people handling Biden probably thought that the draining of our strategic petroleum reserve to shore up fossil fuel supplies would win the day for them. The fact that these reserves were supposed to exist for an emergency like war does not matter to them. Their only interest was in how much power the use of such reserves would give them. The reserves are dangerously low.
A turnover of congressional power will make it more difficult to coerce people into being obedient and compliant to whatever the elite want. This is particularly true if a significant number of MAGA Republicans are elected.
On the economic front, more bad news surfaced. The non-recession recession showed its colors again.
(Wall Street Journal) […] Trans-Pacific shipping rates have plummeted roughly 75% from year-ago levels. The transportation industry is grappling with weaker demand as big retailers cancel orders with vendors and step up efforts to cut inventories. FedEx Corp. recently said it would cancel flights and park cargo planes because of a sharp drop in shipping volumes. On Thursday, Nike Inc. said it was sitting on 65% more inventory in North America than a year earlier and would resort to markdowns.
[…] One response to the melting demand has been to reduce sailing trips. In September, container capacity offered by ship operators in the Pacific was down 13%, dropping the equivalent of 21 ships that can each move 8,000 containers in a single voyage, from a year earlier, according to shipping-data providers Xeneta and Sea-Intelligence.
For the two weeks starting Oct. 3, a total of about 40 scheduled sailings to the U.S. West Coast from Asia and 21 sailings to the East Coast from Asia have been scrapped, according to the data companies as well as customer advisories viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Typically at this time of year, an average of two to four sailings a week are blanked, the industry’s term for canceled sailings.
[…] “In the first week of October, one-third of previously announced capacity will be blanked and for the second week, it will be around half,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta. “The downturn pace in recent weeks has been very fast and it looks like carriers misread the low volumes of a nonexistent peak season.”
Layoffs are going to be coming in droves soon. This will occur during the last quarter flowing into the first quarter next year. This is all a direct result of the intentional destruction of the economy here and in Europe. The Great Reset needs this if the government is going to take over all aspects of economic life.
JP Morgan continues to pretend that a recession may happen in the near future. This ignores the reality that everyday Americans are facing now.
This news about the economic catastrophe that is about to beset us needs to be spread far and wide. The Democrats need to be out of power for a very long time if we are going to right the ship.