A year later — the conspiracy theoris ts’ track record shines brightly

Friday, 9 December 2022 — Albert Park

[7 min read]

Dear Reader,

What a difference a year makes!

It was around this time last year when I decided to pen this rather controversial article. I wrote certain things that hadn’t yet happened, expecting it to progress in some form this year.

While I didn’t get it all correct, we did see several major developments.

Don’t look for dictators overseas, they’re here!

The uprising against governments beholden to public health bureaucracy and climate change activism escalated to a new level with the Canadian truckers’ protests, Dutch farmers’ protests, and even in China where people took to the streets against draconian lockdowns.

The scale of these protests was met with even more astounding responses from the governments, who’ve cast aside any pretences of democracy.

Think about how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered bank account closures. And Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte allowed the police to overturn tractors and use violence to quell the unrest.

While many would say they’re happy they don’t live in an authoritarian State that uses arbitrary measures to suppress dissent, they didn’t realise their governments have quietly transformed into these very beasts!

Now, why would a duly elected government seek to treat their citizens as if they’re enemies?

Perhaps because the governments aren’t legitimately elected!

When elections are rigged…

Merely mentioning this topic could cause heated arguments.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last three years, you’d have your own opinion about whether rigged elections only exist in a banana republic or a totalitarian regime such as North Korea.

Maybe Russia too (the most popular whipping boy of the Western mainstream media).

But the US? Australia? Western European nations?

Get out of here!

By the end of 2021, most Americans believed their elections weren’t immune to fraud. Even a minority of Democrats believed it (they sure thought 2016 was tainted by Russia!).

This year saw more people leaning towards suspecting their own elections may be fraudulent and not without cause.

Let me talk about the French election in April, where incumbent President Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine le Pen. And in the Brazilian election in October, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro lost narrowly to his challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In both cases, there were accusations of manipulated vote counts on live TV broadcasts.

The response in Brazil was more dramatic. Millions of supporters of President Bolsonaro marched for weeks in the streets, with many demanding the Brazilian military intervene. The Brazilian military has intervened with a preliminary audit, releasing a report expressing concern about the reliability of the machines used to count the votes.

And what about the US midterm election? Was it the safest and most secure election, like in 2020?

According to the Democrats, it must’ve been. Biden managed to fend off the ‘red wave’ that was supposed to see the Republicans thump back to power by controlling a strong majority in both the House and Senate. The Republicans, based at least on what we see now, have managed only to clinch a small House majority but failed to take the Senate.

There are several points of contention about whether this election was a smooth and fair process.

There are states like Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Washington taking days to count votes.

Then there are county election officials who were unable to confirm when they’d finish counting their votes while downplaying concerns from citizens airing grievances, including thousands who claimed they couldn’t cast their vote due to inadequate facilities.

And how about a secretary of state running her own state’s election where she’s standing as governor issuing threats of arrest to county officials who have expressed hesitation over the legitimacy of the process?

I could go on for ages about this, but you get the idea.

The notion that questioning the legitimacy of elections makes you a dreaded ‘election denier’ who threatens democracy is as silly as any ad hominem attacks such as ‘science denier’, ‘conspiracy theorist’, or ‘flat-Earther’ employed by The Establishment and their mouthpieces.

And when authorities aren’t actually true representatives of the citizens, you can expect full well their policies won’t serve them either. Just look at how many countries are having to cope with higher inflation, energy shortages, skyrocketing living costs, and more taxes.

They serve their paymasters (the World Economic Forum, central banks, large corporations, and academia) who aren’t even hiding themselves anymore.

They’re even speaking at global summits where leaders of the biggest economies gather.

Twitter turns the tide

Understandably, there’s a lot of despair among us as to when this insanity will stop. Is it possible to turn the tables against this encroaching global dictatorship?

Well, there’s some hope yet.

When Elon Musk stealthily bought a significant stake in Twitter and soon after declared he was making a takeover bid for the company, this marked the turning point in the struggle to stave off the globalist’s march.

How is one company able to do so much?

It’s because we live in a world with a fifth-generation information war raging. It’s a war to win over minds, which is more powerful than tanks, missiles, and boots on the ground.

Since taking over the company in late October, several explosive revelations have surfaced to show how the Establishment plays this game. Through the collusion of government officials, unelected bureaucracies, corporations, and academic institutions, with the media playing a part in propagating ideas en masse, it creates the illusion to the public that their agenda is the most popular.

The most recent bombshell shows how Twitter executives worked with the FBI to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the US 2020 election.

The bombshell, explosive as it ought to be, is dwarfed by the exposure of the massive groupthink of mainstream media upon this revelation.

Elon Musk handed the honour of dropping the bombshell to Rolling Stones journalist Matt Taibbi. The backlash against Taibbi was vicious, as you can see here.

Journalism, for what it was once worth, is dead. Revealing the truth is acceptable only if it fits the narrative of who rules over and pays you.

The Fat Tail difference

While I can cheekily claim that I saw certain things happen before they did, my track record is hardly something to run victory laps around.

But in a world like this, I see the importance of news reporters and market commentators with strong work ethic and are brave enough to speak the inconvenient truth. Even if it doesn’t win any favours.

This is why Fat Tail Investment Research is a place you can go.

Our livelihood is from your support, not corporate or government interests. They don’t pay us anything, nor do we ask anything of them.

That’s why you’ll hear untainted views and analyses.

Now it doesn’t mean we get it right all the time.

But look to us if you’re looking for a more in-depth analysis of events that run the world and find solutions to help you get ahead or stay above water.

One service that I’m part of is Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence Australia. Here, you’ll get to see major events and their implications from internationally renowned strategist and economist Jim Rickards.

We also offer portfolio solutions to invest in response and anticipation of what’s to come.

As the Establishment media roars under a mountain of lies they built, we’re positioning ourselves for the future.

I invite you to be part of this today.

God bless,

Brian Chu,
Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

Dear Reader,

It looks like the post-Thanksgiving shopping binge was not nearly as successful as hoped. Here’s The Wall Street Journal:

‘Sales at bricks-and-mortar stores over Thanksgiving weekend fell short of prepandemic levels and were behind last year’s totals, another sign that Black Friday is losing its status as the crucial kickoff to the holiday-shopping season.

‘It used to be people would wait in line from midnight for the stores to open at 4 or 5 a.m…’

What happened?

Hot off the press is a report from the UN’s International Labor Organisation. It tells us that for the first time this century, workers of the world are getting poorer:

‘This year’s ILO Global Wage Report… shows that, for the first time this century, global real wage growth has become negative while real productivity has continued to grow. Indeed, 2022 shows the largest gap recorded since 1999 between real labour productivity growth and real wage growth in high income countries. While the erosion of real wages affects all wage earners, it is having a greater impact on low-income households which spend a higher proportion of their disposable incomes on essential goods and services, the prices of which are increasing faster than those for non-essential items in most countries.’

Blood on Main Street

One of the themes we’ve been following is the ‘middle class massacre’. Yes, everyone knows that the middle class gets scalped in an inflationary period. It spends most of its money on consumer items; as prices go up, it loses purchasing power.

Inflation also destroys the value of its time. The middle class sells its time to earn a living. Typically, as inflation rates go up, real wages go down. Countries with high inflation rates — Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey — are usually poor, with a middle class that is getting poorer. Countries with low inflation rates, on the other hand — such as Switzerland — have prosperous middle classes.

Back in the summer, we reported the US was suffering the biggest wage losses in 20 years — with working class incomes down 2.8% (annually) between March and May of this year. To get that number, you had to subtract the CPI (inflation) from the nominal wage increases.

Simple maths was apparently too much for most reporters. As of last week, they were declaring that wage-earners were seeing ‘strong gains’ of 5.1%. This was nonsense. But you had to subtract today’s 7.7% inflation rate to see what was really going on. Then, it was clear that the labour market was weak, not strong. The working stiffs were still losing ground at the rate of about 260 basis points (2.6%) per year. In October, for the 20th month in a row, the middle class got poorer.

Tapped out

And now, while middle class shoppers run out of money, the whole economy runs out of fuel. From CNBC:

‘Americans are spending 10% more than they did a year ago due to inflation and rising interest rates, [JP Morgan CEO, Jamie] Dimon said, and they’re tapping into their savings to do so.

‘The personal savings rate—which measures consumers’ savings as a percentage of their disposable income—fell to just 2.3% in October, well below the over 9% figure seen before the pandemic.

‘“Inflation is eroding everything,” Dimon told CNBC. “[T]hat trillion and a half dollars will run out sometime mid-year next year.”’

Whom does recession affect most severely? The middle class of course. They lose jobs and incomes…while the value of their main capital assets — their homes — falls. Stagflation, too, is deadly to the middle class. They lose income — while their costs of living keep going up.

But if inflation/recession/stagflation are harmful to lumpen consumers, few dare to wonder why they are so common? After all, the middle class is where ‘the people’ are. And if the feds wanted to do what was best for the majority of the nation, they would stop inflation immediately.

But inflation continues.

There’s no mystery to controlling inflation. You just have to stop spending money you don’t have…stop lending out money at interest rates below inflation…and stop ‘printing’ up extra money to cover the holes in your budget.

Instead, most governments continue to spend and print. Inflation is on the rise almost everywhere. And for the first time in modern history, much of the entire world’s middle class — the people who make the world work — is facing a grim period of higher inflation and lower real standards of living.

What’s really behind it?

Stay tuned...

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Daily Reckoning Australia