They Can’t Say It Publicly

1. Green energy tyranny (continued)
2. De-dollarization chronicles: The global gold grab
3. Biden whistleblower’s unsealed indictment
4. U.S. small business: Best of times, worst of times
5. “Unfair and Unbalanced”? (Well… fair enough)

Green Energy Tyranny (Continued)

Once again, the smiley face on the transition to “green energy” has come off — to reveal the scowl of tyranny beneath.

The smiley face tells us we’ll make a seamless transition from internal-combustion engines to electric vehicles… while our power grid will likewise transition without a hitch from hydrocarbons to renewable sources.

True, no one in authority made an Obamacare-style promise — “If you want your first-world lifestyle, you can keep your first-world lifestyle” — but that’s what was implied.

Within the last year, however, reality has reared its head.

Californians who dutifully bought EVs were told in 2022 not to charge them at certain hours of the day, lest they put too much stress on the power grid.

And two-thirds of North America is at risk of brownouts or blackouts this summer if demand becomes too intense: Too many coal and nuclear plants have been shut down, while the new wind and solar capacity isn’t enough to make up the difference.

Starting in 2021, the truth began to slip out. We chronicled some of the slippage in our predecessor e-letter.

For starters, there was the study spearheaded by the University of Leeds in England.

It said for America to meet its carbon targets under the Paris Agreement of 2015, our total energy consumption would have to be slashed by 90%.

• The typical family of four would be confined to a space of no more than 640 square feet
• Personal transportation would be limited to the “energy equivalent” of no more than 40 gallons of gasoline per year
• Air transportation would be limited to one flight every three years
• Food consumption per capita would be slashed 30% from 3,000 calories per day to 2,100.

Everything was mapped out — all the way down to a limit of 20 loads of laundry per person per year.

But it’s not just a one-off study: Also in 2021, a New England bureaucrat said more or less the same thing.

David Ismay, the “undersecretary for climate change” in Massachusetts, was speaking to a gathering of the Vermont Climate Council.

In so many words, he said all the “easy” stuff that could combat climate change had already been done — solar arrays, wind turbines, big business adopting greener practices — and the rest would depend on the personal sacrifice of individuals.

“I know one thing that we found in our analysis is that 60% of our emissions come from… residential heating and passenger vehicles,” he said in a video of the meeting released by an outfit called the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance.

“Let me say that again: 60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed income. Right now, there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at and turn the screws on and now break their will so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will. Right? I can’t even say that publicly.”

Indeed he could not. The furor surrounding Ismay’s remarks was such that he had to resign. But he left no doubt about the endgame of the green agenda.

To this disturbing pattern we add a new data point.

This past spring, Paradigm macro maven Jim Rickards spotted an alarming “infographic” laying out what a green future looks like in the United Kingdom.

“This chart was produced by a group of academics called UK FIRES, which is a collaboration of faculty from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and other leading universities in the U.K.,” Jim says. “It is funded by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Resources Council, a government agency.

“The chart has a top-lined scale that shows particular industries and activities such as road vehicles, rail and flying. The left-hand scale shows time periods for implementation such as 2020–2029 out to beyond 2050 with intermediate periods included.

“By selecting a particular activity from the top-line scale and a particular time period from the left-hand scale and looking at the intersection of the two, you can see what this playbook expects the future to be.

“When the vertical bar narrows through the passage of time, it means that activity is being phased out. When a red circle with a white bar appears, it means that activity has ended.”

Looks like fun, huh?

Oh, and the dystopia isn’t limited to transportation. “In the category of food,” Jim says, “the plan is to cut consumption of beef and lamb by 50% before 2029. In the period 2030–2049, beef and lamb and eliminated completely. Bugs, anyone?”

The madness will continue until enough people experience enough pain that they scream out STOP!

In April, Jim took note when the Biden administration approved an $8 billion oil-and-gas drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope… and began auctioning off more than 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore drilling.

Promising, yes… but at the same time, the administration appears determined to regulate new natural gas stoves out of existence.

“The climate scam will certainly fail but it will just as certainly be tried in the years ahead,” Jim concludes. So how the heck do you invest around that?

“Short-run demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper will be strong even if those commodities cannot possibly create all of the batteries needed. China will demand coal to run its coal-fired electricity plants no matter how much the U.S. and Germany destroy their own economies by banning clean coal and natural gas use.”

Meanwhile, “Demand for EVs will crash once enough drivers get tired of waiting two hours or more for a battery charge to finish a three-hour trip. (The 30-minute chargers won’t help if you have to wait two hours in line to use one.)

“These choices are different from the ones investors usually make. Should I invest in something that will fail in 10 years if it makes huge profits in the next five? Should I invest in the oil and gas industry even when the U.S. government is out to destroy it?

“The answer to both questions — one pro-green and one anti-green — might be yes given the strange mix of short-term madness and long-term sanity we are facing.”

We’ll have plenty to say about both pro and anti strategies in the weeks and months to come…

De-dollarization Chronicles: The Global Gold Grab

“A growing number of countries are bringing their physical gold reserves back home to avoid Russian-style sanctions on their foreign assets,” says the Financial Times, “while increasing their purchases of the precious metal as a hedge against high levels of inflation.”

The asset manager Invesco just issued an eye-opening report that even the mainstream can’t ignore. Invesco surveyed 57 central banks and 85 sovereign wealth funds around the world. It found “a substantial percentage” of survey respondents were concerned about the precedent set last year when Washington froze the dollar-based assets of Russia’s central banks.

“Almost 60% of respondents said it had made gold more attractive, while 68% were keeping reserves at home compared to 50% in 2020,” says a Reuters account of the Invesco report.

Invesco quoted one anonymous respondent from a central bank: “We did have it [gold] held in London... but now we've transferred it back to own country to hold as a safe haven asset and to keep it safe."

In addition, survey respondents are increasingly choosing the real thing and not “paper” gold. “Concerned by the decision by the U.S. and others to freeze Russian assets,” says the FT story, “central banks opted to buy physical gold rather than derivatives or exchange-traded funds that track the metal’s price.”

None of this should surprise you if you’ve been keeping up with your 5 Bullets or Jim Rickards’ publications. But Jim says the next phase of the global move away from the dollar will be the most shocking of all. If you’re not yet a Strategic Intelligence subscriber, you owe it to yourself to check out Jim’s brand-new expose.

Biden Whistleblower’s Indictment Unsealed

More than four months after his capture and his subsequent escape, the feds have finally unsealed the charges against Gal Luft.

Luft is the analyst who came on our radar in 2018–19 for his early warnings about de-dollarization (not as early as Jim Rickards’ or even my own, but early enough).

Last February, he was picked up on an Interpol warrant in Cyprus — supposedly for international arms trafficking. He then escaped house arrest and has been on the lam since.

“The chances of me getting a fair trial in Washington are virtually zero,” he told the New York Post from an undisclosed location in late May.

That’s because Luft says he’s got the dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter — having talked to the FBI in 2019 about the Biden family taking illegal payments from Chinese officials.

Yesterday, the Justice Department detailed its allegations against Luft — summed up by USA Today as acting as “an illegal arms broker and unregistered agent for the Beijing government while also seeking to help China obtain Iranian oil in violation of U.S. sanctions.

“Gal Luft, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, is accused of recruiting and paying a former high-ranking U.S. government official — and adviser to then president-elect Donald Trump — on behalf of principals based in China in 2016 without registering in the U.S. as a foreign agent as federal law requires.”

The official Luft allegedly recruited and paid is not named in the feds’ paperwork — but investigative reporters identify him as former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Woolsey is indeed an adviser to the Washington-based think tank founded by Luft. But the idea that Woolsey would be in the tank for China beggars belief.

The term “neoconservative” is thrown around too casually these days; it’s become an epithet for warmongers of all ideologies. But Woolsey is an honest-to-goodness neocon — one of six who had an outsized role in pushing the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.

More than 30 years ago, Woolsey’s close friend and ideological comrade Paul Wolfowitz laid out the Pentagon’s vision for the post-Cold War era. It stated that no one — certainly not China or Russia — should be allowed to challenge Washington for superpower status. The Wolfowitz Doctrine has been Washington’s lodestar ever since.

The notion that Woolsey would take on any project on behalf of the Chinese government is preposterous — yet that appears to be at the core of the indictment against Gal Luft.

And so the indictment really does appear to be a way to shut up Luft — described as a “breakthrough witness” in the House Republicans’ investigation into Biden family corruption.

Small Business: Best of Times, Worst of Times

“Less bad” is the outlook from the small-business community — judging by the latest reading of the National Federation of Independent Business’ optimism index.

The headline number bumped up from 89.4 in May to 91.0 in June. But that’s still 18 straight months below the survey’s average going back nearly 50 years. Meanwhile, the percentage of business owners raising their prices has fallen back to March 2021 levels — which is still well above historical norms.

It’s a best-of-times-worst-of-times vibe: "With owners' views about future sales growth and business conditions dismal, owners want to hire and make money from still positive consumer spending,” says the report from NFIB economists Bill Dunkelberg and Holly Wade.

When it comes to the single-most important problem identified by survey respondents, inflation is tied for first place with finding qualified help — both cited by 24%. Taxes were cited by 15%; everything else was in single digits.

Inflation, as it happens, is the big economic number of the week — due tomorrow.

In the absence of any “big” economic numbers today, the stock market is drifting lazily higher.

The Dow is holding up best, up a half percent. The S&P 500 is up a quarter percent at 4,420. The Nasdaq is pancake-flat.

Gold is up about eight bucks to $1,932; silver is unchanged at $23.10. But look at crude — up nearly two bucks to $74.83, the highest since early June.

“Unfair and Unbalanced,” a Reader Proclaims

“It appears that you may be reporting unfair and unbalanced information, just like the media giants do,” writes a reader.

“You have for years predicted the loss of the U.S. dollar as the main global currency. Whether China, BRICS, Russia, you've recommended buying gold to protect ourselves.

“Your report yesterday states that dollar reserves shrank from 2003 to 2021 significantly. It continues to shrink, as you predicted — but now it is Biden's fault.

“The Ukraine-Russia war may be a contributing factor for sure, but how convenient to bash the sitting president who happens to be in office when your original prediction continues to advance.

“The 9/11 bombing was plotted for years before the actual bombing. No one suggested that George Bush was responsible for being asleep at the wheel. He just happened to be the unlucky president whose name will be associated with it forever.

“If this replacement of the dollar has been proceeding as you have predicted for years, it is unfair and unbalanced reporting to blame the guy who happens to sit in the Oval Office now, unless you have ulterior motives.”

Dave responds: Your complaint is… well, not entirely unfair.

To be sure, economic sanctions are nothing new — as any Cuban still driving a ’57 DeSoto would tell you.

But the real ramp-up in their use started after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 — and the pushback started in 2014.

Early that year, the Obama administration engineered regime change in Ukraine, Russia responded by seizing Crimea and Washington retaliated with sanctions. Within weeks, Russian and Chinese officials convened their first “de-dollarization” conference — so called by Russian media.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, resorted to weaponizing the dollar to feed his Javert-like obsessions with Iran and Venezuela. Who would want to negotiate anything with Washington after Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed Obama’s sanctions? Meanwhile, Venezuela is an impoverished, inflationary basket case — and the sanctions are as much to blame as socialist mismanagement.

According to a Washington Post Op-Ed published last month — citing Treasury Department figures — the number of organizations and individuals under U.S. sanctions ballooned 900% between 2001-2021. As of late 2021, the total was 9,421.

Last year, Joe Biden grew that total by another 24.7% — for a total of 11,745.

In 2022, the Treasury Department added 2,549 new designations while delisting another 225. Most but not all of the recent designations pertain to Russia.

As Jim Rickards has said from the outset — and as we see today with our gold repatriation item above — freezing the assets of Russia’s central bank last year was a watershed moment. Leaders in every nation across the Global South, even the ones friendly to Washington, started wondering if they might be next.

In the West, meanwhile, public awareness of the weaponized dollar started to take off.

And so de-dollarization became “a thing” this year. Interest in the search term on Google reached a peak this spring — at levels unlike anything that had been seen in the previous decade. Here’s a screenshot from Google Trends today…

So we’ll concede your point — but only so far. The dam was approaching the bursting point for many years, yes — but Joe Biden ignited one well-placed stick of dynamite at the dam’s base.

Best regards,

 

 

 

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets