The battle for your perception
â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â April 25, 2024 The Eliteâs Latest Craze âThe history of public relations is...a history of a battle for what is reality and how people will see and understand reality." â Stuart Ewen [Reminder: In case you missed [our announcement]( The Essential Investor has merged with legacy contributors to Agora Financial. The new, larger, more inclusive project is called The Grey Swan Investment Fraternity. If youâre interested in the scope and benefits of our new endeavor, please see what prompted us to merge [here](. If youâve been a member of The Essential Investor, keep an eye out for your new benefits.] Dear [Reader], April 25, 2024 â While their children are off at college protesting the genocide in Gaza, the nationâs âeliteâ are busy fussing with their new obsession. [Matt Taibbi,]( in [Racket News]( analyzes a peculiar, if predictable, meme working its way through the mainstream media, below. [~ Addison]( (How did we get here? Read the financial, economic and political history of the United States up to this point in our collective history: [Demise of the Dollar]( through [Financial Reckoning Day]( and [Empire of Debt]( all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.) (Or⦠simply pre-order [Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed]( now available at [Amazon]( and[Barnes & Noble]( or if you prefer one of these sites:[Bookshop.org]( [Books-A-Million]( or [Target]( CONTINUED BELOW... >>ADVERTISEMENT<< "Chilling War Games Show US Forces Crushed" - FOX NEWS After losing to China in repeated war games, U.S. military to spend billions on new "living missile" for armed forces. Investors stand to reap 35,960% on shares of small defense contractor that makes powerful new weapon. [Get the name of the stock here ]( CONTINUED... It's Not Me, It's You: Blaming the Public's "Perception of the Economy" [Matt Taibbi, Racket NewsÂ]( If you think you spent twenty years being ripped off while a generation of rent-seeking scam artists was showered with public subsidies, experts agree: your "perception" needs correcting. âPeople are really tying Bidenomics and their perception of the economy to the inflation rate,â said Matt Monday of Morning Consult, in a new Bloomberg story titled, âBidenâs gains against Trump vanish against deep economic pessimism, poll shows.â Itâs the latest entrant in an intensifying campaign to describe voters, especially in key electoral swing states, as morons and partisan haters whoâll deny reality itself out of political spite. This campaign has been weirdly perverse in its mockery. Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey recently tossed off a visual of the reality-denying swing voter, rendering him as a pudgy, confused hominid in the mode of Monty Pythonâs duncelike Gumbys. Having negative feelings about âthe best performing [economy] in the worldâ is equivalent to denying who won the Super Bowl: Left, the Swing Voter. Right, Gumbys. When The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran âWhatâs Wrong With the Economy? Itâs You, Not the Data,â I thought the âItâs not me, itâs youâ framing had to be ironic, a spoof of these increasingly numerous âperception of the economyâ pieces. Nope: Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the âpast yearâ was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly âitâs not true,â adding: Iâm not stating an opinion. This isnât something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year. Ip might be technically right about the last year of inflation, but Iâm not sure how many finance writers want to be in the business of deciding who belongs in the âreasonable peopleâ club, given the last twenty years of unpunished thievery on Wall Street. One could argue a reasonable person would have marched on Manhattan and started defenestrating bankers ten years ago: Many of these articles are about inflation, so it needs pointing out that the CARES Act, a Fed-fueled bailout plan with major inflationary ramifications, passed on Donald Trumpâs watch. It was bipartisan, but I was critical of it and spent much of 2020 traveling the country for a never-published project on the unfortunately enormous universe of Covid-era finance scams. Voters may trust Trump more because his pre-Covid economy was better, and heâs signaled he at least listens to public frustrations by criticizing institutions like the Fed, but Biden made moves he should get credit for, too (like trying to lift the bar on bulk pharmaceutical negotiations). Debating which president is better is irrelevant, though. This âperceptionâ campaign is 100% about press douchebags demonizing people whoâve been screwed before, during, and after Trump. Especially in the last two decades, the public has been served one financial âshit burgerâ after another. Theyâve been ripped off by everyone: banks that sold defective mortgage securities to their retirement funds, pharma companies that charge them thousands per course of medication, private equity titans who strip healthy firms for assets and vaporize jobs, all phenomena that widened inequality and were enabled by hyper-aggressive monetary ârescuesâ and stimulus programs like Quantitative Easing. CONTINUED BELOW... >>ADVERTISEMENT<< 2024 â The Real Election Year Surprise In 2016, the October Election Surprise was Hillary Clintonâs email scandal⦠In 2020, the October Election Surprise was the suppression of all the dirty material on Hunter Bidenâs âforgottenâ laptop⦠Now, in 2024, weâre forecasting an October Election Surprise that almost no one sees coming â and this time itâll be way more devastating than anything youâve seen before. [Click here to learn about 2024âs real October Election Surprise »]( Itâs not at all what you think. CONTINUED... Yet when theyâre not sketched swing voters as cartoon dopes, these âeconomic pessimismâ pieces sooner or later blame the ordinary person for failing to appreciate his or her good fortune. Scripps months ago asked, âIs the economy the issue, or the problem with Americaâs perception?â In it, it noted that 78% of the country felt âthe economyâ was going in the wrong direction. âBut is it?â the piece asked, stroking its rhetorical chin before adding: âAfter all, most Americans vote not on statistics, but based on how they feel.â This is an update of the old coverage trope in which everyone from Occupy protesters to Tea Partiers are always described as having âpassions,â while policymakers always have reasons. This new thing is about redefining âthe economyâ as a solved issue, but for the hurt feelings of conspiratorial holdouts. CNN last summer sighed about economic perceptions that âmuch of the stagnation comes from dug-in partisans,â in a piece about Americans who erroneously âthink the economy is getting worse.â A friend in finance grumbled about how the quantity of professional âeconomy masturbatorsâ is getting to be as big as the stable of âforeign policy masturbatorsâ on call for articles about Ukraine and Gaza, but a Los Angeles Times story on this topic, âEconomists see a âspectacularâ economy. Most voters donât. Can Biden turn that around?â recalled a different group of hype artists: The superlatives from giddy economists read like the promo blurbs on movie ads: âJust a perfect reportâ â Mark Zandi, Moodyâs Analytics. âStunning and spectacularâ â Diane Swonk, KPMG. âHard to imagine how things could look betterâ â UBSâ Brian Rose. âThis year has been like Rock âEm Sock âEm Robotsâ â Dan North, Allianz Trade Americas. Stunning and spectacular? Forget my former colleague Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. Not even the fabled Walter Monheit of Spy Magazine â a human hype machine who cranked out blurbs like âOscar has a new friend in Transylvania!â about Bram Stokerâs Dracula and gave every movie âFour monocles way up!â â could match this breathless enthusiasm. But the LATimes was frustrated. Despite all those Must See! reviews of Bidenâs economy from trusted sources like UBS and Allianz, âFrom most Americans, all you get is a Bronx cheer.â Some of these articles even show a big reason why stats might not matter at the ground level, but go on to rip the irrational voter anyway. âAmerican economic pessimism has been bafflingly persistent despite major indicators showing that the economy is actually strong,â wrote Vox last month, in yet another piece about âGaps between perception and realityâ in the economy. That same article showed a graph from the Fed charting consumer credit balances: That graph by itself explains the American pucker factor. Commentators refuse to see it. They also wonât grasp that public mistrust usually has less to do with one-time calculations at the supermarket register than with decades of accumulated frustrations about the increasingly numerous aspects of American life that are straight-up scams, or guaranteed income schemes for failure-proofed rich. For instance: a subtext to the fury about the Columbia University protests this week is the schoolâs obscene $89,000 tuition. Reeling in soaring tuition checks from guilt-ridden parents in exchange for an (often) neither-very-good-nor-useful education is a gravy train any good student loan activist knows is only possible thanks to myriad crookednesses baked in the system. Between over-availability of federal credit, an extraordinarily punitive job market (requiring degrees even for menial office work, though the same degrees guarantee nothing), the failure of even public universities to pass ballooning endowments back to students as tuition savings, and the historical inability to discharge student debt in bankruptcy (another area where Biden has taken [some action]( colleges can raise prices forever without either improving their product or worrying about students not earning enough to pay bills. People arenât stupid. Theyâll read that Pfizer pulled in $58 billion in profits last year, and every time they go to a pharmacy or see a hospital bill, theyâll remember somewhere that these companies benefit from a slew of subsidies, from free R&D to protections from generics and imports. When they go to an airport on Thanksgiving, they hear an airline rep telling them it now costs $30 for a carry-on. Do they know all the relevant history, that in the 2010s executives at the big four airlines gorged themselves on $43.7 billion in buybacks before demanding, and getting, a $50 billion Covid bailout, which in turn resulted in more buybacks, mass layoffs, and even crappier, more dangerous service? No, but they have a good idea they got screwed somewhere, and occasionally even hear a politician admit it. âBuyerâs remorse,â said DC congresswoman Eleanor Norton, characterizing the airline rescue she supported. A lot of âpessimisticâ voters struggle to pass credit checks just to rent an apartment, but see at the same time that a big bank in America can buy the worldâs most toxic subprime company (as Bank of America did with Countrywide) or promote murder and mayhem by evading money-laundering (as HSBC did by serving drug cartels), and they not only get away with it, but get rewarded with fifteen years of low-to-zero interest rate monetary policies. Itâs literally impossible to not make money in banking borrowing at zero â youâd have to be an actual Gumby to pull it off â which makes it all the more offensive that every article about banks like Goldman, Sachs or JP Morgan Chase raves about the amazing smartness of their financial magicians. Even with all those brains, they canât manage their firms: pre-Covid, they blew all their gains on dividends and awards, doling out $121 billion in buybacks in 2019 alone, and so also had to be rescued in the historic $2.2 trillion Covid bailout. To prop up that pandemic economy, and make sure people werenât disenfranchised by those lockdowns we now know we may not have needed at all, our Federal Reserve went on an unprecedented three-year, $5.2 trillion buying spree. That just happened to coincide with a $2.58 trillion bump in the net worth of Americaâs 737 (now 808) billionaires. The curves for national and international central bank spending and billionaire net worth always overlap smoothly: Left, global billionaire wealth. Right, U.S. Federal Reserve assets. Most Americans have no objection to people making money, even gobs of it. Probably most even respect a decent hustle (we have affection for everything from Chia Pets to Flowbees in America). But when people have no chance at all, and money is transferred by the trillion straight from the Fed to accounts of the idiot rich while hardworking people are asked to pay for it in taxes and inflation, they tend to get pissed off, and it takes them much more than a year to get over it. The basics â school, medicine, doctor visits, a home, retirement â have become less and less attainable, while politicians keep waving through giant handouts for the scummiest layers of American society, the leveraged buyout artists and force-placed insurance carriers and pharmaceutical swindlers, the very people making the obstacles higher. These people also happen to be the largest sponsors of both politicians and media organizations. These things donât inspire âpessimism,â but rage. How does anyone justify caricaturing people as dummies for feeling it? ~~ [Matt Taibbi]( So it goes, Addison Wiggin, The Wiggin Sessions P.S. If youâre a paid up member of the [Grey Swan Fraternity]( weâre working on the May monthly issue as we speak. Coming to your inbox ASAP. (How did we get here? Read the financial, economic and political history of the United States up to this point: [Demise of the Dollar]( through [Financial Reckoning Day]( and [Empire of Debt]( all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.) (Or⦠simply pre-order [Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed]( now available at [Amazon]( and[Barnes & Noble]( or if you prefer one of these sites:[Bookshop.org]( [Books-A-Million]( or [Target]( Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com. The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. 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