Vanguard's long term Treasury fund, started in 1986, set a new all time low price record yesterday: What a coincidence

 VUSTX fell to $7.37 yesterday, October 19, 2023.

Until the bond debacle of 2022, the lowest price ever was set way back in 1987, also on October 19, aka Black Monday, when the S&P 500 crashed 20.47% in its worst single day ever.

2022's new all time low for VUSTX at 8.16 had occurred on October 24, missing the anniversary of the old all time low by just three days. Also a very odd coincidence.

The debacle has only continued in 2023, and VUSTX prices haven't seen $8 since September 22nd.

ZIRP since the Great Recession is ultimately to blame for the current mess in long term Treasury securities. The clamor it created for yield drove bond investors long, culminating in the highest nominal prices ever paid for long term UST in March 2020, and the lowest yields. 30Y UST yield crashed to 0.99% on March 9, 2020, 20Y to 0.87%. Yields across the board in 2023 for 2Y to 30Y have set records for this cycle in October. Yesterday 20Y demanded 5.30%, 30Y 5.11%.

No one wants that 2020 and prior junk now, so wherever it sits it's causing collateral problems, at banks, insurance companies, pension funds, et cetera. And on the Fed's balance sheet: As of October 18th the Fed has $1.503922 trillion of UST maturing in more than 10 years on its balance sheet. It basically has to keep it until it matures, and it pays it very little to return to the Treasury as it does.

Are prices done falling?

Confident pretenders said so a year ago this month, and now here we are with $TLT investors down another 12.22% since then.

Given the obscene overvaluation of stocks, and the demand for higher yields by bond investors, cash still seems the safest place to be. VMRXX, Vanguard Cash Reserves Federal Money Market Fund Admiral Shares, has returned 4.00% ytd. You continue to lose to inflation, however.

Nothing is ever perfect.

 

1987 high and low

2022 high and low to the left, all time high and low to the right

OPEC expects global oil demand to rise to 110 million barrels per day by 2045

 Reported here.

2022 global production averaged 80.6 million barrels per day on one accounting.

OPEC must think the 2022 figure closer to 90 million bpd since it projects growth in demand of 23%.

According to this, crude oil remained the top primary energy source in the world at 31.2% in 2020, followed by coal at 27.2%, and natural gas at 24.7%.

71% of China's primary energy is derived from coal. China is the world's number one emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.

You remember the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, right?

 Chickens . . . comin' home . . . to roost!

 

Studies have found the Dodd–Frank Act has improved financial stability . . .  lol

 

Fats Domino would just like to say that Monday's been a mess since at least 1956

 . . . popularized in a recording by Fats Domino in 1956, also on Imperial (catalog # 5417), on which the songwriting credit was shared between him and Bartholomew.   

More.

 

Speaking of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she was the one responsible for backing down on Hong Kong, giving it back to China in 1984

 She won in the Falklands, but folded on China.

Thatcher later recounted that Deng had told her directly "I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon," to which she replied, "There is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like."

More.

It's odd how this guy never mentions the post-election shenanigans which DEFINE the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would REQUIRE faithless votes in the Electoral College

Time To Eliminate the Possibility of Faithless Electors :

In spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chiafalo v. Washington that states can bind electors to the popular vote, only 14 states have laws in place to do so. This leaves open the possibility that as many as 420 electors across the country could still cast faithless votes with the only remedy being whether or not Congress would choose to count those votes in their Jan. 6 joint session. This is the type of scenario the ECRA is trying to avoid.  

He doesn't say anything about the National Popular Vote Compact here, either, which would potentially nullify the will of the people of a state who voted for one candidate but whose electors were forced to vote for another under the compact. That would be done legally by state signatories, but it would still be wrong.

As of June 2022, [the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact] has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force. 

More.

 

All 50 states certified their results in Election 2020, making Joe Biden the winner. Rogue electors weren't recognized by Vice President Pence, correctly, under already existing laws.

Electors would be no less rogue under the NPV.

It would be less ambiguous to these people if the Supreme Court had ruled "shall" instead of "may", but the whole opinion is clear:

A State may enforce an elector’s pledge to support his party’s nominee—and the state voters’ choice—for President.

The Supreme Court on July 6, 2020 concluded by saying that

electors are not free agents; they are to vote for the candidate whom the State’s voters have chosen

which ought to settle the matter, but apparently can't in some minds.

Odd.

 

 

When only Wikipedia gets it right about leftist terrorist and murderer Kathy Boudin, you know the world is truly upside down

 

The targets are more numerous but H-Hour remains the same

 

'Von Neumann entered government service primarily because he felt that, if freedom and civilization were to survive, it would have to be because the United States would triumph over totalitarianism from Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism. During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was quoted in 1950 remarking, "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"'

LOL, someone's having fun with General Mark Milley's Wikipedia page today: "Huge admirer of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao"

 

Rush Limbaugh conservatism is so over, if it ever existed

The worst thing about the announcement of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton being hired by Premiere Radio Networks to fill the noon to three once occupied by Rush Limbaugh is that rushlimbaugh.com is promoting this. That wouldn't be happening without the support of Rush's widow.

Never mind what ex-CIA employee Buck Sexton agreeing to team up with this guy says about him, Travis is the last person to whom Rush's audience would ever warm:

A self-described "radical moderate" who is pro-choice and against the death penalty, Travis said he voted for former President Barack Obama twice and never voted Republican. In 2016, Travis voted for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. As an undergrad, Travis interned for U.S. Representative [Democrat] Bob Clement for four years while in college at George Washington University. In 2000, he worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. Travis was hired to work on U.S. Representative [Democrat] Jim Cooper's 2002 congressional campaign but was fired for wrecking Cooper's wife's car.

Premiere rolled the dice on this duo and came up with snake eyes. They will have to build an entirely different audience, but it sure as hell won't be a conservative one.

You couldn't have asked for a better recipe to blow-up conservative talk radio.

Looks intentional to me. Is Travis on the Democrat payroll?

Just like that EIB, like Rush Limbaugh, passes into oblivion.

Trend for Tanana River Ice-Outs 1917-2020 continues to show them occurring much earlier after 104 years

This is a corrected chart and supersedes all previous iterations. Data in the chart has been double-checked again against printed versions of the data available from the Nenana Ice Classic. One or two dates were incorrectly shown in previous versions of my chart through 2018. 

The overall trend earlier in those charts remains unchanged, however, and has been reinforced by the record-setting early Ice-Out in 2019 on April 14. This is because of the preponderance of relatively earlier Ice-Outs April 30 through May 7, of which there are forty-five. With or without the record early Ice-Out on April 14, 2019 and the relatively early 2020 Ice-Out on April 27, the median date remains the same: May 4. Half the Ice-Outs occur before that date, half after.

Otherwise from April 14-29 there are 27 early Ice-Outs vs. May 8-20 with 32 late Ice-Outs:

April 14-21: 3

April 22-29: 24

April 30-May 7: 45

May 8-15: 29

May 16-20: 3.

Is "global warming" at work?

If you back out all data from the year 2000 onward, here's what you get:

April 14-21: 2

April 22-29: 14

April 30-May 7: 37

May 8-15: 28

May 16-20: 2.

Median date: May 5.

Obviously the biggest impact since 1999 has been on the week April 22-29, adding ten early Ice-Outs, moving the median date earlier by one day after 20 years.

Another thing it does, however, is balance out the data surrounding April 30-May 7, which otherwise was weighted heavier later, with far more Ice-Outs in the second week of May than the last week of April. It could be that over the long course of history prior to 1917 we're missing a lot of early Ice-Outs which recent warming has only now supplied.

For example, we know early 20th century temperatures were warm enough for Roald Amundsen famously to make it through the Northwest Passage from east to west in his small wooden herring ship between 1903-1906. He finally traversed the western half of the Canadian island archipelago during 1905 after being ice bound in the heart of it for two winters. In August 1905 he put in at Herschel Island 5 miles off the north coast of Canada due to ice. From there he skied 500 miles south to Eagle, Alaska, in order to send a message by telegraph wire of the news of his singular achievement. The wire was sent on December 5, 1905. Amundsen spent two months in Eagle before skiing back to his ship and sailing on to Nome in 1906, where his ship then remained until 1972. 

Eagle, AK, incidentally, is about 200 miles due east of the Fairbanks Area, which includes Nenana. The mean average temperature for the Fairbanks Area since 1999 is 28.6 vs. 26.3 1904-1999.

The data for Ice-Outs since 1999 is what it is, evidence of warming.

 

Rush Limbaugh, The Big Fat Idiot, imagines Vitamin D was known during the Spanish Flu Epidemic when it wasn't even first theorized until 1922

In the Face of COVID-19, We’re Not Acting at All Like Americans:

In the Spanish flu, ’17, ’18, ’19, 1917, much death. Do you know that there was not one mention of it by the president of the United States at the time, Woodrow Wilson? Never talked about it. There was no national policy to deal with it. There was no shutdown. There was just, “Hey, go outside, get some fresh air, stand in the sun as long as you can, get some vitamin D, feel better.”

Vitamin D:

In 1922, Elmer McCollum tested modified cod liver oil in which the vitamin A had been destroyed.[12] The modified oil cured the sick dogs, so McCollum concluded the factor in cod liver oil which cured rickets was distinct from vitamin A. He called it vitamin D because it was the fourth vitamin to be named.[194][195][196] It was not initially realized that, unlike other vitamins, vitamin D can be synthesised by humans through exposure to UV light.

How the US acquired so much gold in the first place

Immediately following passage of the [Gold Reserve] Act [of January 30, 1934], the President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. This price change incentivized gold miners globally to expand production and foreigners to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously by devaluing the U.S. dollar it reduced deflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, much of which was stored in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The increase in gold reserves increased the money supply, lowering real interest rates which in turn increased investment in durable goods.

The judge in the Roger Stone trial should be removed from the bench for allowing bias-tainted Tomeka Hart on the jury

Amy Berman Jackson, Obama appointee and former defense for U.S. Representative Democrat William J. "Cash Bribes in My Freezer" Jefferson, who served 5.5 years in the joint.

The idiots at Vox don't know that the constitution specifies a minimum congressional district size of 30,000

Here:

"Literally nothing in the Constitution prevents Congress from admitting the Obama family’s personal DC residence as a state — a state which would then be entitled to two senators, one member of the House, and exactly as much say on whether the Constitution should be amended as the entire state of Texas."

Article I, Section 2.3:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;

You can't have two per thirty thousand, that is, one per fifteen thousand, let alone one representative for just four people.

It doesn't occur to the idiots at Vox, nor Harvard Law whence the idea comes, that the main problem with the federal government is that the US House concentrated power in its hands decades ago by stopping the growth of representation. It's been on a spending spree ever since, picking the taxpayers' pockets.

Why do you think we have a $23 trillion debt?

Giving Obama his own representative just makes the Obama family more like Wyoming, our least populous state, which already has too much representation relative to California according to these liberals.

The feds grabbed this power by fixing the number of representatives at 435 way back in 1929, contrary to the intent of the constitution, which required a census every ten years in order to add representatives to the US House as the country grew in size. The original First Amendment to the constitution would have fixed the formula at one per fifty thousand, giving us over 6,000 representatives by today. It failed ratification by just one vote. The bastards finally realized this loophole in 1929 and pulled a power play.

Yes, maybe some mega states like California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio should be carved up to add states to the union and increase representation that way. Northern Californians and Southern Illinoisans already feel this way.

But carving up DC into a bunch of states? Really? It has about 705,000 residents total, less than the current average size of one US congressional district. If it were a state, the most representatives it should have today would be fourteen, but under the current way it's done, just one.

And the Obama family doesn't get its own private Representative to the US House, not while we're alive anyway. He got to be president for eight years. He can cast his useless vote now like everyone else.

What a farce is Vox. 

Pete Booty Judge is as phony as Pocahonky: His dad's skin is no more brown than any other white person's

The study by Capelli et al. has concluded that the contemporary males of Malta most likely originated from Southern Italy. The study also indicates that Malta was barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century and was likely to have been repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic. These findings confirm the onomastic and linguistic evidence presented in 1993 by Geoffrey Hull, who traced the oldest Maltese surnames to southern and south-eastern Sicily, especially the Agrigento district.

Forget the glowing Wikipedia entry for gay classicist Claude Fredericks of Bennington College, he preyed on students

The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College:

NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press, quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover early on. ...

MATT JACOBSEN: It was never unfriendly between me and Claude, but as I fell more deeply in love with Liz [Glotzer, Jacobsen’s girlfriend and eventual wife], I saw less of Claude. I realized it was kind of ridiculous to hang out with him, cool as he was. And he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, so he moved on to greener pastures, started fooling around with another guy who’d been his student. At the end of the day, Claude was driven by a—you know—perverse interest in me. And that was wrong. I’m a geezer now, and I understand how wrong he really was.

Like millions of Christians, Justin Amash has read the Bible, too, but is the member of a sect with just 75,000 members in the US

Most people who have read the Mueller report have reached a different conclusion, including Robert Mueller.

Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America

Native American Nathan Phillips has a history of seeking out confrontation over race

He's been around a long time and has a Wikipedia page, which is up to date with the latest incident in Washington, DC where he gets in the face of some easy marks, a bunch of unsuspecting Catholic kids.

Just one previous example, at Eastern Michigan University in 2015 when he went looking for trouble:

Native American claims racial harassment by EMU students dressed as indians.

Police find many more infant bodies in another Detroit funeral home as scandal expands

This story is the macabre bookend to the grisly Kermit Gosnell infanticide case in Philly.

63 remains of fetuses removed from Perry Funeral Home in Detroit:

[T]wo attorneys said they believe many more infants’ remains may be found in the improper possession of the Perry Funeral Home, perhaps as many as 200, based on their research of log books kept by the Wayne State University School of Mortuary Science. The funeral home routinely deposited infant remains at the WSU school’s morgue, then failed to follow up with parents’ wishes for the remains to be used in research by the WSU School of Medicine, they said.

“I’m really wondering where all the rest of them are,” Cieslak said late Friday. The lawsuit filed by the two charges that Perry may have fraudulently billed Medicaid, as well as the Detroit Medical Center, for burials it never performed. The lawyers said they can’t estimate how much money might be involved, “but it must be significant,” Parks said.

"We already have people calling us, after seeing the news, saying 'this happened to me,'" he said.