According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) global economic activity, as measured by economic outputs, contracted in the second quarter.  However, when it comes to identifying the cause of the issue, the IMF joins western financial leaders and central banks in playing the game of pretending.

The radical new energy program contained within the Build Back Better agenda, is the root cause of the supply side inflation.  The drop in the production of oil, gas and coal in the same western nations that are following the BBB agenda is origin of the massive spike in energy prices.

Inflation is a major issue, geographically consistent and virtually identical in all the nations who are following the Build Back Better climate change agenda, which is the justification for the energy ‘transition.”  However, not a single leader, central bank or multinational financial institution -including the IMF- will admit the energy policy is the cause of the issue.

(IMF) – The world’s three largest economies are stalling, with important consequences for the global outlook. Inflation is a major concern.

The global economy, still reeling from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is facing an increasingly gloomy and uncertain outlook. Many of the downside risks flagged in our April World Economic Outlook have begun to materialize.

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A key metric in the data released by Wal Mart is not their upfront sales and profit. The recessionary KPI (key performance indicator) is a significant increase in same store sales of 6% (excluding fuel), yet the outcome of that increase in customers is a decrease in profit because the purchases are food.

[Keep an eye on this and we will likely see a similar increase in foot traffic at Aldis]

(VIA NBC) […] Walmart, which is the biggest grocer in the U.S. and often considered a bellwether for the overall economy, said more customers are turning to its stores, which are known for low prices, to fill their pantries and fridges. But they are skipping over general merchandise that they can live without.

Walmart said it now expects same-store sales in the U.S. to rise by about 6% in the second quarter, excluding fuel, as customers buy more food at its stores. That’s higher than the 4% to 5% increase that the company previously expected.  However, that merchandise mix will weigh on the company. Groceries have lower profit margins than discretionary items, such as TVs and clothing.

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Senator Elizabeth “Fauxcahontus” Warren writes an op ed today [SEE HERE] that is fraught with a level of ideological pretending almost off the charts.

Essentially Liawatha is big mad because Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is raising interest rates into a contracting economy.

The duplicitous senator accurately notes what the fed chairman is doing is only going to deepen the recession and hurt main street worse.

American workers are going to suffer, and the middle-class is going to bear the majority of the pain inflicted by the Biden administration policy.

All of that is true, but Fauxcahontus is not stupid.  Instead, she attempts to distance herself with forked tongue while knowing the monetary policy is specifically designed to support the energy policy she demands.

A recession lowers energy use, and as a result lowers energy costs. Pushing the U.S. economy deeper into a recession in order to support the Green New Deal “economic transition” is exactly the intent of the rate hikes.  Liawatha knows this but does not want to be stuck on the USS Biden when it sinks.

“Rising costs are an urgent problem, and interest rates play a key role in maintaining price stability. But urgency is no excuse for doubling down on a dangerous treatment. As with any illness, the right medicine starts with the right diagnosis. Unfortunately, the Fed has seized on aggressive rate hikes—a big dose of the only medicine at its disposal—even though they are largely ineffective against many of the underlying causes of this inflationary spike.” (read more)

Senator Elizabeth Warren is the worst kind of liar.  She is a liar that convinces her followers of her virtue through forked tongue.  Turn over the Senator Elizabeth Warren UniParty medallion and on the opposite side you will find the image of Senator Ted Cruz.

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As oft repeated, in order for severe ideologues to retain their insufferably bad policy they must pretend not to know things.  However, in the case of food shortages, the pretending about the origin of the problem has severe consequences.

Vladimir Putin’s military action against eastern Ukraine had nothing to do with the severe food shortages and inflation in Sri Lanka {link}.  Nor does Putin have any influence over the Dutch government trying to stop food production {link}.  Additionally, Putin has no control over Justin Trudeau’s decision to limit harvest yields by blocking the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer {link}. More importantly, it was not Vladimir Putin who forced all the western politicians to sign up for a new ‘climate friendly’ energy program that is destroying the ability of western farms to generate higher yield crops.

You do not need to be a farmer to understand that nitrogen/phosphorus-based industrial fertilizer has been the reason why farm yields have generated massive amounts of food on a global basis.  The United States, Canada, the U.K. and places like the Netherlands have massively increased their ability to generate food for export, in large part due to the success of improved fertilizer and crop saving modern pesticides.  Take those farming advancements away under the guise of climate change and you get a global Sri Lanka.

Those western climate and energy policies create downstream consequences.  The decision to chase a new global energy policy under the name “Build Back Better,” in combination with short-sighted EU sanctions against Russia, and you get food shortages. And boy howdy are they trying to avoid taking responsibility for it.

It was not Vladimir Putin who told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz their proactive recommendation to switch from crop-based biofuels to human food would be blocked.  That G7 decision was made by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. {link} Even more significantly, it was not Russia who threatened the multinational energy companies about investing in Africa for expanded natural gas supplies for their fertilizer needs. That threat came from the same western government alliance, per their instructions from the World Economic Forum group {link}.

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Until people understand what is happening, we cannot correct things or even respond to them accurately.  Many people don’t want to accept what is happening.  Even more still believe in the Schoolhouse Rock civics they were taught in grade school and cannot accept how these ideologues operate.  As long as denial remains a survival mechanism, correction is difficult.

All of the people on the monetary policy side of the economic equation are working earnestly to manage the global economy into a decline thereby slowing the need for energy production. The bankers are supporting the Build Back Better policy makers by putting the western economies into an intended contraction.  Slowing the western economies helps to lower energy use and moderate/offset the extreme increases in cost (coal, oil, gas, electricity, fuel etc) the policies are creating.

Lower economic activity means less income, job security and wealth for the working class. Simultaneously, increased energy costs mean more expenses for the same workers who are losing income and wealth.  This is the ‘managing’ part of their collectively “managed transition.”  They are monitoring and managing the pitchforks.

In this Meet the Press segment with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, you will note she says “lower economic activity during this transition” is good.  She also happily says businesses are taking “appropriate” action to lower their activity, because that is exactly what the central planners want.  They want businesses to do less, create less, sell less, even employ less, because ultimately, they want businesses to help advance the cause of climate change by consuming less energy resources.  WATCH:

The central bankers are trying to support western government policy.  Unfortunately, the government policy they are under obligation to support is the fundamental energy shift, or what the World Economic Forum (Davos Group) has called the “Build Back Better” climate change agenda.

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The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is scheduled to deliver their calculation for the second quarter (Apr, May, June) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on July 28, next week.   The calculation is essentially the total value of all goods and services generated within the U.S. economy, minus the value of exports received.

CTH has predicted the people within the BEA research group [SEE HERE], ie those who make the determinations of GDP, will circle the statistical wagons and generate something akin to a positive 0.5% GDP figure for Q2.

The reason is simple… As with all other highly political institutions in U.S. government, the BEA is driven by political ideology.

With the Biden administration’s Green New Deal energy policy driving the U.S. economy into the ground; and with the BEA statisticians worshipping at the same governmental altar as all other climate change ideologues; they will do everything in their power to defend what the people behind Joe Biden are doing.

[For the greater good and all things that are associated with that line of elitist thinking.]

The BEA data team will first play with the statistics by underestimating the rate of inflation in their value calculations.  If that effort doesn’t yield the desired result, the BEA will likely move to avoid calculating import data from the West coast (Port of LA, Port of Long Beach, and/or Port of Oakland) for the month of June.  The current labor union and trucker issues within the ports will help create the noise to justify any interim data that is false.  [Whoops, we’ll catch it in the updates, etc]

That’s just how this BEA crew rolls.  If they can save the planet by fudging the statistics, well, they will have done their part.  This approach, the expression of ‘their truth‘, is just an outcome of this great new era of pretending in our modern ideological banana republic. Hey, Wall Street is built upon a foundation of lies, insider trades on proprietary information and manipulation of values, so why shouldn’t everything else – including govt economic data?  Fair’s fair, right?

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Neil Oliver uses his weekly monologue to challenge the originating precept of the Great Reset, Build Back Better or New World Order, agenda. Get beyond the talking points and every policy from within the World Economic Forum instructions boils down to the quackery behind anti-humanism.

“The so-called Green Agenda is predicated on the rape of the earth for rare minerals, lithium and cobalt and more,” he points out. “Also, metals like copper, silver and gold. The extraction of those commodities means wholesale destruction of environments,” he adds. “Before a single turbine is raised or solar panel set in place, the sites are cleared and sterilized of all life. The turbines held up by massive plunks of concrete and while in action they kill millions of birds. When they come to the end of their working lives there’s nothing to be done with the colossal blades but to bury them in vast landfill sites.”  As Oliver notes all of this is being done under the hypocrisy of calling it “green”. WATCH:

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You will switch to bugs, and you will like it.  After using government incentives and subsidies to build a new facility in London, Ontario, to manufacturer 9,000 metric tons of crickets for human consumption to replace cows, pigs and chickens, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau now triggers a series of nitrogen emission reduction regulations to target traditional farming.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is following the same roadmap as his political friend in the Netherlands, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and the Canadian farmers are not happy about it.

CANADA – Saskatchewan and Alberta Ministers of Agriculture are expressing profound disappointment in the federal government’s fertilizer emissions reduction target.

“We’re really concerned with this arbitrary goal,” Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture David Marit said. “The Trudeau government has apparently moved on from their attack on the oil and gas industry and set their sights on Saskatchewan farmers.”

“This has been the most expensive crop anyone has put in, following a very difficult year on the prairies,” Alberta Minister of Agriculture Nate Horner said. “The world is looking for Canada to increase production and be a solution to global food shortages. The Federal government needs to display that they understand this. They owe it to our producers.”

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm couldn’t tell you the difference between electromagnetic or nuclear energy if her life depended on it.  Then again, there’s not a single “climate change” ideologue in the Biden administration who has any concept of science at all.  None of them.  To them, everything is politics.

As you watch this brief soundbite from remarks Energy Secretary Granholm made to the Global Clean Energy Action Forum, pay attention to what she says and the way she says it.  The pantomime of how she says it. [11 seconds] WATCH:

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What state elected her governor?  Oh yeah, she’s from Hunger Games district 5.

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Purchasing managers for both goods and services are reporting a strong contraction in orders.  The decline in goods has been subtle up to this point, with June and July now reflecting a significant change to the negative.  More concerning is the severe change on the service side.

Contraction within business activity is now happening in almost all sectors of the economy.

Bloomberg Reports – US business activity contracted in July for the first time in more than two years as manufacturers and service providers signaled sluggish demand that only adds to heightened recession anxieties.

The S&P Global flash composite purchasing managers output index slid 4.8 points to 47.5, the weakest reading since May 2020, the group reported Friday. Outside of the early months of the pandemic, the July figure is the weakest in data back to 2009. Readings below 50 indicate contraction. 

[…]  “The preliminary PMI data for July point to a worrying deterioration in the economy,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in a statement.

“Manufacturing has stalled and the service sector’s rebound from the pandemic has gone into reverse, as the tailwind of pent-up demand has been overcome by the rising cost of living, higher interest rates and growing gloom about the economic outlook,” Williamson said.

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