While admitting that consumer spending had dropped; and while admitting that production of goods and services had “slowed significantly”; and while admitting that consumers have “lower real disposable incomes and tighter financial conditions; and while stating that “activity in the housing sector had weakened”, housing purchases have fallen; and while accepting that “business fixed investment seems to have declined in the second quarter,” Fed Chairman Powell announces his intention to continue targeting excessive demand.

If we accept that monetary policy can only impact the demand side of the economy (regulatory policy impacting the supply side); and if we accept all off the currently existing realities of a declining demand side, as outlined by Powell; then you might wonder what excessive demand is it that he’s targeting?   The answer to that question is the secret sauce.  They want less energy demand.   WATCH (2 mins):

The federal reserve, just like all the central banks around the collective western alliance, is trying to reduce the economy in order to reduce energy use.   This is the monetary policy side supporting the Build Back Better, Climate Change, regulatory policy side. {Go Deep}

They cannot admit openly what they are doing, but the bankers are trying to help the globalist politicians by shrinking their economy.  Raising interest rates into preexisting economic contraction is against their legislative mandate, because it only leads to unemployment and a smaller economy.

Powell is using the pretense of demand side inflation as a justification to raise interest rates.  It’s not demand driving inflation, it’s the energy policy.

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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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Yesterday, Senator Chuck Grassley sent a letter [pdf HERE] to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray, notifying them of whistleblower allegations from within the FBI that senior leadership in both Main Justice and FBI are involved in a coordinated effort to cover-up criminal activity related to Hunter Biden.

The whistleblower allegations, in combination with the documented history of DOJ and FBI misconduct, culminate in Senator Grassley stating:

“If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are – and have been – institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law. Attorney General Garland and Director Wray, simply put, based on the allegations that I’ve received from numerous whistleblowers, you have systemic and existential problems within your agencies.” (LINK)

Unfortunately, what this amounts to, is Senator Grassley is telling Chris Wray and Merrick Garland, the leaders of the institutionally corrupt activity, that they are systemically corrupt. Which is akin to telling a criminal that he is engaged in unlawful conduct.

Our friend Techno Fog breaks down the outlined allegations succinctly HERE.  Absolutely none of the information contained in the allegations is surprising or new to anyone who has followed the details of Main Justice and FBI activity through the past several years.  What Grassley outlines is simply evidence, supportive evidence, of what has been transparently obvious to those who have reviewed the DOJ and FBI conduct.

The U.S. Dept of Justice and FBI are now political institutions that have abandoned their originating mission in order to become the domestic equivalent of the Soviet-era FSB. Their joint targeting mechanisms have been redesigned to support the interests of corrupt DC politicians, specifically the interests of democrats.  Grassley is admitting what has been visible for years.

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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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Donald Trump and Elon Musk have something in common….

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.”

~Machiavelli

For Elon Musk it is the organization of Twitter with 7,500 employees dedicated to ensuring he would never succeed in his takeover effort.  From the board of directors to the data engineers who build the controlling algorithms, to the third-party service providers who manage the data demand, there are likely only a handful of people within the entire corporation who would welcome the type of change Elon Musk represents.

As a result of the scale of opposition, any organizational takeover would ultimately deliver a company filled with sleeper cells and activist agents who consider it their personal and ideological mission to destroy the social media platform rather than accept change.  The purchase effort was doomed from the outset, considering Musk represented something akin to Rand Paul being nominated to lead the World Bank or Federal Reserve.  Some stuff just isn’t possible.

We The People attempted the Musk route when we sent President Donald Trump into Washington DC.  However, instead of one institution with 7,500 people, it was dozens of institutions housing hundreds of thousands of entrenched ideologues.  Most MAGA voters did not realize it at the time because grade school civics was never updated with our post-9/11 political outcome.

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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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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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From the CTH perspective, if we accept the scale of the approaching U.S. economic pain that is clearly visible on the horizon, this narrative shift from the Associated Press and NPR, about a balancing act for U.S. policy and a corrupt Ukraine government, seems very predictable.

The average U.S. worker, and the middle class in general, is in trouble.  The visible reference of bailing out the people of Ukraine to the tune of $60+ billion is legislative salt in an open economic wound caused by Biden policy.  A shift is needed.

Pivoting away from Ukraine to focus on financial subsidies for Americans requires using a particular arm-distancing toward Zelenskyy from the politicians.   Look, corruption.

Here we go:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s dismissal of senior officials is casting an inconvenient light on an issue that the Biden administration has largely ignored since the outbreak of war with Russia: Ukraine’s history of rampant corruption and shaky governance.

As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine’s suitability as a recipient of massive infusions of American aid.

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