The “Producer Price Index” (PPI) is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages: Origination (commodity), Intermediate (processing), and then Final (to wholesale). Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released June price data [Available Here] showing another 11.3% increase year-over-year in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.

Overall, the wholesale inflation rate is being driven by energy prices.  The June calculation shows exactly that problem with energy prices embedded in goods driving 10% of the price increase.  However, there is some good news in the short-term for July and August, as the intermediate and raw material costs are leveling off temporarily.  Unfortunately, that raw material price plateau is almost certainly the result of a drop in demand.

CTH has modified Table-A and Table-B to take out the noise.

The June inflation rate for final demand goods (2.4%) is driven mostly by higher energy prices (10%).  Energy costs are passed along through every stage of the supply chain contributing to an overall wholesale price increase of 2.4% in June, 11.3% year-over-year.

Notice the slight drop in final demand services; that is important.  What we are seeing is a contraction in the service economy overall, as the service sector -which includes restaurants- cannot pass along the scale of energy price increase to customers. People are changing their spending habits – service demand overall is dropping.

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Officials in the state of Texas are worried the emergency measures taken Wednesday to avoid blackouts may not be enough.  The utility operators urgently need the wind to start operating the windmills or things might get worse.  Reuters News has more:

(Reuters) – Texas’s power grid operator on Wednesday took emergency measures to avoid rolling blackouts as soaring electricity demand threatened to outpace available supplies amid a stifling heatwave.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the grid that serves more than 26 million customers, initiated a rarely used emergency program that is triggered when supplies fall below a critical safety margin.

Earlier, ERCOT had urged residents to cut power use during the hottest hours of the day and warned of a risk for rolling blackouts. Residents were asked to turn up thermostats, defer the use of high-power appliances and turn off swimming pool pumps.

The emergency notice came after ERCOT began paying suppliers an average of $5,000 per magawatt hour to keep generators running. That price is the highest the grid operator pays.  “They were pulling a lot of levers to avoid going into emergency operations and rolling blackouts,” said Doug Lewin, president of consultants Stoic Energy LLC. (read more)

Call me Captain Obvious, but in addition to the population migration, it looks like Texas imported California’s energy policies.  The sustainable energy isn’t sustainable.  However, on a positive note, their state ESG score is improving.

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Gasoline in Mexico is $3.12/gal.  Gasoline in the United States is $4.78/gal

The media did not give this much attention; however, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador thoroughly, albeit diplomatically, dressed down Joe Biden over his economic and energy policy during a Tuesday visit to the White House.

You might remember that together with a host of south and central American leaders, Mexican President Lopez-Obrador refused to attend Joe Biden’s Latin-America summit last month {Go Deep}.  With that in mind Obrador’s media remarks in the oval office are quite remarkable in their pointedness.

The video and audio are tenuous, and the delay for interpretation makes following the flow of AMLO’s comments a little challenging.  However, if you read the transcript you can clearly see how AMLO is diplomatically undressing Biden over the economic issue of U.S. energy policy.  It would appear that AMLO is not part of the great western reset and has no intention on inflicting the pain that is deliberately being created by other western leaders.  [Video at 23:30, Transcript Below] WATCH:

Now keep in mind that socially AMLO is a soft-socialist (immigration).  However, he is also a strong economic nationalist who has previously expressed a strong dislike for the influence of multinational corporations in Mexico.  AMLO is not a World Economic Forum acolyte.  AMLO is on team BRICS.

In these remarks, AMLO is very pointedly telling Joe Biden that his U.S. energy policy is seriously flawed.  It is really quite remarkable.

AMLO tells Biden that Mexico will continue investing in expanded refining of gasoline, and he is willing to sell that gasoline to American companies because Joe Biden will not issue permits to expand gasoline refining capacity in the United States.  Additionally, AMLO affirms his position on further oil development in Mexico and then, here comes the kicker,…. offers to expand electricity sales to the United States, including supplying Texas with electricity because both the Biden administration and Texas are not developing their own energy resources.

AMLO is telling Biden that Mexico will increase energy subsidies to the United States if Biden asks him to.  Think about that.

[Transcript] – PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR:  (As interpreted.)  Yes, I fully coincide with what you have proposed, President Biden.  And I could summarize everything we’ve been saying in five basic items of cooperation.

Number one, since the energy crisis started, Mexico has used 72 percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries — 800,000 barrels a day.

Therefore, we decided that while we’re waiting for prices of gasoline to go down in the United States — and I hope that Congress approves or passes your proposal, Mr. President —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  It has gone down for 30 days in a row.  (Laughs.)

PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR:  (As interpreted.)  — of lowering — lowering prices, yes.  That’s it.

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The professionally furrowed brows are forced to admit high prices remain problematic for the proles while retaining the sympathetic pretense.  WATCH:

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Comrade rebels, when things get spicy, I’ve got dibbs on his swimming pool.

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Folks, the Build Back Better western alliance are fully vested in the pretending game.  It is just one big insufferable game of pretending, and the citizens of the western government powers, You and Me, are the victims.

Seriously, it’s stunning, yet oddly not surprising, that the same multinational forces who created the global inflation crisis as a result of following the World Economic Forum spending agenda, are now claiming the global economy is simply too hot, too successful, there is just too much demand, and that justifies their raising of interest rates:

OTTAWA, July 13 (Reuters)– The Bank of Canada surprised on Wednesday with a full-percentage-point increase to its policy rate, a super-sized hike last seen in 1998, citing “higher and more persistent” inflation and the increased risk of those price gains becoming entrenched.

The central bank, in a regular rate decision, raised its policy rate to 2.5% from 1.5%, and said more hikes would be needed. The move was more forceful than the 75-basis point increase economists and money markets had forecast.

….”With the economy clearly in excess demand, inflation high and broadening, and more businesses and consumers expecting high inflation to persist for longer, the Governing Council decided to front-load the path to higher interest rates,” the bank said. [LINK]

This is the actual justification from the Bank of Canada.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has released the June Consumer Price Index (CPI) [DATA HERE] showing yet another “surprising” increase in overall inflation.  For the month of June overall inflation increased 1.3% bringing the annual rate of inflation to 9.1% as calculated.

Economists and financial pundits are “shocked”, “surprised” and the proverbial “unexpected” is running amok again amid the typeset.  The reality of Joe Biden energy policy being the origin of our current inflation crisis is being avoided at all costs by the pretenders.  The federal reserve raising interest rates can only impact the demand side, but it’s the supply side (total energy policy) creating the problem.  Table-A shows the overview.

(CNBC) – […] The consumer price index, a broad measure of everyday goods and services related to the cost of living, soared 9.1% from a year ago, above the 8.8% Dow Jones estimate. That marked the fastest pace for inflation going back to November 1981.

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Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a GB News correspondent and conservative voice from Holland.  In this interview segment with NTDNews Ms. Vlaardingerbroek outlines what is happening in the Netherlands with the Dutch farm protests and how it connects to the larger Agenda 2030 goals.

In the last 20 seconds of the segment, Vlaardingerbroek has some solid advice for Americans.  WATCH (2 mins):

https://youtu.be/nQ-dIFyYXPI

To really get a strong reference point for how the global ruling elites at the World Economic Forum think about farming and climate change, which includes the brain trust at the World Health Organization, I would urge you to read THIS ARTICLE from the Irish Farmers Journal.

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A slowdown in the housing market is being identified as the primary cause of a significant increase in cancelled homebuyer contracts in the month of June.  Bloomberg Report Here and Redfin Report Here.  It would appear the inflated housing bubble has popped.

According to the data 60,000 home sales were cancelled while under contract in June, that represents 14.9% of all contracts cancelled by the buyer before the transaction closed.  If you take out the forced cancellations due to the pandemic, a 15% cancellation rate equals the highest monthly cancellation rate ever recorded.

The economy is contracting, economic activity and consumer purchases have stopped, and the contraction is now fast and sudden.

(Redfin) – Nationwide, roughly 60,000 home-purchase agreements fell through in June, equal to 14.9% of homes that went under contract that month. That’s the highest percentage on record with the exception of March and April 2020, when the housing market all but ground to a halt due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. It compares with 12.7% a month earlier and 11.2% a year earlier.

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Appearing on GBNews with Dan Wootton, UK commentator Neil Oliver discusses and connects the Sri Lanka protests, the uprising in the Netherlands, and the aligned protests in Poland, Italy, Germany and much of the European continent.

As Oliver notes the pretorian guards for western politicians, aka the ‘western media’, are doing everything they can to ignore the global scale of the popular uprisings that are directly connected to the globalist agenda of the World Economic Forum and their Build Back Better orders to the western politicians.  The media ignore the issue until it reaches a point like Sri Lanka where it can no longer be ignored.  WATCH:

The Canadian trucker protests were targeted by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an effort to quickly stop the spread of any opposition to the globalist agenda. However, in the Netherlands the Dutch farmers have several distinct advantages in their ability to impact the life of ordinary Dutch people, as they refuse to become victims to the new global feudalism.

Like Sri Lanka, the Netherlands is a case study in raw people power, where the government is represented by a select few people.  The only thing keeping the Dutch from storming the politicians’ palaces and government buildings is a preference for polite society.  If that preference changes, and it might as people get more desperate, well, katy-bar the door.

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Two things about this report showing Rivian is planning layoffs for its workforce.

First, the larger ‘layoff‘ issue is going to be more prevalent as the economy contracts and consumer demand declines.  There is almost no expanded investment going into any Main Street business that sells non-essential goods.

The economic contraction, the drop in consumer demand that indicates a recession, is very real and now very easy to spot.

Second, Rivian is backed by the financing of Ford and Amazon and operates in California, Michigan and Illinois (three deep blue states).  Rivian is also the supplier for Amazon electric delivery vehicles having previously announced (in 2019) a deal to purchase 100,000 vehicles from Rivian.  Additionally, Rivian has lost 69% of its market value this year.

LA TIMES – Rivian Automotive Inc. is planning hundreds of layoffs to trim its workforce in areas where the electric-vehicle maker has grown too quickly, according to people familiar with the matter. […] The Irvine company, which has more than 14,000 employees, could target an overall reduction of around 5%, the people said. The layoffs are still in the planning stage, and nothing has been decided.

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