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One of my former firms had a clever ad depicting a turtle at rest. Underneath was this saying : "A turtle only advances when he sticks his neck out."
I do not claim to be the voice of the turtle but here goes:
1) I believe, if Powell and The Fed do what they say they intend, then, interest rates will continue upward even though our economy is softening.
2) This will result in a mild recession causing unemployment to rise .
3) Consumer (family) balance sheets are strong, because of COVID giveaways, but inflation is beginning to alter spending habits which will put pressure on corporate margins and they too will cut back on their own capital spending. More reason to expect mild recession.
4) Profit estimates still do not totally reflect even a mild recession so as analysts reduce estimates, multiples of earnings will also be adjusted downward.
5) Therefore, though I believe the market has discounted much of this, the market still has further to go on the downside with intermittent bear market rallies, some of which could be impressive.
6) Specific to energy stocks. Many prominent investors believe energy could reach $200/bbl or go higher from the current level of around $100/bbl. I am beginning to be concerned about two events that could actually cause energy prices to decline.
They are: a) If Republicans win big and are able to override a Biden veto they could be in a position to allow American oil companies to restart production and exploration. This increased supply could result in prices declining.
b) The Europeans and Biden may choose to force Z to negotiate an end to the war because they too want energy prices to fall and the cost of financing an unending war is not something they are likely to support and finance.
Though, Putin has yet to achieve the military victory he thought doable he could ultimately have us over a barrel by continuing to fight, notwithstanding the casualties he has sustained.
7) In conclusion, I believe the market probes lower until such time as a clearer corporate earnings picture reveals itself and multiples of those earnings settle closer to a range of 13-15 for most companies.
But what do I know?
AND:
This is why stocks with strong balance sheets, buy back programs and ability to pay decent dividends might also prove defensive holdings and outperform. Such a stock could be IBM and consumer essential stocks..
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The Other Side of Rising Interest Rates
By Karina Kovalcik, senior quantitative analyst, Chaikin Analytics
Interest rates are on the move yet again...
Almost everyone has talked about interest rates over and over in recent months (including us). And I bet you're starting to get tired of it.
But the topic is unavoidable. After all, the Federal Reserve just announced another 75-basis-point hike to the benchmark rate yesterday.
By this point, we all realize that rising rates are tough for stocks. And we've seen that rising rates are bad for bond prices as well.
However, this story has another side...
You see, rising rates don't just mean that bond prices are falling. They also mean that the payouts on bonds are rising.
That's great news for risk-averse investors. It means they can get higher payouts on more conservative bond plays.
Now, maybe your gut reaction is, "So what?"
But this side of the story has worldwide effects. That's because it kicks off a global hunt for yield...
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Climate Realism on the Rise?
As a climate and energy realist, in my heart of hearts I dream of the day when the public recognizes climate change will not bring on an end of the world as we know it, or even a long-term net decline for human civilization. That’s what the data and the best science show, despite the claims of corporate media, alarmist activists, heads of corporations, and politicians who profit in terms of money and power by spinning the climate change end-of-the-world fairy tale. Sadly, the public rarely gets to hear this truth.
A few notable instances of the very unalarming facts about climate change getting through on a large scale in the past few years are the release of several bestselling books by prominent liberals advocating what they consider to be reasonable climate policies: Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, Steven Koonin’s Unsettled, and Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm. Sticking strictly to climate science, not policy, Heartland’s own Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students has also sold well on Amazon. However, despite the success of these publications among the literati and reading public, I’d be surprised if these books combined sold more than a million copies in the United States, which has a population of more than 330 million people, or a few million copies among the eight billion people worldwide. Sadly, I suspect more people are exposed to false climate alarm stories in the mainstream media every day in the United States than have been reached by all these books in the past two years since the first one’s release.
Still, hope springs eternal and climate realists keep on plugging away, trying to breach the nearly impregnable wall of climate change disinformation erected by powerful corporate, media, and political elites. Every so often, the realists score a direct hit, making the climate/energy realist case so powerfully that even the mainstream media and elite journals take notice. This occurred recently when The New York Times Magazine (NYTM) published an interview with eminent scientist Vaclav Smil, Ph.D., discussing his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going." (You can’t get more mainstream and yet elitist than the NYTM.) Another direct realist hit on the edifice of climate alarm came with the publication of the article "Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It," in the journal Foreign Affairs, by Ted Nordhaus.
Both Smil and Nordhaus have far more confidence than I that human activities are causing potentially dangerous climate change. Although I disagree to some extent with their assessment of the dangers of climate change, their "realpolitik" analyses of the infeasibility of the net zero energy transition in the 2030-2050 timeline are powerful and accurate.
Despite continual cajoling by the NYTM interviewer, who basically framed the same question again and again and again, pleading for Smil to concede climate change is such an imminent disaster world leaders must forcibly decarbonize our energy systems nearly immediately, Smil refused to rise to the bait. His consistent answer, based on his assessment of the world’s energy needs and the material requirements necessary to meet net zero in the short term, was that this goal is physically and politically impossible. Smil also made clear that the threat posed by climate change does not justify such a dramatic forced transition.
For Smil, the four pillars of modern civilization are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia, each of which requires huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Therefore, he concludes, those calling for rapid decarbonization to combat global warming are being dangerously foolish. "I’m looking at the world as it is," Smil, told the NTYM interviewer, continuing,
The most important thing to understand is the scale. … [A]ccording to COP26, we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels. This is undoable because there’s just eight years left, and emissions are still rising. People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. …
What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.
I’m all for goals but for strict realism in setting them.
For Smil, radical actions to cut carbon dioxide emissions steeply and immediately are neither justified by the problem—because other problems are at least as dire as climate change, and they require fossil fuels to solve—nor are they possible, even if they were justified. It’s a matter of both physics and realpolitik, the latter meaning an honest assessment of the fact that people around the world do and will continue to want to better their lives by their own understanding of what constitutes a better life.
Smil’s assessment coincides with that of Ted Nordhaus, the cofounder (with the above-mentioned Michael Shellenberger) and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a coauthor of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Nordhaus’s article in Foreign Policy is a realist shot across the bow explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is opening eyes to the basic energy truth that fossil fuels are still vital to the world:
[T]he headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.
In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes—and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power—haven’t changed that basic existential fact. …
Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik—and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide—could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades. …
The capacity to adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather events rose significantly … as evidenced by the continued decline in weather-related deaths. But this was not due to any U.N.-led efforts to fund climate adaptation, which never materialized. What made people all over the world more resilient to climate extremes was better infrastructure and safer housing—the product of economic growth powered by cheap fossil fuels.
The geopolitical, technological, and economic competition that characterized the Cold War had more success in reducing the carbon intensity of the global economy than climate policy efforts have had since.
Nordhaus goes on to explain:
The world’s renewable energy economy is deeply entangled with geopolitically problematic supply chains. Huge parts of the world’s supplies of silicon, lithium, and rare-earth minerals rely on China, where solar panels are produced by Uyghur slave labor in concentration camps. The idea that the crisis might be resolved by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement’s pretensions to justice, human rights, and democracy really are.
For Nordhaus and Smil alike, the appropriate response to climate change is to acknowledge the reality of the importance of fossil fuels to continued economic prosperity for the present, while delivering better options through the market—which responds to price signals through efficiency gains and technological innovation—far faster and more effectively than government-mandated energy shifts. Smil states,
at the same time we are constantly transitioning and innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades. Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less environmentally harmful things.
Nordhaus notes the Russian war is increasingly making it clear to countries that climate change is not "the main event," energy security is, and the latter can be achieved while improving economic conditions in the poorest countries and respecting human rights:
But climate and energy policies, especially in the West, may shift significantly from subsidizing demand (for things like solar panels and electric vehicles) to deregulating supply (of things like nuclear power plants and high-voltage transmission lines). A shift of this sort—away from subsidizing specific green technologies favored by activists and lobbyists and toward enabling the broader technological, regulatory, and infrastructural basis for the energy transition—would put clean energy policies on much firmer economic footing. And it would better align climate objectives with energy security imperatives.
People around the world face many problems. Climate change is only one among many, and as Nordhaus and Smil point out, it is probably not the most pressing.
Nordhaus and Smil provide clear-eyed assessments of the physical, economic, and political limits of the energy transition demanded by climate alarmists on the timetable they have laid out. These analysts’ acknowledgements of the benefits fossil fuels have delivered, and the inequities and harms that would result from an attempt to go net zero by 2030 or even 2050, are a refreshing appraisal from scholars whom alarmists cannot in any way smear as "climate deniers."
In my heart of hearts (foolish though it may be), I still hold out hope this truth can get through the daily background noise of climate alarm.
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Elite NYC private schools are teaching kids that American society must be destroyed
Robert Pondiscio
Horace Mann School in the Bronx, NY on November 21, 2019.Horace Mann School senior Ryan Finlay rightfully called out the school's faculty and curriculum. James Messerschmidt
Ryan Finlay is a brave young man. A senior at the elite private Horace Mann School, Finlay last week published a pointed but measured essay describing the aggressive political bias that’s dominated his education on the Bronx campus, where generations of famous and well-connected New Yorkers, from Jack Kerouac to Eliot Spitzer, have matriculated or sent their children.
Faculty “feel obligated to open students’ eyes to the inequality that surrounds them,” Finlay explained, but that takes the form of “continuous pressure in the classroom to embrace visions of wholesale societal reform.”
The message, hammered relentlessly into students’ heads at Horace Mann, is that “the system is broken, unable to be reformed, rotten to the core, and deserving of demolition,” he wrote.
The irony of hyper-privileged New Yorkers paying nearly $60,000 a year for their children to learn they are the undeserving beneficiaries of a broken system need not be dwelled upon here. Finlay’s essay breaks the self-imposed conspiracy of silence that has largely shielded top private schools from criticism from within.
There have been rare exceptions of dissident teachers like Paul Rossi of the Grace School and “Brearley Dad” Andrew Gutmann, who blow the whistle on private-school indoctrination. But few are willing to do so publicly. The largely unquestioned proposition is that private prep schools are the gateway to elite universities and America’s leadership class, an academic arms race famously described in a New York magazine cover story 25 years ago as “Give me Harvard, or give me death.”
Andrew Gutmann, at his New Jersey home. He wrote a letter and pulled his daughter out of Brearly private school, located at 610 East 83st., Manhattan Andrew Gutmann demanded parents at Manhattan’s elite Brearley School fight back against anti-racist curriculum being taught in classrooms.Robert Miller
This explains how the parent body of these schools can be sloppy with C-suite executives and bold-faced names from media, film and television who grow unaccountably meek and humble in the face of private-school admissions officers and headmasters despite their aggressive, Type-A personalities in every other facet of their lives. Finlay’s very public essay is a tacit rebuke to parents, like those at the exclusive Dalton School, who penned an open letter complaining that “love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum” but were too timid to sign their names to the seven-page complaint.
Wealthy parents can afford to purchase billboards anonymously demanding elite private schools teach their kids “how to think, not what to think.” But they cannot afford to put at risk their children’s shot at the Ivy League, so they sit and seethe, lest their children be deemed not a good fit and “counseled out.”
The more troubling picture Finlay paints is of a drifting and deeply anti-intellectual institution. It’s a devastating strike at the heart of another story affluent parents comfort themselves with: that the obscene price they pay for elite private school is not about protecting their privilege. Given the chaotic state of public education, there’s simply no other way for children to get a rich and stimulating education. But Finlay makes clear, the object of social-justice-related curricula at Horace Mann “is not for the material to be challenged, but absorbed without question.”
The real lesson students are learning is not critical thinking and deep engagement with ideas. It’s self-censorship and risk assessment. “It’s not worth jeopardizing academic success at HM in exchange for political expression,” he concludes.
In the end, exclusive private schools have led themselves into a box canyon from which there can be no honest escape. Like an organism that devours its host, their commitment to equity, inclusivity and “dismantling privilege” requires privileged New Yorkers continue spending north of half a million dollars in tuition for their children to learn that their privileges are unearned and undeserved.
And what reason do elite universities’ admissions offices have to continue to look favorably upon on prep-school graduates when they too are committed to equity? Surely an Ivy League acceptance letter is wasted on someone who was born on third base.
Unless, of course, it’s all a cynical exercise with all involved — parents and faculty alike — believing their professed commitment to social justice insures them against practicing what they preach.
Because let’s be honest. There’s really only one surefire way for elite private schools to demonstrate their commitment to dismantling privilege: close their doors and cease operations.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City public-school teacher and private-school parent.
SOURCES: Foreign Policy; New York Times Magazine; Cornwall Alliance; Washington Times
Read This Alert >>>++++++++++++++++ |
WATCH - Tom Trento interview Israeli security analyst Barry Shaw
as he exposes President Biden's historically hypocritical treatment of Israel!
With a goofy, chicklet-white smile, Biden makes lovey-dovey speeches
to useful idiot supporters about his "love" for Israel, while implementing
policies that are clearly detrimental to Israelis and the Nation of Israel.
This explains why American Jews automatically vote for Biden
and his Democrat, anti-Jewish politicians while Israelis can't stand the guy!
CONTACT
BARRY SHAWOpinion It’s almost as if Democrats are trying to make sure Trump wins in 2024
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Biden wants to do a deal with Iran because he feels an obligation to Obama to do his dirty work:
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Report: Iran digging vast tunnel network south of Natanz nuclear facility
Israeli and US intelligence officials monitoring Iran's effort to construct new nuclear facilities that can withstand bunker-busting bombs.
Israeli and American intelligence officials have been watching each day as Iran digs a vast tunnel network just south of the Natanz nuclear production site, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
According to the report, the officials believe this is Tehran’s biggest effort yet to construct new nuclear facilities so deep in the mountains that they can withstand bunker-busting bombs and cyberattacks.
Though the construction is evident on satellite photographs and has been monitored by groups that track the proliferation of new nuclear facilities, Biden administration officials have never talked about it in public and Israel’s defense minister has mentioned it just once, in a single sentence in a speech last month.
In interviews with national security officials in both nations, there clearly were differing interpretations of exactly how the Iranians may intend to use the site, and even how urgent a threat it poses.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this month that the country is just weeks away from being able to enrich enough bomb-grade fuel to make a single nuclear bomb, —though fashioning that into a usable weapon could take at least another two years, even by the most alarmist Israeli estimates, noted the New York Times.
The facility could eventually prove critical to Iran if the Biden administration’s efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement continue to run into roadblocks.
Iran scaled back its compliance with the 2015 deal, in response to former US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in May of 2018, but has held several rounds of indirect talks with the US on a return to the agreement.
An agreement was nearly reached before the talks stopped in March. US Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley told lawmakers recently that the prospects for reaching a deal with Iran are “tenuous” at best.
According to Thursday’s New York Times report, the Iranians are looking for new pressure points, including the excavation of the mountain plant near Natanz. Over the past week, Iranian authorities have switched off 27 cameras that gave inspectors a view into Iran’s production of fuel.
The decision to cut off the cameras, which were installed as part of the nuclear deal, was particularly worrisome to Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations agency responsible for nuclear inspections.
If the cameras remain off for weeks, and it is impossible to track the whereabouts of nuclear materials, “I think this would be a fatal blow” to hopes of reviving the accord, Grossi said last week.
The new facility is close to Natanz, but it resembles Fordow, noted the report.
Biden administration officials say they have been following the construction of the new facility for more than a year, but are not especially alarmed as it is still several years from completion.
To the Israelis, the report said, the tunnel complex is more evidence of a relentless Iranian effort to pursue a bomb capability — and, in the minds of many Israeli military and intelligence leaders, a justification for Israel’s accelerated attacks on the nuclear program and the scientists and engineers behind both Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
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