It should be evident by now that the “strong” economy of the last several years was nothing of the kind. To the contrary, the Keynesian GDP accounts were actually inflated by deferred spending run-offs that flowed from the utterly abnormal build-up of household cash during Washington’s pandemic lockdowns and stimmy extravaganza. The story is evident […]

If the monetary central planners in the Eccles Building cared a whit about enabling the workers, entrepreneurs, savers, investors and consumers of America to maximize capitalist prosperity on main street, they’d be worried to death about the collapse of private savings. After all, what lifts an economy above day-to-day subsistence is capital formation. And that […]

We showed in Part 3 that just 1.3 million RFK votes in five Swing States accounting for just 7% of the US electorate could result in a shift of 42 Electoral Votes (27 to Trump and 15 to Kennedy) from the 2020 outcome. In turn, these shifts would cause a hung jury in the Electoral College, thereby requiring a 12th Amendment based selection of the next President in the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 200 years.

2024 Electoral College Outcome With 42 Vote Shift In 5 Key Swing States:

• Biden: 264 Electoral Votes.
• Trump: 259 Electoral Votes.
• Kennedy: 15 Electoral Votes.
• Needed to Win: 270 Electoral Votes.

This hung jury scenario very plausibly assumed that neither the 191 Electoral Votes in the Blue Wall states that went to Biden nor the 163 Electoral Votes in the Red Wall states that went to Trump in 2020 would change. Alas, what was not addressed is the outlook for the 11 other Swing States that exhibit a purplish hue and ended in a dead heat in 2020.  

And we do mean dead heat.The 146 Electoral Votes in these 11 states split exactly 73 votes for Biden and 73 votes for Trump. And that was on the back of a popular vote outcome among the 49.5 million total votes cast in these states that was virtually tied with 24,481,800 votes for Trump and 24,252,998 votes for Biden. Our trusty hp12C renders the difference as just 228,802 votes or 0.46% in favor of Trump.

Given the uncertainty of the incidence by which RFK will draw votes from Biden versus Trump, there is a clear risk that Biden could pick up 6 more Electoral Votes or Trump 11 more Electoral Votes compared to the 2020 outcome. Either of these small shifts within the 146 Electoral Vote total for these 11 Swing States would result in a 270 vote Electoral College victory under the scenario outline above, thereby nullifying RFK's "hung jury" route to the White House.

Indeed, the potential for shifts of these modest magnitudes is more than evident in the contrast between the 2016 and 2020 outcomes in these state. In 2016 Trump won 120 Electoral Votes versus Clinton's 26 in these states. So the real danger is in the direction of votes reverting to Trump, not additional gains by Biden.



When analyzed on a state by state basis, however, it boils down to a very targeted risk in three states, which voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped to Biden in 2020. These include Michigan (16 Electoral Votes), Wisconsin (10 Electoral Votes) and Pennsylvania (20 Electoral Votes), along with the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska, which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 by a vote of 45% to 52%. The combination of the second district of Nebraska and any one of the three states in this group reverting to Trump in 2024 would put the Donald back in the White House.

In the final section below, therefore, we address how the RFK campaign might attempt to preclude this kind of Trump recidivism. But also it needs be mentioned that the other 7 states plus Nebraska's other 4 Electoral Votes are not likely to shift, especially if the Kennedy campaign gives these areas a hall pass in terms of focused local campaigning and and advertising.

The 16 Swing States of America accounted for 38.5% of the popular vote in 2020, and these 61 million votes, in turn, were reflected in 184 Electoral College Votes or 34% of the total. As it happened, Biden won big in the Swing States, besting Trump by 113 to 71 in the Electoral College. Yet […]

The decibel level from both the Biden and Trump camps about RFK’s alleged “spoiler” candidacy is sure to intensify mightily as Election Day draws nearer. Blocking the election of the other guy, in fact, is about all either of the main party candidates have to offer. Biden’s platform essentially boils down to “Orange Man Bad”, […]

Down on the farm we knew that when the pigs were squealing loudly they were either having an especially fulsome chow-down or the wolf was circling the pen. The Donald’s loud squealing against RFK on social media in recent days is surely a case of the latter. Anti-government conservatives are belatedly abandoning the Donald’s fake […]

Along with the rest of the mainstream media, CNN is so deep in the tank for "Joe Biden" that it should change its call letters to DNC. So its not surprising the network spun yesterday's flaccid GDP number into another attaboy for the puppeteers running the U.S. President's teleprompter---pauses and all.

The US economy cooled more than expected in the first quarter of the year, but remained healthy by historical standards.

Then again, you might wonder which version of history they are referencing. If you look at the the 85 quarters since the turn the century outside of recession quarters, the real GDP growth rate exceeded the Q1 rate of 1.6% more than 80% of the time. And if you scroll back further to the period between 1954 and 2016, the real growth rate averaged 3.04% or nearly double the first quarter result.

Yet what is involved here is not merely a fact-checkers "Pinocchio" owing to blatant abuse of the actual historical facts with respect to the Q1 GDP print. The larger point is that the financial news has become so filtered and distorted by the recency bias of the MSM that the larger truth of the present has been totally suppressed and obfuscated.

To wit, at the core of modern capitalist economies---even with today's so-called technological revolution---is the production of goods for household consumption and business investment. And yet the Fed's own hundred year-old data series on that very matter---the industrial production index---says that the American economy has grown not a single inch since the eve of the Great Financial Crisis

The graph below is indexed to December 2007 =100.0, which is virtually identical to the level posted for March 2024. The real economic story of the moment, therefore, is that even as the official GDP measure continues to pound out tepid gains, the manufacturing, mining, energy and utility producers of the US economy have been spinning their wheels to nowhere for the past 17 years.

Industrial Production Index, December 2007 to March 2024



Needless to say, this flat-lining trend is the very opposite of prior history. The same index rose by 630% between January 1950 and  December 2007. That's 3.5% per annum for 57 years running. And that happened notwithstanding nine recessions, a wide range of Federal fiscal, monetary, regulatory and tax policies that were good, bad and indifferent, and also numerous political crises from the Cuban missile crisis, to oil embargoes, the Persian Gulf wars and 9/11.

You can count on Sleepy Joe to get it upside down. Upon signing the $95 billion OFAA (Omnibus Foreign Aid Abomination), he averred it was a great day for most of humankind: “It’s a good day for America, it’s a good day for Europe and it’s a good day for world peace,” Biden said. The […]

If any proof is needed of the baleful impact on Middle Class America of the Fed's abject subservience to Wall Street, the chart below tells you all you need to know. According to REDFIN, the monthly mortgage payment in April on the median priced home is up 11.3% from last year and a staggering 70% just since April 2021.

But, no, it's not because the geniuses in the Eccles Building have allowed longer-term interest rates to partially normalize. To the contrary, the real culprit is soaring home prices, which have been fostered by the Fed's relentless suppression of interest rates and saturation of the homeownership market with cheap mortgage debt.

For want of doubt, here is the 30-year mortgage rate for the last forty years. Neither today's nominal rate (black bars) at about 7.0% or, more importantly, the inflation-adjusted rate (red bars) at 3.0% can be considered even remotely high relative to the long-term trend.

In fact, today's inflation-adjusted rates only seem high relative to the total aberration of 2021-2022 when the Fed drove real interest rates deeply into negative territory. Of course, no one who thinks rates are now too high has explained how banks and other investors in mortgage debt would be pleased to lose principal year-in-and-year out if the pandemic era monetary madness were to be made permanent.

More appropriately, the real message of this graph is that during well more than 75% of the time over the last four decades real mortgage rates were higher than they are today. Yet that did not send the housing market into turmoil or push potential homebuyers out into the snow.

Nominal and Inflation-Adjusted 30-Year Mortgage Rates, 1984 to 2023



In fact, between 1984 and 2007, the inflation-adjusted mortgage rate averaged +5.25% or 1.5X more than current levels. Yet back then both family housing sales and new units completed relative to the number of households needing shelter posted at levels far higher than during the last 12 months.

Cheap real rates consequently had a far greater impact on housing prices and speculative activity in the sector than on actual levels of housing activity.  In fact, the number of new completions per US household (black line) was 75% higher in 1984 than it was in 2023, while the level of homes sales per US household (red line) was 47% higher in 1984. But to remind, real mortgage rates in 1984 had posted at +9.5 versus and average of +2.7% in 2023.

New Home Sales And New Housing Unit Completion Per US Household, 1984 to 2023

What the Fed did stimulate in the housing sector, of course, was prices. The median home sales price (dashed blue line) of $79,900 in 1984 had risen to $425,000 by 2023, representing a whopping gain of 430%.

The clusterf*ck in the US House of Representatives this weekend is surely the final straw. The dreadful grip of the UniParty on national security policy has finally produced sheer madness in a single package. To wit:

• $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do not benefit America's homeland security in the slightest.
• An extension of section 702 of FISA that wantonly expands an already egregious affront to the Fourth Amendment.
• The wanton transfer of billions of sovereign assets stolen from Russia to its enemies in Kiev.
• A national security ban on 15-second TikTok videos about dances, pranks, pets and poppycock viewed overwhelmingly by under 30-year-old Americans whose viewing habits are of zero value to the Chicoms in Beijing.

It is bad enough that there is not an iota of informed consideration behind any of this, but what is really alarming is that every single House Democrat (212) voted in favor of $61 billion for the Ukrainian Demolition Derby, while only fourteen Republicans voted against all four components of this wholesale assault on constitutional liberty and fiscal rectitude.

In this context it was the predictable histrionics of the bevy of neocon warmongers on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal that brought home the full extent of the challenge. Namely, that the mainstream narrative in the Imperial City and among the nation's elite media is so utterly wrong-headed and morally obtuse that only the complete abandonment of the core framework of contemporary national security policy can save the day.

Accordingly, the "domino" theory needs be repudiated once and for all. Likewise, the Washington-Jefferson doctrine of "no entangling alliances" needs be revived in place of the vestigial cold war notion that informs Washington's current destructive and bankrupting policies. That is to say, the obsolete notion that America's homeland security depends upon a worldwide system of alliances, bases and military power projection capabilities that enable Washington to function as the great Global Hegemon, who is ready, willing and able to intervene in virtually any spate that erupts among the 8 billion peoples of the planet.

The fourteen stalwarts listed below essentially said, no dice to these tired, dangerous, costly and risible formulations: Neither Russia nor China pose even a remote military threat to the American homeland, while proxy wars and economic sanctions against "adversaries" demonized by the Deep State actually undermine domestic liberty and prosperity for no justifiable reason of homeland security at all.

With respect to the latter, for instance, there is no real reason for the sweeping multi-hundred billion cost to the American economy of sanctions and trade restrictions on China, Iran or Russia. And, similarly, there are no security threats in the world today that even remotely justify the national security state's intrusion into the rights and privacies of American citizens.

Still, the crypto intellectuals at the WSJ trotted out Hitler, Tojo and the "isolationist" epithet as if these references prove anything at all, when, in fact, none have any real relevance to the world of today. There are simply no industrial state tyrants on the march anywhere on the global horizon that resemble even the apparent facts of the 1930s, let alone the actual historical realities of the matter.