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How low can we go?
This isn’t ancient history.
Go back to Chinese Lunar New Year 2020: The Year of the Rat
In January, when the coronavirus was launched in the city of Wuhan, Beijing locked the city down, and others, to beat the virus.
In lockstep, Italy picked up the sword to defeat the coronavirus and following their marching orders, arrogant political clowns backed by their bureaucratic servants, locked down much of the world to “flatten the curve.”
They flattened life on earth and did zero to beat the virus, which, as we detailed in this and many previous Trends Journals, was, and is, deadly for those suffering from pre-existing comorbidities… particularly taking down the obese and those with Type 2 diabetes.
And which nation has suffered the most from COVID?
“We’re #1,” America!
The nation that is the originator and junk food/fast food champion of the world where 70 percent of the people are overweight of which 42 percent are obese from stuffing their faces with garbage crap that’s neatly wrapped.
Yes, with a population of some 334 million, America registered over 1,012,461 COVID deaths. Yet, India, for example, much more impoverished, and with a population of 1.403 billion, tallied up 521,723 COVID virus victims.
What’s the point?
The COVID War has destroyed life on earth and killed hundreds of millions of more lives and livelihoods than the virus has over the past two plus years.
But the political criminals who, with their “health experts” decided which businesses were “essential” and which were not, annihilated major sectors of the economy that will not come back for decades… or at all.
Yet, there is never a mention of these and other important facts by the mainstream media. Instead, they just pump out government and corporate agenda bullshit and narrow ranges of data that are a tiny fraction of the big picture.
Real World
Office occupancy rate in the U.S. is down 60 percent from where it was before politicians launched the COVID War in 2020.
People aren’t dressing up to go to work. As a result of the work-from-home and dressing down trend, some 30 percent of the dry cleaners will be out of business in the coming year according to the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute.
Traveling to outside nations is a COVID testing/vaccine nightmare. Thus, travel will not go back to pre-COVID War levels since a sizable segment of the population will refuse the Operation Warp Speed gene therapy jab.
Streets that were bustling at night are nearly empty a few hours after dark.
Nightlife in many nations and states is no-life.
As we detail in numerous editions of the Trends Journal, and as we had forecast: suicide rates, crime rates, drug addiction rates, poverty rates are skyrocketing as a result of the imbecilic/unscientific draconian social distancing, mask wearing, hand sanitizing, plexiglass and other lockdown mandates that “health experts”—arrogant bureaucrats that are too stupid to get a job in the real world and bend over and suck up to politicians to work for the state—imposed upon We the People.
Go back to 2020, despite the lockdowns and businesses going out of business, the word-on-the-street was “It’ll come back.”
It came back for the Bigs, who, with the ability to borrow cheap money became bigger, with merger and acquisition activity hitting record highs—along with stock buy-backs—while much of the world has declined deeper into poverty.
And now the Ukraine War. A war that would have ended and the implications of the Russian invasion would have not gone far beyond their borders has now rattled the earth thanks to America and its NATO allies ramping it up with steady flows of lethal weapons to Ukraine… and their sanctions that have rapidly accelerated the already spiking inflation rates.
Today, British charity Oxfam said that as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns (which worsened the supply chain disruptions) and now the Ukraine War sanctions that have further pushed up already rising energy and food prices, some 860 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty by the end of this year.
Oxfam’s “First Crisis, Then Catastrophe,” reports that the junction of the COVID War and Ukraine War crises may increase the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day—extreme poverty—by more than a quarter of a billion.
And besides “extreme poverty,” what about plain “poverty”?
How many people are living on less than $10 a day?
As we reported last week, food prices worldwide have risen to their highest levels since the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization began tracking them 30 years ago.
Yet, at the top, according to Oxfam, the world’s richest 10 men have collectively seen their wealth more than double from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while the world’s 2,755 billionaires got richer during the first two years of the COVID War than they did in the last 14 years.
The bottom line: Mad Men and Mad Women are running governments around the world and have sent the planet into a downward, dangerous socioeconomic and geopolitical spiral unprecedented in human history.
Obediently, much of the world followed their leaders.
And, just as they marched off to the draconian COVID War mandates and masked up, social distanced, sanitized their hands, and got the COVID Jabs—and as we continue to note, the politicians and “celebrities who sold the jab keep getting the virus and brag they are happy they got the booster—the masses have marched off to Ukraine War.
As always, ignorant of the facts, they swallow the lies and propaganda sold to them by their government leaders and little boy and girl Presstitutes that sell what they are told by their government whore masters and corporate pimps.
Yet, the bottom line is not peace and prosperity, it is Wall Street.
And today, more of the reality of the “worst is yet to come,” came in with the inflation numbers.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5 percent in March, rising more than expected and hitting its highest level since December 1981.
However, being that the government inflation numbers are rigged, the real CPI is more than double the BLS number.
According to ShadowStats, “Corrected” Alternate CPI estimate hit 17.15 percent, up from 16.05 percent …and not the 7.9 BLS number in February. They report that this is the steepest inflation rate since June 1947 (in 75 years).
Real vs. Fake
For example, spiking housing price increases are not added into the “official” stats.” Plus, the BLS (BS) tracks the price of a basket of goods and services that they say represent average American spending habits.
As part of their made-up fiction, when people downgrade the products they buy in the “fixed basket of goods index”, this “substitution bias” brings down the inflation numbers because when prices go up people substitute lower-cost alternatives… i.e., going from steak to ground beef.
It is just another, among its many, long list of government deceptions. If the price of an item in the index rises, a lower-priced item is substituted, inflation is eliminated by substitution. Inflation also is eliminated by redefining a price rise as a quality improvement.
But again, the realities are not hidden in the numbers.
Gas prices spiked 18.3 percent from last month, food prices were up 8.8 percent over the year, and if you want to fly somewhere, airline fares jumped up 23.6 percent from a year ago
On the real hourly earning front, wages are not keeping up with inflation, therefore, the “substitution bias” will continue to escalate. While wages were up 5.6 percent, real average hourly earnings fell 0.8 percent from a year ago.
Earn Less, Pay More
While The Street is celebrating that their phony core CPI reading, which excludes food and energy prices, increased 0.3 percent, they cheered it as being below the consensus economist estimate from Dow Jones of 0.5 percent and was up “only” 6.5 percent on an annual basis.
This is how CNBC reported the “good” inflation news this morning:
“The big news in the March report was that core price pressures finally appear to be moderating,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. Hunter said he thinks the March increase will “mark the peak” for inflation as year-over-year comparisons drive the numbers lower and energy prices subside.
Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said the slowing increase in core CPI is a “welcome” development in the effort to bring down inflation.
So where is the economy heading? Check out Gregory Mannarino’s article in this issue: “Recession? Depression? Worse?”
TREND FORECAST: The worst of inflation is yet to come. And, should America and its NATO allies keep putting sanctions on Russia, as we have greatly detailed in Trends Journals since the Ukraine War began 24 February, the inflation rates will continue to rise beyond “expectations.”
Remember, going back over a year ago, The Street and The Feds were way off in their inflation projections. First inflation was “temporary,” then it was “transitory.”
Never, ever did they warn of it hitting 40 year highs, and now they are trying to play it down again so the gamblers keep gambling to keep the artificially propped up equity rising and people keep spending more than they will make.
We maintain our forecast for Dragflation: Declining economy and rising inflation.