Here @playbookplus goes again: ‘HOW MUCH IS BIPARTISANSHIP WORTH?’ I don't know @politico, how many more months would you like the pandemic to drag on for? How many more dead? How many more people, businesses ruined economically? I'm sorry but this is garbage framing in a crisis.

One thing I will never understand. In 2020, we let ~340,000 Americans die, sometimes in the thousands per day. And we watched. There were no protests, no daily banner headlines befitting a national tragedy on this scale. It's as if we watched 9/11 in a loop for 300+ days. 1/

It was the non-chalance of all of it, the sangfroid. Yes, of course, there were stories in the media, some great ones, but we were shoving bodies into makeshift morgues in America in 2020, and it all became background noise. 2/

And no one rose up. Punctuated outrage from some. But no one on the streets in any substantial numbers asking for, demanding answers, action. 3/

If it weren't for the #BlackLivesMatter protests you'd think most of America was already dead. 4/

You don't have to ask what would I have done if I was present at one of history's great tragedies where people made choices to let barbarism flourish. We've done it now. 5/

Eight years ago, Spencer Cox died of #AIDS. He had access to #antiretroviral therapy, but in his own struggles with #depression and substance use, he stopped taking them. 1/

Spencer left college, dropped out like me in the 80s, and we both found ourselves in @actupny where we joined the Treatment and Data Committee, doing battle with drug companies, the @US_FDA, the @NIH on a quest to save ourselves and our friends from near-certain death. 2/

Now everyone knows what those dark days before the advent of antiretroviral therapy were like. Waves upon waves of dying friends. A government who couldn't care less for the sick and dying. 3/

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. AIDS. #COVID19. The next pandemic. The fire next time. 4/

And it changes you. Seeing so much death so young. Seeing those in power turn away from the catastrophe, even joke about it (find, listen to the tape of Larry Speakes in Oval Office w Reagan laughing about AIDS). 5/

The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

1/

As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

3/

In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

4/

Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

5/

1/10

This is a really tough problem to resolve, especially if the massive increase in inflows from the trade and financial accounts are sustained, as I expect they will be well into 2021.

Clearly the PBoC would like to see the RMB gradually...

2/10

strengthen. This would keep financial markets stable and promote rebalancing, but the RMB has already strengthened a lot, and this puts unwanted pressure on exporters and “international circulation”.

Although PBoC reserves have been flat, other state-controlled Chinese...

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banks have bought large amounts of dollars, but this is expensive. If these banks have half a trillion dollars of exposure, for example, they are losing at least $15-17 billion annually on negative carry, plus another $20-30 billion just this year from the rise of the RMB.

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Beijing seems also to be trying other measures to slow the rise. The regulators are relaxing capital controls on outflows. In mid October the PBoC cut to zero the reserve requirement ratio for banks doing FX forward trading. This requirement was created in 2018 to reduce...

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downward pressure on the RMB. In late October it suspended the counter-cyclical factor in RMB fixing, which was introduced in 2017 also to reduce downward currency pressure. But in both cases while the RMB dropped a few pips on the news, it quickly resumed its upward climb.

1/16

It is a little frustrating to see the response many analysts had to the GDP growth data Chinese released today. These numbers aren’t especially good, and they certainly shouldn’t have been surprising. Back in April and May, when most

2/16

were projecting negative or barely positive GDP growth for China in 2020 (the OECD, for example, expected China’s GDP to contract by 3.7%), I insisted that GDP growth for 2020 would be positive, and probably between 2% and 3%.

Today, it was reported as 2.3%. How did...

3/16

I know? Because I knew that while most of the healthy sources of Chinese growth would contract (except for exports, which would expand given Beijing’s intense supply-side response to the impact of Covid-19), Beijing was going to respond to a significant...

4/16

worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain – basically real estate and infrastructure investment – in order to achieve as much economic activity as it...

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needed for domestic political ends.

And that’s exactly what happened. While GDP grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter, even with substantial tailwinds its retail sales measure – a proxy for consumption – was only up 4.6%, and it was down 3.9% overall in 2020.

For those who haven’t heard, we are witnessing a globally coordinated plan (conspiracy) to use fear and safety as cover for a #GreatReset of the world economy & society. This is a planned and internationally coordinated strategy by the most powerful global elites-the ruling class

The aim of the global ruling class is to refashion global capitalism into what we can call neo-feudalist technocratic bio-fascism-or ‘global fascism’ for short.

The aim is for remaining liberal democratic rights and freedoms that have been in place at least formally in the ‘west’ for the last few hundred years to be eroded and withdrawn.

There’s lots of different terminology and branding, for example: Great Reset, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Technocracy. The main aim of this plan is the concentration of power over capital, wealth, people and nature in the hands of a the very largest corporations and monopolies.

This plan for a new phase of global capitalism is enabled by national states and governments, international organisations & quangos (EU, UN, NATO, IMF, WTO, WHO, Gates, GAVI). With no clear lines between state and non-state actors, this is also a form of global corporatism.