The banquet of consequences is being served, and risk-off crashes are, like revenge, best served cold.

The ideal setup for a crash is a consensus that a crash is impossible--in other words, just like the present: sure, there are carefully measured murmurings about a "correction" but nobody with anything to lose in the way of public credibility is calling for an honest-to-goodness crash, a real crash, not a wimpy, limp-wristed dip that will immediately be bought.

What I'm calling for is a rip your face off, weeping bitter tears over the grave of the speculative wealth that you thought was forever crash. All those buying the dip because the Fed will never let the market go down will be crushed like scurrying cockroaches and all those trying to rotate into the next hot sector or asset class will also be crushed like scurrying cockroaches because when the Everything Bubble pops, well, everything pops. There is no shelter in a risk-off cascade.

The crash is coming as a result of multiple mutually reinforcing dynamics, the first being that no "serious person" believes a crash is possible, much less imminent. In no particular order, here are a raft of other causally consequential triggers of a cascading market crash:

1. As I noted in my call for the top, Is Anyone Willing to Call the Top of the Everything Bubble? (September 6, 2021), there is no history to support the widespread confidence that the extremes of over-valuation, leverage, euphoria and speculation last forever, or even much longer than the lifespan of a cockroach. We're well past that benchmark into unprecedented insanity. So what happens next: squish.

Whenever we hear the word "sustainable" we would be well-advised to take a critical look behind the nice sounding words. In the case of the globalist Agenda 2030 with its 17 sustainable goals by 2030, the one for creating a "sustainable agriculture", when looked at closely, will destroy a huge part of EU agriculture production and drive already rising global prices for food far higher. The EU Commission calls their Green Deal for food the cute title, "Farm to Fork." It is being backed by Klaus Schwab's omnipresent World Economic Forum and their Great Reset.

Keep in mind that sustainable as defined by the UN and Davos World Economic Forum means achieving Zero Carbon emissions by 2050. Yet there is no scientific study independently proving that CO2 is endangering our planet by creating global warming. Only myriads of dubious, well-funded computer models. The harmless gas is essential to all human, animal and all plant life. Now the European Union Commission is pushing a top-down radical agenda on the agriculture heart of the world's second most important food producer as part of its ill-conceived EU Green Deal. If implemented as is likely, it will cause drastic reduction in crop outputs, a severe reduction in meat protein and, perhaps most dangerous, an overturning of current EU law regulating new gene-edited crops, or GMO.2. That will have global consequences.

Farm to Fork...

In May 2020 the EU Commission released its Farm to Fork Strategy. The official Brussels rhetoric makes it sound like a food nirvana is coming. They state, "The Farm to Fork Strategy is at the heart of the European Green Deal, aiming to make food systems fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly." Wow, that sounds super.

We've all seen the videos from Australia. Police chasing down and beating a helpless woman, shooting rubber bullets at construction workers who violate that country's draconian lockdown rules. A 12-year-old girl gets pepper sprayed for not wearing a mask.

Watch the horrific excuse for policing below.


In another video [fast-forwarding to the 3:30 mark and be forewarned, the language is bad], police pepper spray a girl for not wearing a mask.


Do not be fooled into thinking this is just an Australian thing, never to happen in America.

Truly, tectonic changes are happening before our eyes, and today I just want to list some of them but without going to deep into specific analyses, that I plan to do later in the coming weeks. But just looking at this list is impressive enough, at least for me. So, here we go:

The Anglos are circling the wagons:

The planned sale of US/UK SSNs to Australia is nothing short of a HUGE game changer. It is also just the tip of a big iceberg:

• The US seems to have de-facto given up on Europe, not only because the UK left or because the EU is crashing and unmanageable anyway, but because the political grip the US had on the continent is now clearly slipping: NATO is a paper tiger, the "new Europeans" have outlived their utility and Russia has basically successfully diffused the threat from the West by her titanic effort to develop capabilities which make an attack on Russia suicidal for any country, including the USA, whether nukes are involved or not.
• By screwing over France, the US has jettisoned a pretty useless ally which had a short hysterical fit, but is already going back to its usual groveling and begging (BTW - those who think that de Gaulle was the last French patriot capable of telling Uncle Shmuel to "take a hike" are wrong, Mitterrand was the last one, but that is a topic for another day).
• Of course, in political/PR terms, the US will continue to declare itself committed to NATO and the EU, but the "body language" (actions) of the US directly contradicts this notion.
• For all its immense progress since the 80s and 90s, China still has two major technological weak points: aircraft engines and SSNs. It just so happens that these are also two real US strong points. By deploying 8 more SSNs near China, the US is very intelligently maximizing the use of its best assets and hurting China where it will hurt the most. This does come with some very real risks, however, which I will discuss below.

We discovered there was not one set of rules for all, and that even the strictest medical advice could be trumped by political considerations

Early on during the pandemic, it was easy to accept that the politicians, guided by their selected cadre of experts, knew what they were doing. And there was likewise in the public mind a considerable reservoir of trust in their pronouncements, which was not diminished if — in the very early days — a caution or a recommendation put out one week was altered, revised, or even contradicted by a caution or recommendation the week following.

The recent article in The Guardian written by suspected MI6-linked Martin Chulov is a sign of the collapsing regime change project driven by the UK and US intelligence agencies since well before 2011. A war in a series of wars and coups that have plagued the region for decades. I recently wrote about the West being forced to partially normalise relations with President Assad after demonising him relentlessly since 2011. This is only the first in what will be a long line of climb-downs by the US/UK Coalition of intervention.

Europe needs to stop being naive when it comes to defending its interests and build its own military capacity, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday after Greece sealed a deal for French frigates worth about €3 billion euros ($3.51 billion).

The strategic defence and security cooperation pact signed by the French and Greek presidents is part of efforts to increase European military autonomy, something Macron has said is even more vital after the reversal of the submarine deal with Australia.

"It contributes to European security, to the strengthening of Europe's strategic autonomy and sovereignty, and thus to international peace and security," French President Emmanuel Macron told a news conference alongside Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

The 20th-anniversary summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, enshrined nothing less than a new geopolitical paradigm.

Iran, now a full SCO member, was restored to its traditionally prominent Eurasian role, following the recent US$400 billion trade and development deal struck with China. Afghanistan was the main topic - with all players agreeing on the path ahead, as detailed in the Dushanbe Declaration. And all Eurasian integration paths are now converging, in unison, towards the new geopolitical - and geoeconomic - paradigm.

Call it a multipolar development dynamic in synergy with China's Belt and Road Initiative.

The Dushanbe Declaration was quite explicit on what Eurasian players are aiming at:

"a more representative, democratic, just and multipolar world order based on universally recognized principles of international law, cultural and civilizational diversity, mutually beneficial and equal cooperation of states under the central coordinating role of the UN."

For all the immense challenges inherent to the Afghan jigsaw puzzle, hopeful signs emerged on Tuesday (September 21), when former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and peace envoy Abdullah Abdullah met in Kabul with Russian presidential envoy Zamir Kabulov, China's special envoy Yue Xiaoyong and Pakistan's special envoy Mohammad Sadiq Khan.

This troika - Russia, China, Pakistan - is at the diplomatic forefront. The SCO reached a consensus that Islamabad will coordinate with the Taliban on the formation of an inclusive government that including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered his secretary of state to investigate Facebook for "alleged election interference."

The move comes in the wake of a report in The Wall Street Journal, showing that "the tech giant put its thumb on the scale of numerous state and local races by exempting elite users from Facebook's own rules," according to a Monday statement from DeSantis.

In a Sept. 27 letter, DeSantis directed Florida Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee to investigate Facebook's alleged failures to comply with Florida's election laws. The alleged violations create a "privileged class of speakers" who are empowered to exert influence on elections. DeSantis, citing the Wall Street Journal report, wrote:

"While most people are subject to arbitrary censorship at the whims of so-called fact-checkers, Facebook grants select users the freedom to disregard the platform's own community standards without the threat of enforcement action."

The Deputy Premier of New South Wales (NSW) said this week that those who remain unvaccinated even after the draconian lockdowns are ended will "lose freedoms."

Deputy Premier John Barilaro made the statement after NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian revealed a new three-step plan to ending the lockdowns that includes 70% of the population receiving both doses of a vaccine. Barilaro said, according to Sky News:

"A further and final message to regional New South Wales ... that parts of regional New South Wales that are currently open. The 70 per cent road map does apply to the whole state so there will be individuals in regional and rural New South Wales who choose not to be vaccinated who will lose their freedoms on 11 October."

As Sky News reported, some areas of NSW are not under stay-at-home orders, which allows the unvaccinated to move about almost freely. But starting October 11, when the state expects it will reach 70% fully vaccinated, only those who are fully vaccinated will be freed from the lockdowns.