From the Brownstone Institute

By Peter St Onge 

China is going pear-shaped as Beijing panics and wheels out the “monetary bazooka.”

Cue the Worldwide inflation.

Just a few weeks ago I did a video about how China is on the edge of recession. Weeks later, the edge of recession has now progressed to a full-blown Chinese fire drill.

So What Happened?

Last week, China’s ruling Politburo held an emergency economic meeting and decided to crank up the money printers to 11, pumping money to consumers, to banks, to property developers, basically to anybody who might spend it.

Bloomberg called it an “adrenaline shot,” as in it’ll pump assets but won’t last long.

Specifically, Beijing’s going to dump about 3.8 trillion yuan – roughly half a trillion dollars – to keep the economy running.

A trillion yuan goes to consumer subsidies, including a hundred twenty US per month child subsidy – a hundred twenty’s big in China – to bribe Chinese mothers into having more kids, which they’ve stopped doing.

Next up are the banks – as always – who get a cool hundred and forty billion US along with another 100 billion dumped into stock markets.

Allegedly this is all to spur spending – as in the banks lend the money out and the stockholders feel rich – but it would do wonders for the gaping holes in China’s teetering financial industry.

Beyond the Money Dump

Beyond the money dump, China’s slashing interest rates across the board – which governments do to try and gin up some tissue-fire growth.

They’re slashing downpayment requirements on houses, opening a special credit facility so banks and hedge funds can gamble on stocks, and cutting the reserve requirements for banks – meaning banks can raid their vaults and go on a lending spree.

Put it together, and Beijing’s doing everything it can to get money out in the wild, down to bankrolling gamblers and pouring yet more trillions down the black hole of China’s comically over-built housing market.

You may have seen the ghost towns China’s built; here comes round two.

What Scares China

Why so desperate, you might ask?

Easy: China is panicked not only about a looming recession but that it might be falling into the Japan-style doom-loop of structural stagnation thanks to President Xi’s anti-business jihad.

The key number here is the interest rate on 30-year government bonds, which is a classic indicator of a zombie economy in the spawning.

Ominously, China’s 30-year just fell below Japan’s. Flirting with zombie territory.

What’s Next

Near-term, they’re popping the bubble in Beijing with stocks soaring.

And while 4 trillion yuan is a lot of money, this isn’t yet the Big Bang – that would be a long-rumored 10 trillion money dump by Beijing.

They’re not there yet, probably because the US and Europe haven’t hit the meat of their recessions. Debt-fueled Americans are still buying Chinese exports.

If and when that breaks down, either because Americans are out of money or Trump rolls out tariffs on China, Beijing’s up against the wall, and it will blow out into worldwide inflation.

China’s Turn for Chaos

I’ve mentioned in previous articles how if China goes down, the Chinese people won’t have a sense of humor about it. This ain’t Japan where people shake their heads and obey.

Beijing knows this, they know the kinetic history of the Chinese masses when they’re angry, and if they panic hard enough they may reach for a war to both distract the population and to clamp down on dissent.

Just this week they launched a massive military exercise in a disputed area of the South China Sea, there could be more to come.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Peter St Onge

Peter is an economist, a Fellow at the Mises Institute, and a former MBA professor.

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Maryanne Demasi  

Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

A relatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.

“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”

A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.

“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.

Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.

Today, Wenstrup announced a subpoena to compel Moore (The FOIA lady) to appear for a deposition on October 4, 2024, saying that she’d repeatedly resisted these efforts and delayed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.

“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation,” said Wenstrup.

“Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government,” he added.

Moore, however, has indicated through her lawyers that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she’d cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find “an alternative” to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.

They also explained that Morens’ emails suggesting Moore gave tips “about avoiding FOIA,” were misleading because Morens, under oath said, “That was a joke…She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”

Nonetheless, Moore’s decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation’s top health research institutions.

It’s not over until the FOIA lady sings!

Further reading: The great FOIA dodge

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Maryanne Demasi

Maryanne Demasi, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is an investigative medical reporter with a PhD in rheumatology, who writes for online media and top tiered medical journals. For over a decade, she produced TV documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and has worked as a speechwriter and political advisor for the South Australian Science Minister.