Storm clouds blanket the entire global economy right now. In the articles I’ve written over the last ten days, I reported extensively on the following prevailing winds that are assailing all economies, and in this article and the next, I’ll reveal how our governments are actively making them much worse:
- The fastest rise in inflation since IHS Markit began tracking;
- Commodities now at record highs;
- Full-blown Asian and European energy crises (in oil, natural gas and electricity) with gas lines like the 70’s;
- Global shipping problems doing nothing but getting worse for months;
- Developing food shortages due to energy crises and shipping problems;
- The Fed now admitting none of this is as transitory now as they had formerly believed;
- Persistent labor shortages well after all augmented unemployment benefits have ended;
- The European Central Bank, Bank of England and US Federal Reserve all tapering/raising interest rates simultaneously;
- The first time multiple central banks have moved to various levels of tightening after their economies and markets had already started to rapidly decline during a time of extraordinary CB largesse;
- The resolute history of stock-market troubles when the Fed tapers and stock market disaster when it tightens;
- Stock markets and bond markets both starting to shiver over the prospects of tightening now that schedules are being talked about for real, busting through recent trading ranges and levels of support;
- Recent horrible US bond auctions with bid-to-cover levels not seen since the 2008 economic collapse;
- The imminent removal of the Fed’s absolute control over US treasury pricing and the yield curve;
- Risk appetite and sentiment in stocks falling for the past half year according to surveys;
- The rapid growth of product shortages expressed by numerous businesses.
- Relentlessly expanding shipping backups.
The governments of this world and their COVID policies and environmental policies seem hellbent at present on turning the COVIDcrisis into an all-out economic crisis, maybe even to the point of causing global economic collapse. In this two-part series, I’ll lay out some of the inexplicable things they are doing to make the crisis worse.
Our governments brings a pox upon us
While officials are warning us that hospitals and hospital staff are overburdened, these same officials in many states and in the Federal government have decided now is the time enhance this critical medical shortage by forcibly firing all medical personnel who refuse to get one of the various COVID vaccines.
Not long ago, those who are now being jettisoned from their livelihoods were the heroes and heroins who risked life and limb to save the unvaccinated because everyone was unvaccinated. Now, many of those who got COVID for their efforts are choosing not to vaccinate because they (as medical professionals) believe their enhanced natural immunity is better and don’t see the need to take more risk with a vaccine that has had no long-term testing. Now their governments are insisting they all be fired for refusing the vaccine that they do not need (because natural immunity, once enhanced by getting a disease, is almost always as good or better than a vaccine).
Whether you agree with those medically trained individuals and their personal choice or not and whether or not you believe medical confidentiality and civil liberties must be protected in the face of public fear or must also be jettisoned, you have to agree that fewer nurses and PA’s and surgical techs and administrative staff will leave hospitals more overburdened than they are now. That’s math, not politics. As a result,
With President Biden’s federal vaccine mandate set to take effect on Monday, health-care systems around the country are suspending elective in-patient surgeries and refusing to accept ICU patients from other hospitals as they brace for potentially hundreds of firings of nurses and other critical staffers, potentially even doctors….
Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo is planning to do all that and more, as it says it may soon fire about 400 employees who have chosen not to get the single job [sic.] required by the edict….
Northwell Health, the state’s largest health-care provider … might be forced to fire thousands of people who have refused to get vaccinated.
This looming expansion of the health crisis, of course, could be avoided, but the federal government and many state governments are determined to make it worse in order to (they wrongly hope) force millions of people to get vaccinated. It will work with some, but not with many.
Prediction: Therefore, I’m predicting an intensified man-made medical crisis due to officials who believe livelihood threats will force most people to give up what they see as a civil right — their personal right to decide what goes into their bodies and to govern their own health decisions.
New York’s new governor agrees the crisis is manmade, saying,
What is looming for Monday is completely avoidable, and there’s no excuses.
Governor Hochul is right, of course. We just disagree over which people are at fault for creating the crisis — those who put the crisis in play, or those who refuse to play along.
How large, potentially, is this problem?
16% of NY’s 450,000 hospital workers and 83% of nursing home workers – which number around 45,400 – remained unvaccinated.
Paramedics are also being forcibly fired. At a time when shortages are likely to create more conflicts, other first responders are being fired for not getting vaccines, too, such as police and firefighters. Therefore, as we enter what I believe will be the winter of our discontent, we’ll have fewer responders to help deal with the many problems that emerge due to all the building crises.
The new vaccine mandates are also clobbering businesses that barely survived the earlier COVID shutdowns by forcing partial shutdowns all over again. Businesses in some states that barely made it through the sporadic COVID closures are now being given a one-two punch by their local and state governments: 1) Not only must they fire their unvaccinated employees, forcing the businesses to downscale; 2) they just turn away all their unvaccinated customers by requiring a vaccine card and ID to enter restaurants and large public venues.
Running at marginal levels for the past eighteen months, more businesses are permanently closing, as if our shattered economy can handle more busted businesses. I just saw one restaurant in my own county announce in the paper that it is finally closing due to COVID because it just can’t handle the reduced capacity any longer. Governments don’t care. They see this as an essential cost, and they are not even slightly willing to consider softening the blow with immunity cards to go with the vaccine cards that would verify a person had antibodies from a past COVID infection so was not a risk. They completely reject the possibility of even thinking about that.
This madness is no small matter. New York City restaurants report their business has plunged 40-60% just because of the vaccine mandates! That makes survival of already strained businesses in what has always been a low-margin industry almost impossible. Their governments don’t care! Battling COVID at all costs, even with scientifically unsupportable measures, is the sole directive, even if we destroy our nations doing it.
NYC Restaurateurs: Business Down 40 to 60 Percent Due to Vaccine Mandate:
New York City restaurateurs are complaining that their business has been slashed severely by the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which requires people 12 and older to show vaccination proof for indoor dining, indoor fitness, and indoor entertainment….
Comparing the clientele from pre-mandate to when it kicked in about two weeks ago, “Our business is definitely down 50, I’m going to say 60 percent,” Burke said with a somewhat downhearted tone….
Burke and his staff have had to refuse a lot of customers for not having the passes.
“They’re being refused and they get a resentment against us, they don’t get a resentment against Bill de Blasio or Biden, or whoever is mandating us to check for this.”
“I mean how is that fair in New York City, that the trains are jammed with people with a silly mask on and they’re not being mandated to show nothing, and yet they’re coming against the heart of the city. We’re the ones that’s trying to keep 20 people employed here,” Burke said.
“We will go out of business if this continues, it’s gonna force us to shut our doors.”
Their governments will not even CONSIDER the possibility that the hundred-million people who have already had COVID don’t need a vaccine. That doesn’t fit the secular religious dogma of the day.
We are destroying ourselves due to mass hysteria that is not even willing to think. Israel just did a massive study that showed natural immunity among those who have already had COVID is actually far superior to vaccinated immunity. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fit the dogma. It will not even be given thought because, apparently, our leaders would rather destroy us than stray from the CDC’s dogma. Other studies have now shown that those who have had COVID carry antibodies in their bone marrow that will make them immune for a lifetime, just as happens with measles.
The federal government believed, as have many state governments, that it could strongarm citizens into compliance by threatening their survival — their livelihoods. It has rapidly discovered a great many of those citizens will not comply. That means we will have worse COVID because hospitals are being rendered less able to handle it by kicking out employees who are likely no risk at all.
To show how extreme the insanity is, this is all happening at a time when all businesses are struggling with labor shortages as well. Now they have to fire many of their remaining employees.
Prediction: That assures we will have more business closures this winter and more business slowdowns.
Consider how many goods — even medical supplies — have to be driven by truckers and unloaded at ports where nations already have serious shortages of workers. Many truckers in the US are Trump supporters who are ardently opposed to the vaccine mandates and have stated they will not comply, but they work for large companies that must enforce the vaccine mandates. Think about how much the loss of likely thousands of truckers during an existing trucker shortage will slow down all transportation services for the delivery of goods to consumers and commodities to producers and energy to all, again also raising the price of those due to greater scarcity.
Already, the rebellion has begun:
In this time when EVERYONE KNOWS labor is already in short supply, one writer rightly comments,
American workers have been stripmined and abused for 40 years in classic boiling-the-frog fashion, and now they’ve finally had enough. The Great Resignation, like other drivers of inflation, is complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause. Like the other systemic drivers of inflation, labor refusing to work for low pay and being treated like pack animals has been a long time coming, and there are no quick fixes of the sort pundits promote.
There are no quick fixes by the government, but the government has actually mandated that unemployment be made worse (with no eligibility for benefits in some states if it is due to vaccine refusal). These mandates will cement in place the downward spiral of stagflation in which an economy declines as prices rise. The spiral will happen because higher unemployment means more belt-tightening and more shortages in production. More shortages in turn force force more belt-tightening by pressuring prices up even more.
Now that participants understand their income will buy less in the future, they have a powerful motivation to buy something tangible now while the price is lower than it will be next year–a motivation that increases demand and pushes costs higher, which then reinforces the incentives to convert earnings into something real before the Fed destroys even more of the purchasing power. Wage earners have no choice but to demand much higher wages to partly offset soaring costs, and employers who refuse find employees are leaving en masse. Those who increase wages must raise prices to offset their higher costs.
Since governments are depleting the labor that can provide services, perhaps it is a good thing they are also depleting the customers who demand services:
The politicians don’t understand … there is no one size fits all with medicine. And you can’t tell a person has just finished chemotherapy, that they have to take a vaccine to have a dinner, when their doctor says they can’t.
We are compounding our crises with tone-deaf policies that have no nuances in how they are applied. While CDC exemptions exist for employee terminations, I have only heard of a few places with exemptions from vaccination for customers if they have medical limitations. I have not heard of states or the federal government providing “vaccination exempt” cards for customers to carry if they meet the CDC’s short list of exemptions for employees. So, how do you prove you are exempt — carry a letter from your doctor?
If the government is so sure vaccines work, why are they so afraid of unvaccinated people who can only hurt others who have chosen to remain unvaccinated? If the government is so sure vaccines work, why are they even afraid of people who have already had COVID who have been scientifically proven to have less likelihood of a repeat infection than vaccinated people have of a “breakthrough” infection? They cannot argue it is because the unvaccinated are more likely to be carriers who can pass the disease on to other, as science has proven the vaccinated are equally likely to be carriers who can pass the disease on to others.
Is this dogmatic blindness or a hidden agenda that must see you vaccinated even when science gets in the way of the argument for vaccination. Vaccine mandates are not being driven by the science, and this will assure my next prediction.
Prediction: The already serious crisis of shortages is going to become much worse this winter due to the mandate madness limiting businesses. That assures inflation will run hotter still! And these shortages — in food or energy or health care — can be lethal. For some they will be.
Prediction: The vaccine mandates will quickly turn us into a nation of Sneaches where some of us have stars to prove we are vaccinated and others do “not have stars on thars.” The unvaccinated will become the pariah class of social outcastes in our more divided society — people who are segregated out of to public events and restaurants and airplanes, trains and buses, and out of hotels. Therefore, I have another predition:
Prediction: Expect social rage to grow as the orders to refuse service expand, and especially as they result in refusal of health care services to those in desperate need who will be told hospitals must give them last priority since they chose not to protect themselves (even if they are among the millions who are already better protected by natural immunity but struck this year by some other calamity). Expect more conflict between the vaccinated and “the great unwashed” like myself.
You see, I am refusing vaccination on the basis that I recently had COVID; I’ve had many colds that were FAR worse; and I now will fight COVID off even easier because I have naturally enhanced immunity. So, I’m not getting the vaccine, even though my employment will be terminated, just for the sake of making the hysterical non-thinkers feel more comfortable — the people who believe they are more immune due to the vaccine, though they are obviously far more afraid of me than I am of them.
My employer has announced they will terminated all the unvaccinated by the 18th of October, though they are allowing certain medical exemptions. I might qualify for that for reasons I won’t go into because I still believe I have a right to medical confidentiality, so I need prove nothing about my medical health to anyone. It will depend on whether or not my doctor (with whom I will talk of my medical history) is willing to approve the medical exemption. If she does not, I will be unemployed by mid-month in solidarity with those who say, “You are not going to force me to exit my freedoms due to your fears.”
I think I am more immune than they are, and scientific evidence says my immunity is much more enduring. People who have had the measles or smallpox are not required to get a vaccine for the diseases they already had, and those vaccines were test many more years before being forced on the public. So, why should I take a vaccine that has not had longterm testing just because others are afraid?
With inflation already scorching hot and rising still, it appears our leaders want to do all they can to make shortages worse and push money-printing higher with multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages that will place much higher demand on materials and pump much more money into the economy. While that alone is foolish, other plans they have look like diabolical evil, but I’ll cover the rest of these situations in my next Patron Post as a gift back to those who support me.
That second part in this series, available as my thanks to those who support my writing at a level of $5 per month or more, will reveal how …
- the Chinese and European energy crises are expanding almost overnight to other parts of the world, including the US;
- the rapid skyrocketing in energy prices is causing record levels of financial pressure in some hedge funds and other investment companies and adding risk to banks;
- events in China will add to the winter of everyone’s discontent;
- debt defaults may compound some troubles;
- raised taxes will pile in to compound the business and market chill;
- how stocks will respond;
- and how the Fed is trapped from being much help.
Reprinted with author’s permission from The Great Recession Blog
