Better Know The Direction
Any pilot knows the importance of knowing what direction wind is blowing. Wind affects flight times, but the landing part is when things can get pretty tricky. Wind gusts do some challenging things when a flight is about to land.
The economy has its own set of “indicators”. As the Federal Reserve attempts to control inflation with a series of swift interest rate hikes, a frequently ignored economic indicator revealed on Friday that the U.S. economy is either already in or headed for a recession.
The Leading Economic Indicators index from the Conference Board indicated that things continued to get worse in October, down 0.8% from the prior month. This comes after a decrease of 0.5% in September.
Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director of economic research at The Conference Board, stated that "the U.S. LEI declined for an eighth straight month, signaling the economy is possibly in a recession”. The downturn is a result of both a protracted downturn in the property market, and consumers' worsened outlook due to higher interest rates and persistently rising inflation.
This month, officials approved a fourth straight 75-basis-point rate rise, bringing the federal funds rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%, which is close to restrictive levels, and they gave no indication that they will stop raising rates.
A worrying development is that the Fed's rate increases to yet have not been able to control inflation: The consumer price index increased 7.7% from the prior year in October, according to government data released this month, approaching a 40-year high.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters earlier this month, "Let me say this. "Thinking about pausing at this point is extremely premature. People think of pauses when they hear lags. I believe it is way too soon to discuss stopping our rate increases. Still a long way to go”. - Fox Business
I have been writing for a long time about how the Federal Reserve has created the problems we now face. This is a time to be prudent in all that we do.
Has BlackRock Triggered The Global Energy Crisis?
In January, 2020 on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green”. In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,
“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.”
Fink addressed the new capital investing agenda in a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients. According to him, Blackrock will get out of some high-carbon investments like coal, which is the main source of electricity for the USA and many other nations. In order to ensure compliance with the UN Agenda 2030's "sustainability," he continued, Blackrock would examine any new investments in the oil, gas, and coal sectors.
Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal. Fink wrote, “Over time, companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”
The January 2020 Fink letter was a declaration of war by big finance against the conventional energy industry. BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (the TCFD) and is a signatory of the UN PRI— Principles for Responsible Investing, a UN-supported network of investors pushing zero carbon investing using the highly-corrupt ESG criteria—Environmental, Social and Governance factors into investment decisions.
With that fateful January 2020 CEO letter, Larry Fink set in motion a colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector. Notably, that same year BlackRock’s Fink was named to the Board of Trustees of Klaus Schwab’s dystopian World Economic Forum, the corporate and political nexus of the Zero Carbon UN Agenda 2030. In June 2019, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations signed a strategic partnership framework to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. WEF has a Strategic Intelligence platform which includes Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The source of this information is found here, and I urge you to read the entire article.
