Jeffrey

This 45-second clip with Dr. Peter Hotez is difficult to watch. A mom from Texas desperately asks him why she keeps getting “really bad” COVID. She got three COVID shots, took multiple rounds of Paxlovid, but she keeps “getting COVID often.” Dr. Hotez tells the woman that her repeated COVID infections are basically her fault for skipping boosters. WOMAN: “I’m getting COVID often. I took Paxlovid the third time, and then a few weeks later I got it again. COVID was really bad on me.” HOTEZ: “After you had your first two immunizations way back in 2021, did you get boosters regularly?” WOMAN: “I got one booster, and then after that I stopped getting them.” HOTEZ: “Yeah. So that’s the reason why you keep up with the boosters.” The saddest part about this interaction is that the woman was so convinced by Hotez that getting COVID was her fault that she was eager to get another booster shot after the show. This is an extreme case of medical gaslighting that is easy to spot. But what about when it’s not? What about the times you did everything your doctor recommended—only to find yourself worse off than when you started? 🧵

A Minnesota Somali home health fraud suspect named Muhammad Omar jumped out of a fourth-floor balcony before he could be arrested after being federally charged over a $90m fraud case. The charged Somali refugees sent money to Africa to buy real estate.

It’s all a game

Not even once?

Nebius ($NBIS) raising on-demand pricing by 29%. The 3Fourteen GPU Availability Index went from 80% at the beginning of the year to 9%. GPU availability leads pricing. B200 still at 0%...GH200 tightening further.

Two Colombians illegally living in the U.S. have pleaded guilty in federal court to a violent burglary conspiracy targeting Asians in Oregon and Washington. Both states, dominated by Democrats, have laws protecting illegal foreign nationals, including wanted criminals. There are large networks of Democrat-backed radicals who provide lawfare, street thugs and money to the foreigners.

🇬🇧 Graphic details emerge in the trial of Vickrum Digwa, who murdered the Polish-British student Henry Nowak A jury has been shown mobile phone footage of the confrontation. Digwa told the court he was carrying a 21cm kirpan (a Sikh ceremonial blade) around his neck and feared Nowak would use it against him. “I thought I had to do something because I was afraid that he was going to stab me with my own kirpan,” he said. He denies intentionally stabbing Nowak in the chest, claiming he only pushed him away during the struggle. Nowak attempted to flee the scene, climbing over a fence while Digwa was still stabbing him Police initially handcuffed Nowak while he was on the ground, bleeding out, due to Digwa claiming that Nowak was a racist attacker. The court also heard allegations that Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, 53, removed the kirpan from the scene after the stabbing. She denies assisting an offender.

CNY 1.22 trillion per day record set in April, per the article. "Golden window" = Gold is effectively "running the deficits" for China (more CNY trade => more CNY net gold settlement => gold rises more in CNY => CNY creditors' gold reserves buy more Chinese goods => w/r/r.)

More MN fraud: A St. Paul, Minn. scammer convicted of defrauding an 85-year-old victim with dementia out of $1.6 million has been sentenced to only four years in prison. Prosecutors couldn't find or recover any of the money stolen by Joseph Robinson. Judge Jerry Blackwell allowed the man to be out of custody until he starts his sentence at a later date. Outside the courthouse, Robinson's thuggish handler intimidated KARE11 reporter @LouNewsMan.

This is so unjust

MUST WATCH: We asked the 13-year-old student who was barred from presenting her pro-life poem because it’s “offensive”, to read her poem so we can share it with the world. PURE FIRE🔥 This is the poem @JeffcoSchoolsCo doesn’t want you to see. Would be a shame if it went viral!

This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer!

Doorbell video appears to show 34-year-old Sean Hubbard firing a shotgun through a Rock Hill home’s front door. He allegedly shot at the Mount Gallant Road house earlier that day (May 16) with no injuries, then returned and kiIIed 19-year-old Camariya Tidwell.

Amos Ferrier is a veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan. He was just murdered in Minneapolis while trying to thwart a carjacking Riniyah Allen and Janaya Frost are now facing murder charges

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy just DEMOLISHED insufferable Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D)! GILLIBRAND: Your [America250] road trip was paid for by companies you oversaw! DUFFY: Do YOU have jurisdictions over law firms? You received $7 MILLION DOLLARS from the TRIAL BAR! GILLIBRAND: Oh my god! DUFFY: You receive $7 MILLION DOLLARS, and you have jurisdiction on the trial bar! Want me to go on the list of WHAT ELSE you received? GILLIBRAND: This hearing is about YOU! DUFFY: I didn't make any money [on the road trip]. Maybe YOU should answer for getting $7 MILLION from the trial bar! $7 MILLION. That goes in state dinners, to put your ad on TV, that's all to YOU! YOU spend that money. GILLIBRAND: You are using your position for political ways. DUFFY: $500K from the TRIAL BAR to fly you on a PRIVATE JET! They paid for you to fly. Answer to that. I made NOTHING. They put your face on TV, your dinners, your vacations. I make NOTHING on this. I make no money. @SecDuffy 🔥🔥🔥 One of his BEST MOMENTS YET. She's this outraged over Duffy's America250 "Great American Road Trip," by the way.

I explained the Chinese real estate & debt crisis in much detail in 2024 on my Substack. Nothing has changed since. China is in what we call "the largest balance-sheet recession the world has ever seen". And it will take years to get out of it and assuming the CCP's investment-led growth model does not dig the next hole in the meantime - a likely. The FT published added some colour to it two days ago: "Housing is important to every economy. But to China, it’s extra important. According to the PBoC, 96% of urban households own a home, and 41% own at least two. The average household owns 1.5 properties. And as such, property constitutes around 70% of China’s private wealth. The comparable figure for the US is around 30%. So when Chinese property prices fall, the authors make a pretty compelling case that this has all sorts of particularly bad economic spillovers. And fall they have. The negative wealth effect is substantial, and “effects are amplified by elevated household debt, much of which consists of mortgage obligations”. This — and the weaker income expectations that the falls generate — goes some way to suppressing consumption. Moreover, declining land-sale revenues constrain local government budgets, “limiting their capacity to finance developmental projects and maintain existing public infrastructure”. And this is even before any credit impacts from rising non-performing loans and mortgages on bank balance sheets are considered. Tl;dr: bad bad bad. Of course, China isn’t the first soon-to-be-global-economic-hegemon-East-Asian-power staring down demographic oblivion to have piled its savings into a property boom. Back in 1991, the world was fretting over the rise and rise of Japan. And the Japanese were buying Japanese residential real estate at outlandish prices. Japan’s house prices peaked back in 1991 and spent the next 30 years on a downward trajectory. We’re only a few years into the Chinese property bust, and its ultimate trajectory is both unknown and unknowable. But Rogoff and Yang have pulled together some cool data they kindly shared with Alphaville, allowing us to make this chart below. So far, it looks like prices in Chinese cities are falling at around the same pace as they did over the first five-to-10 years of Japan’s bust. Japan’s property crash is associated with a lost decade (or two) of economic growth. In the 10 years leading up to 1991, Japanese real annual GDP growth averaged 4.4%. In the subsequent 10 years it averaged only 0.9% per annum. The same numbers for China, with 2021 marking its property zenith, are 7.0% per year and 4.6% per year (so far). If the IMF’s forecasts turn out right, this latter number will fall to around 4.0% per annum. While the levels are different, the before-and-after drop looks comparable. Was it housing wot dun it? Rogoff and Yang reckon that a 40% decline in house prices translates into a total consumption loss of 2-4% of GDP. Not nothing, but not a single answer explaining life, the universe and wiggles in the decadal pace of real economic growth. To get here, they construct a historical dataset comprising subnational data across 47 prefectures, and input and output data at granular industry levels. They then use this to examine the macroeconomic implications of Japan’s real estate bust. And the authors argue that: a housing bust can generate substantial adverse effects on the economy via real channels. . . . overbuilding during the boom can trigger a demand-driven recession with limited reallocation and low output. Unlike financial channels, which amplify shocks through leverage, bank balance sheets, credit constraints, or fire sales, real channels operate directly through investment, consumption, labour markets, or productivity. In Japan’s case, the housing market collapse depressed activity through three key real channels: investment, consumption, and sentiment. This is all pretty intuitive. But using city-level and household-level Chinese data plus some whizzy maths, they put meat on the bone for these three channels. They find that Chinese cities that overbuilt housing the most are less keen on new building, suppressing investment. Sounds legit. Chinese household consumption is estimated to be more responsive to house price changes than it was in either Japan or the US given its outsized role in private wealth. And it looks to the authors like people have scrambled to rebuild precautionary savings they thought they had amassed in property. Understandable. Then, on the sentiment side, Rogoff and Yang use an LLM to gauge market perceptions of the housing market. And by incorporating city-specific perceptions, they double the estimated effect of house price changes on consumption. Huh. While China is not Japan, 1991 was not 2021, and a *lot* of other things are/were going on, it’s interesting to see that the overall magnitude and pace of property price falls — as well as the aggregate drop in the pace of headline GDP growth — has (so far) been spookily similar. And as for the big question — are we there yet? "If China’s adjustment unfolds in a similar way as Japan’s, it would mean China has not gone half way through the transition. By contrast, if China’s path is eventually comparable to the United States, it appears to have already covered roughly two-thirds of the adjustment before reaching the bottom." So more to come.

CASE UPDATE: Four of the World’s Largest Container Manufacturing Companies and Seven of Their Executives Indicted for a Global Conspiracy Affecting Billions of Dollars of Commerce Seven Chinese executives and four of the world’s largest shipping container manufacturing companies were indicted for conspiring to restrict the output of — and fix the prices of — nearly all of the world’s standard unrefrigerated shipping containers for over four years, spanning as early as November 2019 to at least January 2024. Learn more about the investigation by the #FBI and our law enforcement partners: justice.gov/opa/pr/four-wo…

S&P 500 forward sales growth is projected at ~18% over the next 24 months. Historically, this corresponds to ~12.4% NGDP growth (about 6% annualized). Something to consider as yields (and the Fed) look for a new equilibrium.

🇩🇪 GERMANY’S IMPORTED NIGHTMARE 14-year-old Jermaine B. was murdered and almost decapitated by a 37-year-old rejected Palestinian asylum seeker. The killer had been living in Germany since 2021 under “Duldung”, his asylum denied, but authorities couldn’t deport him. He had prior convictions. Still free to roam. Now police are investigating if shooting the knife-wielding murderer was “justified.” This is what “tolerance” costs German children. Absolute insanity. Source: Bild

Left’s election fraud denials crumble as DOJ exposes two-decade-long California cheating scheme justthenews.com/node/181045?ut…