Economy

What is driving the extraordinary crypto boom we are living through? Deep down, we all know the answer: it’s the power of bluffing. Bitcoin has been a crucible of nuclear-powered gibberish since its inception. Online people have been waffling on about blockchain and ledger systems for well over a decade now — the more people pretend to know what they are saying, the higher the prices go. In recent months, with so much time on our hands, the bluffing has gone manic and crypto-currencies have gone bananas. Is it the greatest pyramid scheme ever? The reformation of western capitalism? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Just keep blagging until the fun stops, then make out that you knew it had to end.

Three weeks after GameStop and Robinhood sent the stock market berserk, Congress is finally catching up. At noon ET, the House Financial Services Committee will hear testimony from several of the major players: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Citadel CEO Kenneth C. Griffin, Reddit CEO and cofounder Steve Huffman, Melvin Capital CEO Gabriel Plotkin and Keith Patrick Gill. Gill is not a CEO: he is a smalltime investor known as DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and RoaringKitty on YouTube. His posts on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit are credited with setting the GameStop saga into motion. Below is the testimony he will read later today. *** Thank you Chairwoman Waters, Ranking Member McHenry, members of the Committee. Before I go further, I want to be clear about what I am not. I am not a hedge fund.

The mandarins of Qing China claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The French noblesse d'épée tied their privileges to a thousand years of military service to the kings of France. The nobles of Spain touted their cleanliness of blood, untainted by Jewish or Moorish ancestry. In America, no such backwards justifications are needed. Our elites claim their supremacy on intellectual merit, the power of their brains and the breadth of their knowledge. And to everyone’s misfortune, they really believe it. But how do you prove intellectual superiority past the age of 22, when it can no longer be measured with letter grades and test scores? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates can at least point to their enormous piles of wealth as evidence of intellectual horsepower. But what can journalists do?

Is there anyone left who still believes in sound government finances? After the 2008/09 financial crisis there was a lively debate between fiscal doves, who wanted government spend its way out of recession, and hawks, who thought it a good idea that governments at least attempt to live within their means, because nasty things would happen in the longer term if they did not. Such arguments seem almost quaint now. Where is the resistance now that Joe Biden is about to spray the US economy with a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, including helicopter money of $1,400 per household? In 2008/09, there was some justification in that economic activity was extremely weak and many households were in debt — you could argue that the economy needed a lift, at whatever price.

The Reddit story — in which a ragtag army of small investors have executed a spectacular short squeeze against hedge-fund goliaths — can be interpreted two ways. Some say it’s another populist citadel-storming in the spirit of the moment, but this time an admirable one because its target is ‘Wall Street’, which everyone hates: the so-called ‘stick it to the man’ version. Others see a fever of price-chasing, part-driven by lockdown despair, akin to crypto-mania and the surge in online gambling; in this version, it has nothing to do with serious investment but is a sure signal of more market turmoil ahead.

The American Spectator Foundation has complained that its trademark is being infringed by The Spectator in the United States. The Spectator is the oldest magazine in the world: founded in 1828 and read in America since at least the middle of the 19th century when, alone among influential British publications, it supported the North and the anti-slavery movement in the American Civil War. It has been sold in the US under that name continuously since that time. The American Spectator, previously called the Alternative, was founded in 1967, very much a publishing newcomer compared with The Spectator. It was not the first US publication to refer to The Spectator in its name. Indeed, an earlier journal, also called the American Spectator, was founded in 1932.

No one man has exposed the ineptitude of our government more staggeringly in the last few months than Dave Portnoy. Naturally federal experts such as $416,000-a-year Dr Fauci and hypocritical politicians such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo were doing a fine job displaying the depths of their idiocy all on their own. But right when it seemed impossible for the bureaucrats in DC to look worse — well, the founder of the podcasting empire Barstool Sports made it happen. As Congress tried to provide COVID relief for struggling Americans, they concocted a ludicrously pork-laden bill that included $10 million for gender programs in Pakistan along with over $1 billion in foreign aid. Their pathetic attempt to help the American people took months to draft and lard up.

It’s headline news at the New York Times: television is getting less gay! America’s paper of record may be uninterested in obscure matters such as Hunter Biden’s laptop or an Intelligence Committee Democrat falling into a Chinese honeypot, but it will always be there for the stories that really matter, such as de facto press releases from activist groups: ‘For the first time in five years, LGBTQ representation on television decreased, an annual report by the LGBT advocacy organization GLAAD has found. The percentage of regular characters scheduled to appear on primetime scripted broadcast television who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer decreased to 9.1 percent in the 2020-21 season, from the previous year’s record high of 10.2 percent.

Less than a week away from his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden has announced his proposed roadmap to navigate COVID-19: a $1.9 trillion stimulus package to provide direct support to families, roll out a mass-inoculation program and send hundreds of billions of dollars the way of businesses and local governments. It is being framed as an extension of last month’s package, which after months of gridlock and political infighting was finally passed by Congress. This near $2 trillion more in spending, we are told, will ‘finish the job’. If it passes, every eligible American will receive an additional $1,400 direct payment, boosting December’s commitment of $600 to $2,000 in total.

Which is madder, bitcoin at $41,500 — oops, make that $31,000 on Monday — or Tesla shares at $880 apiece? Don’t get me started on the crypto-mania in which the UK Financial Conduct Authority has warned gamblers ‘they should be prepared to lose all their money’. But Tesla, relatively speaking, is a real thing: a California-based carmaker which has expanded the frontiers of the electric vehicle market that’s going to become huge in the next decade and could soon make carbon-fueled road transport extinct. Put that way, it’s not so surprising — in tech stock terms — that investors should value Tesla higher than the rest of the US auto industry combined. But those investors are not making an objective calculation based on projected profits or dividend flows.

New York Cuomo to New York City restaurants: drop dead. This is the unmistakable message from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the cornerstone dining industry in America’s premier city. Thankfully, Cuomo’s veritable kiss of death for these establishments is earning him nothing but rotten tomatoes. Cuomo is being fricasseed like a cartoon rabbit for his policy on Gotham’s eateries. New Yorkers across the political spectrum are baffled and revolted at his treatment of these signature local enterprises. Cuomo deserves every spoon of hot gravy ladled down his back. The Emperor of the Empire State has unleashed a policy that makes zero scientific, meteorological, or economic sense. Aside from that, it couldn’t be more brilliant.

It would be great if the President was an icon of virtue and goodness, but he isn’t. As much as my Democratic friends want to parse otherwise, neither was Bill Clinton, but we overlooked Clinton’s repugnancy because we loved his booming economy. When you strip away the media noise, the fundamental question is: do you want a Trump or Biden economy in 2021 and beyond? Thankfully, both men have records in leading the country so the question isn’t a speculative one. Additionally, given that the states are experiencing dramatically different post-pandemic economic recoveries, we can see what a Trump economy is doing under conservative leadership and policies compared to what a Biden economy is doing under progressive leadership and policies.

It could have been technology stocks such as Amazon and Zoom, of course; or government bonds; or cash; or a property, preferably in the countryside. As the COVID-19 crisis rippled around the world and locked-down economies crashed into one of the worst recessions ever recorded, there were plenty of different ways investors might have tried to ride out the storm. But there was one asset they could easily have overlooked, and yet which would have outperformed almost any of them: silver. For much of the past decade, silver has been ignored as a largely irrelevant alternative to gold. In the past few months, however, it has started to shine. The precious metal has soared in price, outperforming most alternatives.

COVID-19 is still raging, with little sign of coming under control. The economy is already a tenth smaller than it was at the start of the year. Joblessness is soaring. And the budget deficit? Don’t even ask. But, hey, perhaps we shouldn’t worry about any of that. As the President of the United States keeps pointing out, the stock market is doing great, and, in his opinion, anyway, that means America, to borrow the kind of slogan that fits neatly onto a baseball cap, is great again as well. There is a problem, however, with Trump’s breezy 21-character analysis. It is not really true. The main equity indices reflect many different things, and the health of the economy is not always one of them. https://twitter.

President Trump’s adversaries are running Joe Biden, a fallback Beltway lifer who is credibly accused of selling his office, leaking false intel about Gen. Flynn to the Washington Post and handsiness with female political allies. Oh, and it appears that a prosecutor in Ukraine is digging into the potential criminal liability of the one or more persons who gorged on Burisma’s trove of US taxpayer funds. Joe’s son Hunter is named, and so Joe, in a context not yet fully disclosed. If there’s a criminal investigation in Ukraine, no problem: Joe’s plea of cognitive impairment will let him walk. And the hosannas reaped by doughty old Jim Clyburn for picking Joe up off the floor in South Carolina now seem no more than a feel-good story.

No single industry was happier to see the government release Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) data Monday than the media. While there wasn’t any sort of significant media bailout, journalists successfully turned the news of the program into profitable clicks of their own. Newsweek: ‘Religious Organizations Receive $7.3 Billion in PPP Loans, Megachurches Amass Millions’ Forbes: ‘Vocal Opponents Of Federal Spending Took PPP Loans, Including Ayn Rand Institute, Grover Norquist Group’ Associated Press: ‘Kanye West? The Girl Scouts? Hedge funds? All got PPP loans’ Deadline: ‘Who Got PPP Loans?

Our Washington editor Amber Athey interviewed Nigel Farage, founder of the UK Brexit party, for a Steamboat Institute livestream. We've published the transcript below.Amber Athey: Welcome everyone to the Steamboat Institute's live broadcast. I'm Amber Athey, the Washington editor for Spectator USA. And I am joined by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Brexit party, who will also be a keynote speaker at the Steamboat Institute's annual Freedom Conference this year from August 28 to 29. Nigel, thank you so much for joining us again.Nigel Farage: Thank you. No problem at all.AA: So I want to go ahead and get started by giving you a chance to respond to a little bit of a controversy. People are very upset with you for attending Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.