Epic Failure: mRNA Therapy Jabs Spike Cases, Govts Reimpose Lockdowns

At this point, there's no point in trying to understand why the ruling class is doing what they're doing. It could be incompetence, it could be malevolence, either way they aren't stopping. They will crash into the iceberg at fullspeed and in a single evening (election night) they will suddenly be all gone.

Summit News: Days After Locking Down the Unvaccinated, Austria Hits COVID Case Record

ays after imposing a lockdown on the unvaccinated, Austria has hit a new COVID case record, bringing into question the effectiveness of its draconian new policy.

Three days into its quarantine for the unjabbed, which prevents those who haven’t had both doses from being allowed outside for anything other than “essential” reasons, daily infections surpassed 14,000 for the first time since the pandemic began.

Numerous hospitals are still at breaking point despite the unvaccinated having been forced to self-isolate.

The unvaccinated are safer at home and away from the vaccinated. If the thesis of the mRNA therapy being a backfire is correct, Germany will be in lockdown in another two weeks. I don't know how widely booster shots are being given in the U.S., but with that data you could make a prediction about when states such as New York and California will be locked down again.

The Sun: Five clues Ireland heading back into strict lockdown and what YOU can do to avoid infection this Christmas

The nation has seen Covid-19 cases continuously surge over the last number of weeks, resulting in a whopping 317.71 per cent increase from October 4 to November 2.

And case numbers have only gone up since then as the Department of Health yesterday confirmed a further 4,407 cases in Ireland.

Seasonality plays a role, but between natural immunity and shots there should not be new highs in case counts which Ireland just printed.

National Socialist Greens in Austria

The Hitler coalition of nationalists, socialists and greens is back on in Austria.

Guardian: Austria's Greens vote to enter government with People's party

Members of Austria’s Green party voted on Saturday to join a new government led by the conservative former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, clearing the final hurdle for an untested national left-right alliance.

The coalition pact approved by their party leadership and Kurz’s People’s party earlier this week was backed by 93% of Green delegates . Out of 264 delegates, only 15 voted against or abstained.

Populism is a roulette wheel. Every country is spinning the wheel. Anglo countries have "first past the post" electoral systems that temper volatility, while European countries with proportional representation can produce some interesting mixes. The media has told us for years that the Austrian populists are Nazis or far-right extremists. The alliance with Greens cements the comparison. They don't seem panicked though, almost as if their years of panic was total bullshit.

Turkey Drifting Out of European Sphere

During peak social mood, there was serious discussion about Turkey joining the European Union. This weekend Austria shut down anti-Western mosques and kicked their imams out of the country.

ZH: "We're Going To Have To Do Something": Erdogan Warns Austrian Mosque Closures Could Lead To Religious War

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blasted Austria's decision to close mosques and expel Turkish-backed Imams as anti-Islamic and promised a response, saying the measures announced by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz could lead to a "war between the cross and the crescent." Erdogan's comments came a day after the Austrian government said it would expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on "political Islam", leading to widespread fury in Ankara.

"These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world towards a war between the cross and the crescent," Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul, suggesting that a return of the Ottoman Empire is among the many ambitious "to do" items in Erdogan's calendar: after all that was the last time the "crescent" decided to take on the "cross", and coincidentally, the Turkish ambitions reached as far as Vienna before the Hapsburgs crushed the Ottoman ascent.

...Meanwhile, other conservative European leaders praised the move, including France's Marine Le Pen and Italy's Matteo Salvini. However, even Austria's opposition parties supported the decision, with the center-left Social Democrats calling it "the first sensible thing this government has done." Though Austria's Green Party argued that it could serve as propaganda for Turkey's government.

There is always war between the cross and crescent. Christendom has been at war with Islam ever since it emerged and they will probably be at war as long as both exist. The overly maligned Crusades were a counter-attack against Muslim invasion.

Samuel Huntington was right and Francis Fukuyama was wrong. It wasn't the end of history, it was the return of history, the clash of civilizations. The final wave of rising social mood was an ideological battle between capitalism and communism. The war ended near the peak in mood and ever since history has been reasserting itself. The globalists are holdovers from the Cold War and increasingly irrelevant as history makes its return.

Austria Moving Right Again

AP: Austria set for rightward political turn after Sunday vote

The Freedom Party is strongly euroskeptic. And while it has long distanced itself from its Nazi roots, and its leader, Hans-Christian Strache, has dismissed his own links with neo-Nazi organizations as youthful folly, its presence in a government could present a new challenge to moderate EU governments shortly after Germany's anti-migrant and EU-critical AfD gained seats in the federal parliament for the first time.

Few saw it coming two years ago. Back then, the Social Democratic-People's Party coalition fervently backed German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open border policy, as hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim migrants flooded into Austria and beyond in their search for a better life in Europe's heartland. The two parties criticized the Freedom Party's call for closed borders and zero migration.

Anyone making predictions based on Socionomics saw it coming. At the time, I said Merkel's policy was almost perfectly wrong, indeed it may be impossible to make a policy more in contradiction with prevailing social mood. Allowing a migrant invasion of hostile foreigners at a time when the public is in a trend that could end with a total ban on immigration is insanity, unless your real goal is to ban immigration must faster than the social mood would otherwise allow.

Austria Will Revote

NYT: Austria’s Highest Court Orders Repeat of Presidential Runoff

“The challenge is upheld,” he said. “The runoff must be repeated in all of Austria.

The decision came after a week of turmoil in Britain, following its stunning referendum vote on June 23 to leave the European Union. Both mainstream political parties, the governing Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party, have been deeply divided since the vote, and it is unclear who will succeed Prime Minister David Cameron, who has announced he will step down by October.

The Austrian presidency has traditionally been seen as a largely ceremonial post. But Mr. Hofer ran on a platform of making it more active, saying he would measure whether the mainstream parties of center-right and center-left were tackling the issues most important to the country.

Negative Mood and Stupid Policy Fallout: Europe Swings Right

Socionomic theory says we have economic depressions because the public is literally depressed (on net, there's always a mix of mood) and this causes a decline in economic activity. Mood shifts in waves and trends, similar to how the stock market trends (because the market is also driven by mood swings that push valuations up and down as expectations rise and fall). Learn about socionomics

A very simply political model of socionomics is based on cooperation/conflict. When mood is positive, people cooperate. When mood is negative, they fight. Incumbents win elections during positive mood and challengers win during negative mood. During positive mood, the economy is growing, the stock market is rising and incumbents tend to win elections. This is a time when international treaties of cooperation are most likely to be proposed and/or ratified. When mood is negative, the economy is contracting, the stock market is falling, and incumbents tend to lose elections. This is a time when international treaties of cooperation may be abandoned or broken. Internally the same breakdown applies.

Mood is currently negative. The first thing this does is increase the odds a challenger will win an election (or seize/add power in a non-democratic country). Political volatility also rises, as it does in bear markets. We should expect more radical candidates to win, and also to expect a wider range of potential outcomes.

The U.S. presidential election provides a perfect example. The Republicans nominated Donald Trump and the Democrats are strongly supporting Bernie Sanders. Since a challenger is expected to win in 2016, this election favors Trump because the party in power is the Democrats.Trump is also running against the Republican establishment, which ups his odds of success. However, it's also possible that Sanders could win if nominated because he also represents a challenge to the status quo. If the Democrats flip to Sanders, it raises the odds of a Democrat victory. If they stick with Clinton, the socionomic trends favor Trump because he is running in tune with social mood. (Romney did not.)


Negative Mood

Social mood peaked around the year 2000, with the creation of the euro and EU serving as the capstone events. The failure to ratify the EU Constitution in some countries, and the refusal to accept a No vote by the public, were signs that the mood had shifted against unity and the EU leaders were taking an increasingly anti-democratic stance. Both of which are consistent with negative mood. The negative mood shift with regards to the euro, the conflict between the debtors and creditors, the disappearance of the political left in Central Europe, are all signs of negative mood. The breakup of the European Union and/or the Eurozone is still ahead as long as the current negative mood continues.

Up until the past couple of years, the United States appeared most likely to experience unpredictable political volatility because it was pursuing an immigration policy suited to peak social mood. Much of the world had adopted some restrictions on immigration or seen the rise of anti-immigration parties, in part because Europe's parliamentary system allowed anti-immigration parties to quickly express shifting mood. Europe also saw rising nationalism express itself in debates over the Greek debt crisis. Still, the U.S. continued on with a very out of tune immigration policy, and the result was finally delivered in 2015, when Donald Trump essentially won the GOP presidential nomination in June 2015 by announcing he would change immigration policy.

Then Angela Merkel one upped the U.S. She managed to implement a policy even more extreme than the United States and spread the effects all over the continent thanks to EU integration. The fallout is a more rapid ascent for a more radical right-wing.

Europe was always at risk of turning harder right because it has a hard right. The Anglosphere countries have relatively libertarian right-wings. Trump's economic and foreign policy are very reminiscent of pre-WWII Republican presidents, not Nazi Germany. Britain's upstart party, UKIP, is similarly libertarian in its outlook. (Corbyn and Sanders are also similarly moderate compared to actual communist and even Maosit parties in Europe.) Meanwhile in Hungary, the right wing is in power and it's only credible challenger is an even more right wing party, Jobbik, which has a paramilitary wing.

Europe was also likely to breakup because of negative mood. Central Europe is swinging right while Western Europe stays relatively centrist, and the strain between creditors and debtors is reaching the breaking point. Eventually, something was going to give.

BBC: Austria presidential vote: Postal ballots to decide result

Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party was slightly ahead of his rival, Alexander Van der Bellen, the interior ministry said on Sunday.

If elected, Mr Hofer would be the first far-right head of state in the EU.

A key campaign issue was Europe's migrant crisis, which has seen asylum-seeker numbers soar.

RT: ‘This is my home’: Thousands gather for anti-migrant rally in Rome

Brexit looks like it will fail, but a lot of people are not so sure.
FT: Ireland frets about a Brexit vote it cannot influence
Guardian: Beyond borders: the Irish villages dreading a Brexit vote

European Bank Dominoes

The Austrian Black Swan Claims Its First Foreign Casualty: German Duesselhyp Collapses, To Be Bailed Out

So a partial impairment on $365 million in debt is enough to send a German bank, which according to its latest interim financial report, had €10.9 billion in assets, into full out insolvency? As if the ECB's farcical stress tests needed any further validation they are nothing but the worst possible joke on Europe's depositors Goldman's head of the ECB could have conceived.

...Because if a 1.5% write down in the assets of a supposedly well-capitalized German bank can lead to almost overnight insolvency, one can almost imagine what will happen when the Austrian black swan wave reaches Europe's actually "undercapitalized" banks...

2014—The Tragic Year? Update

In 2014—The Tragic Year?, I linked to a few sources that show some similarity between 1931 (The original "Tragic Year") and 2014. The main one is the great optimism that the corner was turned and a real recovery was underway. There were several other similarities, and here's another: Austrian bank risk.

Will Austrian Bank Woes Be Again the Catalyst for a European Kondratieff Winter?

Sad affairs have been heating up in the tiny Alpine republic in the center of the European Union. While Austria experiences record unemployment at record growth rates and tax revenues have fallen behind optimistic projections, the looming bankruptcy of a mid-sized regional bank, Hypo Group Alpe Adria (HGAA), may propel the country to the disdained position of being the catalyst for a new round of bank failures due to interwoven banks risks on both the domestic and the international level.

Austrian politicians are up in arms since a third-party expert opinion that recommends to wind down the bank at a cost of €18 billion has been leaked to the media, but keep on marching on the most fatal route that will not dissolve the problems: They keep flogging the dead horse HGAA with taxpayer's millions in a monthly money injection routine that has cost so far around €4.5 billion.

......Austria's banking woes look eerily similar to the failure of Creditanstalt in 1931 that was the fuse for the last European Kondratieff winter. For those sticking with K-cycles this may not be a good outlook. 83 years later such an event is more than overdue in Europe and given Europe's overall outlook it does not take much anymore to set the Great EU Chaos into full fledged motion.

Below is a chart of iShares MSCI Austria (EWO) and below that, a chart of EWO divided by EZU showing the index's under performance relative to the rest of the eurozone. EWO is 42% financials; EZU is 24% financials. However, EWO performed about as bad against EUFN, an ETF of European financial companies, so under performance is not due to financials under performing generally.

Amazing subprime ad from Hungary (2007)

ZeroHedge posted this video as part of a story about Austria's credit rating. Austria lent heavily to Eastern Europe (the bank in the ad above is Austrian), just as they did in the 1920s. It was the failure of Austrian bank Kreditanstalt in 1931 that touched off the second leg of the Great Depression.

Austrian PM blasts Turkish Ambassador

Anti-foreign sentiment is higher all over the globe, including the U.S. and Europe, but the Europeans are ahead of the Americans. In part, no doubt, due to the fact that the culture clash between Americans and lower-class Mexican and central American immigrants is less than the clash between Europeans and Muslim immigrants. There's also a history of conflict, with Muslim invasions of Europe, one of which was stopped at the gates of Vienna.

Below is the iShares MSCI Austria (EWO) ETF, it includes the currency effect from a weaker euro. The speech was made on December 1, a day when the market rallied, but it was almost certainly written the day(s) before, when the euro was plunging.