The indictment of Trump federally confirms what our computer has been warning about for the 2024 election – there will be none – at least a fair one at that. Never has any former president running for office been targeted and the Department of Justice has been completely weaponized. All for documents that he clearly had no intention of handing to some foreign enemy. They had to do with the stolen election and Hillary using the intelligence agencies to even spy on Trump when in the White House.
I do not say that as a Trump supporter. We have Hunter Biden who has committed crimes that anyone else would be in prison for and the IRS and DOJ have been protecting him. You have the FBI brought to the brink of contempt for refusing to release documents that could justify not just impeaching Biden, but charging him with Treason. The point here is that these are the tactics normally seen in banana republics and even Ukraine where the former president is somehow always criminally charged to eliminate opponents in the future.
Yet none of this matters anymore. The media has committed treason and is doing everything to destroy this country by refusing to EVER just be balanced anymore. All we get is endless propaganda and with the Canadian fires, they will not even ask how did all these fires start simultaneously and whether they will be used for now Climate Lockdowns to further destroy our economy?
Remember Schwab’s cheering on how great lockdowns were for society? This is why we now have a Commerical Real Estate Crisis for they deliberately used the lockdowns to stop commuting to work to reduce CO2. They had no basis in mitigating COVID. Now people were compelled to work Virtually and that killed offices which was their end goal. While kids are back in school, physical local stores are doing better than expected, and even retirees have started to return to cruise ships, office space has declined everywhere but Florida. But the primary target was to undermine small businesses and terminate office buildings in general.
Commercial real estate is in far worse shape than most care to look at. Office buildings are struggling and the implications set off a contagion that will engulf banks, landlords, municipal governments from a tax perspective, and individual investment portfolios. The economic damage from the lockdowns is far-reaching and it is due to make everyone sit up and say OMG post-2024.
This will be the next real estate crisis and this one will invoke a catastrophic change that will not come back anytime soon. There is nearly $1.5 trillion of US commercial real estate debt that comes due for repayment before the end of 2025. This impacts the larger banks and many assume that the defaults of banks have been driving the cash from regional banks to the big banks in hopes of stemming this tide.
During the first quarter of 2023, U.S. office vacancy topped 20% nationally for the first time really since the Great Depression. Then there are cities that have embraced WOKE to their detriment and are witnessing the worst. In San Francisco, the vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2023 climbed to 29.4%, up from 27.6% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Manhattan has a vacancy rate of n the first quarter of 2023 at 22.2% according to Cushman & Wakefield. Dallas has been absorbing the flight from California so its vacancy rate is 18.7% according to Cushman & Wakefield. The commercial vacancy rate in Miami, Florida office market has an overall vacancy which has been declining counter-trend to the rest of the nation falling now to 15.8% according to Cushman & Wakefield. In Chicago, Class-A vacancy rate stands at 19.3% while Class-B vacancy jumped to 28.3% according to Cushman & Wakefield.
These figures understate the severity of this crisis. While Biden’s staff is stuffed with LGBTQ which overrepresents their portion of society, we are hanging by a thread economically. You have the standard people running around screaming the sky is falling and selling all stocks. But selling stocks is typically followed by the flight to quality which is government debt. Yet somehow that seems strange in the period of a collapse in the confidence of government.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is the MOST untrustworthy government on the planet. The United States intelligence learned of a Ukrainian plan to attack the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines three months before they were damaged last September by underwater explosions, The Washington Post reported on this citing leaked information posted online. The dam they blew up and tried to blame Russia just so happens to also impact the water supply of Crimea.
It was Ukraine which blew up the dam because it would cut off the water supply to Crimea. Everything also results in Zelensky demanding more and more money from the world. He is “shocked” that the Red Cross and the UN are not pouring money into Ukraine for disaster after every disaster they create. This is the man determined to draw in the entire world to destroy Russia. When we foolishly give them F16s, they will attack Crimea and we will have World War III. The people like Lindsey Graham can’t wait to kill more Russians no matter how many Americans die on the battlefield or nukes start flying around.
Meanwhile, the losses of Ukrainian troops have exceeded 200,000 according to reliable sources inside Ukraine – this is NOT Russian propaganda. This is why NATO is actually looking at sending in ground troops for Ukraine is losing badly. They are desperate and blew up the dam themselves to get more support and cut off Crimea. NATO countries now say that they may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states including the US do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kiev. As I have warned, NATO’s only purpose is to create war – not peace. Drafting Europeans is on the books. They see that there are too damn many people anyhow.
I will address the markets on the private block. What is UP in this crazy world seems to be really DOWN and vice versa. Welcome to the last stretch to 2032.
The post Has the World Simply Gone Mad? first appeared on Armstrong Economics.