🇷🇺🇺🇦 A Lancet with a thermal imager hits another MRAP of the Ukrainian army in the Kherson direction.

🇷🇺🇺🇦 The Lancet crew of the 6th Motorized Rifle Division successfully hit another Strela-10 air defense system

🇷🇺🇺🇦 This is what the Kh-101 cruise missile looks like in the thermal imager of a Ukrainian soldier with a MANPADS, apparently from one of the mobile air defense groups.

🇾🇪🇺🇲 The Houthis now live by the principle that the day when they didn’t hit an American or Israeli ship is bad.

The Houthi military command reported that today, off the coast of Yemen, the American tanker Ocean jaz, carrying liquefied natural gas, was successfully hit.

The vessel has a displacement of 54.5 thousand tons and flies under the flag of Panama.

The extent of damage to the tanker is unknown.

US strikes and statements about destroyed launchers do not stop the Houthis.

🇺🇦 As part of the latest showdown of Ukrainian cockroaches, it turned out that according to official data alone, $1.5 billion in body armor and $950 million in military uniforms were stolen/laundered.

You can easily imagine the volume of theft on really expensive things - vehicles, weapons, drones, special equipment, many of which recently surfaced in the Middle East, including in the hands of Hamas, which has never been particularly selective in its sources of weapons.

🇭🇺🇸🇰🇺🇦 Hungary announced that it would not support the allocation of 5 billion euros for support to Ukraine.

Slovakia informed that Ukraine needs to make territorial concessions for peace.

🇵🇦 Traffic through the Panama Canal is falling at the same rate as through Suez. If the canal administration reduced the number of permitted passages from 36 to 24 vessels per day by 30%, then the actual drop was 50%. On average, 45 ships cross the canal per week, half the average of 90 ship movements.

One of the reasons for the drop in traffic is a decrease in the permitted draft level of the vessel. The bulk of ships traveling through the canal are Panamax class, that is, they were created to meet the maximum possible parameters, but now they have been significantly reduced. A Panamax class vessel is at risk of running aground in the Panama Canal.

If for container ships the problem can be solved at least theoretically: unloading the ship and transporting containers by rail, then for the owners of bulk carriers and tankers and gas carriers, the drying up of Panama is a huge logistics crisis. From the east coast, and especially from the Gulf of Mexico, the United States, mainly raw materials are exported to the Asia-Pacific countries, and they are cut off from the largest sales market. The disruption of logistics usually leads to higher prices.

🇺🇸🏭📉 Manufacturing production has contracted for 14 consecutive months.

The average growth rate of manufacturing production in 2022 was 2.0%

In 2023, growth averaged -0.7%.

📎 Eric Basmajian

🇺🇸🏦 Total Bank Credit v. Total Public Debt

Politburo-driven credit growth since the GFC.

📎 Luke Gromen

🇺🇸📉 The Potemkin Village Economics of Late Liberalism

Recent data shows that in the third quarter of 2023, the economy grew at a rate of 5.2% a year. To give some context to that remarkable growth number, last time we have seen growth that high without an immediately preceding recession, was in the second quarter of 2000 – 23 years ago. Yet many other indicators seem to indicate a sick economy. The manufacturing sector has been in decline since at least mid-2022. During this period retail sales have been weak too. And consumer confidence recently touched levels below what we saw at the bottom of the 2008-09 Great Recession. Public opinion seems to agree with the alternative statistics rather than the GDP boom, with 67% of people polled by Gallup saying that they disapproved of the way that President Biden had handled the economy.

But why the discrepancy between the official numbers and the unofficial numbers? Are we so deep into late liberal decline that the authorities are simply making the numbers up? There has been an unusual amount of data revisions these past two years, but it seems unlikely that these explain the booming GDP growth numbers. Rather the GDP numbers seem to be explained by the fact that the Biden Administration is running enormous government fiscal deficits. Recent estimates put the fiscal deficit at 8.6% of GDP in 2023. Outside of the unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sorts of budget deficits are associated with deep recession of the sort we saw in 2008-09. But GDP numbers are telling us something deeply counterintuitive, namely that the economy is not in deep recession aren’t wrong, but is booming. What is going on? Simply put, the government deficit is propping up the economy like a puppeteer holding up a marionette.

📎 Post Liberal Order

🇺🇸📉 "US Suicides Reached a Record High Last Year" - WSJ

By way of context for the record US male suicide rate shown below, demographer Emmanuel Todd noted that in the late 1990s, Russia's suicide rate was ~35 per 100,000.

Last year was the highest suicide rate in the US since 1941.

📎 Luke Gromen