A Wise Man Always Avoid Simple Answers to Complex Questions

Week ended December 1, 2023, interesting news items to look at this week were:

1. A Wise Man Always Avoid Simple Answers to Complex Questions: I often wonder have our global village evolved into such complexities that it can no longer be managed effectively and efficiently. Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase recently warned we are now in“the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades,” (Fig. 1).

Dimon’s warning came last week but isn’t it a bit too late in the hour? Perhaps it came because the Americans truly felt stressed and helpless for the first time in decades. It was only a month earlier that Joe Biden said ”We’re the most powerful nation in the history of the world. We can take care of Israel and Ukraine and still maintain our overall international defense.” (Fig. 1 Red Framed Window). In 1967, Israel was able to defeat a coalition of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon in six days. It is 57 days since the Gaza war and a coalition of Israel and US could not defeat Hamas even with indiscriminate killing of 14,532 Palestinians and received world wide condemnation.

(i) An Abundance of Raw Data interpreted by Narrow Focused Machines: In my October 20 Blog, I quoted from Paul Craig Roberts that even a fox cannot get through the Israeli Gaza Border Security without IDF’s knowledge. The security arrangements at the Gaza border involved deep motion senses, surveillance camera and towers, 7m high steel walls, buffer zones with remote controlled machine guns and militarized kibbutz all around Gaza. Yesterday, NYT reported the IDF actually knew of Hamas’ planned attack over a year in advance by a plan code name as “Jericho Wall”. (Fig. 2).

If for the time being we drop the speculation that the Hamas attack was allowed for darker motives, then how do we explain what happened. The problem was not with Israel alone but just 8 days before the Oct 7 Hamas Jailbreak, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. ‘The Middle East Region Is Quieter Today Than It Has Been in Two Decades’ (Fig. 3).

Independent Military and Intelligence Analyst Scott Ritter postulates that the IDF bragged about its success with AI in dealing with Hamas in May 2021 that an AI Conference was held in February 2022 in Tel Aviv University and released an unclassified version of its achievements and an array of platforms that employed AI. (Fig. 4).

Last week I wrote the Western Old Dogs cannot learn new tricks, but just quite the opposite, Hamas must have learned their lessons quickly and it took just a little over one year to train the IDF AI like a Pavlov’s Dog to regard Hasmas’ advances as normal non-threatening incidents. I am not tech savvy enough to know how’s that’s done but reckon the trick may be similar to a regular “cry wolf” to desensitize the AI algorithms.

(ii) Education or Stealing Intellectual Properties: “Monkey See and Monkey Do” is a first step in education. If you parade your military exercise at your adversary’s front door day in and day out non-stop, sooner or later your adversary will know enough about you to come up with a plan to defeat you. Who is to blame? Russia was the first jailbreak, Niger the second, Hamas the third and soon enough the fourth, the fifth and it will spread like wild fire. The law of exponential decay is happening right now before our eyes (Fig. 5).

All the signs are there for the Dollar Hegemony Jailbreak in 2024.

2. FT Headline: Investors dump dollar in bet that US rates have peaked: ( Fig. 6)

Sadly Western MSM still think their Central Banks control all the levers when most of the world have been dumping dollars since 2022.

3. WAPO Headline: Netanyahu was protecting Hamas: (Fig. 7)

Zelensky had 18 months before being thrown under the bus by the Western Press, Netanyahu got only one month.

This week’s financial markets:

A. Stock Market: (Fig. 8): Dow closed at 34,947 for the week, a rise of 1298 points or +3.71%, S&P 500 +1.00% and NASDAQ +1.06%.. 

Powell took a dovish stand mid week and indicates no December rate rise.

B. Debt Market: (Fig. 9): USGG10YR ended the week at 4.209%, a drop of 26.3 basis points. Most asset class gone up except the USD and oil after Powell’s speech.

 

C. Commodities and Precious Metals: Trading results for the week: (Fig. 10) Silver (+4.72%), Gold (+3.53%), Bitcoin (+2.49%), JPY( +1.81%), SPX500 (+1.00 %), GBP (+0.75%), Uranium (+0.42%), NASDAQ (+0.30%), Rmb (+0.14%), Eur (-0.61%), Rubble (-1.19%), and Oil (-1.52%).

USD continued to show weakness as smart money moved into precious metals.

Ezekiel 4:1  "You also, son of man, take a clay tablet and lay it before you, and portray on it a city, Jerusalem. 2  Lay siege against it, build a siege wall against it, and heap up a mound against it; set camps against it also, and place battering rams against it all around. 3  Moreover take for yourself an iron plate, and set it as an iron wall between you and the city. Set your face against it, and it shall be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel. 4  "Lie also on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it. According to the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. 5  For I have laid on you the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days; so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. 6  And when you have completed them, lie again on your right side; then you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days. I have laid on you a day for each year.