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Timing is everything w/Robert Barnes (Live)
Truss Mugged Millions of Pensioners Who Will Now Live and Die in Abject Poverty
The obscenely reckless mini budget introduced by Kwarteng, the most idiotic buffoon in British political history (aka Twat of the current Century and the last one too) was not dreamt up without the approval of that woman Truss.
And even though the budget has been largely reversed (except, apparently, for lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses) the damage has been done.
It is customary for pension advisors to recommend to those in their 50s or 60s that they put their nest egg into Government gilts.
Traditionally, Government gilts are the safest investments anyone can buy. Rock solid. Secure. Unlike shares, the money is safe. That’s why pension funds are put into gilts. It’s why investment advisors recommend them to careful savers who don’t like taking risks.
Truss’s budget (and let’s be honest – Truss was standing behind Kwarteng and working his lips) has destroyed the value of Government gilts. Many gilt funds have dropped 30-50%.
What that means in practice is that pensions could have halved in value.
The 60-year-old who has worked all their life, saved cautiously, and hoped for a privately held pension of, say, £10,000 a year, to supplement the miserable State pension, will now, instead be lucky to get £5,000 a year.
That’s the difference between a week’s holiday in Skegness and a day out on the bus. It’s the difference between three meals a day and two meals a day, if you’re lucky. It’s the difference between being chilly and being freezing cold in winter.
Are the gilts going back up to the price they were?
Probably not. The situation was made infinitely worse by reckless techniques used by pension companies who fiddled around with liability-driven strategies (LDIs) and inflation rate hedges and turned an incredibly safe investment into an each way bet on a three legged horse in the 3.30 at Newbury.
Read More: Truss Mugged Millions of Pensioners Who Will Now Live and Die in Abject Poverty
States Seek to Depose Fauci, Other Top Officials in Big Tech–Government Censorship Case
Plaintiffs in a high-profile case that’s uncovered evidence of collusion between Big Tech and government officials to censor users are seeking to depose 10 top officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and other plaintiffs asked a U.S. court in a recent motion to allow them to depose Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser; FBI special agent Elvis Chan; former White House press secretary and current MSNBC pundit Jen Psaki; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, deputy assistant to the president.
They also want to question five other officials, including Carol Crawford, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Digital Media Branch.
While emails and other documents uncovered in discovery have revealed an “enormous and far-reaching” censorship enterprise, the discovery “makes very clear that federal officials have frequently engaged in their most telling and probative communications with social media companies orally, not in writing,” plaintiffs said in a joint statement with defendants.
“Perhaps not surprisingly, the more senior the federal official involved, the more likely they appear to have been to rely on oral, rather than written, communications to pressure social-media platforms to censor,” the statement also said.
Fauci, for instance, communicated in a long-shielded phone call with some scientists who went on to write a paper castigating others who were open to the theory that the COVID-19 virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected.
Read More: States Seek to Depose Fauci, Other Top Officials in Big Tech–Government Censorship Case