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Toyota has said it plans on making a record 11 million vehicles worldwide in its fiscal 2022, which starts in April of this coming year. The production number would shatter the record Toyota set in 2016 if it can be accomplished. 

The target marks a major 20% hike from the company's current fiscal year production and suggests a coming robust recovery in the auto market, which has suffered this year not only due to Covid, but also due to a global semiconductor shortage. 

It's a bright sunbeam of optimism not only for Toyota, but for the entire industry, which has struggled with supply chain hang-ups throughout 2021.

Toyota has already been sharing its plans with its suppliers, a new report from Nikkei said overnight. The company is planning on making 7.5 million vehicles overseas and 3.5 million in Japan, the report says. These mark increases of 25% and 15%, respectively. 

Toyota is planning on output of more than 900,000 vehicles every month and has already told its suppliers that it has a target of 1 million vehicles for April 2022. 

But heading into the new fiscal year, the automaker still has its challenges: output for February will be reduced by 20%, Nikkei reported. 

In FY 2021, Toyota is expected to have produced about 9 million vehicles. 

By Garfield Reynolds, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and analyst

This month’s bond rout is overdone. Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting may offer more carrots than sticks for debt investors.
While central banks are moving to exit quantitative easing as they look past the pandemic into a world of faster inflation, it’s worth remembering that Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this month that it would be “a long road to normal from where we are now.”

This characterization jars with rates markets pricing in four hikes this year and yield curves that are threatening to flatten too far and too quickly.

Keep in mind that the Fed’s plan to rapidly shrink its balance sheet should help deliver a steeper yield curve, in contrast to the flattening implied by commentators including JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon, who see the risk of more than four rate hikes this year.

Dimon has been wrong-footed on rates before -- including a 2018 warning that 10-year Treasury yields would hit 5% -- yet traders are falling over each other to catch the bandwagon. It’s easy to momentum-chase rate shorts, and profitable for a time, whereas betting on balance-sheet reductions is a tougher game.

Also keep in mind that forecasts and the bond market itself show that inflation should cool, either because the impact of supply shocks fade as the coronavirus shifts from pandemic to endemic, or the first one or two hikes from the Fed’s zero bound hit the real world harder than traders envisage.

On top of this, there’s the dynamic whereby the more aggressive the market gets with pricing in steep hikes, the less aggressive the Fed needs to be to get financial conditions back to normal.

So even if the broad outlook for bonds remains bearish for the next few quarters, many traders could find themselves unhappily ahead of the Fed this week.

A massive group of single adult illegal immigrants - most of whom were men - were caught on video by Fox News being released into a Texas town via a small, unmarked office in a parking lot.

Fox News footage shows several federally contracted buses dropping off dozens of mostly male migrants at a parking garage in Brownsville, Texas. Black tarps were set up with a makeshift sign said "Border Patrol drop-off" above it. -Fox News

Watch:

There are black tarps set up around the parking garage to obstruct the public’s view. In a statement, the city of Brownsville confirmed to me that they use this spot to work with the federal government to facilitate travel for the migrants released from federal custody. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/c7kgs4rgyL

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 25, 2022

Fox employees witnessed men enter a small, unmarked office - only to emerge moments later and get into multiple taxi cabs, who were then taken to nearby Harlingen Airport. According to the report "there were no children or migrant families among the groups."

Several of the migrants told Fox that they had crossed illegally that morning, paying approximately $2,000 per person to cartel smugglers. They also said they were flying to destinations including Miami, Houston and Atlanta.

Single adults are typically being expelled via Trump-era Title 42 public health protections. The Biden administration kept Title 42 in place but is not applying it to unaccompanied children or most migrant families. However, single adults have long been the easiest category of migrant to deport. -Fox News

The Brownsville Office of Emergency Management has been conducting the migrant transfers using FEMA funding in order to facilitate "the transfer of these migrants to their final destination by allowing them to use services to contact their families, NGOs, or a taxicab," according to the city, which confirmed that the parking garage is serving as a staging area for migrants to obtain travel information to "facilitate their transfer to their final destinations."

As soon as I finished typing this, another bus pulled up and is also releasing dozens more single adult men. Some of them are wearing ankle monitors. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/1xZhlCLYd1

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 25, 2022

According to Fox, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) says they aren't involved in the releases, while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement source said they thought it was an ICE release.

Amid record volumes and a sharp intra-day price reversal in the US equity markets yesterday, and with confused retail investors first panic selling then panic buying as they chased the unprecedented reversal in momentum on Monday...

... the Goldman Sachs Prime book saw the largest 1-day net buying since Nov ‘20 (a +3.9 standard deviation vs. the average daily net flow of the past year), driven by short covers and to a lesser extent long buys (1.6 to 1). North America was by far the most net bought region followed by EM Asia, while DM Asia was the most $ net sold.

Here is the breakdown from the latest Goldman Prime report. There are some staggering datapoints here.

• After 8 straight days of net selling, US equities on the GS Prime book saw the largest $ net buying since Dec 17th (+3.4 SDs), driven short covers and to a lesser extent long buys (2.3 to 1).
• Yesterday’s $ short covering in US equities – driven by Macro Products – was the 5th largest in the past five years (+3.0 SDs).
• US ETF shorts decreased 4% (ex. MTM) – the largest 1-day reduction since Oct ’20 – driven by covers in Broad-Based Equity and Technology ETFs.
• Single Stocks saw the 3rd largest $ net buying in the past five years (+4.1 SDs), driven by long buys and to a lesser extent short covers (4 to 1).    
• With the sole exception of Energy, all sectors were net bought led in $ terms by Consumer Disc, Info Tech, Comm Svcs, Health Care, and Industrials.
• Following 7 straight days of net selling, Consumer Disc stocks saw the largest $ net buying since Jun ’21 (+3.8 SDs) driven by long buys and short covers (1.4 to 1).
• Info Tech stocks were net bought for a second straight day and saw the largest $ net buying since Dec 17th (+2.1 SDs), driven by long buys and short covers (2.5 to 1).
• Most $ Net Bought Industries – Software, Interactive Media & Svcs, Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure, Internet & Direct Marketing Retail, Entertainment, IT Svcs, Biotech, Multiline Retail
• Most $ Net Sold Industries – Tech Hardware, Capital Markets, Oil, Gas & Consumable Fuels, Media, Pharmaceuticals, Metals & Mining, Banks, Household Durables

What about performance?

Well, on Monday, hedge funds lucked out: according to GS Prime, fundamental LS managers were down as much as -2.2% intra-day before recovering amid the price reversal, and closing -0.2% (alpha +0.2%) vs MSCI Total Return -0.6%. We suppose a similar pattern was observed on Tuesday.

But while hedge funds may have been saved by that mystery put seller we profiled yesterday, they are still facing a world of pain (and unprecedented redemption requests): according to Goldman, so far in January, Fundamental L/S funds are down 7.2% (alpha -4.0%) after just 16 trading days in 2022.

And the devastating punchline: according to Goldman "since we starting compiling performance estimates using Prime positions in Jan ’16, Fundamental LS returns had only experienced worse drawdowns in March ’20, and Q4 ’18."

And instead of having conviction one way or another and risking capital to justify their ridiculous performance fees, the so-called smart money is now absolutely clueless, and net leverage has collapsed to one year lows and sliding fast.

And in this environment where everyone is losing money and nobody knows what to do, it is not surprising that emini liquidity has cratered to levels not seen since March 2020... when the Fed had to inject $5 trillion and backstop the bond market with direct purchases of corporate bonds, to reboot the market.

Translation: good luck to Powell tomorrow and the Fed with those "six or seven hikes" and balance sheet runoff...

It looks like supply chain shortages are showing up everywhere...

For example, a woman in a Walmart in Texas this month reportedly offered another shopper $500,000 for her infant child.  

The "bizarre encounter" took place in Crockett, Texas, when two women were reportedly both at the self-checkout line. A mother on line said 49 year old Rebecca Taylor commented about her son's blond hair and blue eyes before asking "how much he costs". 

The mother originally laughed off the incident, before Taylor claimed to have $250,000 in her car. Then, the mother alerted the authorities. 

She told police that Taylor was at the store with another woman and that she waited for them to leave the store before leaving herself. After she thought Taylor left, she made her way out to the parking lot where Taylor and the other woman "screamed at her that the offer was now $500,000."

Taylor has since been charged with "sale or purchase of a child" and has been released from the Houston County Sheriff’s Office on a $50,000 bond, the NY Post, Fox News and Click 2 Houston reported.

Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,

Days before Biden’s inauguration as president on January 20 last year, instigating Russian dissident and Putin’s longtime foe Alexei Navalny to return to Russia on January 17 from his sojourn in Germany for no apparent political advantage, after being allegedly poisoned in August 2020, was clearly the job of the US deep state that wanted to sabotage newly inaugurated Biden administration’s relations with Russia and forestall the likelihood of rapprochement between the arch-rivals.

It’s pertinent to note that as a goodwill gesture before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva in June, Russia significantly drewdown its troop build-up along Ukraine’s border. Reciprocating the courtesy, however, the ambience and body language of the summit, clearly choreographed by the US national security establishment, were kept as austere as possible.

No joint press conferences were held, as is customary after such momentous meetings. The organizers of the farcical show strictly ordered “no breaking the bread” or refreshments during hours-long strenuous discussions. All blame games and tough talk. Even Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was held in a more cordial atmosphere than the bitter encounter between the leaders of the two global powers.

The civilian administrations of the United States, whether Trump or Biden, want to have friendly relations with other major powers, including Russia and China, and want to focus on national economy to provide much-needed financial relief to the American electorate. But the mindset and institutional logic of the US deep state has been frozen in the Cold War era, and it perceives any threat to its global military domination agenda with utmost suspicion and hostility.

The current brinkmanship on the Ukraine crisis is a manifestation of this global power belligerence where the hands of civilian presidents are tied behind their backs and the Pentagon’s top brass determines the national security agenda pursued by the United States.

It’s worth noting that it wasn’t the first time the deep state scuttled peace negotiations between the civilian administration of the United States and its global rivals. Following their first-ever rendezvous in Singapore in June 2018 and a “bromance” lasting over a period of several months, a much-anticipated two-day summit meeting between capricious North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump was held at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, on February 27–28, 2019.

On the last day of the Hanoi Summit, however, the White House abruptly announced that the summit was cut short and that no agreement was reached. Trump later clarified that it was due to North Korea's insistence on ending all sanctions. The real reason of the foundering of the much-hyped North Korea nuclear negotiations, however, can be discovered in hardly noticed news headlines weeks after the summit.

In March 2019, Adam Taylor and Min Joo Kim reported for the Washington Post:

“In broad daylight in late February, just days before President Trump met with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, a group of masked men forced their way into the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. The intruders tied up staff and took computers and mobile phones before fleeing.

“The raid was initially a mystery, but the culprit was soon revealed: Free Joseon, an organization that calls for the overthrow of Kim’s dynasty. More details emerged this week as a Spanish judge lifted a secrecy order on the embassy raid case and claimed one of the perpetrators had later shared stolen material from the raid with the FBI.

“More startling still to North Korea watchers, however, was one of the names of the suspects Spain would reportedly seek to extradite from the United States: a Mexican citizen by the name of Adrian Hong Chang. To many, that name rang a bell.

“Adrian Hong had been a prominent figure in the tightknit world of defectors and activists in Washington and Seoul a decade earlier. Hong had spent some of his childhood in Mexico and later studied at Yale University, where he formed a now well-known NGO that campaigned for change in North Korea. He was a regular at government events and in newspaper op-eds.

“Some said the statements by Free Joseon fit in with the man they knew. For years, Hong has sought to establish a government-in-exile for North Korea. Lee Wolosky, a lawyer with Boies Schiller Flexner and a former State Department official, issued a statement on the group’s behalf Wednesday that said ‘the United States and its allies should support’ groups that oppose the North Korean government.

“Hong later formed Pegasus Strategies, an advisory firm, and was listed as president of a North Korea-focused group called the Joseon Institute. He appears to have broadened his interests to include the Middle East, traveling to Libya in 2011. ‘I consider the Arab Spring a dress rehearsal for North Korea,’ he said in an interview with the National that year.

“Park Sang Hak, a prominent North Korean defector, said he had last seen Hong in Washington in June 2018, when they both attended a meeting at the Director of National Intelligence. There has been widespread speculation in both the Spanish and South Korean media that the group has ties to the CIA. South Korea’s Munhwa Ilbo, the country’s main evening conservative newspaper, published an editorial Thursday that said the ‘US seems to be unofficially involved and providing support’ to Free Joseon.

“State Department spokesman Robert J. Palladino said Tuesday that the U.S. government ‘had nothing to do’ with the embassy incident. Kim Jung-bong, a former NIS official, said while he thought the Free Joseon movement was probably in contact with the CIA, he doubted the U.S. intelligence community would have supported the embassy raid. ‘Their moves were too sloppy,’ Kim Jung-bong said.

“It was not immediately clear how the group could have afforded to carry out raids in a foreign country or hire a prestigious law firm such as Boies Schiller Flexner.”

After reading the excerpts, it becomes abundantly clear that Adrian Hong was a CIA asset and the brazen tactics of raiding North Korea’s embassy in Madrid were deliberately made to look “sloppy” because the raid’s purpose was nothing more than sending a clear message to the North Korean leader before the Hanoi Summit.

Although Trump was eager to get a coveted feather in his diplomatic cap by making Kim Jong-un agree to discard North Korea’s nuclear program, the US national security establishment was staunchly against the negotiations since the beginning.

While Trump was holding a summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore in June 2018, the deep state shills in the mainstream media were publishing fabricated satellite images and speculating that Trump was being duped by Kim and that North Korea had shifted its nuclear arsenal at a secret location in the mountainous region bordering China.

Coming back to Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO and the alliance’s eastward expansion along Russia’s western borders, the ostensible cause of the current standoff, it’s pertinent to mention that the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its auxiliary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.

Historically, the NATO military alliance, at least ostensibly, was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the former Soviet allies, the Central and Eastern European states, to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international economic isolation.

It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of workers from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.

Regarding the global footprint of the American forces, according to a January 2017 infographic by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were deployed across the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been significantly brought down after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 47,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.

Not surprisingly, the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, were as freaked out over the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and threatened to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the precedent of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 28,500 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and send a signal to the leaders of the former Soviet Union, which had not developed its nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East.

Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the former Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policies as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

*  *  *

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

In between rearranging its programming to account for sacked presenters and accused pedophile producers, CNN found itself in a bind when a guest uttered a few words of truth by completely slamming the Biden administration.

Host Anderson Cooper was lost for words as Scott Jennings, former Special Asst. to President George W. Bush, tore into the “disaster” that is the Biden regime.

“I think he has a lot of political problems,” Jennings noted, adding “and an AP poll came out this morning, only 28 percent of Americans want the sitting president to run for re-election. And fewer than half of Democrats.”

“This is a disaster,” Jennings continued, also noting:

“I never imagined how quickly this would all unfold.”

“The person they sold on the campaign,” Jennings went on “The nice old moderate Grandpa who just wanted to help everybody get along and compromise is not what we got over the past year.”

“He has no mandate, really, to do much of anything,” he added, urging “It’s amazing that he got a couple of things done when the mandate was pretty clear: 50/50 Senate and near 50/50 House, and a pretty close presidential election.”

“The mandate was simply ‘replace Donald Trump and don’t do anything drastic or stupid,” Jennings said, adding:

“And yet everything about this agenda is extremely drastic. And he’s been angrier than I think people expected, he’s been more divisive, he’s been more partisan.”

“You look at the issues. We built five years of coverage on Trump out of Russia, COVID, and democracy,” Jennings asserted, adding:

“The president, in his press conference, invites Russia to invade the Ukraine. We have more [COVID] deaths under Biden than Trump. And now we have the president and the vice president question the legitimacy of the 2022 election? Are we any better off on these issues that we crucified Trump over?”

Watch:

Of course, no one saw this because CNN has lost 90% of its viewers and is more concerned with sending the likes of Brian Stelter into schools to man spread and blather about ‘misinformation’ in front of masked kids.

*  *  *

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After surviving a major re-branding and fierce opposition from regulators and central bankers, Facebook's effort to create a global stablecoin usable on its platform has reportedly been scrapped, according to a Bloomberg report.

BBG reported late Tuesday that Facebook-owner Meta has been looking for a buyer for its Diem project after the Federal Reserve and several powerful American lawmakers (including notably Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren) produced enough resistance to the project to leave it finally dead in the water. At one point, a couple of Democratic senators sent threatening letters to people involved with the project. 

The Diem Association, a cryptocurrency initiative once known as Libra backed by Meta Platforms Inc., is weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members, according to people familiar with the matter. Diem is in discussions with investment bankers about how best to sell its intellectual property and find a new home for the engineers who developed the technology, cashing out whatever value remains in its once-ambitious Diem coin venture, said the people, asking not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public.

As a result, the cryptocurrency ambitions of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg have unraveled.

Just in on @TheTerminal: *META-BACKED DIEM IS SAID TO SEEK BUYER AFTER COIN PLANS DASHED

Stay tuned...

— Beth Williams Liou (@BWilliLiou) January 25, 2022

Former Twitter CEO and bitcoin evangelist Jack Dorsey could not resist taking a quick shot...

carpe diem https://t.co/QTN2JzehUZ

— jack?? (@jack) January 26, 2022

The news has also hammered shares of Silvergate, the obscure banking partner that was supposed to issue the stablecoin, before being bogged down in resistance from regulators.

In addition to the "rebranding" (the project was originally known as Libra), the project sent anti-trust hawks into a tizzy, while central bankers accused Facebook of trying to usurp their control over the money supply. In the years since its introduction, the SEC has won the "battle of the regulators" over who will be the primary regulator of stablecoins, while the Fed has sought to create a stablecoin of its own nicknamed "Fedcoin".

Given the intense hostility to the Diem project (which is technically controlled by a nonprofit foundation that is itself controlled by Meta), some speculated that Diem might be co-opted and become Fedcoin by default.

After all, it was the Fed that dealt the killing blow to the project, per BBG.

Diem said in May that an affiliate of the firm, Silvergate Bank, was to be the issuer of the Diem USD stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar that’s typically used to buy and sell other crypto. After a lengthy back-and-forth between the Diem advocates and regulators, Fed officials finally told Silvergate last summer that the agency was uneasy with the plan and couldn’t assure the bank that it would allow that activity, the people said.

Without a green light from the bank’s regulator, Silvergate was left unable to issue the new asset with confidence the Fed wouldn’t crack down, and so the Diem effort had no coin.

Facebook had already abandoned the original Libra concept - one coin backed by a basket of global currencies - in favor of creating a more traditional dollar-linked stablecoin more in line with what the Fed might want.

So, now that Diem is up for grabs, the big question is: will the Fed step in, co-opt the technology, and use it to catch up with the PBOC, which has already produced its own "e-RMB" (even if the project appears to still be in the troubleshooting phase)?