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Zero Hedge: Janet Yellen is Joe Biden’s Treasury Secretary nominee. She claims to support “market forces” as the driver for the US dollar. What does that really mean in a practical sense?

Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is also a prior Fed Chair. I noted her Swiss Cheese Statements on the US Dollar.

“The United States doesn’t seek a weaker currency to gain competitive advantage. We should oppose attempts by other countries to do so.”

Yellen can make whatever swiss cheese statements she wants but how would a central bank act if it wanted to sink the dollar?

Steps to Weaken a Currency

1. Cut interest rates
2. Engage in massive QE balance sheet expansion
3. Pledge to keep rates low indefinitely
4. Pledge to ignore inflation and let it run hot to make up for alleged undershooting
5. Encouraging more fiscal stimulus

The Jerome Powell Fed is five for five on doing the very things that would cause the dollar to sink and Yellen supports all of them. Read More

Zero Hedge: President Joe Biden’s United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Thursday stopped executive orders from his predecessor designed to significantly lower prescription drug prices for Americans, including insulin and epinephrine.

The new administration will apparently re-evaluate the executive action from President Donald Trump toward the end of March. It remains unclear if it will be reinstated.

“The HHS Thursday froze the former Trump administration’s December drug policy that requires community health centers to pass on all their insulin and epinephrine discount savings to patients,” Bloomberg Law reported Thursday. “Centers that don’t pass on the savings wouldn’t qualify for federal grants.” Read More

Zero Hedge: Of all the technological revolutions we’ll live through in this next decade, none will be more fundamental or pervasive than the transition to digital cash. Money touches nearly everything we do, and although all those swipes and taps and PIN-entry moments may make it seem as though cash is already digital, all of that tech merely eases access to our bank accounts. Cash remains stubbornly physical. But that’s soon going to change.

As with so much connected to digital payments, the Chinese got there first. Prompted by the June 2019 public announcement of Facebook’s Libra (now Diem)—the social media giant’s private form of digital cash—the People’s Bank of China unveiled Digital Currency/Electronic Payments, or DCEP.

Having rolled out the new currency to tens of millions of users who now hold digital yuan in electronic wallets, the bank expects that by the time Beijing hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics, DCEP will be in widespread use across what some say is the world’s biggest economy.

Indeed, the bank confidently predicts that by the end of the decade digital cash will displace nearly all of China’s banknotes. Read More

Seattle Times: Amazon wants the upcoming unionization election at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse to be held in-person, arguing against National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guidance to hold mail-in balloting in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

The e-commerce giant late Thursday appealed the ruling by an NLRB hearing officer a week ago to allow roughly 6,000 workers to take seven weeks, starting Feb. 8, to cast their ballots by mail to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Amazon argued in one of two filings that the agency’s pandemic-voting policy is flawed, in part because it fails to define what a COVID-19 “outbreak” actually is.

That guidance “reflected assumptions developed comparatively earlier in the pandemic — before scientific understanding of the virus and possible precautions had developed to where it is today,” Amazon says in the filing.

A union spokeswoman declined to comment on the filing. Read More