An administrative restructuring is underway at Soros Fund Management, founded by billionaire George Soros in the 1970s, as it plans to shutter its Hong Kong office, according to a Bloomberg report. Although the exact reasons were not disclosed, this move comes just days after Soros’ son, Alex Soros, through the family’s Open Society Foundations, wasted tens of millions of dollars backing the biggest Democrat loser in a generation: Kamala Harris. 

The New York-based investment firm, best known for its $10 billion trade against the British pound in 1992, explained in an emailed statement that its Asia investments will now be managed by traders in its New York and London offices. The firm added that it will continue allocating capital to managers in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Bloomberg reporters working on the story could not obtain further comment from the investment firm. 

A key question remains: Why is Soros Fund Management shrinking its Asian physical footprint? Bad china bets?

This administrative restructuring at the investment firm comes months after a major restructuring occurred within OSF over the summer. OSF reportedly laid off over 40% of its workforce worldwide and implemented a new operating model.

Even with all this restructuring, the philanthropic organizations controlled by the Soros family, with Alex Soros somewhere at the helm—and even further off the reservation than his father—wasted a lot of daddy’s money on supporting the biggest Democratic loser in a generation: Harris-Walz. This historic loss will be detrimental to the Soros family and far-left Davos elite, who push nation-wrecking globalist policies. The tide has turned.

Authored by Nic Carter via X (emphasis ours),

My view of the election is that Trump and Harris were locked in a spiritual battle. Many, including myself, felt that the sparing of Trump’s life in the first assassination was an act of clear divine providence. For him to turn his head at that precise moment to avoid the assassin’s bullet, suffering only a grazed ear – it defies belief. I don’t believe in coincidences like that. Trump himself leaned into the religious overtones, understanding that many Christian supporters had come to see him as a messianic figure. Personally, I do believe – and there are many examples of this in the Bible – that God selects certain individuals to carry out His plans on Earth, and there is no doubt in my mind that Trump is one of those individuals. (Isaiah 6:8 says: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me”)

Trump’s travails have been almost Job-like. Stripped of virtually everything, impeached, battered, humiliated, almost killed, slandered, deplatformed, sued, on the verge of being thrown in prison for the rest of his life, Trump found the strength to mount a remarkable campaign and win. It is the greatest political comeback in American history. Many see his resilience as superhuman and divinely inspired.

Now on the other side we have another religion, one I consider idolatrous, but a religion nonetheless. See when you strip God from life, you don’t leave people intact, but rather you leave them with a God-shaped hole. Today’s left has eliminated (or corrupted) the Church, and in its place they have adopted secular religions (some call this ‘gnostism’). Harris and her progressive supporters subscribe to three of these cults: climate doomerism, wokeism, and to a lesser extent AI safety. Broadly, these all fall under the umbrella of decel-ism.

It’s worth unpacking these slightly. Climate and AI doomerism are contemporary millenarian cults; that is, they are concerned with the apocalypse. Adherents to such cults believe that a reckoning is coming which will transform the earth, punish the sinful, save the worthy, or just wipe us out entirely. On climate, the idea is that we committed a grave original sin by debauching nature and emitting CO2; Gaia is punishing us by unleashing her wrath in the form of ever-intensifying storms (never mind that the cost to humans from climate-related disasters has been falling); and if we don’t sufficiently change our ways we will be extinguished in a final day of reckoning (think The Day After Tomorrow). AI safety is a newer cult, but very similar: we summoned a demon of sorts by creating AI, and we risk destroying humanity if we delve any deeper into machine intelligence. (There is a trippier variant of the AI doomer cult in which we achieve a rapture and merge with the Machine God in some kind of singularity.) Both cults stress the sin of industrial pursuit, and in both case the solutions are the same: slow down or even reverse progress.

Compare Trump and Harris on AI and Climate. Trump wants to re-energize America’s heartland, unleash our abundant energy resources for Bitcoin mining, AI, chip manufacturing, and so on. Trump recognizes that we cannot hamstring ourselves with a Merkel-style Energiewende. It’s suicide to sacrifice ourselves to the angry climate God via Thunbergesque atonement while China prints coal and nuclear plants. Meanwhile, Harris stands for an insipid green transition which simply hasn’t paid off anywhere it has been tried. The left’s infatuation for green transitions should be understood as superstition, not policy. (If they really believed in the existential risk from climate, they would be all in on nuclear, or even global cooling with aerosolized sulfates. They aren’t.) On AI, Harris stands for AI Safety, the self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley cult which both worships and fears the machine God. Trump instead sees AI as a vital strategic resource to be unleashed, making no underlying metaphysical claims whatsoever.

Leaving aside the decel cults, the most important spiritual lens through which Harris should be understood is wokeism. Wokeism is in some ways similar to those other two secular cults, in that it has rituals, priests, and has the elements of original sin – whiteness, privilege, etc. Wokeism even has a millenarian bent in that it presumes that the world is fundamentally unjust and subject to vast oppressive conspiracies (although it doesn’t clearly specify what the day of reckoning might look like). However the inherent flaw of Wokeism and the reason it doesn’t universalize well is that it offers no absolution. There’s no way for a straight white man (or anyone else near the top of the privilege hierarchy) to atone for their original sin. Compare with Christianity, which stresses (depending on the denomination) that all you have to do to be absolved of your sins is accept Jesus Christ into your heart. So wokeism can’t really sustain itself, because it’s dependent on a spiritual underclass of “oppressors” who are willing to continually submit to and elevate the least privileged (the trans disabled PoC, etc). But who would sign up for a religion that offers no atonement? Even the most ardent white wokes must feel a twinge of doubt at their membership in the cult, realizing that they are permanent Dalits in the woke caste system.

So I see the Trump Harris conflict through the lens of a spiritual war. Of course, the battle between right and left already has a spiritual component in that it’s not just two sets of rival policy positions but in fact a much more deep-seated set of mutually conflicting worldviews; individual versus system-level thinking, merit versus racial score-settling, small government versus collectivism, nuclear family versus the state as your family, and so on. In the case of Trump and Harris it was even more direct. Trump plays the role of an unintentional Messiah, almost accidentally thrust into this savior role. Though Trump’s faith may not be particularly sincere, his fans’ belief that he is a tortured savior chosen by God is. Meanwhile Harris is the purest representative we’ve seen of the progressive religion to date, being selected for the role not due to her track record in government but because of her anointed status within the woke cult. She is perfect: Black, Indian, a woman, and so on. (She merely lacked charisma, meaningful policy views, a distinct message of change, or a platform.) There can be no real dispute that she was more of an empty vessel for woke payloads than a genuine candidate. Her campaign was mainly focused on marshalling the high-propensity female vote on abortion, shaming minorities into falling in line, scolding men into voting “for their wives and daughters”, and so on. She abjectly refused to specify meaningful policy positions, keeping them deliberately vague, running instead on pure identitarianism.

To the right, her great sacrilege was her primary campaign issue – the murder of unborn children. Other issues she stands for – the coercive chemical castration of children, for instance, are considered not simply poor policy by the right, but downright satanic. It’s unsurprising that Trump’s strongest campaign message was “Kamala is for They/Them. Trump is for You.” For Trump’s Christian supporters, the distinction could not have been starker. Many felt that this was the last election if she won. The left misunderstood this when folks like Elon said it. The idea wasn’t that there would never be an election ever again, but rather that the left would vastly accelerate their import of the third world and spontaneously grant them citizenship. This isn’t far-fetched. The left was quite explicit about their desire to do this, and they partially executed on it under Biden. Some on the left, too, felt that if Trump regained power, he would fashion the government into a fascist authoritarian regime and permanently leave democracy behind. So this election had a decidedly existential bent to it. Many on both sides felt that this would be last freely contested vote.

As a Christian and a conservative, I am encouraged that America resoundingly rejected these woke cults and their emissary in Harris. This was a realigning election which cannot be written off as a fluke like 2016 was. Hispanics shifted abruptly right, undermining the Left’s core coalition. Harris actually underperformed Biden with black voters, showing the weakness of her identitarian campaign. Black men in particular defected from the left quite markedly. Trump gained with young voters, a generally secular group that is still infatuated with wokeism. By contrast, Trump did astoundingly well with Catholics, winning them by 18 points, the largest gap in decades. Trump also gained with Protestants relative to 2020. Eighty percent of evangelicals broke for Trump, again a better margin than 2020. Harris’ campaign built around Roe simply wasn’t compelling enough. And some of her high-propensity supporters, like suburban white moms, were turned off by the left’s ritual sacrifice of girls at the altar of wokeism (by allowing males in women’s sports, for instance). Voters were more concerned with immigration and the economy.

The democrats should engage in soul searching and realize that by embracing cults like wokeism, and GDP-destroying fantasies like climate doomerism and AI doomerism, they are swimming against the current. Their Obama coalition has been shattered in the biggest realigning election since Reagan. Having lost the working class, Hispanic vote, and unable to import new voters as they had planned, if they continue down the path of racial shame and elevating DEI candidates, they will lose over and over. As for the right, they have resurrected their messiah. Expectations couldn’t be higher. But one thing is clear. Religion, real religion, is still a force to be reckoned with in American politics. The left has lost the Mandate of Heaven. It belongs to Trump now.

It appears President Vladimir Putin is jumping at the opportunity of pursuing a serious reset with the United States under the future Trump presidency. In surprisingly positive Thursday remarks, Putin issued congratulatory statements and heaped praise on Trump for winning the election, also saying he acted “like a man” following the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania last summer.

“His behavior at the time of the attempt on his life made an impression on me,” Putin said at the Valdai Club in the Black Sea city of Sochi. “He turned out to be a courageous man. And it’s not just about the raised hand and the call to fight for his and their common ideals… He behaved, in my opinion, in a very correct way, courageously, like a man.”

Significantly these were the very first public remarks given by Putin after the Tuesday election. The Russian leader emphasized that Trump’s campaign promises to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war “deserve attention”. Putin further highlighted Trump’s desire to improve relations with Moscow as a major plus as part of the remarks.

“It seems to me, it deserves attention what was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said. “I have always said that we will work with any head of state who has the trust of the American people.”

Without doubt, these mark the warmest words issued by Putin regarding the spiraling US relationship in years, and certainly the most positive remarks since the invasion of February 2022. Rhetoric between Moscow and Washington have over the course of the war up to now been marked by severe accusations and even veiled nuclear threats.

And importantly, Putin signaled he might speak to Trump, per state media:

Putin congratulated Trump on his win, and said that he is open to a phone call with the president-elect. “It wouldn’t be beneath me to call him myself,” Putin added.

The US-President elect has in turn told NBC the following:

President-elect Donald Trump said that Vladimir Putin wasn’t among the “probably” 70 phone conversations he has held with world leaders since winning the election, but that he still is planning to speak with the Russian president, according to NBC News. 

“I think we’ll speak,” Trump told NBC, Thursday, the news organization said. 

This type of positive dialogue while the Ukraine war rages was unthinkable under the Biden-Harris administration, and for that reason the Kremlin was very closely watching the US election.

Interestingly, despite their recent subtle tensions, Ukraine’s Zelensky and President-elect Trump have spoken in the wake of the landslide election victory. Trump confirmed to NBC that Zelensky was among the congratulatory phone calls from world leaders he’s received so far since Tuesday.

President Zelensky also issued a congratulatory statement on X, expressing hope he could work with Trump to implement “peace through strength” and that his country was “interested in developing mutually beneficial political and economic cooperation that will benefit both of our nations.”

Ukrainian soldiers SHOOT a mannequin wearing a TRUMP SHIRT.

Are they upset that American funds will end?pic.twitter.com/1Ic86hcddf

— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) November 7, 2024

However, following this, in a Thursday press briefing, Zelensky sought to pour cold water on the potential for a quick peace:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy poured cold water Thursday on a plan by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to strike a rapid peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, arguing it would amount to a “loss” for Ukraine.

“I believe that President Trump really wants a quick decision” to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Zelenskyy told journalists in Budapest. “He wants that. It doesn’t mean that it will happen this way.”

He complained that a rapid ceasefire would be tantamount to “preparation to ruin and destroy our independence.” Below are more of Zelensky’s words aimed at Trump, revealing serious tensions remain, given in Budapest:

“He [Trump] wants this war to be finished,” Zelenskyy said through an interpreter. “We all want to end this war, but a fair ending … If it is very fast, it’s going to be a loss for Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian leader also responded to an appeal from Hungarian strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, issued minutes earlier from the same stage, for a rapid ceasefire deal between the two warring camps.

“I heard that it’s better to implement a ceasefire and then, ‘we’ll see,’” Zelenskyy said, referring to Orbán’s comments. “[A] ceasefire was tried back in 2014. We tried to reach this ceasefire and we lost Crimea and then we had the full-scale invasion.”

But for several months as Ukrainian forces have suffered a string of defeats in Donetsk, putting the Russian army on the brink of capturing the strategic city of Pokrovsk, there have been signs that behind the scenes Western diplomats have actually been increasing the pressure on Kiev to find an exit strategy – sooner rather than later. 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

It’s a reasonable supposition that a recession will become obvious to all by next summer. It will then be declared by year’s end. The following year it could become backdated with data revisions that take us to 2022. At that point, it will become obvious to people that we have a major problem. Money velocity will freeze up and banks will start failing.

That’s a lot to consider so let’s unpack this a bit.

Consider history. In October 1929, the stock market crashed. Many people on Wall Street suffered but Main Street was largely unaffected. The Hoover Administration got busy with some efforts to loosen credit but without success as credit markets slowly dried up. Throughout 1931, public sentiment toggled between pessimism and denial. Many people thought it was a temporary blip that would go away.

No one called it the Great Depression. That came much later.

By the election of 1932, enough people were concerned about the economic situation but the campaigns did not really focus entirely on that. The big issue was Prohibition. Hoover did not have a strong opinion but Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke out loudly for repeal. His fiscal policy pushed frugality and balanced budgets, and he decried Hoover as a big spender.

FDR won of course. But before the inauguration, the economic environment became dramatically worse. A banking crisis developed, and FDR used emergency powers to impose a bank holiday and repeal the gold standard. As part of this, he imposed a ban on private gold ownership. It was enforced with fines and jail terms.

Central planning then ensued with massive fiscal stimulus, crazed agricultural policies that required digging up crops to create artificial shortages, and price and wage controls.

All of this unfolded over the course of four years, the first three of which were not at the time thought to be much of a crisis generally speaking. Today it is obvious that 1929 marked the beginning but that was not apparent at the time.

It is not discernible in our time that we are already in recession but that is due to some brittle statistical measures. If you extend the inflation numbers to include housing and interest, plus extra fees and shrinkflation, minus hedonic adjustments, and then adjust the output numbers by the result, you end up in a recession now.

Do you remember the two successive quarters of declining GDP in 2022? At the time, it was said that this was not a recession, even though every definition of recession was two declining quarters of GDP. It was said at the time that the data was not enough to declare it because labor markets were strong.

Trouble was that this too was an illusion. Most of the job gains were in fact in part-time jobs and multiple job holders, and those gains went to foreign-born workers and not natives. Overall, jobs held by native-born workers that are full-time are down relative to four years ago. No one in the mainstream press admitted this.

The jobs report that came out last week was the first glimpse of truth because it was brazenly awful, underperforming every prediction. It also chronicled major job losses in manufacturing and professional services. Those are hard-core recession signs that are likely going to worsen.

All this data will start to be revised next year as the conventional wisdom will change. It will be widely admitted that the economy is weaker than we previously supposed. This will happen regardless of who wins. For one winner, it will serve as an attack and for another winner, it will serve as pretext for extreme intervention like the promised price controls on rents and groceries.

Meanwhile, we will be revisiting the inflation problem. The Fed has already added $1.1 trillion to the money stock over the last 12 months plus lowered interest rates. The effect of this easing has not affected mortgage rates because investors are expecting higher rates in the future. The Fed can control overnight lending but the shape of the yield curve is determined on the bond market.

If major changes are proposed in terms of spending cuts, the bond market will freak out and the United States could repeat the experience of the UK just a few years ago. New prime minister Liz Truss was quickly hounded out of office on grounds that her spending cuts had spooked the bond markets.

U.S. creditworthiness is already on a hair trigger as the debt pileup has reached astronomical levels. The entire purpose of this wild spending has been to balloon the GDP as much as possible to prevent a recession from being declared already. The debt-to-GDP level is now higher than it was in the Second World War, and getting worse by the day.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

The easy solution is dramatic spending cuts but that won’t happen if the bond market starts panicking with quality downgrades. There are only two private institutions that grade U.S. bonds and both are subject to being muscled by political concerns. Such an event could easily overwhelm a new administration. The political people will go into overdrive and demand that the Fed accommodate the bond market, fueling more inflation.

I truly wish that none of this would happen but the truth is that economic forces are always and everywhere more powerful than political ones. There are structural problems alive in U.S. economic life today that are not easily solved by policies of any sort.

But in U.S. political culture, whatever takes place under one president’s watch is blamed on the officeholder regardless. That the circumstances have been created by the previous administration or have nothing to do with existing policy has no relevance in the political culture. That alone makes it nearly impossible for a sitting president to plead with the public for patience.

In 1981, Reagan did make a plea for patience, and lost a great deal of Congressional support in the midterm elections of 1982. He was fortunate that the economic recovery came in time for the 1984 election that granted him a second term. But that was a very close call, and that was also under conditions that were not as structurally dire as conditions today.

As a result, the new administration will encounter pressure to achieve the impossible: immediately improve American living standards without imposing any pain at all. Such a demand is impossible to grant. As a result, whatever happens in this election will likely be reversed in the midterms of 2026, meaning that we cannot count on any kind of policy consistency for many years to come.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. But from what I’m looking at, I don’t see how a frank acknowledgement of current conditions can be put off for another year.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

It’s not a good day for the establishment. Just hours after Kamala Harris – and the Democrats – staggering loss which ushered in Trump as president for the third time and gave Republicans a sweep of Congress, Germany’s three-party ruling coalition which had been on the verge of collapse for months, imploded on Wednesday evening after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he will fire Finance Minister Christian Lindner over persistent rifts on spending and economic reforms, a move that paves the way for a snap election at the end of March.

The firing ejects Lindner’s fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party  (FDP) from the troubled coalition, forcing Scholz to call for a confidence vote that he said would take place on January 15. If Scholz loses that vote, which is virtually certain, a snap election is set to take place by March.

The collapse of Germany’s government came just hours after Donald Trump’s clear win in the U.S. election, a result that stunned German political leaders, who depend on American military might for their country’s defense and fear Trump’s tariff policies will hobble German industry.

“Dear fellow citizens, I would have liked to have spared you this difficult decision, especially in times like these, when uncertainty is growing,” said Scholz – viewed as the weakest German chancellor in decades – in a statement at the chancellery.

But the rifts inside the coalition proved too great to overcome. Caught in the middle of an impossible battle, Lindner and his conservative FDP insisted that the German government stick to strict spending rules and cut taxes, even as his left-wing coalition partners wanted to maintain social spending and boost German industry through economic stimulus.

“All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner,” said Scholz in a statement. “Too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics. Too often he has broken my trust.”

Scholz said he had offered Lindner a deal to create an emergency fund to aid Ukraine that would exist outside Germany’s regular budget, but Lindner refused to participate in such fiscal gimmicks that saw the UK recently redefine the nature of “debt.”

“Olaf Scholz has long failed to recognize the need for a new economic awakening in our country,” said Lindner. “He has long played down the economic concerns of our citizens.”

As Politico reports, the FDP is the smallest party in the coalition and is now polling at only four percent — below the threshold needed to make it into the German parliament — meaning its leaders have been mulling a coalition break in order to save their political futures.

Crisis talks in the coalition of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and Lindner’s Free Democratic Party had come to a head after the FDP issued a paper with demands for liberal economic reforms that were difficult for the other two parties to accept.

Lindner’s recent policy paper, leaked to the media last week, called for tax cuts and a scaling back of climate policies in order to stimulate economic growth — both positions that put the party at odds with his coalition partners.

Central to the coalition disagreements was the adoption of the 2025 budget by parliament in which a gap of at least €2.4 billion, and potentially far more, needs to be filled, as well as an agreement on measures to revamp the country’s ailing economy.

The government crisis comes at the worst possible time: Trump’s victory, which anticipates imposing significant tariffs on German exports, is expected to put heavy pressure on Europe’s largest economy. An analysis from the German Economic Institute (IW) estimates that a new trade war could cost Germany €180 billion over Trump’s four years in office.

Many in Germany had hoped that the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. election earlier in the day would force the coalition to hold together over fears that the incoming president would give Europe’s biggest economy a hard ride, targeting its all-important car industry in a trade war.

Ultimately, however, not even the looming threat of Trump proved enough for the fractious parties to put aside their differences.

Sensing that the economy is about to go from bad to much worse, last Tuesday – amid mounting concern about the imminent collapse of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy – Germany’s giant trade union IG Metall launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed.

Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote.

Meanwhile, in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, around 400 employees, including those at Jensen GmbH, KSM Castings Group, Robert Bosch, Waggonbau Graaff and ZF CV Systems Hannover, have reportedly halted operations.

Protests are also expected at BMW and Audi plants in Bavaria. Work is to be stopped nationwide during the course of the day, the tabloid wrote.

”The fact that production lines are now at a standstill and offices are empty is the responsibility of the employers,” IG Metall’s negotiator and district manager Thorsten Groger stated, as quoted by Deutsche Welle.

IG Metall is demanding a 7% pay raise compared to the 3.6% raise over a period of 27 months offered by employers’ associations, due to soaring inflation. The companies call such demands unrealistic.

The mass strikes come as Volkswagen announced on Monday it would close “at least” three of its ten plants in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and downsize remaining plants in the country. The measures are part of a cost-cutting drive, the conglomerate said earlier. Oliver Blume, chief executive of the VW Group, has cited a “difficult economic environment” and “failing competitiveness of the German economy” as factors behind the decision.

The German Association of the Automotive Industry warned last year that the country was “dramatically losing its international competitiveness” due to soaring energy costs.

A recent survey by the VDA auto industry association suggested that the reshuffling of the German car industry could lead to 186,000 job losses by 2035, roughly a quarter of which have already occurred.