USA - American soil. Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up patriotic feelings. They are also words that can't be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 million acres of US farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.

USA - A significant group of cardinals, bishops, and Catholic leaders have signed a declaration denouncing unjustified government coercion of citizens over coronavirus. Under the “pretext” of the Covid-19 epidemic, “the inalienable rights of citizens have in many cases been violated and their fundamental freedoms, including the exercise of freedom of worship, expression and movement, have been disproportionately and unjustifiably restricted,” states the text, which bears the signatures of three cardinals, nine bishops, seven priests and theologians, 20 journalists and writers, ten medical doctors, 16 lawyers and judges, 28 university professors and intellectuals, and 14 associations.

USA - For a long time I warned that our economic bubble would burst and that we would plunge into a nightmarish economic collapse. Now it has happened, and it turns out that fear of COVID-19 was the “black swan event” that triggered the collapse. The ironic thing is that COVID-19 is not even close to the worst thing that is going to happen to us. But it was more than enough to topple our incredibly fragile economic system, and now tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering.

US Debt crosses the $25 trillion mark and continues to rise... rapidly.

USA - Today's jobs report was, as expected and as previously discussed, absolutely horrific, although as Bank of America points out there was one silver lining which Larry Kudlow quickly latched on to: with 72% of jobs lost being reflected as temporary layoffs, workers should be able to be more seamlessly rehired as the economy reopens. However, the longer this pandemic goes on, the more likely that what was temporary becomes permanent, and as we pointed out in a previous post, even baseline cases see unemployment not returning back to normal until 2022 or later. Offsetting this "good news", however, there was one especially scary aspect of today's jobs report that has not gotten enough publicity, namely that as BofA writes, the employment to population ratio plunged to a record low, with only 51.3% of the population working. Inversely, this means that in April, 49% of the US population was not working.

USA - As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wage a silent war across the country, American farmers are being forced to pour out milk, crush eggs, toss fresh fruits and vegetables, euthanize livestock and plow under perfectly robust crops. Meanwhile, financially beleaguered Americans are lining up at food banks in unprecedented numbers, humanitarian leaders fear a global starvation pandemic is burgeoning, and grocery store shelves are sparsely filled. So what has gone wrong? A dramatic dip in demand, weak links in the highly consolidated supply chain, and decades of industry monopolization, experts say. “A large portion of our food is now produced for restaurants, hotels, schools, and institutional users, about 50 percent. Those markets have effectively closed up, and there is not enough demand for home use now,” Dan Glickman, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute and former US Secretary of Agriculture, told Fox News. “Nor is the supply chain set up for this rapid transformation.”

IRAN - Iran is desperately trying to buy millions of tonnes of wheat, corn and soybeans to shore up its grain reserves amid fears food supplies are being devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, insiders have claimed. An agriculture ministry source said Iran needed to import 4 million tonnes of wheat, 1.5 million tonnes of barley, 700,000 tonnes of raw sugar and 4 to 5 million tonnes of corn, in the Iranian year ended March 2021. Competition for international commodities is heating up as governments move to buy more to shore up their reserves, spurred into action by lockdowns which have slowed supply chains and prompted export curbs. Food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies including animal feed are exempt from US sanctions, re-imposed in 2018 after the United States pulled out of Iran's nuclear deal with six world powers.

USA - Roughly one out of every four Americans who hold a credit card — nearly 50 million people — saw their credit limits slashed or accounts involuntarily closed altogether by lenders over the past month, according to a new survey. CompareCards, the Lending Tree site that conducted the survey, was so struck by the high numbers that they ran the survey a second time to be assured of the fallout to cash-strapped consumers hit with staggering unemployment due to the coronavirus crisis. Lenders are reportedly trying to avert losses amid staggering unemployment from the coronavirus crisis.

USA - A consortium of powerful interests that include Visa and Mastercard, the International Monetary Fund, billionaire Bill Gates and the US Treasury have been slowly lobbying for cash to be abolished worldwide and replaced with digital only currencies.

EUROPE - Former Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan has claimed the EU will never recover the power it is losing thanks to the coronavirus crisis. Mr Hannan had represented South East England since July 1999. Writing a column piece in The Telegraph, he said that coronavirus had put the project into intensive care. He explained: “While surpluses of medical equipment piled up in Germany, Italy was forced to turn to China for help. A bloc notionally devoted to trade liberalisation imposed export bans”.

EUROPE - European leaders are also nowhere to be found. The Brits have drifted away from the Old Continent together with Brexit and Boris Johnson’s medical condition. In Berlin, the future of Angela Merkel and Germany’s political system are still unknown. In the prosperous city of Paris, protesters are telling Emmanuel Macron that they are hungry. It deprives the French President of any mandate to suggest a concerted international effort. In both Italy and Spain, tens of thousands of people have already died. The debate on potential Eurobonds has come to a standstill. European capitals are trying to monitor the developments taking place in distant Asian countries. However, such models cannot be implemented in Europe due to societal and ideological differences. In this case, where will recovery plans for the Western Civilisation come from and who will lead the way out of the recession?

USA - Another three million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits during the week ending May 2, which brings the total claims over the seven weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown to over 33 million. Some 3.839 million initial jobless claims have been registered in the past week. Florida saw the highest number of initial filings, at an estimated 432,000 on an unadjusted basis, from 507,000 in the week prior.

USA - The Evergreen State has had quite a 2020 so far. First, it had the early cases of the coronavirus. Then, it was the "murder hornet." Now, Washington is facing a new enemy: the Asian gypsy moth. The issue of the new flying bug is so worrisome that the governor issued an emergency proclamation this week, saying there is an "imminent danger of an infestation."

USA - Catholic League president Bill Donohue has decried a coordinated left-wing attack on the project of the US Commission on Unalienable Rights in an attempt to downgrade religious freedom and elevate LGBT and “reproductive” rights. Dozens of international left-wing organizations “recently signed a statement lecturing the US State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights,” Dr Donohue noted, including “the Center for Reproductive Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the International Women’s Health Coalition. Their opposition to religious liberty was on grand display,” Donohue said. “In their world, every time religious liberty clashes with abortion rights or the LGBT agenda, the former must bow to the latter.”

GERMANY - Foreign policy experts in Germany and the EU's Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell are warning that Brussels' corona relief measures could widen the EU's economic gap. So far, the EU's reaction to the Corona crisis has led to companies in economically stronger countries receiving more relief assistance than their competitors in more heavily indebted countries, according to a proximate analysis by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

After the crisis, German companies will probably be in a stronger position than, for example, their Italian competitors. "The north-south divide that was already in place before the crisis, could become even more pronounced afterwards," Borrell predicts. The growing inequality could threaten the EU's "political project" in the foreseeable future, the DGAP writes.

In the competition within the EU, German companies are benefiting from the fact that, by fostering a bottom-to-top redistribution, national corona relief measures are already to their advantage - a development that exacerbates the crisis.