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Another stern stock market crash warning was just issued from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it’s fueling fear across global markets.

The IMF, an organization of 189 countries, is worried about the ripple effects should the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union (EU).

A British vote to exit the EU, or “Brexit,” could have significant and negative effects on the UK economy, the IMF said last Friday. The quickly approaching Brexit voting date is June 23.

Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, said nothing positive could come from a Brexit. She cautioned a vote in favor of a Brexit could lead to a technical recession. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney shares a similar sentiment.

Dow Jones Industrial Average That has many investors worried that tensions overseas could lead to a 2016 stock market crash…

A Brexit vote would cause a “protracted period of heightened uncertainty” and “severe regional and global damage,” the IMF warned. A spike in interest rates, extreme financial market volatility, and damage to London’s revered status as a global financial hub are all likely outcomes.

Other concerns include falling stock prices, a plunge in real estate values, surging borrowing costs for businesses and households, and a steep drop-off in foreign investment.

The UK’s economy could contract by 1% to 9% following a Brexit, according to the IMF’s research. If the UK chooses to stay in the 28-country bloc next month, the IMF expects the economy to grow about 2% this year and around 2.25% in 2017.

And the issue isn’t isolated to the United Kingdom. All global economies will be affected, which is what has sparked the stock market crash fears.

Atlanta U.S. Federal Reserve President Dennis Lockhart said last month that a vote for the UK to leave the EU might have destabilizing consequences for the world economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Mystery Of Saudi Treasury Holdings Solved: US Reveals Saudi Holdings For The First Time

May 16, 2016

The Mystery Of Saudi Treasury Holdings Solved: US Reveals Saudi Holdings For The First Time

In the aftermath of Saudi Arabia’s explicit threat to sell off US Treasurys (of which according to the NYT it had some $750 billion) should the US pursue legislation that could hold it liable for the September 11 bombings, Wall Street’s analysts quickly tried to calculate whether Saudi Arabia had anywhere remotely close to that amount of US paper available for liquidation.

As a reminder, despite starting to release data on foreign ownership of Treasuries in 1974, the Treasury’s policy has been to not disclose Saudi holdings, and it has instead grouped them with those of 14 other mostly OPEC nations, including Kuwait, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. The group held $281 billion as of February, down from a record of $298.4 billion in July. For more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed monthly breakdown of how much U.S. debt each owns.

A few days after the NYT’s disturbing article on Saudi Treasury liquidation, in hopes of bringing some clarity to this all too important topic, we penned an article titled “Does Saudi Arabia Have $750 Billion In Assets To Sell?” we cited Stone McCarthy which analyzed oil exporter reserve holdings and observed that “at the end of January, Asian oil exporters held $563.6 billion of U.S. securities, with Treasuries and U.S. equities accounting for 92.2% of the total. Treasury holdings totaled $268.2 billion.”

SMRA speculated further, adding that “these figures reflect holdings that Treasury can directly attribute to the Asian oil exporting countries. Regular readers of our updates on the TIC data know that foreign investors often hold securities at custodial institutions in other countries. For example, in February, the five major custodial centers held $1.1 trillion of Treasury securities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blockbuster Story – How Hedge Funds Invest Heavily in Washington D.C.’s Culture of Corruption

May 14, 2016

Blockbuster Story – How Hedge Funds Invest Heavily in Washington D.C.’s Culture of Corruption

Earlier today, Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal published a blockbuster piece in the Huffington Post, titled: The Vultures’ Vultures: How A New Hedge-Fund Strategy Is Corrupting Washington.

It details the secretive world of the dark money groups representing mercenary hedge funds in their insatiable quest for more and more money. In many ways, it’s merely a microcosm of America in 2016. A culture in which ethics has become so irrelevant, it isn’t even a nuisance; it simply never factors into the equation.

The first few paragraphs set the stage perfectly:

WASHINGTON – Take Robert Shapiro.

A Harvard-trained economist, Shapiro is the head of a consulting firm called Sonecon. That business card doesn’t do it for you? He’s got a few more in his wallet:

Senior fellow at the Georgetown University School of Business.

Adviser to the International Monetary Fund.

Director of the Globalization Initiative at NDN, a progressive think tank.

Shapiro, a Democrat, has advised presidents and presidential candidates, and has held powerful government posts. It stands to reason, then, that when he has thoughts on public policy, he can find an outlet ready to publish them.

Recently, he’s had ideas on how the government can address the debt crisis in Puerto Rico and how it can end the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by moving them into the private market. Before that, he had a take on how to deal with Argentina’s debt crisis. For all three, he produced academic-looking papers, complete with footnotes and charts.

All three situations have one thing in common: If they were resolved the way Shapiro suggested, a variety of bets placed by a select group of the most politically powerful hedge funds would pay off in a huge way. In the case of Argentina, they mostly have.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Will The Global Economy Look Like After The ‘Great Reset’?

May 14, 2016

What Will The Global Economy Look Like After The ‘Great Reset’?

A very common phrase used over the past couple years by the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde as well as other globalist mouthpieces is the “global reset.” Very rarely do these elites ever actually mention any details as to what this “reset” means. But if you take a look at some of my past analysis on the economic endgame, you will find that they do, on occasion, let information slip which gives us a general picture of where they prefer the world be within the next few years or even the next decade.

A few goals are certain and openly admitted. The globalists ultimately want to diminish or erase the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. They most definitely are seeking to establish the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights basket system as a replacement for the dollar system; this plan was even outlined in the Rothschild run magazine The Economist in 1988. They want to consolidate economic governance, moving away from a franchise system of national central banks into a single global monetary authority, most likely under the IMF or the Bank for International Settlements. And, they consistently argue for the centralization of political power in the name of removing legislative and sovereign barriers to safer financial regulation.

These are not “theories” of fiscal change, these are facts behind the globalist methodology. When the IMF mentions the “great global reset,” the above changes are a part of what they are referring to.

That said, much of my examinations focus on these macro-elements; but what about the deeper mechanics of the whole scheme? What kind of economic system would we wake up to on a daily basis IF the globalists get exactly what they want? This is an area in which the elites rarely ever comment, and I can only offer hypothetical scenarios.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Negative-Interest-Rate absurdity is another “rabbit out of the hat.”

May 14, 2016

Negative-Interest-Rate absurdity is another “rabbit out of the hat.”

For the second time this year, Spain’s caretaker government just managed to sell 50-year bonds in a €3 billion ($3.4 billion) deal. Despite maturing in the year 2066, when many of us won’t even be alive and the duty to pay back the debt (assuming it still exists) will have been handed down to our children’s children, the bonds will pay an annual interest rate of just 3.45%. Not only that, but the issuance was over-subscribed by €7 billion.

This is a mind-blowing turn-up for a country that just four years ago needed an unprecedented bailout from the Troika to save its saving banks and avert total financial collapse. It is also a resounding testament to the power of central bank policy to turn economic reality on its head.

Less than three years ago, when Draghi had only just begun doing “whatever it takes” to save the single currency, the Spanish government had to pay a 5% yield to get investors to buy their one-year bonds. Now investors are willing to take 50-year bonds off the government’s hands in exchange for an annual interest rate of 3.45%, despite all the attendant risks involved.

While the Spanish economy has improved somewhat since then, that is largely due to the fact that the government has sacrificed long-term stability for short-term growth, going so far as to plunder half of the nation’s social security reserve fund in order to keep spending at its current levels. The remaining half is exclusively invested in Spanish bonds. Even Brussels now admits that Spain’s public debt is out of control.

To make matters worse, Spain doesn’t have an elected government to speak of and could struggle to form one even after the next round of elections, on June 26.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How A Collapse In South America Could Trigger Martial Law In The U.S.

May 4, 2016

How A Collapse In South America Could Trigger Martial Law In The U.S.

If an economic system collapses in the woods and no one is paying attention, are there any consequences outside the woods? Well, yes, of course. As with most situations financial and global, however, consequences are not usually taken very seriously until they have spawned a vast bog of sewage we all have to then swim through.

The issue is and always will be “interdependency,” and the dissolution of sovereign borders. Take a close look at the European Union, for example.

You have a large network of fiscally interdependent nations struggling to maintain a sense of principled identity and heritage while participating in the delusion of multiculturalism. You have a system in which these nations are admonished or even punished for attempting to become self-reliant. You have a system which encourages a Cloward-Piven-style forced integration of incompatible cultures. You have unmanageable debt. You have a welfare addicted socialist population plagued by naive assumptions of entitlement. And on top of it all, you have a political structure dominated by cultural Marxists who would like nothing better than to see the whole of the old world go down in a blazing inferno.

This EU dynamic can only end in one of two ways — the complete dismantling of the supranational body and a return to sovereignty, or, a socio-economic crisis followed by even more centralization and the end of all remnants of sovereignty. Either way, the consequences will not be pretty.

In the EU there are particular nations that are being exploited by globalists to initiate greater disaster in the overall region. As Wikileaks exposed in transcripts of IMF discussions on Greece, the plan has always been to create enough chaos to drive fear into the general populace.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Global Growth Funk

May 2, 2016

The Global Growth Funk

NEW YORK – The International Monetary Fund and others have recently revised downward their forecasts for global growth – yet again. Little wonder: The world economy has few bright spots – and many that are dimming rapidly.

Among advanced economies, the United States has just experienced two quarters of growth averaging 1%. Further monetary easing has boosted a cyclical recovery in the eurozone, though potential growth in most countries remains well below 1%. In Japan, “Abenomics” is running out of steam, with the economy slowing since mid-2015 and now close to recession. In the United Kingdom, uncertainty surrounding the June referendum on continued European Union membership is leading firms to keep hiring and capital spending on hold. And other advanced economies – such as Canada, Australia, Norway – face headwinds from low commodity prices.

Things are not much better in most emerging economies. Among the five BRICS countries, two (Brazil and Russia) are in recession, one (South Africa) is barely growing, another (China) is experiencing a sharp structural slowdown, and India is doing well only because – in the words of its central bank governor, Raghuram Rajan – in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Many other emerging markets have slowed since 2013 as well, owing to weak external conditions, economic fragility (stemming from loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies in the good years), and, often, a move away from market-oriented reforms and toward variants of state capitalism.

Worse, potential growth has also fallen in both advanced and emerging economies. For starters, high levels of private and public debt are constraining spending – especially growth-enhancing capital spending, which fell (as a share of GDP) after the global financial crisis and has not recovered to pre-crisis levels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Venezuela at risk of unravelling as economic, energy turmoil deepens

May 2, 2016

Venezuela at risk of unravelling as economic, energy turmoil deepens

Violent protests follow decision to ration energy, cut work week for public employeesSo much is riding on the onset of the rainy season in Venezuela, where people across the drought-stricken country lined up on April 28, 2016, to buy food. So far, Caracas is being spared from energy-saving blackouts but its suburbs are increasingly being left in the dark. (Marco Bello/Reuters)

A devastating drought has brought Venezuela, already facing economic and energy crises amid simmering political unrest, to the brink and threatens the future of the oil-rich nation.

“Simply put, a natural disaster is making a man-made disaster much worse,” said Donald Kingsbury, a professor of political science and Latin American studies at the University of Toronto.

The “man-made disaster,” in this case, is a heavily petroleum-dependent, state-run economy gutted by the precipitous drop in crude oil prices.

Inflation will reach 720 per cent some time this year, the International Monetary Fund estimates, and the economy will contract another 10 per cent. Food staples and essential medicines are increasingly scarce. The costs of basic goods and services has skyrocketed. Incomes, for those lucky enough to still have one, are stagnant.

Further, crime rates have reached troubling levels. Venezuela now boasts the world’s second-highest per capita homicide rate after Honduras.

A man holds a picture of Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez, whose time in power still looms large over the country’s politics. (Ariana Cubillos/Reuters)

“People are fed up, from all over the political and social spectrum. At this point, it may not take much for things to erupt,” said Kingsbury.

The worst drought to hit Venezuela in almost half a century could be the catalyst, he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eugen Bohm Von Bawerk: Chinese Dragon: Breathing Credit Fumes

April 25, 2016

EUGEN BÖHM VON BAWERK: CHINESE DRAGON: BREATHING CREDIT FUMES

Economic forecasting, no matter how complex the underlying model may be, is essentially about extrapolating historical trends. We showed last week how economic models completely fail to pick up on structural shifts using Japan as an example. On the other hand, if an economy doesn’t really change much, as in the case of Australia over the last thirty years, model “forecast” are generally quite accurate. However, spending millions of dollars to do the job of a ruler doesn’t seem like wise resource allocation to us. That said there’s obviously a very limited market for model based GDP forecast and most of them are not exchanged among pure market based players, but rather between governmental funded agencies. True, Wall Street spews out their sell-side GDP propaganda on a regular basis, but claiming international banking is anything akin to a free market is absurd. GDP forecasting is something only wasteful organizations do and that should tell you all you need to know about these exercises in futility.

Take the latest IMF forecast for China as a half decent example. According to the IMF, the credit junkie known as China, which needed one trillion dollar in fresh credit in the first quarter alone to create GDP “growth” of somewhere between 6.3 and 6.7 per cent (265 billion dollars for the quarter) will continue to race ahead with six per cent growth for the foreseeable future. The Chinese economy is 100 per cent dependent on ever more money and credit expansion to maintain its completely unsustainable momentum and will very soon come crashing down. And by the way, China’s reported GDP numbers are obviously grossly overstated anyway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Officials Admit to ECONOMIC False Flag Operations

April 18, 2016

Government Officials Admit to ECONOMIC False Flag Operations

There Are Economic – As Well As Military – False Flag Attacks

False flag attacks don’t just involve physical deaths and wars …

They also involve faked economic events and financial casualties.

For example, two officials of the International Monetary Fund said last month that they needed the threat of an imminent financial catastrophe to force other players into accepting its measures such as cutting Greek pensions and working conditions, and – as the Greek government put it (via Bloomberg) – they were “considering a plan to cause a credit event in Greece and destabilize Europe.”

And high-level officials admitted to intentionally destroying their nations’ economies in order to “justify” structural economic reforms.

For example, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Japanese central bank officials admittedthat they kept Japan’s economy in a deflationary crisis to promote “structural reform” which would allow the Japanese economy to be looted by foreign interests. Japanese central bank officials admitted the same thing.

Something similar happened in Thailand and the EU.

Indeed, the former head of the Bank of England said last month that the depression in the EU was more or less a “deliberate” policy choice.

And an economist at insurance giant AIG – and former head of the European Commission’s unit responsible for the European Monetary System and monetary policies – said in 2008 that what European leaders wanted was to create a crisis to force introduction of “European economic government.”

And see this and this.

And The Tarp bank bailouts in the U.S. were passed using apocalyptic – and false – threats. And they were not used for the stated purpose.

For example, as I’ve previously reported:

The New York Times wrote last year:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Angola Could Be OPEC’s First Member To Fall

April 13, 2016

Angola Could Be OPEC’s First Member To Fall

OPEC-member Angola, which is dependent on oil for 95 percent of its export revenues, is facing an urgent cash flow problem, and the only way out is external help as the dominoes start to fall.

Angola has sought financial aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to weather the crisis engulfing the African nation due to low oil prices, while President José Eduardo dos Santos has gone as far as to dip into the country’s sovereign wealth fund just to pay civil servant salaries.

The Finance ministry said in a statement: “The government of Angola is aware that the high reliance on the oil sector represents a vulnerability to the public finances and the economy more broadly. The government will work with the IMF to design and implement policies and structural reforms aimed at improving macroeconomic and financial stability, including through fiscal discipline.”

Along with the drop in oil prices, it doesn’t help that Angola’s economy has largely become a kleptocracy—a government run by those gunning for status and personal gain at the expense of the nation.

For those who may argue with this terminology, we can look at the Angolan President’s daughter, Isabel dos Santos, who is worth $3.3 billion and is the richest woman in Africa, according to Forbes. Meanwhile, 68 percent of the Angolan population lives below the poverty line.

President José Eduardo dos Santos has run the country since 1979, but until now, he has avoided seeking aid from the IMF, most likely because the IMF has been known to delve into the state’s finances to locate irregularities—irregularities such as the President’s daughter’s net worth being over 6,000 times Angola’s GNI.

Only a few believe that the actions of the IMF may help bring an end to the opaqueness of the current rule.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Schauble Throws Up All Over Mario Draghi: “The ECB Is Causing Extraordinary Problems”

April 12, 2016

Schauble Throws Up All Over Mario Draghi: “The ECB Is Causing Extraordinary Problems”

Following this weekend’s snafu in which Spiegel said that Germany is considering suing the ECB if it launched QE, Mario Draghi reportedly made attempts to “mollify” Germany with promises that this won’t happen (it will) and that it was willing to meet – literally – with the German finance minister to appease any concerns he may have. Moments ago, Reuters reports that the meeting appears to have gone… badly.

SCHAEUBLE SAYS ECB CAUSING ‘EXTRAORDINARY PROBLEMS’: REUTERS

Oops.He added that he doesn’t see the ECB seriously discussing helicopter money (it is) adding that ECB policy does not help trust in Europe integration, and conluded with the following condemnation of everything that has been tried, and failed, so far:

SCHAEUBLE: FISCAL, MONETARY POLICY LARGELY EXHAUSTED GLOBALLY

Meanwhile, the IMF says that only more monetary and fiscal policy can save the world from fiscal stagnation.

While it is unclear what happens next, it is very much clear that never during the New Normal has there been so much confusion on how to proceed and what the next steps should be.

Former IMF Chief Economist Admits Japan’s “Endgame” Scenario Is Now In Play

April 11, 2016

Former IMF Chief Economist Admits Japan’s “Endgame” Scenario Is Now In Play

Back in October 2014, just after the BOJ drastically expanded its QE operation, we warned that the biggest risk facing the BOJ (and the ECB, and the Fed, and all other central banks actively soaking up securities from the open market) was a lack of monetizable supply. We cited Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Japan Macro Advisors in Tokyo, who said that at the scale of its current debt monetization, the BOJ could end up owning half of the JGB market by as early as in 2018. He added that “The BOJ is basically declaring that Japan will need to fix its long-term problems by 2018, or risk becoming a failed nation.”

Which is why 17 months ago we predicted that, contrary to expectations of even more QE from Kuroda, we said “the BOJ will not boost QE, and if anything will have no choice but to start tapering it down – just like the Fed did when its interventions created the current illiquidity in the US govt market – especially since liquidity in the Japanese government market is now non-existent and getting worse by the day.”

As part of our conclusion, we said we do not “expect the media to grasp the profound implications of this analysis not only for the BOJ but for all other central banks: we expect this to be summer of 2016’s business.”

Since then, the forecast has panned out largely as expected: both the ECB and BOJ, finding themselves collateral constrained, were forced to expand into other, even more unconventional methods of easing, whether it be NIRP in the case of the BOJ, or the outright purchases of corporate bonds as the ECB did a month ago.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yanis Varoufakis Issues a Major Warning to the Greek People

April 5, 2016

Yanis Varoufakis Issues a Major Warning to the Greek People

Varoufakis said that Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister and the architect of the deals Greece signed in 2010 and 2012, was “consistent throughout”. “His view was ‘I’m not discussing the program – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.

“So at that point I said ‘Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries’, and there was no answer. The only interpretation I can give [of their view] is, ‘Yes, that would be a good idea, but it would be difficult. So you either sign on the dotted line or you are out.’”

– From last year’s post: Everything You Need to Know About the Greek Crisis and ECB Fascism in Two Paragraphs

By now, most of you have heard about Wikileaks’ release of internal deliberations between the top two IMF officials in charge of managing the Greek debt crisis – Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF’s European Department, and Delia Velkouleskou, the IMF Mission Chief for Greece.

In nutshell, the two discussed whether or not a new credit crisis would be required in order to force EU creditors to agree with the IMF’s debt relief objective. Shedding some much needed perspective on the situation, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has chimed in, and he makes one thing perfectly clear — no matter who comes out ahead in this dispute (the IMF or the EU), it will be the Greek people who lose.

Here are a few excerpts from his op-ed published at Der Spiegel.

The feud between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European side of Greece’s troika of creditors is old news. However, Wikileaks’ publication of a dialogue between key IMF players suggests that we are approaching something of a hazardous endgame.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

IMF’s Christine Lagarde: “When The World Goes Downhill, We Thrive”

April 2, 2016

IMF’s Christine Lagarde: “When The World Goes Downhill, We Thrive”

When we wrote earlier that based on a leaked Wikileaks transcript, which the Greek government interpreted “as revealing an IMF effort to blackmail Athens with a possible credit event to force it to give in on pension cuts which it has rejected“, the article promptly went viral. While it remains to be determined if the IMF indeed made such an implied threat, we attribute this spike in interest to the general public’s surprise that the IMF could stoop to such a low, even by its own standards, level as to use a nation of 11 million people as a lab rat on which to conduct policy experiments.

But why the surprise?

As the below transcript from a April 2012 interview given by Lagarde to the Wharton school at UPenn, none other than IMF president Lagarde herself admitted that for the IMF to “thrive”, the world has to “goes downhill“, and that the IMF “to be sustainable” it needs to be “very in touch with our client base.”

She added that “when the world goes well and we’ve had years of growth, as was the case back in 2006 and 2007, the IMF doesn’t do so well both financially and otherwise”

It goes without saying that Lagarde’s sole prerogative as the managing director of the IMF is to make sure it “does well.”

She concluded by saying that “we need to be able to invent and reinvent ourselves in many ways.” One such client-facing “reinvention” just happened to be caught on tape.

Here is the key section:

Knowledge@Wharton: Of all the things that you do here, what are you most passionate about? What would you really like to make sure happens? It could be a small thing, it could be a large thing. What is it that really has your heart?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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