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Desperate and unwilling to speak directly to the truckers, Justin Trudeau is now vowing to freeze the personal and business bank accounts of those involved in the Freedom Convoy. Trudeau is drunk with power and passed the emergency order despite the premiers of Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta stating it is an unnecessary move. Only Ontario’s Doug Ford supports the extreme measure. Quebec Premier Francois Legault believes the emergency order will “throw oil on the fire.”

This is the first time that a Canadian prime minister invoked the 1988 Emergencies Act, which is intended for an “urgent and critical situation” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians.” Deeming a peaceful protest an act of terrorism is an act of free speech oppression. Trudeau believes he deserves praise for refraining from deploying troops to end the protest through violence. “We are not suspending fundamental rights or overriding the Charter of Rights and Freedom. We’re not limiting people’s freedom of speech. We are not limiting freedom of peaceful assembly. We are not preventing people from exercising their right to protest legally,” Trudeau said while speaking at Parliament Hill on Monday.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney told reporters, “We would prefer that the emergency act not be invoked. But if it is, we would very much prefer that it not be applied to Alberta. It’s not needed. It could make the situation even more complicated.” Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe stated that the police already have the tools required to remove illegal blockades, therefore, “Saskatchewan does not support the Trudeau government invoking the Emergencies Act.” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh supports Trudeau’s decision but said it points to a larger problem with the Trudeau Administration. “The fact that the Prime Minister is resorting to this measure is proof of a failure of leadership…

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

Inflation Is The Kryptonite That Will End Our Decades-Long Monetary Policy Ponzi Scheme

January 27, 2022

Inflation Is The Kryptonite That Will End Our Decades-Long Monetary Policy Ponzi Scheme

“It means buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye.”

The linchpin that allows the world’s nefarious central banking model to be so effective is that the commonfolk – the plumber, the electrician, the teacher, the bartender, bus driver or barber – don’t understand it.

Countless times, I have reminded my readers and listeners that the inflationary “machinery of night” blankets the most regressive tax possible upon the people who can least afford it, and does so in an extraordinarily convenient way for elites, politicians, central bankers and central planners whose titles and “jobs” hinge upon nobody questioning them and/or figuring out how the system works in the first place.

Today, the fabric of our modern banking world is held together by a logical fallacy of a system, wherein central banks are afforded the asinine luxury of being able to print infinite amounts of “money”, which is then disproportionately distributed toward the ruling class, billionaires, and elites, instead of the people who need it the most.

This shows up, literally, as a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” that has widened consistently since the late 1970’s.

As a result of the most recent re-distribution of purchasing power disguised as “monetary stimulus” during the Covid-19 “crisis”, billionaires amassed an additional $4.1 trillion of wealth during a period of time in which the World Bank estimates that “some 100 million people have fallen into extreme poverty,” Bloomberg reported, in conjunction with the World Inequality Report, in December.

As I have asked many times, when the Fed considers stimulating by printing trillions: why not just divide up the money evenly amongst everybody in the country? Why must it be re-balanced and then deployed in a fashion that benefits those who already own financial assets?

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

The Zombie Ship of Theseus

January 7, 2022

The Zombie Ship of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is an old philosophical thought experiment. It asks a question about identity. Suppose you replace all of the boards of a ship with new ones—is it still the same ship?

We are not going to try to resolve this millennia-old paradox. Instead, we are going to add one more element, and then tie it to the monetary system. The additional element is what if the replacement boards are adulterated in some way. That is, each new board is warped, or weakened, or otherwise not fit for purpose.

It should be clear that replacing boards with unsound wood does not alter reality, only the ship. It does not remove any constraints such as the need to be watertight. It does not make anything better, only adds new flaws.

Let’s call this new ship, with each original board replaced with these adulterated boards, the Zombie Ship of Theseus. It looks like the Ship of Theseus. However, it does not work like it. It has been corrupted to work in a different way, i.e. to lull sailors into going out to sea, where a storm will drown them.

The History of our Warped Monetary System and Currency

So how does this relate to the monetary system and the currency? There has been a centuries-long process of replacing important boards. Let’s highlight the key changes.

The Original System

At the Founding of America, there was the original Ship of Theseus. One had the right to deposit one’s gold (we will leave out silver, as this complicates the story somewhat) and get a paper bank note in exchange. Or one could keep one’s gold, if one did not like the terms. One had the right to redeem the note, and get one’s gold back…

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

War Drums Are Beating

December 26, 2021

War Drums Are Beating

A RISK NOT DISCUSSED

It was around 2017 when I began seeing the ridiculous climate hysteria being pushed not just by dreadlocked physics deniers chaining themselves to trees but at an institutional level.

This, I thought to myself, was something very, very dangerous and which — if taken to any greater level — would ultimately bring about war.

The past two decades have seen Russia sanctioned and repeatedly threatened by Western powers. One of the many threats and arguably the most fierce has been eliminating Russia from the international payments system SWIFT.

Prepare a swift response to Russia invading Ukraine, Latvia tells west

From the article:

A swift reprisal package against Russia – including US troops and Patriot missiles stationed in the Baltics, the cutting off of Russia from the Swift banking payments system and reinstated sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – must be prepared now in case it invades Ukraine, the Latvian foreign minister has said.

And this:

“If Nato fails to protect its member states or its territories,” he warned, “then it will not just be a military and political failure but a complete mental collapse of the system of values that have been built since the end of world war two. It will mean the whole transatlantic community will be in complete disarray and the glue that keeps us together has failed”.

This horse has already bolted. The “glue” holding this ball of wax together is more like slime and “isht” is falling through the cracks in every direction, while the bureaucrats desperately try to hold it all together. It won’t work.

Now, this isn’t solely an EU-Russia issue. This is a West vs East issue.

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

Economist Michael Hudson Explain Bankers Are Parasites and Not Part of the Real Economy

October 27, 2021

Economist Michael Hudson Explain Bankers Are Parasites and Not Part of the Real Economy

Turning Out the Light When the Bankers Leave Town

May 17, 2021

Turning Out the Light When the Bankers Leave Town

I have written before how a friend of mine who is very senior at one of the investment banks in New York called to see if I would go to dinner. I thought he was here in Florida to catch a breath of fresh air and relax outside of what use to be called the Big Apple, but is now only called the Arm-Pit of the World thanks to COVID.

I can attest that the major banks, despite what they are saying, are abandoning both New York and London. In Europe, the long-standing hatred between France and England spans countless generations. France is seeking to punish the English by denying them access to EU markets. This has led bankers to start to shift their top talent to the EU because once the nut-case Boris Johnson decided to destroy Britain to Build Back Better, taking instructions from Gates and Schwab, there is now no going back. I have stated at conferences there were meetings I had in the EU where I was not allowed to bring a Brit because it was assumed they are just biased.

The Financial Capital of the World is moving. It will eventually end up in China post-2032. We have the worst possible politicians systematically destroying the West all for this Great Reset.

Understanding the Persecution of John Law

April 7, 2021

Understanding the Persecution of John Law

COMMENT: Hi Mr. Armstrong…..this is a surprising (to me) summary, on John Law. Every piece I ever read about him, cast him as a complete scoundrel, yet you obviously write with admiration. Just another example of history depending on someone’s perspective. You never cease to surprise. And that’s good.

REPLY: John Law was actually a brilliant man. His legacy is not so different from John Maynard Keynes. He advocated deficit spending ONLY in times of recession, but governments have spent relentlessly with deficits that never end. We call this “Keynesian economics” when in fact he never advocated such a system. Likewise, John Law never advocated what the French government did in creating the Mississippi Bubble.

It is true that John Law fled to Amsterdam, but this is when he studied real banking operations and saw that money was actually virtual. Because coins were counterfeited or their edges shaved, bank money was more valuable than coins. Once the coins were deposited, each had to be inspected. So the bank became a sort of guarantor of the validity of the coins. Here is an ancient coin from Lydia with numerous banking marks applied, verifying that the coin had been inspected by them before for the same reasons.

It was this first-hand observation that led John Law to see that money was actually virtual, whereby people preferred bank money to actual coins. John then returned to Scotland, where he published in 1705 his Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money. Law would later publish a second edition in 1720. He attempted to use his writing to convince the Scottish Parliament to adopt his ideas about money, but they declined, giving rise to the adage that a genius is never acknowledged in his native land (i.e. Columbus, Einstein to just mention two)…

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

john law, currency, money, martin armstrong, armstrong economics, banking, banks,

The Big Banks’ Green Bafflegab

November 25, 2020

The Big Banks’ Green Bafflegab

Look behind their pro-climate ads and do what they do. Follow the money.

Greenwash gulch? Toronto’s financial district. Photo: Wikimedia.

There must be a basement somewhere on Bay Street full of English majors. Every day they churn out great reams of verbiage about “environmental, social and governance strategy” and fill annual reports with a dozen different ways to say that the big five Canadian banks care about the environment.

Except the numbers tell a different story, and if you want to know the truth, then the old adage “follow the money” will steer you in the right direction, passing quickly through all the green bafflegab and arriving at the conclusion that the banks are sacrificing our climate to make a profit.

The latest news is a recent pledge by TD to achieve a “target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions associated with our operations and financing activities by 2050,” trumpeting that it’s the first Canadian bank to do so. Sounds good, yes?

But dig deeper and there’s no mention that since the Paris Agreement TD has financed more than C$135 billion in fossil fuel projects, the eighth largest amount out of all the banks on the planet. What will TD’s net-zero pledge do to alter this climate-killing practice? It doesn’t say. But judging from the collective shrug from the oil patch, probably not much.

What TD does say is that it will “work closely with clients” rather than decide that certain clients probably shouldn’t be clients. Notably, Suncor, Cenovus and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. all also have 2050 net-zero pledges, so presumably TD will continue to finance them, whose products rapidly fill our atmosphere with “green” carbon while our life-support systems fail.

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

Mapping out the Banking Elite’s Goal for a Cashless Monetary System – Part Two

February 23, 2020

Mapping out the Banking Elite’s Goal for a Cashless Monetary System – Part Two

In the first part of this article we traced the development of the ‘Utility Settlement Coin‘ – a project that began in 2015 and which has now evolved through the inception of a consortium called Fnality International. Fnality are comprised of a number of the world’s biggest banks including Barclays and UBS, all of whom are shareholders in the scheme. Their objective as stated on the company’s website reads:

Fnality International has been founded to create a network of decentralised Financial Market Infrastructures (dFMIs) to deliver the means of payment-on-chain in tomorrow’s wholesale banking markets.

In practice, what Fnality are seeking to deliver is the construction of a distributed ledger technology based global payment system, one that can ‘facilitate tokenised, peer-to-peer markets‘.

Before we look into this more, let’s examine some of the key figureheads behind the project. First there is the CEO Rhomaios Ram, who for the best part of two decades worked for Deutsche Bank in roles that included European Head of Currencies & Commodities and Head of Transaction Banking in the UK and Ireland. The Chairman of Fnality, Jim Turley, has also worked at Deutsche Bank in various different positions. Outside of commercial banking, Turley once served on the board of the New York Fed Foreign Exchange Committee.

But perhaps the standout name on Fnality’s management team is Daniel Heller, the firm’s advisor on regulatory affairs. Described as an expert in financial sector regulation and financial stability, Heller has a track record of having served at both the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund. At the BIS he was head of the Secretariat of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems, whilst at the IMF he was the executive director for Switzerland, Poland, Serbia, Azerbaijan, and four Central Asian republics.

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

Crisis-O-Rama

February 3, 2020

Crisis-O-Rama

All of a sudden, events are looking a bit fluxy out there, as though the world is shuddering through some spooky ch-ch-ch-changes, like a monster waiting to be born, with strange convergences of ecology, politics and economy, and there’s only so much you can do to prepare, really. Criticality is in the air!

The horses are out of the barn on the Wuhan Coronavirus. Air travel was curtailed too late in the game — and still only partially — with asymptomatic-but-infectious human carriers winging to every corner of the world and probably contaminating airports all along the way. There’s plenty of thought and counter-thought on what exactly is going on behind the scenes in China. The ruling party has knocked itself out demonstrating its earnestness in the crisis, performing great feats like the construction of a one-thousand-bed hospital in ten days, shutting down the lunar new year festivities (like cancelling Christmas here), and locking down a hundred million citizens in quarantine. Pretty impressive.

But there’s also a theory that the Coronavirus affords a cover for cascading failures in China’s corrupt and shifty banking system. The country had already stepped across some frontiers in demographics, energy consumption, and industrial growth that were shoving it toward contraction for the first time in two generations. Coronavirus has shut down a lot of production in big things like cars and big-little things like cell phones, and supply lines are shutting down to world markets. This amounts to the first big test of the integrated global economy, as well as the world’s debt-saturated business model.

When a lot of parties and counterparties can’t pay each other because their revenue flows are cut off, the securities, currencies, equities, and other abstract representations of wealth go south. The US and Europe are no better positioned for a crisis in their banking arrangements, and confidence is starting to crack.

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

They Don’t Ring A Bell But… Banks Begin Pitching First Managed Synthetic CDO Since Financial Crisis

January 30, 2020

They Don’t Ring A Bell But… Banks Begin Pitching First Managed Synthetic CDO Since Financial Crisis

With spreads so tight – despite credit risks (leverage) at or near record highs – it would appear the bankers have returned to what they know best to be able to keep demand for new issues high and at the same offload their exposures in case of crisis – “baffle ’em with bullshit.”

IG and HY spreads relative to turns of leverage are at their tightest levels (least risk-aware) in two decades…

Thanks in large part to the incessant and heavy hand of The ECB on the bid for European corporate debt, credit spreads are at their tightest since 2007, and that, according to IFRE, has sparked several European banks into action.

Source: Bloomberg

JP Morgan, Nomura and BNP Paribas are among the banks racing to sell the first managed synthetic collateralised debt obligation since the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the matter, with sources signalling that a deal could land in the first quarter of the year.

Such a move, as IFRE points out so accurately, would represent a further landmark in the rehabilitation of this controversial breed of structured credit investment that many associate with the kind of excessive financial engineering that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

As a reminder, a synthetic CDO, sometimes called a CSO, invests in a portfolio of single-name CDS, not mortgages to obtain a supposedly diversified portfolio of fixed-income exposure. The returns of that portfolio of premiums is then divided (or tranched) up to meet investors’ needs from a demand vs risk perspective (high yields and higher risk, low yields and relative safety) which typically – thanks to the magic of leverage and some financial engineering -can outdo the more generic sources of income available to investors.

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

China’s Growing Economic Miracle…(Collapse). Or… Everyone Pays the Piper!

January 18, 2020

China’s Growing Economic Miracle…(Collapse). Or… Everyone Pays the Piper!

In emulating the American economic raison d’etre, China has attempted to develop its unique capitalist model while ignoring that it too will soon suffer the same fate for the same reason: Unsustainable debt. When examining the recent realities of Chinese banking and finance over the past year it seems the steam that president Xi Jinping touts as powering the engine of his purported economic miracle of a master-planned economy is only a mirage, now almost completely evaporated before his eyes.

Like the many other similarly foolish western nations, China seeks only one path out of this fiscal death spiral, one that will likely spell doom and/or revolution in many countries soon: More debt.

China is becoming increasingly unable to continue to pay into the base of the world’s largest pyramid scheme of an economy and the cracks in the bubble are showing. This past year, saw three of the 4,279 Chinese lenders almost fail, if not for the massive intervention by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) of immediate liquidity via more debt. The Chinese economic miracle is built on unsustainable debt-based infrastructure projects over the past two decades that have provided China with a face of prosperity to show the world, but this is only a mask to hide the limited countrywide success of the Chinese miracle into the rural areas. The injection of $Trillions in capital has seen China distribute these sums across the base of its economy creating a GDP that hit a high of 14.2 % in 2007 then averaged nearly 9% for the next decade before dropping yearly to 6.1% in 2018. All this growth had produced a personal affluence to a sub-set of Chinese society that has stoked this appearance of a flourishing economy.

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

Farewell to Paper Money?

December 25, 2019

Farewell to Paper Money?

A decade or more ago, I began to discuss with associates the possibility of governments and banks colluding to eliminate physical cash. Back then, the idea struck most everyone as poppycock, that governments could never get away with it.

I didn’t write on the subject until 2015, when several countries had begun to limit the amount of money a depositor could extract from his bank account. At that point, the prospect that central banks might conceivably eliminate cash was looking less like an alarmist fantasy, and it became possible to write on the nascent issue.

In a nutshell, today, in most of the world’s most prominent countries, the people who control banking are the same people who pull the strings in government. A cashless system therefore seemed to me to be a natural, as it dramatically increased both profit and power for both banking and government – an opportunity that can’t be passed up.

The Benefit to Banking

Some banks have been delving into negative interest rates, which is a euphemism for charging you to keep your money in the bank, so that they can loan it out for their own profit. You actually lose money annually by having it on deposit.

Of course, some people accept negative interest rates in order to retain the imagined safety of having their cash in a bank vault, rather than at home. Others tolerate it because they value the convenience of using ATMs and chequing.

But anyone else may simply decide to store their money at home and save the “reverse interest” charges.

But what if cash were eliminated? No one would have a choice. They’d have to have a bank account and use it for all transactions, or they couldn’t purchase goods or pay bills.

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

The Federal Reserve Is Directly Monetizing US Debt

November 16, 2019

The Federal Reserve Is Directly Monetizing US Debt

In a very real way, MMT is already here

Sure, it’s not admitting to this. And it’s using several technical jinks and jives to offer a pretense that things are otherwise.

But it’s not terribly difficult to predict what’s going to happen next: the Federal Reserve will drop the secrecy and start buying US debt openly.

At a time, mind you, when US fiscal deficits are exploding and foreign buyers are heading for the exits.

How It’s Supposed to Work

Here’s how it’s supposed to work when the US government issues new debt:

If the US Treasury needs to raise new funds, it announces an upcoming auction of US Treasury bills/notes/bonds.
A date for the auction is set.
Various participants bid for those bills/notes/bonds (including ‘regular folks’ like you and me if we’re using the government’s Treasury Direct program).
At a later date, the Fed can buy those US Treasury bills/notes/bonds. The various holders of that debt submit offers to sell, and the Fed (presumably) selects the best offers on the best terms.

The Federal Reserve, under no conditions, buys Treasury paper directly. The Federal Reserve’s own website still maintains that this is the case:

There are two important claims plus one assertion I’ve highlighted in there, each in a different color:

Yellow: Treasury securities may “only be bought and sold in the open market.”
Blue: doing otherwise might compromise the independence of the Fed.
Purple: the Fed mostly buys “old” securities.

So according to the Fed: it’s independent, it follows the rules set forth in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and it mostly buys “old” Treasury paper that the market has already properly priced in a free and fair system.

But that’s not really what’s going on…

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

Bankers Going for Broke Because They Know it’s Broke – G. Edward Griffin

November 10, 2019

Bankers Going for Broke Because They Know it’s Broke – G. Edward Griffin

Edward Griffin, author of the wildly popular book about the Federal Reserve “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” is holding a conference this weekend called “Red Pill Expo.” It is all about waking people up from the illusions they are being told. Griffin explains, “The illusions are in health, in politics and in education. The illusions are in the media, in money and in banking, which is my specialty. So, people are coming, some of whom are informed, but most respond to the slogan we are using for the “Red Pill Expo,” and the slogan is ‘Because you know something is wrong.’ That sort of spells it out for most people, not just in America, but for people all over the world. People everywhere are being fed propaganda, lies and false stimuli of all kinds, but deep in their hearts, deep in their instincts, they know something is wrong.”

What’s wrong in the financial world with the longest expansion in history and the Fed starting QE (money printing) again? Griffin says, “We are living in a system of the banks, by the banks and for the banks, and that is the reality. . . . They see that the wheels are coming off. . . . The system of inflation in which we live cannot go on forever. . . . All systems of exponential growth always collapse. They come to an end at some point, and it’s hard to tell exactly at what point, but you do know there is a breaking point where it just moves beyond reality. The banks know this better than anybody. So, I am assuming that they feel they are at the end. You can smell it. You can see it. You can touch it almost.

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

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