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International Man: You have sounded the alarm on a coming financial crisis of historic proportions. How do Trump’s trade policies figure into your view that a crisis is coming?

David Stockman: Trump’s trade policies only create more risk and rot down below.

They’re just kicking the can down the road. With this latest move by the Fed, they have cut the interest rates three times and short-term rates are back at 1.55%. They’re pumping their balance sheet back up—it’s up $300 billion just since September.

The Fed has reverted to all of the things that have created the underlying rot—and that means when finally things break loose, it’s going to be far worse than it would have otherwise been.

Given that they’re kicking the can down the road, they’re building the pressure in the system to really explosive levels.

The trade chaos that Trump’s creating is probably the catalyst that will bring down the whole house of cards.

At end of the day, it’s about the Red Ponzi. The world economy would be not nearly as good as it looks had the Chinese not been borrowing like there’s no tomorrow and building regardless of whether its efficient or profitable.

This has kept the global economy inching forward on a totally artificial basis. You could track it; some people call it the “China credit impulse.” Every time they get into trouble, they turn on the printing press. That causes commodity prices to rise and industrial activity and trade to pick up. It shows up in the GDP numbers, and then everybody gets all excited.

The fear of recession that we had a while back has now abated. We’re back to another global reflation meme, but none of this is sustainable.

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

Getting rid of Debt: How About Replacing Money with Social Credit?

May 25, 2019

Getting rid of Debt: How About Replacing Money with Social Credit?

Mark Twain had a genial idea with his story “The One Million Pound Bank Note” published in 1853. It was such a huge amount of money that it couldn’t be exchanged, yet it gave its owner all sorts of perks and goods. It was, in a certain way, an anticipation of what we call today the “social credit score” obtained on the various social media services on the Web. It is a form of money that can be owned, but cannot be exchanged — in most cases, you can’t even go negative with your social credit. So, no debt, no bankruptcy. Would it be possible to build a financial system based on this concept? Not easy, but also an idea being examined nowadays, especially in China with their state-owned social credit system (shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì). The text below is derived from the chapter on financial collapses of my new book “The Seneca Strategy,” to be published in later 2019.

The whole problem of financial collapses is the result of the existence of money. But what is money exactly? Without going into the various theories of money that economists are still discussing, we can say that once, money was something that everybody agreed on: a weight of precious metals. After all, the British currency is still defined in units of weight, even though one pound (in monetary terms) does not weigh a pound (in physical terms). Still, up to not too long ago, money was simply a token representing a physical entity, typically a certain weight of gold and silver. But things changed a lot with time and, with the 20th century, the convertibility of the dollar into precious metals was more theoretical than real. In 1971 president Nixon formally canceled it.

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

The Coming Wave Of High-Tech Authoritarianism

March 19, 2019

The Coming Wave Of High-Tech Authoritarianism

One of history’s hard lessons is that collapsing financial systems beget authoritarian politics.

Today’s world, alas, is following this script, as rising debts lead to wrenching political changes in nearly every country that holds free elections, while fascism and socialism are once again being taken seriously by people who in normal times would inhabit the political center.

But there’s one big difference this time around: the advanced state of social control technology. Past governments, when trying to tamp down dissent, were limited to blunt-instrument policies like curfews, phone taps and press shutdowns. Today’s would-be Big Brothers can do vastly more, and in many cases will use the coming financial/political emergency as an excuse to place Orwell’s proverbial boot on their citizens’ necks.

Some examples from a recent Wall Street Journal article titled The Autocrat’s New Tool Kit:

• Chinese authorities are now using the tools of big data to detect departures from “normal” behavior among Muslims in the country’s Xinjiang region—and then to identify each supposed deviant for further state attention.
• The Egyptian government plans to relocate from Cairo later this year to a still-unnamed new capital that will have, as the project’s spokesman put it, “cameras and sensors everywhere,” with “a command center to control the entire city.”
• Moscow already has some 5,000 cameras installed with facial-recognition technology, and it can match faces of interest to photos from passport databases, police files and social media.

But scary as these things sound, they’re crude compared to what’s coming. From the same WSJ article:

“Microtargeting” enables governments to build personality assessments of citizens and tailor propaganda for targets’ psychological weak spots. Russia’s Internet Research Agency reportedly harvested data from Facebook to craft specific messages for individual voters during the 2016 US presidential race. Private firms are developing artificial intelligence that can automate this customization for whole populations.

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

Planetary Collapse Threatens Our Survival: A New Study Says That More Than 1,200 Species “Will Almost Certainly Face Extinction”

March 14, 2019

Planetary Collapse Threatens Our Survival: A New Study Says That More Than 1,200 Species “Will Almost Certainly Face Extinction”

We are witnessing a worldwide environmental collapse, and nobody seems to know how to stop it. As you will see below, a study that was just released that looked at more than 5,000 species of birds, mammals and amphibians discovered that nearly a quarter of them “will almost certainly face extinction”. Never before has our society faced such a massive collapse of life on a planetary scale, and yet the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem concerned about what is happening. Species after species is being permanently wiped out, and most of us couldn’t care less.

The time for action is now. According to this new study, over 1,200 species will soon be extinct unless dramatic action is taken. The following comes from the Guardian…

More than 1,200 species globally face threats to their survival in more than 90% of their habitat and “will almost certainly face extinction” without conservation intervention, according to new research.
Scientists working with Australia’s University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society have mapped threats faced by 5,457 species of birds, mammals and amphibians to determine which parts of a species’ habitat range are most affected by known drivers of biodiversity loss.

Once these species are gone, they will be gone forever.

And remember, this study from Australia only included larger creatures such as birds, mammals and amphibians. The situation is far more dire when we look at what is happening to the insect world. The following is an excerpt from my previous article entitled “Insect Apocalypse: The Global Food Chain Is Experiencing A Major Extinction Event And Scientists Don’t Know Why”…

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

Insect Apocalypse: The Global Food Chain Is Experiencing A Major Extinction Event And Scientists Don’t Know Why

February 13, 2019

Insect Apocalypse: The Global Food Chain Is Experiencing A Major Extinction Event And Scientists Don’t Know Why

Scientists are telling us that we have entered “the sixth major extinction” in the history of our planet. A brand new survey of 73 scientific reports that was just released has come to the conclusion that the total number of insects on the globe is falling by 2.5 percent per year. If we stay on this current pace, the survey warns that there might not be “any insects at all” by the year 2119. And since insects are absolutely critical to the worldwide food chain, that has extremely ominous implications for all of us.

I write a lot about the inevitable collapse of our economic systems, but it could definitely be argued that our environment is already in a very advanced stage of “collapse”. According to this new research, insects are going extinct at a rate that is “eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles”…

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

Perhaps the entire world will come together and will stop destroying the planet and we can reverse this trend before it is too late.

Unfortunately, you and I both know that this is extremely unlikely to happen.

And if it doesn’t happen, the researchers that conducted this scientific review insist that the consequences will be “catastrophic to say the least”…

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

Where Will The “Pending” Financial Crisis Originate?

January 14, 2019

Where Will The “Pending” Financial Crisis Originate?

– Case for a pending financial collapse is well grounded warns Rickards
– “Ticking time bomb” the Federal Reserve has created is set to go off…
– Economist warns U.S. high-yield debt, default of “junk bonds” could cause next crisis
– Systemic risk is “more dangerous than ever” as “entire system is larger than before”
– Protect wealth by allocating at least 10% of assets in physical gold and silver

Source: BofA Merrill Lynch via Marketwatch.com

from The Daily Reckoning:

The case for a pending financial collapse is well grounded. Financial crises occur on a regular basis including 1987, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2007-08.

That averages out to about once every five years for the past thirty years. There has not been a financial crisis for ten years so the world is overdue. It’s also the case that each crisis is bigger than the one before and requires more intervention by the central banks.

The reason has to do with the system scale. In complex dynamic systems such as capital markets, risk is an exponential function of system scale. Increasing market scale correlates with exponentially larger market collapses.

This means a market panic far larger than the Panic of 2008.

Today, systemic risk is more dangerous than ever because the entire system is larger than before.

Due to central bank intervention, total global debt has increased by about $150 trillion over the past 15 years. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, have a larger percentage of the total assets of the banking system and have much larger derivatives books.

Each credit and liquidity crisis starts out differently and ends up the same. Each crisis begins with distress in a particular overborrowed sector and then spreads from sector to sector until the whole world is screaming, “I want my money back!”

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

The Fourth Turning & War of the Worlds

November 5, 2018

THE FOURTH TURNING & WAR OF THE WORLDS

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The paragraph above captures everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen during this Fourth Turning. It was written over two decades ago, but no one can deny its accuracy regarding our present situation. The spark was a financial crash. The response to the financial crash by the financial and governmental entities, along with their Deep State co-conspirators who created the financial collapse due to their greed and malfeasance, led to the incomprehensible election of Donald Trump, as the deplorables in flyover country evoked revenge upon the corrupt establishment.

The chain reaction of unyielding responses by the left and the right accelerates at a breakneck pace, with absolutely no possibility of compromise. A new emergency or winner take all battle seems to be occurring on a weekly basis, with the mid-term elections as the likely trigger for the next phase of this Fourth Turning.

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

Tenth Anniversary Of Financial Collapse, Preparing For The Next Crash

September 5, 2018

Tenth Anniversary Of Financial Collapse, Preparing For The Next Crash

Ten years ago, there was panic in Washington, DC, New York City and financial centers around the world as the United States was in the midst of an economic collapse. The crash became the focus of the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain and was followed by protests that created a popular movement, which continues to this day.

Banks: Bailed Out; The People: Sold Out

On the campaign trail, in March 2008, Obama blamed mismanagement of the economy on both Democrats and Republicans for rewarding financial manipulation rather than economic productivity. He called for funds to protect homeowners from foreclosure and to stabilize local governments and urged a 21st Century regulation of the financial system. John McCain opposed federal intervention, saying the country should not bail out banks or homeowners who knowingly took financial risks.

By September 2008, McCain and Obama met with President George W. Bush and together they called for a $700 billion bailout of the banks, not the people. Obama and McCain issued a joint statement that called the bank bailout plan “flawed,” but said, “the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.” Obama expressed “outrage” at the “crisis,” which was “a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years.”

By October 2008, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), or bank bailout, had recapitalized the banks, the Treasury had stabilized money market mutual funds and the FDIC had guaranteed the bank debts. The Federal Reserve began flowing money to banks, which would ultimately total almost twice the $16 trillion claimed in a federal audit. Researchers at the University of Missouri found that the Federal Reserve gave over $29 trillion to the banks. These are historically these are signs of a coming recession.

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

The Coming Collapse

July 2, 2018

The Coming Collapse

The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics.

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

Our Approaching Winter of Discontent

February 16, 2018

Our Approaching Winter of Discontent

The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life.

That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented–and for most people, unexpectedly severe–winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what’s coming, let’s speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept.

This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don’t need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc.

Nearly “free” (to you) healthcare: no.

Generous public pensions: no.

Social Security with an equivalent purchasing power to the checks issued today: no.

As for the implicit promises:

A national currency that holds its value into the future: no.

High-functioning public infrastructure: maybe in a few places, but not something to be taken for granted everywhere.

A working democracy in which common citizens can affect change even if the power structure defends a dysfunctional and corrupt status quo: no.

A higher education system that prepares its graduates for secure jobs in the real-world economy: on average, no.

Cheap, abundant fossil fuels and electricity: during recessionary head-fakes, yes; but as a permanent entitlement: no.

High returns on conventional capital (the kind created and distributed by central banks): no.

A government that can borrow endless trillions of dollars with no impact on interest rates or the real economy: no.

Pay raises that keep up with real-world inflation: no.

Ever-rising corporate profits: no.

You get the idea: the status quo will be unable to keep the myriad promises made to the public, implicitly and explicitly. The reason is not difficult to understand:

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

Albert Edwards: “We Just Had A Small Taste Of The Coming Financial Collapse”

February 14, 2018

Albert Edwards: “We Just Had A Small Taste Of The Coming Financial Collapse”

What is the outcome when three market skeptics sit down for dinner to discuss the future of the global economy? Whatever it is, it’s hardly optimistic.

In his latest note released moments after the big CPI upside surprise and titled, what else, “We just had a small taste of coming financial collapse. Still feeling lucky?“, SocGen’s permabearish Albert Edwards writes that he had dinner this week with “two of the great, London based, sellside macro analysts,” George Magnus (formally UBS Chief Economist and now at the China Centre, Oxford University), and Nomura’s Bob Janjuah. This is what was discussed:

In the aftermath of last weeks surge in equity volatility among many of the topics we discussed was the extraordinary ballooning of the US budget towards 6% of GDP at this late stage of the cycle. My view is that this fiscal expansion is probably the most foolhardy escapade in modern economic policy history.

Here Edwards posits that while he agrees that US corporate taxation is anomalously high, “it is the timing of the fiscal stimulus that is utterly ridiculous and will only accelerate the collapse of US financial markets as the Fed hikes rates even more quickly.”

That also happens to be his key thesis: Trump’s tax cuts will so overheat the economy, that the outcome will be another deflationary crash.

While he returns to the topic of the unprecedented fiscal stimulus at a time when the economy already appears to be overheating, Edwards first points out two charts we showed last week, namely the technical breakout in the 10Y and what that could mean for risk assets. Quote Edwards:

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

Global Elites Are Getting Ready To Blame You For The Coming Financial Crash

October 16, 2016

Global Elites Are Getting Ready To Blame You For The Coming Financial Crash

Those people that have any doubts about where the narrative is headed for global economic stability simply have not been paying attention lately.

As I pointed out in my pre-Brexit referendum article, Brexit: Global Trigger Event, Fake Out Or Something Else?, the story being scripted by the globalists is one of the “failures and crimes” of conservative movements. I predicted that the Brexit would pass based on this language used by international financiers and elites leading up to the vote.

The vast majority of analysts in the mainstream and in the alternative media refused to acknowledge the possibility that a successful Brexit actually works in FAVOR of the globalists, because it provides them a perfect scapegoat for a financial crisis that has been broiling for years and is now ready to burst into flames. I find still that many people will not dare to consider the idea that a successful conservative resurgence is actually part of the plan for globalist institutions. Many argue that the elites just don’t have that kind of pervasive control over the system, or that I am attributing “too much power and ability” to them.

I find this argument rather naive but also interesting, because many of the people that claim the elites do not have such influence were also the same people that argued before the Brexit that the elites would “never allow” the U.K. referendum to pass. So, do they have extensive influence, or don’t they? This kind of selective blindness to the game being played prevents a whole host of otherwise intelligent people from grasping reality.

These folks need to finally admit to themselves that they were half right; the globalists would not allow the passage of the Brexit, UNLESS, a successful Brexit actually works in their favor.

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

What to Do to Prepare for Financial Collapse: “Get Out of Debt. Store. Prep. Cash. Gold.”

October 1, 2016

What to Do to Prepare for Financial Collapse: “Get Out of Debt. Store. Prep. Cash. Gold.”

Prepare by balancing debt. Before you max out your credit cards on top notch gear, make sure you can survive the economic conditions that are coming.

Mass unemployment. Loss of income. Heavy dependence on assistance. And the biggest strain on the system we can imagine.

The United States is once again brought to the brink of collapse. Regardless of how dismissive mainstream voices are on the issue, it is clear that Americas is only a few shades and another crisis away from an all out return to the Great Depression era.

In 1929, it was a banking collapse that spread the panic, but it was the fallout in the heartland where its effects were felt. The means of survival become very difficult for the working class.

The comforts disappear, and even items like toilet paper are hard to come by. People line up in droves for handouts, because they are too desperate to do without. The proud become embittered as they wither to the bone, and people in the 1930s depression-era were hedged much better in mostly rural settings, with the ability to grow their own food.

Today, populations rely almost entirely upon deliveries, stocks and stores. All that could be gone in a matter of hours. If trucking were to halt, shelves would be empty and people would be rioting within three days, especially if EBT and other payments stopped or were cut off.

Beyond the flashpoints and headlines, investment dries up, small businesses cease. Goods stop flowing, inflation makes everything unaffordable anyway. Between a jobs shortage and a dysfunctional economy, it means hard times, whether then or now.

So what should you do? How should you handle this harsh reality?

Bill White at Survivopedia.com gives this detailed advice:

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

Where Will You Be When the End Game Begins?

June 4, 2016

WHERE WILL YOU BE WHEN THE END GAME BEGINS?

Sometime after oh dark thirty it will begin, the previously cocked trigger suddenly released to wreck havoc throughout the world’s financial system. Like an intricate and interwoven design made entirely of standing dominoes, all it takes is a slight disturbance to knock one off its base and start the cascade of toppled consequences running down the line.

With the benefit of hindsight it will be seen that the trigger itself was not the killer. Instead, sometime later, a specific projectile will be (most likely falsely) identified as the blunt instrument which tore economic flesh asunder and quickly bled the system of ‘liquidity’ faster than a slash to the femoral artery. Too late to make a difference, tourniquets will be applied to stem the red tide. Sadly, all it will accomplish is to extend economic life long enough to enable a final frenzy of looting before the bloody end.

And the totalitarian end game will have only just begun.

A socioeconomic system, if healthy and vibrant, can usually withstand extremely rough handling and even intentionally directed assault. A severed lifeline, while certainly a devastating shock to the organism, can and will be survived simply because adequate resources and flexibility remain within the structure which can be quickly marshaled while emergency repairs are made.

But a compromised entity already deathly ill, continuously pumped with toxic drugs and stimulants, stressed beyond compare by various Rube Goldberg financial devices, constantly monitored and regulated to assure compliance to artificial standards no natural system would ever adhere to, is always one disturbance away from disaster.

Thus the stage is set for the dark thirty triggering event.

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

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

February 17, 2016

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

Normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing. It is so frightening because it is so final; much like death, there is simply no coming back. Rather than a physical death, normalcy bias represents the death of reason and simple observation. It is the death of the mind and cognitive thought instead of the death of the body.

Ever since the derivatives collapse of 2008 the public has been regaled with wondrous stories of recovery in the mainstream to the point that such fantasies have become the “new normal”. These are grand tales of the daring heroics of central bankers who “saved us all” from impending collapse through gutsy monetary policy and no-holds-barred stimulus measures.

Alternative economists have not been so easy to dazzle. Most of us found that the recovery narrative lacked a certain something; namely hard data that took the wider picture into account. It seemed as though the mainstream media (MSM) as well as the establishment was attempting to cherry-pick certain numbers out of context while demanding we ignore all other factors as “unimportant.”

We just haven’t been buying into the magic show of the so called “professional economists” and the academics, and now that the real and very unstable fiscal reality of the world is bubbling to the surface, the general public will begin to see why we have been right all these years and the MSM has been utterly wrong.

Mainstream economists have done absolutely nothing in the way of investigative journalism and have instead joined a chorus cheerleading for the false narrative, singing a siren’s song of misinterpreted statistics and outright lies drawing the masses ever nearer to the deadly shoals of financial crisis.

Why do they do this? Are they part of some vast conspiracy to mislead the public?

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

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