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Doug Casey, Jeff Thomas, and Nick Giambruno recently discussed a critical topic—the rise of a police state in the former “free” world.

Nick Giambruno: In my experience, the US has some of the most aggressive police in the world. I first noticed this when I started traveling many years ago.

I’ve also noticed that law-abiding citizens are more likely to encounter the police in the US. Both of these trends are accelerating.

What happened to “the boys in blue”—the friendly cop on the beat that everyone knew personally and trusted?

Doug Casey: The fact is that police forces throughout the US have been militarized. Every little town has a SWAT team, sometimes with armored personnel carriers. All of the Praetorian style agencies on the federal level—the FBI, CIA, NSA, and over a dozen others like them—have become very aggressive. Every single day in the US, there are scores of confiscations of people’s bank accounts, and dozens having their doors broken down in the wee hours of the night. The ethos in the US really seems to be changing right before our very eyes, and I think it’s quite disturbing. It’s a harbinger, I’m afraid, of what’s to come.

Jeff Thomas: Yes, this change has certainly been more prevalent in the US than elsewhere. And I don’t doubt that the black combat uniforms are intentional. Psychologically, combat gear is very threatening. It serves only one purpose—aggression. And blue is the color of officialdom, whilst black is the color of death. This, to me, was a very conscious change—maximum intimidation.

Nick Giambruno: Police training has also changed. The War on (some) Drugs and the so-called War on Terror have turbocharged police militarization. What are your thoughts?

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

Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization

May 7, 2017

Doug Casey on the End of Western Civilization

Nick Giambruno: The decline of Western Civilization is on a lot of people’s minds.

Let’s talk about this trend.

Doug Casey: Western Civilization has its origins in ancient Greece. It’s unique among the world’s civilizations in putting the individual—as opposed to the collective—in a central position. It enshrined logic and rational thought—as opposed to mysticism and superstition—as the way to deal with the world. It’s because of this that we have science, technology, great literature and art, capitalism, personal freedom, the concept of progress, and much, much more. In fact, almost everything worth having in the material world is due to Western Civilization.

Ayn Rand once said “East minus West equals zero.” I think she went a bit too far, as a rhetorical device, but she was essentially right. When you look at what the world’s other civilizations have brought to the party, at least over the last 2,500 years, it’s trivial.

I lived in the Orient for years. There are many things I love about it—martial arts, yoga, and the cuisine among them. But all the progress they’ve made is due to adopting the fruits of the West.

Nick Giambruno: There are so many things degrading Western Civilization. Where do we begin?

Doug Casey: It’s been said, correctly, that a civilization always collapses from within. World War 1, in 1914, signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Of course, termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. It’s been on an accelerating downward path ever since, even though technology and science have been improving at a quantum pace. They are, however, like delayed action flywheels, operating on stored energy and accumulated capital.

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

How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard of Living?

June 18, 2016

How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard of Living?

The forces are mounting that will eventually overwhelm most Americans and send their standard of living to unknown depths. Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created a nation of whining, self absorbed, entitlement minded people with no moral or mental toughness.

Doug Casey believes we are headed for what he calls a super depression created by the ending of a debt super cycle. The bigger the debt cycle the bigger the depression that follows. That’s how reality works and most people are not prepared for reality.

When this depression, which has already started, gets momentum, it will overwhelm the plans of a society that is expecting to get things like social security, pensions and payouts from retirement plans they have paid into for many years. All of those things will disappear almost overnight and leave society gasping and stupefied over what to do. Their reactions will be to yell and scream and try to identify who to blame but the only person they should blame is the one in the mirror.

Many very smart people have raised the alarm and done their best to warn the sleeping public, but those slumbering masses have ignored the warnings and hit the snooze button one more time. The masses do not understand economics, do not want to understand economics and they will pay dearly for that ignorance in the coming days.

When the real unemployment rate becomes common knowledge as it increases substantially, people will be left to survive on what resources they have saved up outside the banking system that cannot be stolen by the politicians and bankers. That is a key point here. The assets you have outside the system that cannot be stolen from you with a few key strokes on some computer.

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

Making the Chicken Run

May 14, 2016

Making the Chicken Run

“Making the chicken run” is what Rhodesians used to say about neighbors who packed up and got out during the ’60s and ’70s, before the place became Zimbabwe. It was considered “unpatriotic” to leave Rhodesia. But it was genuinely idiotic not to.

I’ve written many times about the importance of internationalizing your assets, your mode of living, and your way of thinking. I suspect most readers have treated those articles as they might a travelogue to some distant and exotic land: interesting fodder for cocktail party chatter, but basically academic and of little immediate personal relevance.

I’m directing these comments toward the U.S. mainly because that’s where the problem is most acute, but they’re applicable to most countries.

Now, in 2016, the U.S. is in real trouble. Not as bad as Rhodesia 40 years ago—and definitely a different kind of trouble—but plenty serious. For many years, it’s been obvious that the country was eventually going to hit the wall, and now the inevitable is rapidly becoming imminent.

What do I mean by that? There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about things financial and economic. But I personally believe we haven’t been bearish enough on the eventual social and political fallout from the Greater Depression. Nothing is certain, but the odds are high that the U.S. is going into a time of troubles at least as bad as any experienced in any advanced country in the last century.

I hate saying things like that, if only because it sounds outrageous and inflammatory and can create a credibility gap. It invites arguments with people, and although I enjoy discussion, I dislike arguing.

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

Doug Casey Warns: “It’s The Next Stage Of The Greater Depression… The Economy Is Going To Be Very, Very Bad”

April 25, 2016

Doug Casey Warns: “It’s The Next Stage Of The Greater Depression… The Economy Is Going To Be Very, Very Bad”

While President Obama took credit this weekend for saving the world economy from a global depression and stock markets are hovering around all-time highs, not everyone is convinced that central bank policy and government involvement in financial markets has stabilized the system. Doug Casey, one of the most well respected institutional investors in the world and someone who thrives in environments plagued with volatility and risk, joins Future Money Trends to explain exactly why the world has not avoided a Greater Depression and how things are about to get “very, very bad.”

And by very bad he means that centrally manufactured super-bubbles and bubbles are set to wipe out trillions.

You’ve got to remember that all of these governments and central banks all around the world have driven interest rates not just to zero, but to negative levels in some cases… and they are simultaneously printing up trillions of currency units. And even while they are desperately doing that the economy is falling apart in lots of different ways.

…They’ve created a super-bubble in bonds, a bubble in stocks, and meanwhile commodities have collapsed and are below production costs in many cases.

…The economy is going to be very, very bad… It’s the next stage of what I call the Greater Depression.

Full interview via Future Money Trends:

(Watch At Youtube)

But as centrally manufactured bubbles burst in one sector of the economy, says Casey, capital will flow en masse to other sectors as investors panic. First to safe haven assets like gold, and then to to broader commodities which have been left for dead since the start of the decade:

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

We are exiting the eye of the giant financial hurricane

April 1, 2016

We are exiting the eye of the giant financial hurricane

(Editor’s Note: This is Doug Casey’s foreword to Casey Research’s Handbook for Surviving the Coming Financial Crisis.)

Right now, we are exiting the eye of the giant financial hurricane that we entered in 2007, and we’re going into its trailing edge.

It’s going to be much more severe, different, and longer lasting than what we saw in 2008 and 2009.

In a desperate attempt to stave off a day of financial reckoning during the 2008 financial crisis, global central banks began printing trillions of new currency units. The printing continues to this day.

It’s not just the Federal Reserve that’s printing. The Fed is just the leader of the pack. The U.S., Japan, Europe, China… all major central banks… are participating in the biggest increase in global monetary units in history.

These reckless policies have produced not just billions but trillions in malinvestment that will inevitably be liquidated. This will lead us to an economic disaster that will, in many ways, dwarf the Great Depression of 1929–1946. Paper currencies will fall apart, as they have many times throughout history.

This isn’t some vague prediction about the future. It’s happening right now. The Canadian dollar has lost 25% of its value since 2013. The Australian dollar has lost 30% of its value during the same time. The Japanese yen and the euro have crashed in value. And the U.S. dollar is currently just the healthiest horse on its way to the glue factory.

These are gigantic losses for major currencies. After all, we’re not talking about small volatile stocks. We’re talking about the value of money in peoples’ bank accounts. These moves show we’re in the early stages of a currency crisis.

At this point, it’s a lock cinch that the world’s premier paper currency – the U.S. dollar – will lose nearly all its value.

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

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote

February 27, 2016

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote

Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote Democracy is vastly overrated.

It’s not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people’s thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion.” Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it’s necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people.

The only form of democracy that suits a free society is economic democracy in the laissez-faire form, where each person votes with his money for what he wants in the marketplace. Only then can every individual obtain what he wants without compromising the interests of any other person. That’s the polar opposite of the “economic democracy” of socialist pundits who have twisted the term to mean the political allocation of wealth.

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

Doug Casey Shines a Light on the Sociopaths in Politics

January 31, 2016

Doug Casey Shines a Light on the Sociopaths in Politics

There are seven characteristics I can think of that define a sociopath, although I’m sure the list could be extended:

Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.

Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.

Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren’t burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they’re above all that. They’re arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.

Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they’re responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You’ll never hear a sincere apology from them.

Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.

Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.

Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors, and they’ll falsify information to damage others.

The fact that they’re chronic, extremely convincing, and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies, means they aren’t easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be “politically correct” in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy?

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

Debunking Anti-Gold Propaganda

December 25, 2015

Debunking Anti-Gold Propaganda

A meme is now circulating that gold is the investment equivalent of a pet rock, and that the smart investor should sell gold, and buy stocks. That’s a ridiculous notion. In fact, if you believe in buying low and selling high, this is the time to buy gold, and sell stocks.

It pays to remain as objective as you can be when analyzing any investment. People have a tendency to fall in love with an asset class, usually because it’s treated them so well. We saw that happen most recently with Internet stocks in the late ’90s and with houses up to 2007. Investment bubbles are driven primarily by emotion, although there’s always some rationale for the emotion to latch on to. Perversely, when it comes to investing, reason is recruited mainly to provide cover for passion and preconception.

In the same way, people tend to hate certain investments unreasonably, usually at the bottom of a bear market, after they’ve lost a lot of money; even thinking about the asset means reliving the pain and loss. Love-and-hate cycles occur for all investment classes.

But there’s only one investment I can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions – especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum, or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. Let’s spend a moment looking at how gold’s fundamentals fit in with the psychology of the current market.

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

Money As the Greater Depression Deepens

November 14, 2015

Money As the Greater Depression Deepens

We talk a lot in these pages about what to do with one’s money, but I question whether most subscribers (forget about the public at large) have an adequate grasp of the basics. Without it, much of what we say may seem capricious or outlandish, crazy ideas readers tolerate only because we’ve been so right about the big trends. But the basics in speculating and investing are like the basics in martial arts: Just remembering them isn’t enough; they need to be second nature. That means reviewing and practicing over and over.

It’s not an accident that we usually make good investment calls; the selections arise from a constant awareness of the basics. So I want to briefly review those fundamentals. Let’s start with gold. We’re very gold-oriented around here.

You undoubtedly have a good position in gold. Many of your friends are aware that you’re a gold bug, and more than a few of them question your wisdom. Are you able to give them a succinct and cogent explanation not just for why gold is cyclically a good speculation, but why it’s money? I’ll wager the answer in many cases is, “No.”

I say that because when I give a speech, I often offer a prize to the audience member who can tell me the five classical reasons gold is the best money. Quickly now; what are they? Can’t recall them? Read on, and this time, burn them into your memory.

Money

If you can’t define a word precisely, clearly, and quickly, that’s proof you don’t understand what you’re talking about as well as you might. Here, we talk a lot about money, so it only makes sense to know the subject completely. So, what is money? The proper definition of money is: Something that functions as 1) a medium of exchange and 2) a store of value.

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

The Deep State

October 10, 2015

The Deep State

I’d like to address some aspects of the Greater Depression in this essay.

I’m here to tell you that the inevitable became reality in 2008. We’ve had an interlude over the last few years financed by trillions of new currency units.

However, the economic clock on the wall is reading the same time as it was in 2007, and the Black Horsemen of your worst financial nightmares are about to again crash through the doors and end the party. And this time, they won’t be riding children’s ponies, but armored Percherons.

To refresh your memory, let me recount what a depression is.

The best general definition is: A period of time when most people’s standard of living drops significantly. By that definition, the Greater Depression started in 2008, although historians may someday say it began in 1971, when real wages started falling.

It’s also a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated, and when the business cycle, which is caused exclusively by currency debasement, also known as inflation, climaxes. That results in high unemployment, business failures, uncompleted construction, bond defaults, stock market crashes, and the like.

Fortunately, for those who benefit from the status quo, and members of something called the Deep State, the trillions of new currency units delayed the liquidation. But they also ensured it will now happen on a much grander scale.

The Deep State is an extremely powerful network that controls nearly everything around you. You won’t read about it in the news because it controls the news. Politicians won’t talk about it publicly. That would be like a mobster discussing murder and robbery on the 6 o’clock news. You could say the Deep State is hidden, but it’s only hidden in plain sight.

The Deep State is the source of every negative thing that’s happening right now. To survive the coming rough times, it’s essential for you to know what it’s all about.

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

Three Reasons Why the U.S. Government Should Default on Its Debt Today

September 19, 2015

Three Reasons Why the U.S. Government Should Default on Its Debt Today

The overleveraging of the U.S. federal, state, and local governments, some corporations, and consumers is well known.

This has long been the case, and most people are bored by the topic. If debt is a problem, it has been manageable for so long that it no longer seems like a problem. U.S. government debt has become an abstraction; it has no more meaning to the average investor than the prospect of a comet smacking into the earth in the next hundred millennia.

Many financial commentators believe that debt doesn’t matter. We still hear ridiculous sound bites, like “We owe it to ourselves,” that trivialize the topic. Actually, some people owe it to other people. There will be big transfers of wealth depending on what happens. More exactly, since Americans don’t save anymore, that dishonest phrase about how we owe it to ourselves isn’t even true in a manner of speaking; we owe most of it to the Chinese and Japanese.

Another chestnut is “We’ll grow out of it.” That’s impossible unless real growth is greater than the interest on the debt, which is questionable. And at this point, government deficits are likely to balloon, not contract. Even with artificially low interest rates.

One way of putting an annual deficit of, say, $700 billion into perspective is to compare it to the value of all publicly traded stocks in the U.S., which are worth roughly $20 trillion. The current U.S. government debt of $18 trillion is rapidly approaching the stock value of all public corporations — and that’s true even with stocks at bubble-like highs. If the annual deficit continues at the $700 billion rate — in fact it is likely to accelerate — the government will borrow the equivalent of the entire equity capital base of the country, which has taken more than 200 years to accumulate, in only 29 years.

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

The New World Order—A Faustian Bargain

June 9, 2015

The New World Order—A Faustian Bargain

Faustian bargain: An agreement in which a person abandons his or her spiritual values or moral principles in order to obtain wealth or other benefits. A deal with the devil.

The argument over the existence of an Elite, who plan to control the entire world under a New World Order like some great yo-yo, has been around for a long time. Not surprisingly, events created by world leaders of all stripes in recent years give rise to an increasing belief in the likelihood of the existence of such an effort.

There are two great dangers in attempting to describe this perceived secret endeavour, and they are at opposite ends of the spectrum: a) being so naive as to assume that no collusion exists amongst various groups of leaders to further their respective ends, and b) over-simplifying such alliances to suggest that there is an Elite Master Plan that all members implicitly agree upon and follow in every respect.

Assumption A

In any country, the citizenry are accustomed to such acts of collusion as all the petrol suppliers raising the price by the same amount, overnight. Few individuals would doubt that the two companies get together well in advance to agree on the price hike.

The same sort of collusion can be expected between banks and governments, etc. However, most people in any given country seem to believe that the political parties that rule them do not collude in their own collective interest and against the best interests of their respective constituents.

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

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