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COMMENT: This business with Trump and the media is quite amazing when seen from a distance. I read posts from people who can not see past what they are believing. It’s as if the hate for Trump has become a Religion. A religious person will refuse to look at things from another perspective and this is what is happening in your country.

K (UK)

REPLY: Oh yes. It has been whipped up into a religious frenzy. What the media and the Democrats have overlooked is they have gone WAY TOO FAR and this is indeed becoming a religious quest and therein lies the danger for HUGE civil unrest. After the November elections, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that either side will accept the results. This means historically the only solution becomes violence. The Media is so hateful of Trump because he has called them the fake news. But he has only stated what the majority believe and those in the media refuse to acknowledge. Most Americans cannot even name a nonbiased neutral news source! Gallup Poll now shows that 45% see a great deal of political bias in news coverage, up from 25% in 1989.

We are cascading into the War Cycle and believe me, this is NOT a forecast I even like to repeat. It is not something where I am warning people to reverse course or else, because there is no reversing this trend. We are a fly on the rear-end of an elephant with no shot of steering him in the right direction. We simply have to ride it out until the bloody end.

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

Nine “Fascinating” Stats About Inflation

September 19, 2018

Nine “Fascinating” Stats About Inflation

In a report on the history (and future) of inflation from Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid, the credit strategist notes that while it may not feel like it, but we live in inflationary times relative to long-term history.

Before the start of the twentieth century prices generally crept higher only very slowly over time and were indeed often flat for very long periods. For example in the UK the overall price level was broadly unchanged between 1800 and 1938. However, inflation moved higher everywhere across the globe at numerous points in the twentieth century. UK prices since 1938 have increased by a multiple of 50 (+4885%) and of the 25 countries with continuous inflation data back to 1900, the UK is one of only 5 countries in the sample not to experience extreme inflation (defined as >25% YoY) in a given year. Of these 25 countries only Holland (3.0%), Canada (3.0%), the US (3.0%) and Switzerland (2.1%) have seen average annual inflation at 3% or below.

As shown in the chart below, while inflation was virtually non-existent until the 20th century, all of that changed once the Federal Reserve was created…

And while we will discuss in a follow up post Reid’s observations on just “what changed in the twentieth century”, below we list some “fascinatingf stats” about inflation as we thank the central bankers for unleashing this most powerful economic force on the face of the planet.

From Deutsche Bank:

No country has seen average annual inflation below 2% since 1971 when we moved to a global fiat currency system (87 in our sample), only 28 averaged less than 5%. No country has seen annual average inflation below 2% since 1900 (25 in our sample) and only 4 between 2-3%.
UK prices (longest history we have) were more or less unchanged between 1800 and 1938 but have subsequently risen by a stunning multiple of 50 times (4885%) in the 80 years since this point. In the 728 years between 1210 and 1938 prices only rose 26 times.

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

Civil Unrest for 2018/2019 Post Election Cycle – The End of the United States?

September 3, 2018

Civil Unrest for 2018/2019 Post Election Cycle – The End of the United States?

QUESTION: I have followed you for many years and read you daily. To the point, I was looking at the riots in LA 1n 1965 and then the riots in 1992, that being 27 years so I divided that by 8.6 and got 3.14, so I backtested 27 years and found more race-related riots etc. Does this mean we will see riots in 2019?

ANSWER: Yes. Our model is broader, and it extends back in time much further and incorporates all countries. This sort of civil unrest will rise in 2019 after the election cycle. It will not be just a race issue. It will be politically oriented and broader. Nonetheless, the Democrats will portray Trump and the Republicans as racists for the election fueling the fire of both race and class warfare.

We are preparing a report for the election cycle. This year is crazy. There are so many people in Congress calling it quits. The Republicans who will be defending 40 open House seats this fall compared with the Democrats’ 20 all because of retirement announcements. Even Speaker Paul Ryan told his colleagues he would not seek election. What is going on is that there are those in politics who see the handwriting on the wall. Politics is doomed. Those retiring seem to comprehend that incumbents may lose this round for the Trump Revolution is spreading even to the Democrats with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-Year-Old Democratic in New York they call the “Giant Slayer” because she was a bartender and unseated Representative Joseph Crowley, a 19-year incumbent, and Queens, New York’s political stalwart who had not faced a primary challenger in 14 years.

While the Democrats are cheering and claiming with 40 Republicans retiring it proves that Trump has destroyed their party. Of course, this is their perspective always focused on the hate the rich.

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

Provocations Have A History Of Escalating Into War

September 1, 2018

Provocations Have A History Of Escalating Into War

The Russian Government and President Putin are coming under pressure not from US sanctions, which are very good for Russia as they force Russia into independence, but from Russian patriots who are tiring of Putin’s non-confrontational responses to Washington’s never-ending insults and military provocations. Russian patriots don’t want war, but they do want their country’s honor defended, and they believe Putin is failing in this job. Some of them are saying that Putin himself is a West-worshipping Atlanticist Integrationist.

This disillusinonment with Putin, together with Putin’s endorsement of raising the retirement age for pensions, a trap set for him by Russia’s neoliberal economists, have hurt Putin’s approval ratings at the precise time that he will again be tested by Washington in Syria.

In many columns I have defended Putin from the charge that he is not sufficiently Russian. Putin wants to avoid war, because he knows it would be nuclear, the consequences of which would be dire. He knows that the US and its militarily impotent NATO allies cannot possibly conduct conventional warfare against Russia or China, much less against both. Putin also undersrtands that the sanctions are damaging Washington’s European vassals and could eventually force the European vassal states into independence that would constrain Washington’s belligerence. Even with Russia’s new super weapons, which probably give Putin the capability of destroying the entirety of the Western World with little or no damage to Russia, Putin sees no point in so much destruction, especially as the consequences are unknown. There could be nuclear winter or other results that would put the planet into decline as a life-sustaining entity.

So, as I have suggested in many columns Putin is acting intelligently. He is in the game for the long term while protecting the world from dangerous war.

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

How A Central Bank Caused One of History’s Biggest Cons

July 19, 2018

How A Central Bank Caused One of History’s Biggest Cons

In the summer of 1821, a roguish Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor arrived by boat in London, and initiated arguably the most audacious confidence scam in history. MacGregor had spent much of the previous decade fighting as a soldier of fortune in the Venezuelan War of Independence, where he had manoeuvred his way up the ranks, eventually being promoted to general by Simón Bolívar. At some point during this period, local Central American rulers had granted MacGregor a large tract of land, most of which took the form of uninhabitable, malaria-ridden swamp along the Black River, in modern-day Honduras. Despite the poor economic prospects of his new acquisition, MacGregor was determined that the land should be his ticket to fortune, even if that required unconventional measures.

It was this series of events which led to the ‘founding’ of the non-existent country of Poyais. Upon returning to Britain, MacGregor ingratiated his way into London’s high-society, claiming to be the sovereign prince, or ‘Cazique’, of a newly-formed, British-friendly colony on Central America’s Mosquito coast, supposedly named ‘Poyais’ after the Poyer peoples of that area. In order to convince the British public of the realness of this imaginary country, MacGregor was forced to employ an extremely elaborate series of means, foremost amongst them being the publication of a 355-page guidebook for prospective settlers. This book, likely penned by MacGregor himself, contained a plethora of highly-detailed (and entirely fictitious) descriptions of every aspect of life in Poyais. These included convoluted descriptions of its tricameral parliamentary system and of its commercial and banking systems, distinctly designed uniforms for each regiment of its non-existent armed forces, a fully elaborated honours system, a Poyaisian coat of arms (featuring unicorns), and a national flag.

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

EXPOSED: Secret History of Russia and Wall St.

July 19, 2018

EXPOSED: Secret History of Russia and Wall St.

As we have often explained in our book Splitting Pennies, the world is not as it seems. Politics often polarizes a country it seems every election there becomes ‘two’ Americas but the current polarization seems to be that of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ whereas on one side, there are facts; and on the other, hysterical opinions. While no evidence was provided that any Russians ‘hacked’ the mere accusation in absentia is ‘proof’ for the irrational left that it was the Russians. “Blame it on the Russians” seems to be the scapegoat story of the day, perhaps lingering from the previous generation that came to power during the cold war. It’s a bunch of nonsense, the entire Russian narrative is a fantasy created by intelligence operatives as a propaganda effort to smear Trump and anyone who doesn’t fall into the Leftist/Liberal mindframe. As any American who has ever been through the justice system in America knows, you are guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. Someone can sue you or call the cops and make any false claims and the burden is on you to prove it is false. If the complaining witness is the US Government itself, you can forget about any ‘rights’ you may have had or the right to a fair trial (they have immunity and other powers that prevent any fair and reasonable defense if you are targeted). As usual, these aggressive and toxic forces that are attacking Trump politically from inside the deep-state are exploiting the masses lack of education of history, so we would like to here expose perhaps one of the most important looked over historical facts pertinent to understanding the deep roots of the relationship between USA and Russia. MUST READ: Wall St. and the Bolshevik Revolution.

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

The Economic History Of The World In One Minute

July 9, 2018

The Economic History Of The World In One Minute

“…and America’s pre-eminence is over”

✔

The economic history of the world in one minute

6:53 PM – Jul 7, 2018

As we noted previously, history did not end with the Cold War and, as Mark Twain put it, whilst history doesn’t repeat it often rhymes. As Alexander, Rome and Britain fell from their positions of absolute global dominance, so too has the US begun to slip. America’s global economic dominance has been declining since 1998, well before the Global Financial Crisis. A large part of this decline has actually had little to do with the actions of the US but rather with the unraveling of a century’s long economic anomaly. China has begun to return to the position in the global economy it occupied for millenia before the industrial revolution. Just as the dollar emerged to global reserve currency status as its economic might grew, so the chart below suggests the increasing push for de-dollarization across the ‘rest of the isolated world’ may be a smart bet…

The World Bank’s former chief economist wants to replace the US dollar with a single global super-currency, saying it will create a more stable global financial system.

“The dominance of the greenback is the root cause of global financial and economic crises,” Justin Yifu Lin told Bruegel, a Brussels-based policy-research think tank. “The solution to this is to replace the national currency with a global currency.”

Energy: A Human History – a slim slice of history and science

June 26, 2018

Energy: A Human History – a slim slice of history and science

“The population of the earth has increased more than sevenfold since 1850 – from one billion to seven and a half billion – primarily because of science and technology,” Richard Rhodes concludes at the end of his new book Energy: A Human History. “Far from threatening civilization, science, technology, and the prosperity they create will sustain us as well in the centuries to come.”¹

Rhodes tells an engaging tale of energy transitions over some 500 years. Yet the limitations in his field of view become critical in the book’s concluding chapter, when he reveals which particular axe he is especially eager to grind.

Both the title of the book and its timing invite comparison with Vaclav Smil’s 2017 work Energy and Civilization: A History (reviewed here). There is a significant overlap, most notably in both author’s views that major energy transitions – from wood to coal, from coal to petroleum – have been multi-generational processes.

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

The tales of history are a dead-end road

June 22, 2018

The tales of history are a dead-end road

Culture is what people do. It decays when people stop culturing. Changing a culture means changing what we do. Often, that will need a step by step transition as we negotiate obstacles. Even though we follow some backward meanders, the river may flow on.

But there are some transitionary illusions – convenient untruths, which are not obstacles to be overcome, but dead-end roads to be avoided. In those cases, we must turn back and begin again.

Dead-end roads (or stagnant backwaters) can be paved (or punted) with the best intentions – often because we are focused on singularly-important things, such as energy-use, pesticides, human rights… We applaud solar panels on the buildings of a retail park, or the rising quantity of organic and fairly-traded produce in the super market swamp. But retail parks and super markets were created by and are maintained by fossil fuel. Greening such infrastructures gives them an illusory credence. It satisfies complacent images of social justices, green energy and regenerative farming. But what came with oil must go with oil. However green we strive to make them the retail park and super market remain vast and stagnant backwaters.

We lazily mined those millions of years of sequestered photosynthesis. Now we must live by singular seasons as they pass. The thing about natural limits, is that they have shape – taste, scent, sound, mass, energy, volume, chronology… We can give them meaning, and if we know them truly, they can gain beauty.

Buying organic produce (for instance) in a super market defers a large part of cultural creation to infrastructures, which we cannot see, or taste. Those green market signals are not signs to a better future but delusive advertisements to the virtues of a dead-end road.

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

Murder Incorporated

June 20, 2018

Murder Incorporated

Murder Incorporated is a three-book series by Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria, which I can highly recommend based on the first book. The other two are not out yet.

Book One, “Dreaming of Empire,” is a critique of U.S. imperialism, a debunking of U.S. nationalist myths, a corrective or alternative history of the U.S. nation. Politically, a book like this would never be permitted in U.S. schools, and it’s clearly not aimed at clearing that hurdle. It uses curse words, which would provide a handy excuse for keeping it out. It’s also not straight history. It’s part chronological, part theme-based. It mixes historical accounts with pop-culture, with quotations from scholars, historical sources, and analysts interviewed by the authors.

Dreaming of Empire also does not try to leave the past in the past. Instead it proposes to explain current wars, the weaponization of outer space, and the rhetoric of contemporary U.S. politics through a myth-busting hard look at the past. And there’s little the U.S. public needs more. Indeed the authors seem to have concentrated on topics around which damaging myths have been constructed, including the glories and goodness of the Founding Fathers.

Reading here in Charlottesville, I’m struck by the extent to which local boys, Jefferson and Monroe (and the latter’s “Doctrine”), dominate this story. I wonder how many people realize that when a participant in a fascist rally here last summer drove his car into a woman and killed her, he was in that moment driving past the location of James Monroe’s first house here. I’m sure it’s more people than realize that Charlottesville is not a hotbed for fascists (they mostly come from elsewhere) but is a town that was founded by and which still prominently honors fascists avant la lettre.

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

How Mises Explained the Fall of Rome

June 8, 2018

How Mises Explained the Fall of Rome

An excerpt from Mises’ classic work, ‘Human Action’.

Observations on the Causes of the Decline of Ancient Civilization

Knowledge of the effects of government interference with market prices makes us comprehend the economic causes of a momentous historical event, the decline of ancient civilization.

It may be left undecided whether or not it is correct to call the economic organization of the Roman Empire capitalism. At any rate it is certain that the Roman Empire in the second century, the age of the Antonines, the “good” emperors, had reached a high stage of the social division of labor and of interregional commerce. What brought about the decline of the empire and the decay of its civilization was the disintegration of this economic interconnectedness.

Several metropolitan centers, a considerable number of middle-sized towns, and many small towns were the seats of a refined civilization. The inhabitants of these urban agglomerations were supplied with food and raw materials not only from the neighboring rural districts, but also from distant provinces. A part of these provisions flowed into the cities as revenue of their wealthy residents who owned landed property. But a considerable part was bought in exchange for the rural population’s purchases of the products of the city-dwellers’ processing activities. There was an extensive trade between the various regions of the vast empire. Not only in the processing industries, but also in agriculture there was a tendency toward further specialization. The various parts of the empire were no longer economically self-sufficient. They were mutually interdependent.

What brought about the decline of the empire and the decay of its civilization was the disintegration of this economic interconnectedness, not the barbarian invasions. The alien aggressors merely took advantage of an opportunity which the internal weakness of the empire offered to them.

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

Weather Impacted Wars & Migrations in Pre-Recorded History

May 24, 2018

Weather Impacted Wars & Migrations in Pre-Recorded History

Archaeologists working in the wetlands of Denmark have uncovered 2,000-year-old human remains are revealing that the Germanic “barbarians” were engaging in warfare in northern Europe against other barbarian tribes which had nothing to do with Rome. The research, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a unique look at how Germanic tribes memorialized their battles. The sheer magnitude of the number of remains demonstrates that the Germanic armies were clearly organized with leadership. There is no recorded history of this people so all we have to go on are the things left behind.

One thing to emerge is that the climate in Northern Europe was turning very cold. Even by 170AD, when the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was battling the Germanic attempts to invade the south most likely due to climate change. He wrote his Mediataions to keep his mind distracted from the cold at night. He sent his children home to Rome to live with their great-great-aunt Matidia because Marcus thought the evening air of the country was far too cold for them. He even asked his friend for “some particularly eloquent reading matter, something of “your own, or Cato, or Cicero, or Sallust or Gracchus—or some poet, for I need distraction, especially in this kind of way, by reading something that will uplift and diffuse my pressing anxieties.” id/ Ad Antoninum Imperator 4.1 (= Haines 1.300ff), qtd. and tr. Birley, Marcus Aurelius, 120.

It appears from this new evidence that as the weather grew colder and colder, barbarians first fought against each other for resources. It appears that after such inter-tribal warfare proved fruitless, this is when the Germanic invasions of Rome begin. The Germanic invasions of Rome began during 113 BC and lasted until they finally conquered Rome by 596 AD.

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

Weekly Commentary: Conventional Wisdom

April 30, 2018

Weekly Commentary: Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom is so often proved wrong. Thinking back over my career, it’s amazing how many times what is believed true without a doubt in the markets turns out completely erroneous. There’s no mystery behind this phenomenon. Responsibility lies foremost in flawed analytical frameworks. Fundamentally, bull market psychology rests on the basic premise that underlying fundamentals are sound – economic growth, earnings, inflation dynamics, new technologies, global trade, etc. No need to look further or dig any deeper.

When securities markets are strong (inflating), it’s taken as a given that the financial system is robust. The problem, however, is that the underlying finance fueling the recent bull market has been patently unsound – and has been so for three decades of recurring boom and bust cycles.

A wise person said that it’s not true that we don’t learn from history. It’s that our learning is dominated by recent history. It becomes too easy to ignore everything beyond the past few years. Over a relatively short time horizon, the previous bust cycle becomes ancient history. What matters for the markets – especially as the cycle evolves to the speculative phase – is the here and now. It’s assumed that everyone acquired understanding and insight from the crisis experience – especially policymakers. They’ll ensure there is no repeat; they have the tools and have amassed experience and comfort employing them. The previous crisis was a “100-year flood.” Good not to have to ponder a recurrence for a few generations.

Conventional Wisdom will look especially foolish when this protracted cycle comes to its fateful conclusion. Not only was the mortgage finance Bubble not the proverbial “100-year flood,” it set the stage for historic global government finance Bubble excesses. The real once-in-a-lifetime crisis lies in wait. Not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we instead seem to go out of our way to create bigger ones. This time much Bigger. This predicament was on full display this week.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End Of Our Empire Approaches

April 28, 2018

The End Of Our Empire Approaches

History is clear on where we’re headed

Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?

If so, don’t be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we’re in very good company. Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.

This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major “dad win” by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18^th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).

All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, Aztec…you name it. She’s read the Iliad four times, a different version each time, as each has the biases of the translator subtly woven throughout.

Naturally, her dream mini-vacation involved going to the British Museum where the Rosetta stone lies, along with Viking horde treasures and every possible Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifact one could hope to see.

The British empire came of age at the perfect time to muscle in and “retrieve” the cultural treasures of many different countries. Such are the spoils of empire.

Who knows, perhaps one day we’ll see sliced off segments of the Palace of Westminster on display in Cairo’s main square. History ebbs and it flows. Back and forth. Victors and losers swapping places over and over again.

If the British Museum reveals anything it’s just that. The long sweep of human history shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

The treasures on display at the British Museum also show us that every race and culture has revered beauty. The most intricate and delicate and objectively beautiful jewelry and adornments were worn by kings and queens, priestesses, nobles, and warlords alike.

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

A Tale of American Hubris: Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat

April 16, 2018

A Tale of American Hubris: Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat

The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington’s present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let’s take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the previous century and the first years of this one might be for the world’s most exceptional and indispensable nation, the planet’s sole superpower, the globe’s only sheriff. Those were, of course, commonplace descriptions from the pre-Trump era and yet, in the age of MAGA, already as moldy and cold as the dust in some pharaonic tomb.

Let’s start this way: you could think of the post-Cold War era, the years after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the moment of America’s first opioid crisis. The country’s politicians and would-be politicians were, then, taking street drugs (K-Street and military-industrial-complex ones, to be exact) and having remarkable visions of a planet available for the taking, as well as the keeping, forever and ever, amen.

On a globe without another superpower — pre-Putin Russia was a shattered, impoverished shell of the former Soviet Union, while China was still entering the capitalist world, Communist party in tow — history’s ultimate opportunity had obviously presented itself. And about to ascend to the holodeck of the USS America (beam me up, Dick Cheney!) were history’s ultimate opportunists, the men (and woman) who would, in January 2001, occupy the top posts in the administration of President George W. Bush. That, of course, included Cheney who, after overseeing a wide-ranging search for the best candidate for vice president, had appointed himself to the job. As a group, they couldn’t have been more ready for America’s ultimate moment in the sun.

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

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