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Beware Central Banks’ “Illusion Of Control”; Spitznagel Warns “If The Fed Hikes, Markets Will Go Down Very, Very Hard”

September 17, 2016

Beware Central Banks’ “Illusion Of Control”; Spitznagel Warns “If The Fed Hikes, Markets Will Go Down Very, Very Hard”

Central banks have created a bubble in the stock market, which will come down “very, very hard” when it finally prices in a series of Fed rate hikes, said Universa’s Mark Spitznagel, warning that “the markets are absolutely not positioned for this.”

CNBC anchors were stunned into relative silence as Spitznagel unleashed truth-bomb after truth-bomb. Those ‘facts’ are just hard to argue with…

Key Excerpts…

CNBC: Well what’s the precipitating factor?

Spitznagel: Well, the ultimate cause of that would be the fact that the central banks got us here in the first place. Ultimately, my view is that central banks are the cause of bubbles.

CNBC: So you’re betting essentially that the central banks, whether it be the Fed or the ECB, they can’t unwind the trade that they put on years ago. It’s going to be a messy unwind for their trade.

Spitznagel: There’s no doubt about that.

CNBC: But is that really a black swan? Because you’ve got all these people at Delivering Alpha talking about it, isn’t a black swan supposed to be something that nobody is talking about? Godzilla attack on Tokyo, out of the blue, or something like that?

Spitznagel: So it’s great that everyone’s talking about this now. I had a little less company a few years ago when this was sort of building and now it’s so obvious, you know, the casual user has become an addict, and now we’re concerned about this. And that’s great. But you’re right it’s not a black swan. The reason I’m going to still call it a black swan is because the markets still price it as a black swan.

...

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

Control What You Can

September 10, 2016

Control What You Can

Our society does not make it easy to control what you can control.

One of the aphorisms to live by here at Of Two Minds is control what you can.We don’t control the erosion of our money from inflation, the state’s vast criminalization machinery, the nation’s foreign policies or the central bank’s free money for financierspolicies.

So what do we control? Amazingly enough, we still control a few things. We control what we eat (at least those of us who aren’t institutionalized do), what fitness/ stretching/ bodywork routine we do or don’t do, and we still control what we do with our surplus money: we can salt it away as savings rather than spend it, and we control where to invest our savings.

Here’s a couple of thoughts on productively controlling what we can control.

1. Don’t count on bailouts, debt forgiveness, debt jubilees, guaranteed minimum income or any other form of free money. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the Justice Department have made it very clear: free money is for financiers, banks and corporations, and bailouts are for too-big-to-fail banks and financial institutions.

As for debt forgiveness and debt jubilees: every $1 of debt that’s forgiven (i.e. written off) is $1 that’s removed from some investor’s balance sheet. If we jubilee $1 trillion in debt, that’s $1 trillion in assets that are destroyed.

As the saying goes, there’s no free lunch (except for friends of the Fed), and since every dollar of debt is someone else’s asset, don’t expect bailouts or debt forgiveness. If it happens, great, but there will will be catches–including Catch 22, 23 and 24.

2. It’s tough not to self-destruct in Our Impoverished, Pathological Society. We all know extra weight is hard on our bodies and health, even if we’re fit, and so the fact that 70.7% of Americans 20 and older are overweight or obese indicates just how difficult it is to remain healthy in our “salty, sugary, fatty treats are temptingly everywhere” culture.

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

Jeff Gundlach: “Things Are Going To Get Pretty Scary”

June 18, 2016

Jeff Gundlach: “Things Are Going To Get Pretty Scary”

One day before the Fed’s June statement, Jeff Gundlach once again accurately predicted the somber mood that would ensue as a result of Yellen’s Wednesday decision and press conference when he correctly said that “Central Banks Are Losing Control.” Today, in the aftermath of James Bullard stunning U-turn where he cast aside years of fake hawkishness and emerged as the market manipulating dove he had been all along, Gundlach appeared on CNBC, to discuss many things, among which his latest take on central banks.

Specifically, he said that central banks are “out of control” because they don’t understand the consequences of their own policies. On CNBC’s “Halftime Report“, the DoubleLine bond guru projected that markets are likely to see another round of negative interest rates before central bankers realize they aren’t working and that fiscal stimulus may be the better option. “The policies that they’re implementing don’t have the consequences that they’re looking for,” he said.

Gundlach pointed out the chart which we said back in 2010 is the only one that matters: the S&P’s liquidity “flow” manifested by the Fed’s balance sheet overlaid on top of the Fed’s balance sheet:

He said that “it’s really uncanny how the S&P500 rallied when they were doing QE and expanding their balance sheet, and how the S&P never goes anywhere when they stopped expanding their balance sheet. They stopped QE3 back in December of 2014 and the S&P500, the DJIA, the Nasdaq are all exactly the same when they stopped expanding their balance sheet. The S&P has been dead money for 18 months.”

That – once again – resolves the whole “flow vs stock” debate.

So what went wrong? According to Gundlach, chief among central bank mistakes was negative rates.

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

Economic Collapse Logistics For The Government

May 14, 2016

Economic Collapse Logistics For The Government

When a national currency collapses, the government goes into survival mode and does what is necessary to insure its continued existence. The state power becomes all important and citizens become expendable. The state exists for it’s own fulfillment.

When the monetary system collapses along with the banks, the government will still need a way to pay government employees to insure they continue enforcing the governments will. If all government employees suddenly decided to stay home the few officials that remained at their desk would be ordering 300 million people around with no way to enforce their orders. To maintain control of the population it is necessary for government minions to continue doing their job of enforcement.

This means the government would need the means to continue fulfilling the needs of government employees to insure their compliance and obedience. As long as people get the things they need to survive day to day they will continue to do as ordered to continue that supply.

The government would need to insure that a payment system and banking system would remain functioning after a collapse. The banking system may not look like the current one but something would have to take it’s place. Once the currency has failed it would be necessary for the government to issue a new currency. It may not be accepted by the majority but it is only necessary for it to be accepted by the government minions. This would allow the government to remain in control.

If the government employees know they will still be able to get food, clothing, gas and other items they need when normal citizens cannot, they will be inclined to stay on the job and do the governments bidding in order to maintain their standard of living. This would be a necessary control mechanism in the event of a collapse.

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

Where Does the Future Lie?

March 18, 2016

Where Does the Future Lie?

QUESTION: Are you more worried about a 1984 esque future or A Brave New World esque future?

Orwell_George ANSWER: Unfortunately, the two go hand in hand. George Orwell simply took the past and laid out what government ALWAYS gravitates toward – total control. We live in a delusion with our brains filled with propaganda. Over the years, I have encountered comments from people who ask, “Why would anyone want to live outside the USA? We are the greatest nation on earth!” I typically reply, “Have you ever traveled outside the country?” The response is telling: “No. What’s the point?”

Perhaps I am the doubting Thomas. I went through Checkpoint Charlie into East Germany before the wall fell because I really wanted to see what was true and what was false. You cannot just accept the indoctrination of society as it is systemic.

So what George Orwell wrote was not pure fiction; no more than “Star Wars” being based on nothing. “Star Wars” is the epic battle between the Republic and Imperialism that dominated the Roman period going into the 1st century AD. They just changed it to planets and updated the swords to light sabers. In the case of Orwell, he took history and postulated what would happen in a modern context. He was only off in terms of technology advancement.

So the bottom line is both will unfold. However, you cannot reach the second without causing pain with the first. With the NSA and socialism, you have seen terrorism used as the excuse to further the control of society so we cannot buy or sell anything ultimately without government approval. l.

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

How the Mass Media Controls Consensus Reality

November 16, 2015

How the Mass Media Controls Consensus Reality

“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.” — George Orwell

“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” — Henry Kissinger

“Whoever controls the media controls reality.” — Peter Jennings

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” — Dresden James

In an earlier message I wrote:

“Nothing in the world is as it seems.”

On one level, the ‘theater of illusion’ world we live in believed by many to be true can be mainly attributed to two things.

1. The hidden controllers running the planet have managed to manipulate the mass media and in effect control consensus reality.

This has been done to produce the desired behavioral patterns; thoughts, opinions, attitudes, social norms… in the masses so that they can be ruled over.

In short, the media is regarded by the hidden controllers as a necessary tool for a dictatorship.

2. The majority of the human population has allowed itself to be deceived through ignorance, deception, stupidity, chronic apathy or a serious lack of curiosity and questioning, all somewhat bolstered by cynicism… Consumerism rules; as long as their bellies are full and heads filled with mindless entertainment or other gratuitous distraction… they’re happy.

Genetic cloning is unnecessary. Cloning has already been done care of the effects of mass media brainwashing.

Taking the above two factors into account let’s look at just how the mass media controls consensus reality.

Tool for a Dictatorship

The hidden controllers regard the human population as nothing more than sheep incapable of looking after themselves, needing to be shepherded.

This has been made abundantly clear over the years by spokesmen/agents for the controllers advocating mind control techniques in the mass media for shaping human thought.

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

Methods For Fighting Back Against Collectivist Tyranny

November 11, 2015

Methods For Fighting Back Against Collectivist Tyranny

In any examination of historical precedence, it is easy to see that the sheer number of collectivist and tyrannical systems have far outweighed any experiments in individual liberty. I have explored the reasons for this in numerous articles, including recent pieces such as “How To Stamp Out Cultural Marxism In A Single Generation” and “The Tools Collectivists Use To Gain Power.” To summarize, there is a driving desire among weaker-minded people to seek control over other people in the name of arbitrary standards of safety as well as arbitrary standards of “civil” conformity. While such people proclaim publicly that they do what they do for the “greater good,” in reality they seek only to satiate a private lust for power.

In the darkest corners of their souls, many people have personal aspirations to attain godhood in their own little worlds. And if they cannot achieve such godhood outright on their own, then they will join a mob with similar aspirations so that they can at least feel omnipotent through vicarious tyranny.

This is why collectivism and individualism are mutually exclusive. A collectivist uses force or manipulation to compel the masses to accept a society that follows his personal ideology. An individualist adheres only to the tenets of natural law and the non-aggression principle. He believes force is justified only when the personal liberties of an individual are threatened by others. And he demands that if he participates in any society, it be voluntary. Collectivism is society through coercion. Individualism promotes society through voluntary cooperation. The two philosophies cannot coexist.

I’ll say it again because there are some people out there with severe reading comprehension issues; the definition of collectivism requires the prioritization of the group over the rights of the individual. Collectivism by its very nature denies or destroys individualism and individual choice in this prioritization.

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

The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control

October 28, 2015

The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control

The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives.

We live in an era of illusion: the illusion of understanding, and the illusion of control.

Few institutions reflect these illusions better than the Federal Reserve, though the Pentagon, Congress, the Imperial Presidency, the sick-care cartel and the higher education cartel are certainly giving it a run for its money.

The foundation of the illusion of understanding is data–Big Data. That the Fed has no idea of how the real economy actually functions is painfully apparent. But the state’s vast flood of data, neatly organized into slop-troughs that suggest precision, creates a very compelling illusion of understanding: media shills go to absurd lengths to treat bogus or marginal data as the equivalent of the tablets brought down by Moses.

Sorry, Corporate Media: the unemployment rate and the official rate of inflation are not real. They are illusions rigged to lull the masses and enrapture the simulacrum experts living high on the hog in academia, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and think-tanks.

Here is the reality, as expressed by IMF Chairwoman Christine Lagarde: what passes for precise data is a guesstimate at best, and a carefully executed distortion at worst.

The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives. Even more tragicomic, the spokespeople tasked with presenting this failure to the Great Unwashed are forced to speak gobbledigook that borders on the psychotic if taken at face value.

For example, Janus Yellen must claim she is planning to raise interest rates while also proclaiming that she’s keeping rates at zero for the indefinite future. If a non-Elite person rambled on in this fashion, they would be tossed in jail as a 51-50 (involuntary psychiatric hold).

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

Things Fall Apart

October 24, 2015

Things Fall Apart

“Things fall apart”is an apt sub-title for historians to apply to the first half of the 21st century. The phrase properly describes the collapse of the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. Further, it also is appropriate to describe the happenings in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

freedom15 Things fall apart describes the economy of every developed nation and the balance of power that the world has known since the end of World War II.

The powers that be have lost control. After almost a century of playing the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is disintegrating. Institutions to ensure control, stability and prosperity are failing. People and markets were not to be trusted and most of these institutions were established to protect against such freedom. Bureaucrats, central planners and big governments were to be the answers for a better world.

The damage of nearly a century of this nonsense is suddenly becoming evident. Things fall apart is characterized by institutions that no longer are trusted or believed in. Few institutions are seen to work and when they do they are increasingly seen as favoring the elites at the expense of the masses. No institution is under greater scrutiny as the cloak of wisdom is being destroyed by the hard facts of reality is that of central banking, the corner piece of socialism even at the height of the Thatcher–Reagan movement back toward markets. The Daily Bell writes about the US Federal Reserve, although other central banks are incurring similar doubts and distrust:

Things Fall Apart Around Janet Yellen

By Daily Bell Staff – October 16, 2015

Fed policymakers downplay divisions on U.S. rate hike … Federal Reserve policymakers are not as divided as it may appear and are generally operating under the same framework for determining when to raise interest rates, one Fed official said on Thursday, while another said the differences of opinion reflect the countervailing economic data. Many Fed watchers are exasperated by the mixed messages from the U.S. central bank in recent weeks. Fed Chair Janet Yellen and other officials have said they expect a rate hike will be needed by the end of this year, but two Fed governors this week urged caution. – Reuters

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

Twenty-First-Century Fascism

October 21, 2015

Twenty-First-Century Fascism

Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund.

The TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.

The TCC are keenly aware of both their elite status and their increasing vulnerabilities to democracy movements and to unrest from below. The military empire dominated by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves to protect TCC investments around the world. Wars, regime changes, and occupations performed in service of empire support investors’ access to natural resources and their speculative advantages in the market place.

When the empire is slow to perform or faced with political resistance, private security firms and private military companies (PMC) increasingly fulfill the TCC’s demands for the protections of their assets.

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

Self-Reliance: Control What You Can (Food/Fitness)

August 16, 2015

Self-Reliance: Control What You Can (Food/Fitness)

Self-reliance boils down to taking control of what we can control and depending as little as possible on what we can’t control.

Self-reliance is a grand-sounding phrase, but what does it mean in real life?Does it mean total self-sufficiency?

To my way of thinking, even the most self-sufficient still rely on energy pulled out of the ground somewhere far away, grains grown far away and a host of goods manufactured far away.

For most of us, living in urban or suburban zones, self-reliance boils down to this:take control of what you can. We can’t control monetary policy or the shared infrastructure; we’re at the mercy of authorities at the top of highly centralized hierarchies.

But that doesn’t mean we have no control. We can control what we put in our mouths, what we do with our time and what we pursue with our minds.

The dynamic here is well-known: garbage in, garbage out. Garbage food in, garbage health out. Garbage financial planning in, garbage finances out. And so on.

As longtime readers know, we maintain a messy postage-stamp sized urban garden. Despite my lazy gardening style, the garden produces more vegetables than we can eat, so we share much of the yield. In summer, we only buy what we don’t grow: round onions, carrots, etc.

Here’s a few photos of this summer’s bounty.

Fitness is like food: garbage in, garbage out. Any 6-foot/2-meter square of open space is a gym. You don’t need any weights, machines or special equipment. If you want this stuff, much of it is available used at a huge discount to the retail price. If the weather allows, a bicycle replaces many auto trips. Fitness does not have to be a separate activity–it can be part of everyday life.

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

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

August 14, 2015

Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?

QUESTION: Marty, you have written many times how everything is connected and how in Asian culture that is the foundation of all understanding. Why is it so hard in the West to comprehend this fundamental concept?

All the best

ANSWER: I think it is all part of the idea that we can alter society forcing it to do as we desire. Politics is based upon this. Socialism is all about robbing one class to benefit the other. There is no comprehension that everything is connected and this permeates analysis as well. This is not my personal discovery for many have seen these connections in Eastern Philosophies. I think in economics, politicians are not interested in such realizations for it means they are not the masters of the universe.

You take Obama’s policy against Russia. He has effectively been disrupting everything around Europe and the consequences are pouring in refugees to Europe and his sanctions have hurt European farmers and the economy. It is not deliberate, but it is reckless for there is no recognition of how everything is connected.

Every action has a consequence. We have the Fed lowered rates to help the banks. But that crisis is over and the consequence has been to create the next crisis – the defaults of pensions and insurance companies that required high interest rates. So many regulations required pension funds to own government bonds. The regulations have set the stage for the next crisis.

We cannot escape this connectivity. Whatever action we take has a consequence. It is impossible to manipulate markets and the economy for there will always be unintended collateral damage. We are living in the era that will bring about a collapse of socialism precisely as took place in communism. Government is incapable of ever managing society for they cannot escape the inter-connectivity.

The Delusion of Control

June 25, 2015

The Delusion of Control

I’m sure most of my readers have heard at least a little of the hullaballoo surrounding the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. It’s been entertaining to watch, not least because so many politicians in the United States who like to use Vatican pronouncements as window dressing for their own agendas have been left scrambling for cover now that the wind from Rome is blowing out of a noticeably different quarter.

Take Rick Santorum, a loudly Catholic Republican who used to be in the US Senate and now spends his time entertaining a variety of faux-conservative venues with his signature flavor of hate speech. Santorum loves to denounce fellow Catholics who disagree with Vatican edicts as “cafeteria Catholics,” and announced a while back that John F. Kennedy’s famous defense of the separation of church and state made him sick to his stomach. In the wake of Laudato Si, care to guess who’s elbowing his way to the head of the cafeteria line? Yes, that would be Santorum, who’s been insisting since the encyclical came out that the Pope is wrong and American Catholics shouldn’t be obliged to listen to him.

What makes all the yelling about Laudato Si a source of wry amusement to me is that it’s not actually a radical document at all. It’s a statement of plain common sense. It should have been obvious all along that treating the air as a gaseous sewer was a really dumb idea, and in particular, that dumping billions upon billions of tons of infrared-reflecting gases into the atmosphere would change its capacity for heat retention in unwelcome ways. It should have been just as obvious that all the other ways we maltreat the only habitable planet we’ve got were guaranteed to end just as badly.

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

Trade Deals and the Quest for Global Dominance

June 13, 2015

Trade Deals and the Quest for Global Dominance

The Slavery Economy

The Setup

“In the factory books, you see lots of turnover. But slaves couldn’t quit. While factories were worrying about filling positions and just keeping things going, plantation owners were focused on optimization. They could reallocate labor as they saw fit. I found real quantitative analysis in their records. They were literally looking at humans as capital.”

— Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard Business Review

As this is being written U.S. President Barack Obama is pushing the House of Representatives to give him ‘fast-track’ authority for his trade agreement, the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), granting him the authority to cede political control to global capital at will. As has now been well commented on, the agreement isn’t about trade per se, but is a template for the consolidation of corporate power within an international framework. The current push for explicit ‘political’ control is only an anomaly to the historically illiterate— the growth of Western capitalism has come through use of state power in the service of predominant economic interests. Hopes that the defeat of ‘fast-track’ will represent a strategic victory against global capital have several centuries of history to overcome.

A machine that turns the toil of one group into the possession of another is invented. Presciently, the source of the labor and toil to be converted; be it through slavery, imperialism, armed robbery or capitalism, is irrelevant. Nature, as expressed through the ‘will’ of the machine, is served by the conversion. Or at least that is the explanation provided by those whose pockets its product ends up in. Original image source: flourmillmachines.com.

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

How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?

May 27, 2015

How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?

The talk of FEMA camps and martial law has been almost nonstop for the past few years. The actions by the government have led us to the current predicament where the surreal has become the new norm. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago to imagine we would actually be talking about the subversion and downfall of the United States with little outcry from the population in general.

Many articles have made the case that at least some of the military and police would follow orders to put the population into submission by force if necessary. This would include the forced detention and possible execution of many antigovernment protestors.

If even a small percentage of the enforcers revolted against the government orders it would provide a very large armed component that would add to the armed civilian population and would provide a serious impediment to government operations even if external forces were brought in.

In a serious event it has been noted that many enforcers would simply abandon their posts and go home to protect their families. This is an ever present problem for the government pundits giving the orders. They will want to maintain control over the enforcers at all times and must have sufficient controls in place to do so in a chaotic situation.

One way to maintain that control is to move the family members of those enforcers to “safe” locations where they can be protected while the enforcers do their job. These locations could be FEMA camps or secure military bases that could prevent persons from leaving once inside. This would not only provide safe harbor for those family members but would act as a control mechanism as well.

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

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