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The Economic “Reopening” Is A Fake Out
The Economic “Reopening” Is A Fake Out
How does one define an economic “reopening”? I think most people would say that a reopening means that everything goes back to the way it was before the crisis; or at least as close as possible. Most people would also say that a reopening is something that will last. Simply declaring “America has reopened” while keeping many restrictions in place in certain parts of the country is a bit of a farce. And, reopening with the intention of implementing lockdowns again in a matter of weeks without explaining the situation to the public is a scam of the highest order.
For example, states like New York, California, Illinois and New Jersey have extended their lockdowns; with LA’s extension remaining ambiguous after they initially declared restrictions for another 3 months. New York’s lockdown is extended to the end of May (so far). This is the case in many US states and cities, while rural areas are mostly open. This is being called a “partial reopening”, but is there a purpose behind the uneven approach?
As I predicted in my article ‘Pandemic And Economic Collapse: The Next 60 Days’, the restrictions will continue in major US population centers while rural areas have mostly opened with much fanfare. The end result of this will be a flood of city dwellers into rural towns looking for relief from more strict lockdown conditions. In about a month, we should expect new viral clusters in places where there was limited transmission. I suggest that before the 4th of July holiday, state governments and the Federal government will be talking about new lockdowns, using the predictable infection spike as an excuse.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
From Overstretch to Collapse
From Overstretch to Collapse
In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world’s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist Fintan O’Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:
“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”
Quite right. But how and why did this pitiable condition come about? Is it all Donald Trump’s fault as so many now assume? Or did the process begin earlier?
The answer for any serious student of imperial politics is the latter. Indeed, a fascinating email suggests that the tipping point occurred in early to mid-2014, long before Trump set foot in the Oval Office.
Sent from U.S. General Wesley Clark to Philip Breedlove, Clark’s successor as NATO commander in Europe, the email is dated Apr. 12, 2014, and concerns events in the Ukraine that had recently begun spinning out of control. A few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had been on top of the world thanks to a nationalist insurrection in Kiev that had chased out a mildly pro-Russian president named Viktor Yanukovych. Champagne glasses were no doubt clinking in Washington now that the Ukraine was solidly in the western camp. But then everything went awry. First, Vladimir Putin seized control of the Crimean Peninsula, site of an all-important Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Then a pro-Russian insurgency took off in Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking provinces in the Ukraine’s far east. Suddenly, the country was coming apart at the seams, and the U.S. didn’t know what to do.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Eurozone Collapse: V-Shaped Recovery Mirage Is Gone
Eurozone Collapse: V-Shaped Recovery Mirage Is Gone
Eurozone Economy Collapses 3.8% in the first quarter, the worst on record. Spain (-5.2%) and France (-5.6%) GDP were much worse than Italy (-4.7%).
Economist Daniel Lacalle offers his thoughts on the European economy in a YouTube video.
EUROZONE COLLAPSE
The V-Shaped Recovery Mirage Is Gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO_RxjESCk4 … YouTube at 🏠 @YouTube
What LaCalle says about the Eurozone also applies to the US.
What’s Next for America?
For a 20-point discussion of what to expect, please see Nothing is Working Now: What’s Next for America?
No V-Shaped Recovery
Here’s the correct viewpoint: The Covid-19 Recession Will Be Deeper Than the Great Financial Crisis.
Simply put, a quick return to business as usual is not in the cards.
Inflation or Deflation?
Meanwhile, the debate over inflation or deflation continues.
Will it be Inflation or Deflation?
If you believe the answer is inflation, then you do not understand the importance of credit and demand shocks. Click on the link for discussion.
Collapse: the way we imagined it, and the way it was.
Collapse: the way we imagined it, and the way it was.
Even those of us who could see some kind of collapse coming (the “collapsniks”) were taken by surprise by the form it took. But, as always, for everything that happens there has to be a reason for it to happen. Above: the Seneca Curve.
Collapses happen, it is a rule of life, as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca had noted long ago when he said that “ruin is rapid” (festinantur in damnum). Yet, another rule of collapses is that they always take you by surprise. I think even Seneca himself was surprised when he received a message from his former pupil, Emperor Nero, ordering him to commit suicide.
So, even the most hardened collapsniks were surprised by the onrush of the coronavirus epidemic. I had been thinking about the collapse that the models predicted but, honestly, I hadn’t imagined it would take this form. Surely, I had in mind that some unexpected shock would have unbalanced society enough to cause it to take the fast way down, but I imagined it mostly in the form of a war. When the Iranian general Soleimani was assassinated by US drones in January, I thought “This is it.” It wasn’t. Nobody could have imagined what would have happened just a couple of months afterward.
Yet, for everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen. And there is a reason also for the coronavirus. I noted in my book (Before Collapse) that epidemics hit stressed societies after that they have reached their physical limits. The main example I discuss is that of the “Black Death” that struck Europe in the mid-14th century.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Here’s Why the Economy Won’t Recover–and No, It’s Not Covid-19 or the Lockdown
Here’s Why the Economy Won’t Recover–and No, It’s Not Covid-19 or the Lockdown
When reality and truth become the sworn enemies of society’s political and economic elites, the society is well and truly doomed.
The risks of Covid-19 and the lockdown have been explored across a wide spectrum of opinion. To hit just a few of too many to count:
— Permanent loss of civil liberties under the guise of “pandemic controls.”
— Failure of control measures to limit the pandemic in any sort of economically manageable manner.
— Schemes for ID Cards identifying those with antibodies may fail as immunity might be fleeting, or low antibody counts may not confer immunity.
These visible risks arise directly from the pandemic and efforts to control it, but the reasons why the economy won’t recover were in force long before the pandemic:
1. Unsustainable dependence on expanding debt to fund consumption as earned income stagnated.
2. Unsustainably high costs imposed by cartels, monopolies, insider-skims/scams, institutionalized fraud, hyper-financialization, exploitation, etc. (Please see What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy)
3. The economy-wide creation of self-serving simulations of trust, credibility, transparency and accountability as substitutes for actual trust, credibility, transparency and accountability.
This ceaseless spew of simulacra to cloak self-serving corruption is hidden from view lest the truth–that authentic trust, credibility, transparency and accountability have been dismantled because they inhibit the profiteering and exploitation of insiders and elites– undermine the entire status quo.
And so “success” (as in maximizing profits) in America is now a game of creating believable facsimiles of what was once authentic. Like all mammals, humans retain a sixth sense–commonly referred to as the “sniff test”, i.e. something doesn’t feel right–and so the simulacra are only partially successful in making us believe institutions are trustworthy, credible, transparently operated and governed in a way that enforces accountability.
As a result, the more all our dominant institutions press their claims of legitimacy, the more they erode their legitimacy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How a pandemic could bring down civilization
How a pandemic could bring down civilization
Preface. Some excerpts from the article below:
“The fact is that the best way for people to avoid the virus will be to stay home. But if everyone does this – or if too many people try to stockpile supplies after a crisis begins – the impact of even a relatively minor pandemic could quickly multiply.
Especially vital are “hubs” – the people whose actions link all the rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries from the UK’s oil refineries for 10 days in 2000, nearly a third of motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were cancelled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the UK shut down for just a week.
What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or too scared to work? Even a small impact on road haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects [because of] just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades, people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely instead on frequent small deliveries.
Cities typically have only three days’ worth of food, and the old saying about civilizations being just three or four meals away from anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the UK.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Collapse: The Coronavirus is not a Cause, it is a Trigger
Collapse: The Coronavirus is not a Cause, it is a Trigger
Is the epidemic going to cause civilization to collapse? It may happen for good reasons
This is a version of the article that I published on the English version of “Al Arabiya” On March 26, 2020. It is not the same text I published there — but I kept the wonderful illustration by Steven Castelluccia. It perfectly conveys the concept of “Seneca Cliff“
Do you remember the story of the straw that broke the camel’s back? It is an illustration of how overloaded systems are sensitive to small perturbations. Could the COVID-19 epidemic be the straw that breaks the back of the world’s economy?
Like an overloaded camel, the world’s economy is strained by at least two tremendous burdens: one is the increasing costs of production of mineral resources (don’t be fooled by the current low prices of oil: prices are one thing, costs are another). Then, there is pollution, including climate change, also weighing on the economy. These two factors define the condition called “overshoot,” occurring when an economic system is consuming more resources than nature can replace. Sooner or later, an economy in overshoot has to come to terms with reality. It means that it can’t continue to grow: it must decline.
These considerations can be quantified. It was done for the first time in 1972 with the famous report The Limits to Growth sponsored by the Club of Rome. Widely disbelieved at the time, today we recognize that the model used for the study had correctly identified the trends of the world’s economy. The results of the study showed that the double burden of resource depletion and pollution would bring economic growth first to a halt and then cause it to collapse, probably at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Crazy long food lines across America reveal the total LACK of preparedness that now characterizes our just-in-time society
Crazy long food lines across America reveal the total LACK of preparedness that now characterizes our just-in-time society
(Natural News) As the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread across the United States, sickening and killing tens of thousands, other problems are just beginning, including food shortages.
As reported by The Sun, the U.S. now has more recorded COVID deaths than any other country in the world, though there are doubts even among U.S. intelligence agencies that China has been completely transparent and up-front in reporting its true number of cases and deaths.
That said, as the virus spread and governors ordered non-essential businesses closed to help contain the spread, newly out-of-work Americans, by the millions, are already beginning to suffer basic shortages of food.
The news site reports:
The shocking statistics come as the need for emergency food aid has exploded in recent weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Nearly 100 per cent of food banks in the Feeding America network are serving more neighbors in need during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet nearly 60 per cent are facing reduced inventory levels amidst rising demand,” according to a survey by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief and food rescue organization.
Meanwhile, organizations are having difficulty replenishing their food stocks and keeping food on hand for the growing numbers of needy, many of whom line up for hours in cities like San Antonio, Texas, and elsewhere waiting for assistance.
The survey noted further that the current number of people needing food assistance has surpassed the 37 million who faced hunger in the country last year.
It added that “since establishing the COVID-19 Response Fund on March 13, Feeding America has distributed $112.4 million and over 94 million pounds to food banks throughout the network, helping provide nearly 79 million meals to neighbors facing hunger.”
If this doesn’t prove to you why aspects of “prepping” are vital, nothing will.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Resilience and Collective Psychology – fast collapse or slow disintegration
Resilience and Collective Psychology – fast collapse or slow disintegration
Will a failure in hub interdependencies lead to economic and social disintegration? The connection between the energy and finance institutions, as well as the state of public health are explored to examine whether there might be a “cross contagion” of cascading collapse between some combination of a public health crisis, difficulties in the financial economy, the energy sector and supply networks which run into and reinforce each other.
A repeated theme of this book has been that, in concentrating on the improvement of production (i.e. the increase of production), economics has systematically neglected issues of safety, vulnerability and resilience. We saw in an earlier chapter that the research of Kahneman and Tversky suggests that people are risk averse. However, economic decision-making is driven by powerful companies and governments who are frequently able to impose risks and costs on others while taking gains for themselves. There are however other risks which occur, not at local or company level, but in the system as a whole. There is a need to explore what might happen after the limits to economic growth are reached, and whether humanity will face a manageable contraction or a variety of catastrophic collapses. In this chapter, I want to look at some of the conceptual thinking about these issues as they relate to the beginning of the 21st century.
The decline in resilience
As explained by the late David Fleming:
The resilience of a system is its ability to survive without loss of diversity and complexity despite shocks. The diversity and complexity are essential: resilience is an empty concept except when they are implicit in it. The surface of Mars, or a dead coral reef, are resilient in a trivial sense – resilient, since they do not change under assault.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Are We Living Through “12 Monkeys”?
Are We Living Through “12 Monkeys”?
A brand new mini-documentary “We’re Living in 12 Monkeys” was released today by Truthstream Media that outlines the agenda that is unfolding from the coronavirus hysteria.
The full New World Order agenda of complete control over humanity is in play. Watch below:
As we watched we were reminded of an article written in 2018 by Abraham Riesman who noted (at the time) that ’12 Monkeys’ was the apocalypse movie we need right now.
Critically, Riseman had just completed an addendum to his essay (excerpted below), tying it perfectly back to what the world is currently experiencing…
…the world has not yet collapsed.
I just went to pick up some supplies from my local chain pharmacy outlet and people seemed to be going about their daily business much as they always do.
The ambience stood in stark contrast to the reports I’d been reading all night about what the situation is likely to become in the near future.
I felt like 12 Monkeys’ protagonist, James Cole – someone who has been in the future, after it all hit the fan, and is granted a brief, bittersweet opportunity to visit the world as it was before the fall.
Given what’s happening, we thought we should republish this essay, which I wrote a year and a half before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 12 Monkeys, a film that is less about surviving a plague than it is about making a meaningful life on the eve of a crisis – and stubbornly believing that there’s something on the other side worth preparing for.
* * *
“How can I save you?” says the protagonist, Bruce Willis’s James Cole, early on in the 1995 Terry Gilliam film.
“This already happened. I can’t save you. Nobody can.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The stages of the collapse
The stages of the collapse
Could the coronavirus act as a catalyst for a new global economic crisis? It certainly has that potential—but how would the crisis proceed?
In the December 2018 issue of our Q-Review, we laid out the likely scenarios of an approaching global economic collapse. But, like most things in life, such a dramatic event is unlikely to proceed in a linear fashion. There will be different stages within it.
In December 2019 we outlined these stages, which are likely five: the onset, counter-attack, flood, calamity and recovery. Here, we briefly define the characteristics of each.
The onset
Currently, there seems to be two possible ignition points for the collapse: the credit market and the European banking sector.
At the onset, stresses that have been building in the credit markets since the summer of 2019 will explode, shrinking if not eliminating entirely the exits from many parts of that market. Downgrades of corporate debt in the U.S. and peripheral sovereign debt in the Eurozone will push large fixed-income investors, including pension funds, into higher-rated bonds, leading to large-scale selling of lower-rated bonds, forcing wider spreads and even more selling.
Panic will build first in the junk bond market, then in the “investment-grade” corporate bond market, and then rapidly metastasize to engulf the stock market. A frantic retreat to ‘safe-haven’ assets, including U.S. Treasuries, German Bunds and U.K. Gilts as well as cash and precious metals will commence.
Cascading banking troubles in Europe will have the same destabilizing effects on the global stock and bond markets.
The counterattack
The second phase of the collapse will be the desperate efforts of authorities to stop the crisis by a counterattack.
These are likely to include the restarting and acceleration of QE-programs and other market support programs, gigantic fiscal stimulus, increasing trade protectionism and possibly even calls for direct debt monetization (see Q-Review 3/2019 for an explanation).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Venezuela collapse: looting, hunger, blackouts
Venezuela collapse: looting, hunger, blackouts
Preface. Venezuela is experiencing a double whammy of drought and low oil prices, which has lead to blackouts and inability to import food, ultimately due to their oil production peaking in 1997. The same fate awaits the U.S. someday when oil declines.
Related posts:
- Nafeez Ahmed: Venezuela’s collapse is a window into how the Oil Age will unravel
- Book review of “In order to live: A North Korean girl’s journey to freedom” by Yeonmi Park
- Inside North Korea’s Environmental Collapse
- Who Lives, Who dies in a never-ending energy crisis. Book review of Nothing to Envy. Ordinary Lives in North Korea
- North Korea: what happens to a country when the oil is cut off?
- How different nations have coped with oil shortages
- Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
- A book review of “Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization”
- Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
- Cuba’s agriculture experiments are not working out
And Mexico may be the next to collapse, as you can read here.
***
2019. Venezuela’s Water System is Collapsing. New York Times.
In Venezuela, a crumbling economy and the collapse of even basic state infrastructure means water comes irregularly — and drinking it is an increasingly risky gamble. Scientists found that about a million residents were exposed to contaminated supplies. This puts them at risk of contracting waterborne viruses that could sicken them and threatens the lives of children and the most vulnerable.
The risks posed by poor water quality are particularly threatening for a population weakened by food and medication shortages.
Electrical breakdowns and lack of maintenance have gradually stripped the city’s complex water system to a minimum. Water pumps, treatment plants, chlorine injection stations and entire reservoirs have been abandoned as the state ran out of money and skilled workers
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Final Act
The Final Act
In processing the flow of information about the goings on in the US, it is impossible to get rid of a most unsettling sense of unreality—of a population trapped in a dark cave filled with little glowing screens, all displaying different images yet all broadcasting essentially the same message. That message is that everything is fine, same as ever, and can go on and on. But whatever it is that’s going on can’t go on forever, and therefore it won’t. More specifically, a certain coal mine canary has recently died, and I want to tell you about it.
It’s easy to see why that particular message is stuck on replay even as the situation changes irrevocably. As of 2019, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by four media conglomerates: Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, ViacomCBS (controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia). Together they have formed a corporate media monoculture designed to most effectively maximize shareholder value.
As I wrote in Reinventing Collapse in 2008, “…In a consumer society, anything that puts people off their shopping is dangerously disruptive, and all consumers sense this. Any expression of the truth about our lack of prospects for continued existence as a highly developed, prosperous industrial society is disruptive to the consumerist collective unconscious. There is a herd instinct to reject it, and therefore it fails, not through any overt action, but by failing to turn a profit because it is unpopular.”
Two years earlier, in a slideshow optimistically titled “Closing the Collapse Gap” (between the USSR and the USA), I wrote: “…It seems that there is a fair chance that the US economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won’t be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the US economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder and Collapse
Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder and Collapse
The frantic efforts of am exploitive elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime’s path to collapse.
Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust–the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many– the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.
What the regimes don’t understand is dissent is the immune system of society: suppressing dissent doesn’t just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.
Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.
Here in the U.S., the suppression of dissent is the work of the corporate media and the Big Tech monopolies: Facebook, Twitter and Google. As Mark St.Cyr and I discuss in a new no-holds-barred podcast (1:08 hours, 4 segments), Big Tech is effectively suppressing dissent via shadow banning, de-platforming and de-monetization:– shadow banning: the audience who gets to see your content is throttled back to a fraction of your pre-shadow-banning audience.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
