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Don’t Mess With the U.S. (Financially)
Don’t Mess With the U.S. (Financially)
I’ve been documenting financial warfare in my articles for years, but it still doesn’t get the mainstream attention it deserves.
Because as you’ll see below, it can directly impact your wealth.
Financial warfare tools include account seizures and freezes, expulsion from global payment systems, secondary fines and penalties on banks that do business with targeted entities, embargoes, tariffs and many other impositions.
These tools are amplified by the unique role of the U.S. dollar, which is the currency behind 60% of global reserves, 80% of global payments and almost 100% of transactions in oil.
The U.S. controls the banks and payments systems that process dollar transactions. This leaves the U.S. well positioned to impose dollar-related sanctions.
Much has been made of the recent killing of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani. Many say it was an act of war. But guess what, folks?
We’ve been in a full-scale war with Iran for two years now. It’s just that most people don’t realize it.
It’s not a kinetic war with troops, missiles and ships (except Iran’s use of terrorist bombs and the U.S.’ use of drones). And it’s severely damaged the Iranian economy, which has led to protests against the regime.
From the U.S. side, it’s a financial war. People need to stop thinking about financial sanctions as an extension of trade policy, for example.
This is warfare. It’s just a different form of warfare.
It’s critical to understand that financial war is not a sideshow. It may actually be the main event in today’s deeply connected and computerized world.
North Korea is also the current target of a U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign, where harsh sanctions are applied to a wide range of banks, companies and individuals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Bank of England’s Governor Fears a Liquidity Trap
The Bank of England’s Governor Fears a Liquidity Trap
The global economy is heading towards a “liquidity trap” that could undermine central banks’ efforts to avoid a future recession according to Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England. In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times (January 8, 2020), the outgoing governor warned that central banks were running out of ammunition to combat a downturn:
If there were to be a deeper downturn, more than a conventional recession, then it’s not clear that monetary policy would have sufficient space.
He is of the view that aggressive monetary and fiscal policies will be required to lift the aggregate demand.
What Is a Liquidity Trap?
In the popular framework that originates from the writings of John Maynard Keynes, economic activity is presented in terms of a circular flow of money. Spending by one individual becomes part of the earnings of another individual, and spending by another individual becomes part of the first individual’s earnings.
Recessions, according to Keynes, are a response to the fact that consumers — for some psychological reasons — have decided to cut down on their expenditure and raise their savings.
For instance, if for some reason people become less confident about the future, they will cut back their outlays and hoard more money. When an individual spends less, this will supposedly worsen the situation of some other individual, who in turn will cut their spending. A vicious cycle sets in. The decline in people’s confidence causes them to spend less and to hoard more money. This lowers economic activity further, causing people to hoard even more, etc.
Following this logic, in order to prevent a recession from getting out of hand, the central bank must lift the growth rate of the money supply and aggressively lower interest rates. Once consumers have more money in their pockets, their confidence will increase, and they will start spending again, reestablishing the circular flow of money, so it is held.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Ethics of a Gold Standard
The Ethics of a Gold Standard
The efficacy of a metallic monetary system is beyond dispute at least among real economists which eliminates just about 95% of whom are now engaged in the “profession.” Money, which gold is, allows for specialization, the division of labor, and provides the means for mankind to escape from barter and, thus, a primitive existence. Like free trade, money naturally integrates mankind both among and between peoples.
A system of central banking with an unbacked paper currency is the antithesis of a gold standard. Manipulation of currencies by central banks, mostly through debasement, hinders trade, creates distortions, and ultimately leads to the dreaded business cycle. Murray Rothbard aptly describes the baneful results of state intervention in the monetary system:
. . . government meddling with money has
not only brought untold tyranny into the world;
it has also brought chaos and not order. It has
fragmented the peaceful, productive world
market and shattered it into a thousand pieces,
with trade and investment hobbled and hampered
by myriad restrictions, controls, artificial rates,
currency breakdowns, etc. It has helped bring
about wars by transforming a world of peaceful
intercourse into a jungle of warring currency blocs.*
While the economic efficiency of a gold standard is important, the ethical case for it is more compelling and was the reason why gold, as money, lasted as a medium of exchange for so long. Gold/money has to be created through honest-to-goodness production and exchange. The often dangerous mining of gold takes labor, capital goods, and land. Turning raw gold into coinage is another process which requires a high level of specialization and production techniques. Both are honest and morally sound activities which make for the betterment of life all around.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Wealth Redistribution Scam that Is “Inflation”
The Wealth Redistribution Scam that Is “Inflation”
The world over people are told that central banks pursue “price stability” by making sure that consumer goods prices do not rise by more than 2 percent per annum. This is, of course, a big sham. If the prices of goods rise over time, it does not take that much to understand that prices do not remain stable. And if the prices of goods increase over time, it necessarily means that the purchasing power of the money unit declines.
As money loses its purchasing power, income and wealth are stealthily redistributed. Some individuals and groups of people are enriched at the expense of others. Savers and workers are swindled out of their deserved income and retirement benefits, while those who own goods that rise in value or who borrow money typically reap a windfall profit. Clearly, the banking industry is a major beneficiary of monetary debasement.
“Inflation” Is a Rise in the Quantity of Money
Central banks are the very source of the phenomenon that all prices of goods tend to rise over time. They hold the money production monopoly and increase — in close cooperation with commercial banks — the outstanding quantity of money through credit expansion, an increase in the supply of credit that is not backed by real savings. It goes without saying that it is rather profitable to be active in the money-production business.
The increase in the quantity of money results, and necessarily so, in higher prices compared to a situation in which the quantity of money has not been increased. This is no arbitrary assertion but stems from logical reasoning: a rise in people’s money holding lowers the marginal utility of the additional money unit, meaning that the marginal utility of other goods that can be exchanged against money rises.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Paul Volcker: The Man Who Vanquished Gold
Paul Volcker: The Man Who Vanquished Gold
The flood of obituaries that noted the passing of Paul Volcker (1927–2019) last week have almost all lauded his achievement as Fed chair (1979–1987) in reining in the double-digit inflation that ravaged the US economy during the 1970s.
Volcker was referred to as the “former Fed chairman who fought inflation” (here); “inflation tamer” and “a full-fledged inflation warrior” (here); and the “Fed chairman who waged war on inflation” and led “the Federal Reserve’s brute-force campaign to subdue inflation” (here). Mr. Volcker certainly deserves credit for curbing the Great Inflation of the 1970s. However, he also merits a lion’s share of the blame for unleashing the Great Inflation on the US and the world economy in the first place. For it was Mr. Volcker who masterminded the program that President Nixon announced on August 15, 1971, which unilaterally suspended gold convertibility of US dollars held by foreign governments and central banks, imposed a fascist wage-price freeze on the US economy, and slapped a 10 percent surcharge on foreign imports.1
Tragically, by severing the last link between the dollar and gold, Volcker’s program scuttled the last chance of restoring a genuine gold standard.
More than two years before Nixon slammed down the “gold window,” Volcker, the recently appointed undersecretary of the treasury for monetary affairs, gave an oral presentation to Nixon and his closest advisors on US balance-of-payments problems. The presentation was based on a memo that the secret “Volcker group,” initiated by Henry Kissinger, spent five months preparing.
Among other things, Volcker recommended a continuation of capital controls to prop up the inflated dollar’s overvalued exchange rate and a massive appreciation or “revaluation” of the currencies of less inflationary countries such as West Germany, placing the burden of adjustment to unrestrained US inflation on these countries.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A History of Inflationary Money: From 1844 to Nixon
A History of Inflationary Money: From 1844 to Nixon
So that we can understand the financial and banking challenges ahead of us, this article provides an historical and technical background. But we must first get an important definition right, and that is the cause of the periodic cycle of boom and bust. The cycle of economic activity is not a trade or business cycle, but a credit cycle. It is caused by fractional reserve banking and by banks loaning money into existence. The effect on business is then observed but is not the underlying cause.
Modern banking has its roots in England’s Bank Charter Act of 1844, which led to the practice of loaning money into existence, commonly described as fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking is defined as making loans and taking in customer deposits in quantities that are multiples of the bank’s own capital. Case law in the wake of the 1844 act, having more regard for the status quo as established precedent than for the fundamentals of property law, ruled that irregular deposits (deposits for safekeeping) were no different from a loan. Judge Lord Cottenham’s ruling in Foley v. Hill (1848) 2 HLC 28 is a judicial decision relating to the fundamental nature of a bank which held in effect that
The money placed in the custody of the banker is to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases. He is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it. He is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in haphazardous speculation.
This was undoubtedly the most important ruling of the last two centuries on money. Today, we know of nothing else other than legally confirmed fractional reserve banking. However, sound or honest banking, with banks acting as custodians, had existed in the centuries before the 1844 act and any corruption of the custody status was regarded as fraudulent.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Free Money Bubble Is About To Burst
The Free Money Bubble Is About To Burst
Recently, there has been a parade of central bankers along with their lackeys on Wall Street coming on the financial news networks and desperately trying to convince investors that there are no bubbles extant in the world today. Indeed, the Fed sees no economic or market imbalances anywhere that should give perma-bulls cause for concern. You can listen to Jerome Powell’s upbeat assessment of the situation in his own words during the latest FOMC press conference here. The Fed Chair did, however, manage to acknowledge that corporate debt levels are in fact a bit on the high side. But he added that “we have been monitoring it carefully and taken appropriate steps.” By taking appropriate steps to reduce debt levels Powell must mean slashing interest rates and going back into QE. The problem with that strategy being that is exactly what caused the debt binge and overleveraged condition of corporations in the first place.
Global central banks have abrogated the free market and are in the practice of repealing the business cycle and ensuring stocks are in a permanent bull market. Massive and unrelenting money printing is the “tool” that they use. The good old USA had its central bank cut rates to 0 percent by the end of 2008 to combat the Great Recession; and that paved the way for the EU to join the free-money parade by 2016. In fact, the Band of Japan had already been at the zero-bound range years before. This means much of the developed world has been giving money away gratis for the better part of a decade.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Will MMT Trigger the Collapse of “Money”?
Will MMT Trigger the Collapse of “Money”?
If the supply of money in an economy is $1 billion, each unit of currency buys X (the purchasing power of each unit of currency).
If the money supply is doubled without any expansion in the consumers’ pool of goods and services, the purchasing power of each unit of currency falls in half. This reduction in the purchasing power of each unit of currency is called inflation.
Governments facing soaring demands and limited tax revenues are naturally tempted to meet these demands with “free” new currency, since the political and financial pain caused by skyrocketing taxes leads to governments being tossed from power.
This temptation explains the regular occurrence of hyperinflation and debt default, as the temptation to over-borrow and pile up interest payments leads to governments defaulting on their debt. In both cases — hyperinflation and debt default — there’s a currency/ governance/ financial crisis that upends the status quo.
This is one common objection to MMT: the freedom to issue new currency is difficult to limit, as there will always be more demands for government spending. Without some “governor” to limit the issuance of new currency to align with the expansion of goods and services, then governments tend to issue new currency far in excess of what the real economy is creating.
This generates inflation, which impoverishes everyone using the currency.
MMT advocates claim that since MMT generates goods and services, it won’t generate inflation. But rebuilding a bridge doesn’t actually create any new goods and services, or increase productivity: it generates wages and consumes materials and energy.
Since it doesn’t generate more consumable goods and services, the expansion of wages and demand for materials will drive prices higher.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken
The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken
I say these things because:
- Money is free for those who are creditworthy because the investors who are giving it to them are willing to get back less than they give. More specifically investors lending to those who are creditworthy will accept very low or negative interest rates and won’t require having their principal paid back for the foreseeable future. They are doing this because they have an enormous amount of money to invest that has been, and continues to be, pushed on them by central banks that are buying financial assets in their futile attempts to push economic activity and inflation up. The reason that this money that is being pushed on investors isn’t pushing growth and inflation much higher is that the investors who are getting it want to invest it rather than spend it. This dynamic is creating a “pushing on a string” dynamic that has happened many times before in history (though not in our lifetimes) and was thoroughly explained in my book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises. As a result of this dynamic, the prices of financial assets have gone way up and the future expected returns have gone way down while economic growth and inflation remain sluggish. Those big price rises and the resulting low expected returns are not just true for bonds; they are equally true for equities, private equity, and venture capital, though these assets’ low expected returns are not as apparent as they are for bond investments because these equity-like investments don’t have stated returns the way bonds do. As a result, their expected returns are left to investors’ imaginations.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What We’ve Lost
What We’ve Lost
This is only a partial list of what we’ve lost to globalism, cheap credit and the Tyranny of Price which generates the Landfill Economy.
A documentary on the decline of small farms and the rural economy in France highlights what we’ve lost in the decades-long rush to globalize and financialize everything on the planet— what we call Neoliberalism, the ideology of turning everything into a global market controlled by The Tyranny of Price and cheap credit issued to corporations and banks by central banks.
After Winter, Spring (2012) was made by an American who moved to a small village in the Dordogne region of France to recover something of her childhood on a small Pennsylvania farm.
The farmers–self-described as paysans, peasants in English, (a translation I don’t consider entirely accurate, for reasons too complex to go into here)– describe the financial difficulties of earning enough to survive without outside jobs.
One young farmer who is taking over the family dairy from his aging parents encapsulates the economic reality of small farms: in the 1960s, they had 3 or 4 cows, now they have 100, but their income is the same.
Corporate mega-farms can produce huge quantities of agricultural products of questionable quality because they have the scale, access to cheap credit and expertise to deal with the voluminous bureaucratic paperwork imposed by the EU and the French government. (One slip-up on a form and you’re sunk if you’re a one- or two-person operation.)
Artisanal producers can’t compete, and will never be able to compete in a global marketplace where there is always a cheaper source. (Up to half a small farmer’s income comes from EU subsidies, which the EU is trying to cut.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Fed is Lying to Us
The Fed is Lying to Us
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie”
The recent statements from the Federal Reserve and the other major world central banks (the ECB, BoJ, BoE and PBoC) are alarming because their actions are completely out of alignment with what they’re telling us.
Their words seek to soothe us that “everything’s fine” and the global economy is doing quite well. But their behavior reflects a desperate anxiety.
Put more frankly; we’re being lied to.
Case in point: On October 4, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell publicly claimed the US economy is “in a good place”. Yet somehow, despite the US banking system already having approximately $1.5 trillion in reserves, the Fed is suddenly pumping in an additional $60 billion per month to keep things propped up.
Do drastic, urgent measures like this reflect an economy that’s “in a good place”?
The Fed’s Rescue Was Never Real
Remember, after a full decade of providing “emergency stimulus measures” the US Federal Reserve stopped its quantitative easing program (aka, printing money) a few years back.
Mission Accomplished, it declared. We’ve saved the system.
But that cessation was meaningless. Because the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped right in to take over the Fed’s stimulus baton and started aggressively growing its own balance sheet — keeping the global pool of new money growing.
Let’s look at the data. First, we see here how the Fed indeed stopped growing its balance sheet in 2014:
And we can note other important insights in this chart.
For starters, you can clearly see how in 2008, the Fed printed up more money in just a few weeks than it had in the nearly 100 years of operations prior.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Monetary failure is becoming inevitable
Monetary failure is becoming inevitable
This article posits that there is an unpleasant conjunction of events beginning to undermine government finances in advanced nations. They combine the arrival of a long-term trend of rising welfare commitments with an increasing certainty of a global-scale credit crisis, in turn the outcome of a combination of the peak of the credit cycle and increasing trade protectionism. We see the latter already undermining the global economy, catching both governments and investors unexpectedly.
Few observers seem aware that an economic and systemic crisis will occur at a time when government finances are already precarious. However, the consequences are unthinkable for the authorities, and for this reason it is certain such a downturn will lead to a substantial increase in monetary inflation. The scale of the problem needs to be grasped in order to assess how destructive it will be for government finances and ultimately state-issued currencies.
Introduction
Listening to recent commentaries about the repo failures in New York leads one to suppose there is insufficient money in the system. This is not the real issue, as the chart below of the fiat money quantity for the dollar clearly shows.
The fiat money quantity is the amount of fiat money (in this case US dollars) both in circulation and held in reserve on the central bank’s balance sheet. Before the Lehman crisis, it grew at a fairly constant compound growth rate of 5.86%. Since the Lehman crisis, it has grown at an average of 9.45%, even after the slowdown in its rate of growth that started in January 2017. FMQ is still $5 trillion above where it would have been today if the massive monetary expansion in the wake of the Lehman crisis had not happened. If there is a shortage of money, it is because the process of debt creation to fund current expenditure is spiralling out of control.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Japan’s Monetary System is a Warning to Modern Society
Japan’s Monetary System is a Warning to Modern Society
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; My friend who retired from the Bank of Japan told me you had recreated the monetary system of Japan and that was how you could predict the yen would go below par back in 1995 and again in 2011. Could you please publish the chart on the yen showing the full monetary system from the Meiji reform?
Thank you
AH
ANSWER: Japan has been through a truly wild ride when it comes to currency. The emperors would devalue the outstanding money supply when they came to the throne and reduce it to 10% of its former value. This allowed the new emperor to issue coins as if he were beginning anew. By the time the third emperor pulled this stunt, the people simply refused to accept the coins of the emperor ever again.
The Japanese resorted to using bags of rice as money and Chinese coins. Eventually, they also used ingots of silver or gold for larger transactions by the 18th to 19th century.
This is actually a very good reference point because Japan lost the ability to issue money for 600 years until the Meiji reform in 1870 when the yen was born. The last official Japanese coin issue was in 958 AD.
The Meiji Reform of 1870 set the yen at par with the US dollar based upon a silver yen which was the equivalent of the US silver dollar.
This is an important point because as governments today try to eliminate their currency in the hunt for taxes, people are hoarding US dollars exactly as the Japanese began to hoard Chinese coins. Governments should look well at what they are proposing for they can lose the confidence of the people and they will lose the right to issue money.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth
For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth
It’s not just the megarich: increased spending power leads us all to inflict environmental damage. It’s time for a radical plan
It is not quite true that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Musicians and novelists, for example, can become extremely rich by giving other people pleasure. But it does appear to be universally true that in front of every great fortune lies a great crime. Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. The very wealthy, almost as a matter of definition, are committing ecocide.
A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a worker at a British private airport. “I see things that really shouldn’t be happening in 2019,” he wrote. Every day he sees Global 7000 jets, Gulfstream G650s and even Boeing 737s take off from the airport carrying a single passenger, mostly flying to Russia and the US. The private Boeing 737s, built to take 174 passengers, are filled at the airport with around 25,000 litres of fuel. That’s as much fossil energy as a small African town might use in a year.
Where are these single passengers going? Perhaps to visit one of their superhomes, constructed and run at vast environmental cost, or to take a trip on their superyacht, which might burn 500 litres of diesel an hour just ticking over, and which is built and furnished with rare materials extracted at the expense of beautiful places.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that when Google convened a meeting of the rich and famous at the Verdura resort in Sicily in July to discuss climate breakdown, its delegates arrived in 114 private jets and a fleet of megayachts, and drove around the island in supercars. Even when they mean well, the ultrarich cannot help trashing the living world.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Suffering the Profanity of Plentiful Cheap Money
Suffering the Profanity of Plentiful Cheap Money
What if the savings in your bank account lost 55 percent of its value over the last 12 months? Would you be somewhat peeved? Would you transfer some of your savings to another currency?
That was the favored approach in Argentina – where the official inflation rate’s 55 percent. But no more. On September 2, President Mauricio Macri resorted to capital controls to preserve the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves and prop up the peso. What gives?
Just fifteen months ago Macri secured the biggest bailout in the International Monetary Fund’s history. Now Argentina’s delaying payment to its creditors and is rapidly approaching what will be its third sovereign default this century. On top of that, Macri’s Peronist rival Alberto Fernández will likely take his job come election day in October.
Alas, for Macri and his countrymen, a painful lesson is being exacted. You can’t solve a debt problem with more debt. Eventually the currency buckles and you’re left with two poisons to pick from: inflation or default. With Macri’s latest capital controls scheme he’s choosing to take swigs of both.
Make of Argentina’s woes what you will. Central bankers in the United States are also guilty of programs of mass money debasement. They may have a bigger economy to better mask their malice. But despite what the MMT delusionals say the day of reckoning always arrives – and always at the worst possible time.
Indeed, the U.S. dollar hasn’t lost 55 percent of its value over the last 12 months. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own inflation calculator, the dollar’s lost 55 percent of its value since 1988. In other words, it takes $1 to purchase what $0.45 could buy during President Reagan’s last year in office.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
