The emperor will make a mockery of the future.
There is a Supreme Ruler of the world. During the early years of his reign he won accolades and devotion, showering his subjects with goods and services that were beyond their means. As he consolidated his rule, a few malcontents warned that there was less to his cornucopia than met the eye. However, his grip on power tightened and they were shunned. Once he had an iron chokehold, their warnings were forgotten or ignored.
Meet Emperor Debt. The first true globalist ruler, his dominion spans the planet. A cosmopolitan and multiculturalist, he reigns impartially over all races, nationalities, ethnicities, genders, creeds, and political persuasions. The little figures who supposedly run things think he’s their servant; they are actually his puppets. They promise and propose; he denies and disposes. Just the other night a puppet made a long speech full of promises and proposals. The Emperor smiled at the speech and the raucous reaction in the ownership-claims market the next day. “We’ll see about that,” he said to himself.
One of Emperor Debt’s minions once said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” A ninety-four-year long run later, we’re all in debt, and it would be an optimistic mischaracterization to say up to our eyeballs. We’re buried. The world’s debt is so stupendously huge it can only be estimated. Nominal debt is roughly $250 trillion dollars, or over three times what the world produces each year. Unfunded promises for old age pensions and medical care are another $500 trillion or so. Throw in financial derivatives of $1.5 quadrillion. Stated debt, unfunded liabilities, and derivatives sum to $2.25 quadrillion, or about $300,000 per person. Leave out the derivatives and per capita debt and unfunded liabilities are still $100,000 (figures from “March 2017: The End Of A 100 Year Global Debt Super Cycle Is Way Overdue”).
KEEP THE DEEP STATE ON THE RUN!
US statistics are equally unsettling. Nominal personal, business, and government debt is $67 trillion (over 3.5 times the GDP), unfunded government pension and medical liabilities are estimated at $105 trillion (some estimates are up to two times higher), and derivatives held by US institutions at $612 trillion (all figures from US Debt Clock.org). That’s $2.412 million per person. Back out derivatives and it’s “only” $529,000 per person. The Debt Clock says we have $395,000 assets per person, so net debt is around $134,000. However, asset values are the Emperor’s sleight-of-hand. His debt blows up asset values, but sometimes the Emperor punctures the bubble and asset values deflate. Obligations to pay interest and principle on debt, on the other hand, do not deflate, absent rescheduling or bankruptcy.
“We’ve been hearing about debt from Cassandras, Nervous Nellies, and Chicken Littles for years; nothing’s happened!” cries the Chorus, and the Emperor smiles. The Chorus is dead wrong; plenty has happened, none of it good. The more you borrow from the future, the less future you’ll have. Debt has grown faster than production; the future has arrived and growth rates are falling. Unable to borrow its way to prosperity, Japan has been in a recession punctuated by interludes of anemic growth for 27 years. Growth in Europe has been virtually non-existent since the turn of the century, and debt crises loom in Greece and Italy. In the US, Barack Obama left office as the first president who did not have even one year of 3 percent real growth. His government needed to borrow over $9 trillion just to buy a feeble recovery. The Chinese “miracle” has sputtered as China struggles to carry its increasingly heavy debt load.
In the US, real incomes are lower now than at the turn of the century. The young see an increasingly bleak future—more debt, less opportunity—and forego marriage and procreation. Birth rates have fallen across the Emperor’s domain, well below replacement rates. Populations are aging and there are fewer workers supporting more of the elderly trying to collect on all those unfunded liabilities. Some day the young will rebel against debt slavery to the old and the Emperor will smile: divide and conquer.
Central bankers are the Emperor’s subalterns. They promote cheap debt, “magically” breaking the link between debt and the production or assets needed to pay it back. The Emperor’s propaganda ministers hail the “prosperity” that flows from central banks exchanging their debt for governments’ debt. Both sets of debt are collateralized by nothing and are claims on nothing; they can only be “redeemed” for more central bank or government debt. Yet this debt can be produced without limit or restraint—including the obligation to pay it back with real goods and services—and the Emperor’s subjects think of it as money and wealth. Constantly expanding debt and illusory prosperity promote a mirage economy.
Say what you want about the Emperor, he has a sense of humor. Amused by his subjects’ delusions, he plays with them like a cat plays with its prey. When financial asset prices drop, buy into the next debt-fueled upswing. Prosperity won’t end as long as credit standards fall and more credit is extended. Borrow two dollars for a dollar’s worth of growth. Credit is income. Creditors’ claims are wealth. Sooner or later, both the Emperor and the cat tire of their games. Pouncing, they make waste of the best laid schemes of men and mice. The Emperor has stopped armies, brought down governments, sparked revolutions, opened countries to invasion, and left poverty, devastation, and misery in his wake. Only fools doubt that he is not once again readying a destructive masterstroke that will level welfare and warfare states alike. Given the paper and promises that litter the globe, encumbering every asset and income stream, this one will be his most terrifying.
The Emperor’s reign waxes and wanes, but as long as humans remain human it won’t end. Hubris, avarice, and folly are occasionally tempered, never vanquished. There will always be that wish for something for nothing, that desire to consume more than one produces, that hope that continued improvidence won’t lead to ruin. Events, not contemplation, end mass delusion. It takes little foresight to see what’s coming, and little wisdom to recognize that it can no longer be prevented, but the herd refuses to see or think. That is the ultimate default.
Fortunately, I was able to escape Debt’s clutches, but his son Inflation and his brother Taxes still pursue. As soon as the great defenders, Gold and Silver, defeat Inflation’s evil fraternal twin, Deflation, they may still be able to rescue some. Although slavery is rooted economics, Gold and Silver are beholden to noone. Neither are their violent cousins, Guns and Ammo.
Unassimilated,
The point the article made was that we are ALL on the hook for what the central banks say we are. No matter what situation our personal finances are currently in. And that is currently to the tune of around $300,000 each.
You’re right about taxes, inflation, and the rest for sure:-)
Blessings:-}
No one is two words. Nobody can be one word.
And if one believes the powers that be will allow a handful to repeap thr rewards of prudent saving and investing (in gold and silver), in all liklihhood they will be sorely disappointed. And yet, one must at the very least do something.
Agreed. The big trouble with this debt is that the PTB want to claim that it’s everybody’s debt, not just those who borrowed it into existence.
Right-on!
All the energy of the banking cartel is now focused on maintaining inflated asset prices, which serve as collateral for the debt edifice. It’s been one, helluva-a-long circularity, or feedback loop, where more money creation required to create more debt and service existing debt, also leads to asset price inflation, which then creates more collateral for more debt creation, and so on.
Monetary inflation also distorts factor and consumer prices so that we don’t know how much real income we’re generating. GDP measures dollar transactions. How much of that is do to inflation? We don’t really know, we can only estimate. For all we know, real GDP, for what it’s worth, could be massively overstated, which makes the debt edifice even more precarious, since money printing has to ramp even higher to service the debt, and interest rates kept near zero, because real income is insufficient to cover it.
This debt, as the banksters know, can never been reduced. It must keep expanding, because when it stops everything collapses.
The hardest thing is letting go of worldly things.
https://youtu.be/hm8GLIl5qRU
” It takes little foresight to see what’s coming, and little wisdom to recognize that it can no longer be prevented, but the herd refuses to see or think. That is the ultimate default.” I disagree here, Robert. I’ve been reading doom porn for a decade. I don’t own any baked beans or water purifiers. Am I foolish? Lots of projections have come and gone in that time. Not you, nessesarily, but a lot of people confuse the american project of globalization with other times and events. We have never had a period in time where the US government’s goal was to steal american (and Europe’s) assets and deal them out around the world. We have never had a time when the US government discouraged american business from building a prosperous america. We have never had a time where we have allowed one group of people to operate totally outside of the law, to the detriment of everyone else. We never voted for any of this. Those cards were never on the table. They were political decisions . That is changing. I hear people freak out about derivatives, for instance. Nothing to worry about. Derivatives are worthless. Nobody will ever pull the pin. 2008 exposed that. Everyone holding derivatives knows in case of default they will never get paid. Extend and pretend. Until we wind them down. Lots of debts will have to be renegotiated, no question. It’s always been that way. Gold is good, but as long as there is printed gold, it will never appreciate. Most business guys have worked their way out from under some staggering numbers at one time or another. Just part of it. Let’s see what Trump can do. The national debt is too big of a number for most people to comprehend. They are scared of zeros. Because that’s all it is. An upside down country is no different than an upside down household or business. And it gets fixed the same way. There are just more zeros.
I prefer not to call my prognostications “doom porn,” but “doom eroticism.” It sounds better, don’t you think?
No. It doesn’t.
Upside down households or businesses declare bankruptcy.
So you are saying a bankruptcy of the United States is the painless solution?
Sometimes your responses are just plain gibberish.
This is one of those responses.
Star- If anyone is schooled in bankruptcy, that is Trump. That is some of the lamest shit you have come up with so far. Unless you really want El Trumpo to pull the pin on Merika and have a REAL lesson in pain. No, we can’t go on forever printing and pretending.
Robert, ok, doom eroticism it is. Jim, lots of restructurings (bankruptcies) never go through the courts. People sit down, lay out the unpleasant facts and numbers, and do their best to come up with a solution that hurts everybody the least. Done all the time, quietly and without fanfare. I suspect this would be Trump’s angle. It’s tough stuff, no question, and there will be losers. But that’s not the same as collapse. We learned a lot in 2008. And with Trump in charge of Treasury and DOJ, it’s not likely that the shit Paulson pulled could ever be duplicated. Bea, I never said anything about continuing to print.
We went thru a lot in 2008 but I do not believe that we learned a damn thing.
I couldn’t agree with you more. We are more in debt now than we were then.
Robert, two different points. We (guys like you and I) learned in 2008 that cash flows and resources were finite, and our path was unsustainable. We should have reset it then. Paulson and company learned that congress was a bitch, and would roll over and allow massive counterfeiting to keep the party rolling. And that got us here. So we learned different things
By “reset” I assume you mean bankruptcy, which is where every one of the TBTF’s would have been had not the government bailed them out. Instead, the government went even deeper into debt and bailed them out. We would be in so much better shape if prices had been allowed to reset, improvident firms, leveraged to the eyeballs, had gone out of business, and assets had moved from weak hands to strong. Failure is a part of capitalism and capitalism cannot work if failure is artificially prevented by the government.
No, not bankruptcy. Repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 et al, and repudiate the debt. We’ll keep our stuff. Kick the bankers out!
Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment, and while we’re at it, repeal the federal income tax.
That should do it.
“People sit down, lay out the unpleasant facts and numbers, and do their best to come up with a solution that hurts everybody the least.”
You mean like the Gold Reserve Act of 1933 (aka “Roosevelt gold coin confiscation”), where nobody was consulted ahead of time?
I have a good friend, who is a family physician, who lost 400 grand in 2000, and another 400 grand in 2008, betting on the stock market. Nobody bailed him out, nobody cared. What makes it so different the day that happens to the bond holders? All I hear is hand wringing about that. Why do we set that up as if to default on bonds will end our civilization? It won’t. And people will forget quick, just like they always do, and line up to buy bonds again the next day. Edit: regarding your comment at 7:15. Yes, I agree with you completely. Jim and I have bickered in the past about TARP, it was sold as liquidity to keep things functional while we cleaned up the mess. Paulson realized two things. He could scare congress into giving him ungodly sums of money, with no strings attached, and that liquidity could hide a lack of solvency in any number of institutions.
“Why do we set that up as if to default on bonds will end our civilization? It won’t. And people will forget quick, just like they always do, and line up to buy bonds again the next day.”
No one knows how this will all end. However, I think the next go-round will be the end game. Why? Because this one is global and systemic. That means sovereign defaults everywhere. Remember, sovereign debt is the basis of all fiat currency and credit, in general. All assets are priced directly, or indirectly, off the 10 year treasury. All fiats are priced off the US dollar.
Also, there are no more new frontiers to exploit and re-collateralize the debt edifice, other than by conquest. Russia would be a real prize but somehow I don’t think they’ll cooperate and let themselves be taken over.
So, when credit ends because money has been destroyed with a massive contraction in debt by default, sovereigns have no credit worthiness, and their counterfeit money has no takers, who’ll be lined up to finance anyone’s markers?
Who will lend against any illiquid asset (real estate)? Who will provide consumer credit? If any real savings exist, and that is a big “if”, what will it be used for other than financing self-liquidating trade bills (real bills) just like in the old days.
Back then, any other form of credit, other than sovereign and trade finance, was referred to as accommodation lending, which was something no banker engaged in. If you needed money like that, you tapped your old man or brother-in-law.
No – we’ll be returning to a market-based money, economy until we revive the real savings pool, which will allow the credit markets to function again. That means real hardship.
The day that happens is also the day your bank accounts are confiscated by whomever you bank with. Remember that. You are nothing but an unsecured creditor to these very same institutions.
A point that can’t be repeated frequently enough.
“I don’t own any baked beans or water purifiers. Am I foolish?”
If you have no other preparations either, then yes.
Forty-seven MILLION people on SNAP and 100,000,000 working age American without gainful employment will not respond well to “renegotiating” or “economic hurt”.
Suffice it to say, I’d hate to be anywhere near where the post-election map showed as blue if the EBT cards run dry ( or even cut back)–you think it’s nuts when a cop shoots a black criminal or 103 Muslims are delayed for 3 hours at airports nationwide from a travel ban, imagine the blood and fire if the urban populace don’t git their entitlements…………
That’s the thing people tend to forget. Once the government bills a the holders of its debt, it will be forced to live within its means, which will also be drastically reduced. These entitlements that people depend on are gone too.
EC- You can pry my worldly possestions from my cold dead fingers.
It’s hard, I tell you. That is why I posted both videos. One is deals with resignation and one is holding on.
My buddy El Stucko seems to have let go. He sounds much happier.
When you head off, like I-S’s dad, to that little house in the ground, you will find a greater world without limits beyond. Your material possessions are holding you back, man.
If anyone on this thread thinks we’re coming out of this mess unscathed, they’re dreaming. The debt goes hand in hand with a dependent class that will never willingly give up the largesse that enables their very existence. The former allows the feeding of the latter and latter demands the continuance of the former. Half this country is fed, clothed, and sheltered in some degree by the machinery of debt. Make no mistake, the deadliness of that synergy cannot be overestimated. When that debt-fueled largesse is even slightly interrupted, never mind cut off altogether, this country will explode!
Pollyanna this crap all you want. The bottom line is this: No individual, no family, no business, no city, no state, no nation, not even this planet can live beyond its means forever. The wall will be hit. The only question is when.
“The wall will be hit. The only question is when.”
We don’t need to ask why, that seems abundantly clear, but, while your statement is fundamentally true, the answer depends on the important question of “How we are going to get there?
With Hilliary in the office it would have been more rape and pillage – business as usual until rather quickly there was a liquidity crises causing a cascading worldwide credit collapse destroying all of our on time delivery systems. Followed shortly by chaos, marshal law, famine, pestilence, etc., etc.
We are still going to have all of the bad but with Trump, being a real estate guy, business man and trader, we have a chance for a more orderly descent in to hell. He knows and understands the massive debt and dollar value problems. You say “Bullshit! If he did, he wouldn’t be talking billions for defense and infrastructure and don’t touch entitlements.” That is part of the brilliance of his apparent plan, he will spend like a madman to get the US economy going and then massively devalue the dollar. This will gut the paper portfolios of the rich and famous (and everyone else too) but, more importantly, virtually eliminate all debt. Us debt becomes worthless, the mortgage on your house and the loan on your car disappear. This will disproportionately benefit everyday Americans and especially real estate owners. The real property and it’s utility value remain but the debt is inflated away.
The ugliness doesn’t go away, it is still coming with the end of oil, but it could buy as much as a decade before the shit really hits the fan.
Congrats! You are the first person I have seen express this in print. This would amount to something along the lines of a Jubilee I suppose. Or would the PTB roll out dictates to reproportion debt to the evolving currency explosion. Or could they? This above scenario is something I’ve pondered for a long time. Is it just a fantasy to think it might go that way? Does anyone else think Trump, in all his boldness, would take the country down that path as a way out of the deep woods?
Uncle Donald said he’d build a wall to keep the good guys in and keep the bad hombres out. Work Camp Delta is going to be one happy little camp. They will outlaw currency and make everybody sign up for bank accounts to keep everybody accounted for.
They just print up your bank/social security number on your forehead for easy identification. They’ll tell you that only Americans can have numbers so that you will gladly submit to being stamped with Mammon’s numbers.
They will expand state driver’s licenses to include biometric information and it will be controlled nationwide by Apple Corp. They will claim it’s not a national ID, it is merely a cost-cutting measure to aid law enforcement.
They wont tell you that if you have diabetes or other anti-social disease, Commissioner KaD will cull you from the rolls; your data will be deleted and you will become a non-person. You will be on your own, unauthorized to work, buy or sell in the USA.
We would be wise to heed the warnings of the IMF and BIS. “Reset” may involve broken supply chains solving the global overpopulation problem. After the dust settles a new global RFID chip currency 🙂
This shit show is going to last a lot longer then most people think. Why?
The shit would have already hit the fan, except the US dollar is still, for now, the world’s reserve currency. At the current time, no other currency can compete (not the yuan, euro, or yen). The Euro or the yen will implode first (then eventually the other), which perversely will extend the life of the US dollar for a while (decades?) longer.
That doesn’t mean that we wont feel pain or not have some crashes, but we aren’t going Venezuela style for a while.
Yeah, and like someone always says when you play a game of Monopoly,”What if this money was real?” Its a salient point you know. Its not the gold standard, or having metal behind it. Paper or plastic, its all smoke and mirrors. It really is rigged. Whether you invest, save, spend or borrow, you never get anywhere. There’s no value in stocks or bonds. There’s no value in the “market”, whatever market it is.
Some point soon, and people will all realize that this debt is fake. The bankers are all crooks, and the laws and system was always rigged. Then what? If everyone stops accepting the fake funny monies, what happens? What happens if people just don’t play this game anymore?
It’ll happen. You don’t have to unplug. At some point real soon, people will realize this game is rigged. Crash or burn. You cannot arrest everyone. Laws are meaningless without force to enforce them.
At some point, it goes beyond farce. Billions, Trillions, Quadrillions, to infinity and no – fuck you. Greed has no math skills. You can argue with me, but when you argue with Math, you’re just stupid.
Trees don’t grow to the moon. Debt is already in an exponential curve. Think the lily pad analogy. No one notices they are in trouble until 50%, then the next double is death. We are in the last double now. It WILL happen, the only question is whether time wins (short duration until death) or volume wins (point where debt goes completely vertical). As another poster stated, this is like the bomb tech, shaking with his pliers, hoping he can cut the wire before the clock runs out. The “fed” is the bomb squad, the only difference being the “fed” also placed the bomb. The irony is, the longer it takes to happen, the worse it will be, and the amplitude of the “worse” increases with every “tick”.
The ONLY refuge from this is your own skills. It is the only thing that you can take with you. Property can (and most likely will) be taken by force. Government can confiscate wealth of ANY type – gold, silver, ammunition (except what you can carry) etc. Skills are portable, and above all, you can hide them from oppressors. The two MOST valuable assets when TSHTF is health (no need for pharma) and wits (no your way around many environments and conditions). Period. Everything else is a cherry on top, and just makes it easier to use the other two.
Thanks Robert , I feel much better now,
FOWARD they said…and they called it progress.
I love the picture on this article,
But I can’t read the gothic letters, anybody have a clue what it says?
EROPGROK?
It has to mean something, right?
anybody?
It says Emperor, although it’s not that easy to detect.
“Constantly expanding debt and illusory prosperity promote a mirage economy”
I really like that!
How many people do you know that measure their worth in an illusion of
prosperity? We are NOT the collective. We are individuals, and are individually
responsible for our actions.
I believe the US is bankrupt, and a day will come when credit fails, even for the gov.
Before that day comes, many individuals will experience bankruptcy, and likely
have to forfeit any assets they do hold.
There will be a backlash of chaos if all the entitled lose their benefits. Poetic justice?
Well, we can think that, but no one will be cheering if that happens.
I pray the Trumpster can do a work around to prevent the powers from starting WWlll,
but chaos in our streets can’t be avoided. Powers have worked hard at fostering hatred,
at least resentment between various groups in the US. Very bad people those “powers.”
On a positive note, many people rebound from bankruptcy. And an entire system/country
can rebound too.
edit add: Mr. Robert,
how about doom erotica?
I salute your unflagging optimism and your unfailing reasonableness and restraint.
This is exactly how magic works.