Guest Post by Nick Giambruno
“It’s possible to have more than one reserve currency.”
These are the recent words of Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
It was a stunning admission from the one person with the most control over the US dollar—the world’s reserve currency.
Reading between the lines, Powell’s remarks are a strong hint that the current international monetary system based on the US dollar is on its way out… and soon.
From Peter Reagan at Birch Gold Group
The latest official inflation update of an 8.3% year-over-year rate was either good news or bad news. Good news: it’s noticeably lower than June’s blistering 9.1% report. Bad news: it’s yet another painfully high report in ten consecutive months over 6%, continuing our most severe inflationary episode in four decades.
Experts had predicted only an 8.1% increase, so it’s safe to say a lot of observers were rather surprised by reality.
Worse, though, there were some rather optimistic analysts like Nomi Prins, still hoping for the Fed to “pivot” and surrender the fight against inflation. She forecast first a slowing, then a reversal of quantitative tightening:
Continue reading “The Fed Declares War on Wall Street – With Everyone Suffering the Consequences”
Guest Post by Nick Giambruno
Four thousand years ago, the rulers of ancient Babylon discovered a technique to stave off violent revolts.
In ancient times, there was a tendency for people to become hopelessly in debt to their creditors. Eventually, they would rise up and cause instability that could threaten the entire ruling system.
The rulers of the ancient world recognized this dynamic.
Their solution was to enact widespread debt cancellation—a debt jubilee.
Debt jubilees acted as a societal pressure release valve when there were no other options.
The practice spread in the ancient world and became codified in different civilizations.
Continue reading “A Debt Jubilee of Biblical Proportions Is Coming Soon… What You Need To Know”
Guest Post by Nick Giambruno
Every day there are over 2 billion consumer transactions around the world.
Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and other large companies process most of these payments.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, does not have anywhere near the capacity to handle this kind of volume.
The Bitcoin protocol sets the maximum size of each new block at about 1 megabyte (MB).
That means there is a hard limit on the maximum number of transactions the Bitcoin network can process—about 375,000 transactions a day, or about 0.019% of all the world’s consumer transactions.
That’s why it was never possible to record every Starbucks or McDonald’s transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. It was also never desirable.
Today—after over 13 years of transaction history—the size of the Bitcoin blockchain has grown to about 420 gigabytes (GB). The small block size means that the Bitcoin blockchain grows slowly and is predictable.
Continue reading “Here’s Why the Hardest Money Ever Known Is Now Easier To Use Than Visa”
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
You have heard me say it over and over again. What we are witnessing right now reminds me so much of 2008, and we all remember what happened in the fall of 2008. That doesn’t mean that this new crisis will unfold exactly the same way that the last one did. Ultimately, every economic downturn is unique. But the fact that we are seeing so many parallels between what is transpiring now and what transpired 14 years ago should deeply alarm all of us. We appear to be on the precipice of another economic crash, and all of the “solutions” that our leaders give us just seem to make things even worse.
Hopefully someone out there can find a way to pull a miracle out of a hat and a worst case scenario can be averted.
But I wouldn’t count on that happening. The following are 12 numbers that show that we are getting dangerously close to an economic crash as the fall of 2022 approaches…
Guest Post by Colin Todhunter
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.
According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
Continue reading “How “Food Shortages” & Economic Collapse Protects the Status Quo”
Guest Post by Nick Giambruno
This definitive sign of a currency collapse is easy to see…
It’s when paper money becomes trash.
Maybe you’ve seen images depicting hyperinflation in Germany after World War I. The German government had printed so much money that it became worthless confetti. Technically, German merchants still accepted the currency, but it was impractical. For example, it would have required wheelbarrows full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread.
At the time, no one would bother to pick up money off the ground. It wasn’t worth any more than the other crumpled pieces of paper on the street.
Continue reading “Whoever Does Not Respect the Penny is Not Worthy of the Dollar”
The PBS Frontline documentary above, “The Untouchables,” which originally aired in 2013, investigates the cause of the 2007-2009 financial crisis,1 and why Wall Street crooks escaped fraud charges related to the sale of bad mortgages. As explained by PBS:2
By Chris MacIntosh
There is momentous change taking place right now.
Part of a disturbing trend over the last few months has been one of financial institutions and governments stealing other people’s money in broad daylight.
Jeff Dorman wrote a worthwhile piece on the collapse of the LME as well as other associated topics. Continue reading “The World Order Has Changed… Here’s What it Means for Your Net Worth”
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
The way financial markets puked this week, they must have started reading the news. Let’s face it, the headlines are a little short of reassuring. The $6.49 price on a gallon of diesel is enough alone to tell you that the nation can’t do business the way it’s set up to do, and there isn’t a new model for running things ready to launch — not even Klaus Schwab’s utopia of robots and eunuchs.
What’s out there, rather, is a model of breakdown and collapse which the Woked-up, globalist neo-Jacobins are doing everything possible to hasten. US-inspired sanctions on Russia have quickly blown-up in America’s face. How’s that ban on Russian oil working? Do you understand that US shale oil — the bulk of our production — is exceptionally light in composition, meaning it contains not much of the heavier distillates like diesel and aviation fuel? ‘Tis so, alas. Truckers just won’t truck at $6.49-a-gallon, and before long they’ll be out of business altogether, especially the independents who have whopping mortgages on their rigs that won’t be paid. The equation is tearfully simple: no trucks = no US economy.
Submitted by Brewer55
Well, folks, we’re here.
Over the past decade I’ve written a few essays on the coming economic collapse of the USA. I noted in 2013 that the on-book national debt was an estimated $16 Trillion. The actual debt using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which includes all off-book obligations (promises of future payments such as Social Security, government retirement accounts, Medicare A & B, et.al.) was $238 Trillion. Today the on-book debt is $30.3 Trillion, not quite double what it was when I last wrote about this. We can reasonably assume the total debt according to GAAP is similarly doubled, all in at $450 Trillion.
The rest of the world loaned us such vast sums, merely because the dollar was the worlds’ reserve currency. And that worked, when the USA produced things of inherent value. Oil and gas, manufactured goods, electronics, software, infrastructure products, even textiles. These days we manufacture dollar bills (or digital currency), and shoot anyone who rejects them. But these strong-arm tactics have worked up until now because we basically slapped around weak countries to keep them in line. Anyone who attempted to “de-dollarise” has had economic sanctions put against them, or invaded, or “revolutions” fomented to facilitate the execution of such leaders who would dare to challenge the dollar hegemony. THIS is the real reason for US troops in Iraq, the desire to go to war with Iran, the NATO attacks of Libya, the attempts to start a war in Syria, the destabilization efforts in Turkey. In every single example listed, the leaders of those countries had announced their intentions to bypass the dollar. Even now, when Saudi Arabia announced they were negotiating with China to sell oil in Chinese Yuan, a missile was mysteriously launched from Yemen somewhere that wiped out a huge refinery in Saudi Arabia within a few days; quite the coincidence.
It’s been rightly said that “he who holds the gold makes the rules.”
After World War 2, the US had the largest gold reserves in the world, by far. Along with winning the war, this let the US reconstruct the global monetary system around the dollar.
The new system, created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, tied the currencies of virtually every country in the world to the US dollar through a fixed exchange rate. It also tied the US dollar to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce.
The dollar was said to be “as good as gold.”
On January 2, 1710, King Louis XIV of France was finally ready for peace.
After nearly seven decades on the throne (which still makes him the longest reigning sovereign monarch in human history), Louis XIV had seen more wars than he could probably remember.
Most recently, France had been fighting the War of Spanish Succession against virtually all of Europe. It had been incredibly costly — France alone suffered half a million casualties, plus the war had ruined the economy.
Continue reading “And yet, there’s still plenty of good news.”
“How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” – John Adams
Hemingway’s famous quote about going bankrupt connects with so many because it is true on a personal basis and a civilization basis. It applies to individuals and empires in decline – like the American democracy. John Adams realized two centuries ago democracy was no better than monarchy or aristocracy over the long haul. We were handed a Republic by Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries, but we failed to keep it almost from the very birth of this nation.
As we rush towards our World War 3 rendezvous with destiny, aided and abetted by politicians placed in power by globalist billionaires hellbent on the destruction of our way of life, so they own everything and you own nothing, I can’t help but ponder who is to blame and could we have avoided this dystopian outcome.
Whenever a movie has been a huge hit, the film industry tries to follow it up by doing a sequel. The sequel is almost invariably far more costly, as there’s the anticipation by those who create it that it will be an even bigger blockbuster than the original.
International Man: Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we discussed the rising tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine.
What is your take on what has transpired since then?
Doug Casey: I think it makes sense first to recount the genesis of this war.
It started when an American-backed coup overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. A US-backed thug replaced a Russian-backed thug— nothing unusual, except that Ukraine shares a long border with Russia. The Russians viewed that much as the Americans would if the Russians had put a puppet government in Ottawa.
Continue reading “Doug Casey on What Happens Next in the Conflict With Russia”