“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’s a stunning admission from the one person who has the most control over the US dollar, the current world reserve currency.
Ponzi schemes keep going until the perpetrator is stopped from the outside. They never stop by of their own volition. Bernie Madoff kept going until it all blew up.
In the year 2000 the Nasdaq composite exceeded a P/E of 200 before collapsing 78% by October 2002. The more successful a Ponzi the more egregious the bubble and resultant pain. The granddaddy of Ponzi — far greater than anything we’ve seen before — is our monetary system.
Continue reading “Here’s Why Our Monetary System is a Giant Ponzi Scheme”
Guest Post by Doug Casey
Editor’s Note: Resource expert and financier, Marin Katusa is Doug Casey’s longtime friend. He’s known for finding the most lucrative investment opportunities in the world. In fact, Doug invests his own resource money with him.
Below is a private conversation between Doug and Marin about their next big score.
We urge you to read what they have to say—including all the details on how you can get in on the action.
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International Man: Inflation, as measured by the government’s own crooked CPI statistics, recently hit a 40-year high. What is going on here?
Doug Casey: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) itself has been totally corrupted over the years, mainly by changing definitions of what it entails. That’s why it’s interesting to follow the work of a website called Shadow Statistics, where John Williams calculates the CPI and other government statistics using the parameters of 40 years ago.
Guest Post by Doug Casey
International Man: Recently, the Biden administration threatened Russia over Ukraine.
What’s really going on? Is the US government toying with the prospect of war with Russia over Ukraine?
Doug Casey: Over thousands of years of history, governments have always threatened each other with war. It’s a good part of what they do to justify their existence, and it’s been said, correctly, that war is the health of the state. Nothing has changed in that regard.
Continue reading “Doug Casey on the Likelihood of a Military Conflict Over Ukraine”
In advising those who are considering international diversification, the most common misconception I hear is that, “There’s not really anything you can do. The globalists are taking over the world and that means that there’s nowhere to go to escape them.”
Not so.
Clearly, much of what was at one time known as the “free world” is in a dramatic decline and this is most certainly due, in large part, to globalists. Consequently, those who live in one of the declining countries assume that the world mirrors what exists in the country in which they live.
Many of these people tend to be fatalists and assume that they have no options. However, throughout history, there have always been countries (and empires) that were in the declining stages of their “shelf-life.” But, likewise, there have also always been those countries that were on the rise at the same time.
Guest post by Doug Casey
International Man: Lee Kuan Yew, the former leader of Singapore, once said:
“The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance.
It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
What is your take?
Doug Casey: China has united 1.4 billion people into a single political entity, so of course they have a lot of weight. But simply having masses of people under your political control doesn’t mean as much as it used to.
China would still be a poverty-stricken non-entity if it hadn’t been for the reforms that Deng Xiaoping made starting in 1980. Masses of uneducated, desperately poor peasants are more of a liability than an asset in the modern world. Deng transformed China’s economy into something that functions pretty much like those in the West. But now, Xi Jinping seems to be returning to the philosophy of Chairman Mao, with much more centralized control. That’s very negative for the country.
Secondly, China’s demographics are horrible. The average woman today only has 1.4 children. Low reproduction rates are to be expected when a society urbanizes. But China also had a draconian one-child policy starting in 1980 that only ended in 2015. That, and the fact the Chinese prefer males for cultural reasons, compounded the phenomenon.
Few people in the West realize that as a result of these things, the Chinese population is in steep decline. UN projections—which aren’t worth much but are still interesting—find that by the end of this century, their population could collapse to 600 or 700 million. And they’ll mostly be old people, so it’s not going to bounce back quickly.
Continue reading “Doug Casey on the Rise of China… And What it Means for the World”
International Man: The average person doesn’t care about economics. But to the extent that he does, he only reads mainstream publications like The Economist and editorials in The New York Times.
In these publications, the average person will find so-called economists advocating upside-down and destructive concepts like negative interest rates, banning cash, debt-fueled consumption, government spending, and rampant money printing as the cures to economic ailments.
And if those methods don’t work—or inflict damage—the establishment economists’ response is to simply call for more money printing, more debt, and even lower interest rates.
What’s your take on conventional economic thinking and methods?
Continue reading “Doug Casey on How Economic Witch Doctors Convince Everyone They’re Neurosurgeons”
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
For many years now there has been a contingent of alternative economists working diligently within the liberty movement to combat disinformation being spread by the mainstream media regarding America’s true economic condition. Our efforts have focused primarily on the continued devaluation of the dollar and the forced dependence on globalism that has outsourced and eliminated most U.S. manufacturing and production of raw materials.
The problems of devaluation and stagflation have been present since 1916 when the Federal Reserve was officially formed and given power, but the true impetus for a currency collapse and the destruction of American buying power began in 2007-2008 when the Financial Crisis was used as an excuse to allow the Fed to create trillions upon trillions in stimulus dollars for well over a decade.
The mainstream media’s claim has always been that the Fed “saved” the U.S. from imminent collapse and that the central bankers are “heroes.” After all, stock markets have mostly skyrocketed since quantitative easing (QE) was introduced during the credit crash, and stock markets are a measure of economic health, right?
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Four monster waves are about to crash onto the Fed’s beach party and sweep away the unwary revelers.
Hey, is the water in the bay receding? Never mind, free drinks are on the Federal Reserve, so party on, life’s a beach, asset bubbles will never pop, we’re safe. Of course you are. The Fed is all-powerful and would never let a rogue wave turn all its precious phantom wealth into broken detritus.
The water is fast receding and a wave is visible if you care to look, but nobody cares to look. Why bother? The Fed is invincible, that’s all you need to know to mint another fortune.
Just to keep life interesting, let’s look anyway. Gordon Long and I discuss four monster waves that are about to crash onto the Fed’s beach party and sweep away the unwary revelers:
Continue reading “Life’s A Beach Until The Tsunami Hits: Four Waves Nobody Cares About…Yet”
“Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” – Galations 6
“I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me. Sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize: the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety. It simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.” – George Carlin
In a previous article – Cascade of Consequences – I attempted to make the case the ruthless billionaire oligarchs and their bought off lackey whores in government, media, academia, corporations, the military industrial complex, sickcare industry, and Federal Reserve have used this engineered covid pandemia to further consolidate and expand their wealth, power and control over a frightened, willfully ignorant, compliant populace. In the month since that article the “powers that be” have ramped up the fear, increased their coercive mandates, reinstated mask mandates, and instituted vaccine passports in liberal bastion cities across America.
I see these ham-handed authoritarian dictates as a sign of weakness and their false narrative falling apart. A sense of desperation wafts from the halls of power in DC, corporate executive suites, and left-wing media outlets on the coasts who have overplayed their tyrannical hand. Resistance is building among an irate minority of critical thinking individuals who follow George Carlin’s first rule.
Guest Post by Antonius Aquinas
Traditional Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson’s latest missive should be a wake- up call for those who naively believe that the worst is behind for the US and Western economies after the March financial sell off and the long-anticipated implosion of the bubble economy. His Excellency asserts that the US and much of the world are on a financial precipice:
At this moment the United States has been brought to the brink of a tremendous
economic crisis, and with the USA, the rest of the world.*
Bishop Williamson contends that it has not only been the response to the virus, but more importantly, the response to the bursting of the financial bubble, created by the Fed, which will ultimately lead to a cataclysmic collapse:
As I’ve been observing the actions and justifications of men like Jerome Powell, Anthony Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, Joe Biden and Donald Trump during this self-inflicted global depression, I can’t help but channel the iconic American actor Clint Eastwood and his most famous role – Dirty Harry, when assessing whether they have an understanding of their limitations. If a man doesn’t know his limitations, he can ruin his own life.
When men in positions of immense power don’t know their limitations, they can ruin the world, destroying the lives of millions and propelling the world towards a catastrophic financial collapse and likely global conflict. Our benevolent leaders act as if they know what is best for mankind, when they are actually flailing about blindly, corrupted by their own power and wealth, leading us on a path to destruction, because their immense egos won’t allow them to humbly admit their dreadful mistakes and take corrective actions.
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy.
A collapse of major chunks of the economy is widely viewed as “impossible” because the federal government can borrow and spend unlimited amounts of money because the Federal Reserve can create unlimited amounts of money: the government borrows $1 trillion by selling $1 trillion in Treasury bonds, the Fed prints $1 trillion dollars to buy the bonds. Rinse and repeat to near-infinity.
Continue reading “Here’s Why The “Impossible” Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable”
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
If this (first?) summer of Covid-19 has revealed anything about the current version of civilization, it’s the profound exhaustion of a culture reduced to going through the motions of its once-vital activities. A lot of things that we hope will come back are probably gone forever in the form we knew them, though they will eventually return in another configuration, reduced in scale, but perhaps finer in quality.
Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
Well, the Virus Patrol sure has done it. In a fit of reckless overkill they have managed to vaporize six years of economic growth during the last 90 days. And that’s just by the mechanical reckoning of the GDP accounts, where total output in Q2 weighed in at essentially the same level as Q4 2014.
The real damage is far deeper, however, and is reflected in millions of small businesses permanently destroyed, tens of millions of households wiped-out financially and the vicious daisy chain of delinquencies, deferrals and defaults just beginning to rip through the $78 trillion edifice of debt which entombs the US economy.
Continue reading “Stockman Slams “Lockdown Lunacy” – Your Government Ordered Depression Has Arrived”