Gold – Page 40 – The Burning Platform

THE WEST REHYPOTHECATES, THE EAST TAKES

Change is coming. The sociopathic ruling class think they have it figured out. China and Russia are calling their bluff. And it is a bluff. The end game will not be pretty.

Where We Are At In the Global Precious Metals Markets – A Framework

“We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake.

Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K.”

Edward ‘Steady Eddie’ George, Governor Bank of England 1993-2003

The general hypothesis I have put forward over a period of time at this café is that with the spike in the price of gold up to $1900, the central banks of the West became greatly concerned, and opted for a lower price, and a more orderly rise. And so the price of gold was smacked down into a trading range between $1540 and $1780 through the various price and market operations of some central and bullion banks in what we can think of as a gold pool.

As you may recall, the great sea change was that central banks turned from being net sellers to net buyers of gold, slowly over a ten year period from 2000-2010 approximately. This change of policy was not uniform, but driven largely from the emerging and re-emerging nations. It ought not to surprise us. No fiat currency has survived for long in historical terms, and even fewer as the world’s reserve currency, unless backed by an unassailable empire. They will fall to Triffin’s Dilemma, and the decay of power to self-serving and short-sighted corruption.

Forces similar to those that are working against the EU monetary union, without a comprehensive political union, are working against the dollar global reserve currency, on a much larger and slower paced scale. This is why a global currency issued and controlled by one central entity tends to presume a one world governance, or at least a cohesive governance of a rather large piece of it. It is not incidental to their financial goals.

In late 2012 the Deutsche Bundesbank requested, albeit under some domestic political duress and after a polite request to audit the gold was deferred, to have the return of some portion of their nation’s gold from its wartime home in New York and Paris.

The NY Fed responded with a rather surprising timeline of seven years for the return of what ought otherwise be a fairly doable amount of gold, despite what the Lord Haw Haw’s of the Western gold pool might otherwise have you believe. The gold pool is a consortium of central banks, bullion banks, and purveyors of paper gold in various unallocated forms who are beholden to a vested interest in a very powerful status quo.

In their desire to control the price of gold, the gold pool has leased out a fair amount of their national bullion holdings to the bullion banks, who in turn sold it into the markets to hold down the price. A rising price was risky for the confidence of their paper money, and rising demand placed a strain on their ability to supply additional gold to supplement what the miners could produce. And so it appears that Germany’s gold was unavailable.

With the unfortunate circumstance of the gold of the German people threatening their deal to maintain confidence in their currency arrangements, the central/bullion banks of the West were once again ‘staring into the abyss.’

How could anyone even imagine that government sources, who traffic in public confidence, could allow such a thing to happen, so blatantly abuse their powers, and prevaricate to the public? It would be a tremendous loss of face, and personal career risk. And so absent a whistleblower, the goal is to keep the game going at all costs.

So starting in late 2012, a major push began to manage physical gold away from the West’s ETFs, to relieve the short term supply constraints, which involved driving the price lower, and once again mobilizing the troops to talk the metal down. Please notice the difference in the inventory of silver and gold, both of which had comparable price declines.

This gambit worked to some extent in the West, but overall it failed, miserably. Demand for physical bullion skyrocketed in the East, as Asia took advantage of the lower bullion prices to increase their official/private offtake of bullion. The West rehypothecates, but Asia takes. And that taking presents a heavy toll to a highly leveraged trade.

Apparently the people of Asia for the most part did not agree with the Western economists and brokers that gold was undesirable, for whatever reasons they hold, with a strong basis in human history I should add. Let’s call it a difference of opinion amongst ‘peers.’

In a very real sense we should remember that gold is gold, and the price of gold is more like a currency exchange rate than the price of a commodity. And so one can think of this entire scenario as a major defense of the dollar at some ideal exchange rate to gold, in much the same manner that the Bank of England sought to defend a particular valuation of the pound.

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So here we are today, with gold at a level somewhat below $1250 and silver at $20. And the Comex deliverable gold is at record lows, and indications, albeit somewhat difficult to obtain, of continuing strains for producers (e.g. miners) to continue adding to supply, in the face of a shrinking discretionary market for physical gold (scrap, ETFs, exchanges). And those who are managing the floats in the market, the unallocated, forward sold, and rehypothecated, are fundamentally shitting their pants, and seek to sit in it with smiling faces lest they give their vulnerable positions away.

The gold pool can rehypothecate and leverage physical gold by multiples into paper, and outright create it with naked short selling. And they can sell this paper in bulk at whatever they wish in the markets which they control. And they can use positional advantage and their media to bully boy anyone who dares to question this into silence. But they cannot print gold bullion and deliver it to Asia, which quite frankly does not care what they say.

In general this is what is referred to at the divergence between the paper and physical gold markets. It is what happens when ‘semi-official’ forces endeavor to set an artificially low price in a market that involves some physical commodity which is in a somewhat limited supply. It tends to become more limited as a result.

But the supply of paper gold is not limited, especially where things like position limits and leverage are given the wink and a nod behind a wall of opaque obfuscation. And like the reckless fools that they are, they decided late in 2012 to press their advantage hard, with shock and awe, and they are failing.

So this is why I think things will unravel in a manner similar to the London Gold Pool’s operation which sought to set an artificially low price. How exactly this will unravel is a matter of much conjecture. I doubt it will break at the source of the paper gold, given the power the insiders have over the rules and information there. Rather, there is more likely to be a strain at some physical delivery source that will cause the current pool to back up the price higher to some more sustainable level. What that will be I cannot say.

What is driving this current dynamic is what is called the ‘currency war,’ which is shorthand for a difference of opinion amongst the world powers over the existing global currency trade regime, and the trustworthiness of the financial system that supports it.

China, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela et al. have lined up their interests against the Anglo-American banking cartel which rides the wave of dollar hegemony.

If you think about this a bit, how would you feel if China’s yuan was the world’s currency, in which your country held its savings, and with which it paid for important and useful things like oil. And what if China decided it could print as many yuan as it liked for its own purposes, thank you very much, and distributed them as they wished to its favorite banks and friends. You would not like it one bit, it would make you rather uneasy, especially if the Chinese mouthpieces in academia started talking about trillion yuan platinum coins to resolve their own internal political corruption.

So, the most likely outcome is a compromise, in which a basket of currencies and a commodity or two like gold, are bundled together into an artificial currency for world trade. This way no one country, or group of countries, held the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of owning the world’s currency.

Quite to the point, I think much of what we are seeing now is the ‘negotiation stage’ of this process. It is not so much a question of outcome, but rather, of price. What is to be included and at what valuation to the various world currencies. I would be stunned if there was a return to an actual gold standard. I would prefer to see the price of gold float freely without an official government valuation or the thinly disguised monkey shines of the Comex. But such antics seem to be de rigueur in most financial markets as we have recently learned.

As you might imagine, the existing power structure might choose to continue to fight this rather aggressively, since there are no such enjoyable privileges as exorbitant ones. Especially if there is a partnership between the political and financial class to maintain their privilege for themselves and their favorite one percent of their constituents. But they must also contend with their waning power, and significantly low approval and discontent at home. Pushing questions of one’s authority are ill-advised when you cannot be sure of the answer.

And perhaps the biggest unspoken risk-that-must-not-be-named is the credibility trap. What will the people say if they discover that the Bankers have taken their gold in order to give it to their banking cronies for short term profits? Yes they will wrap it in rationalizations, excuses, jingoism, and personal immunities, but when the cards fall on the table, the thefts will be uncovered.

So here we are. Those who think they know what will happen next probably have not given it sufficient thought. I have a range of ten scenarios, in four major groupings, that are all fairly plausible. There are some very large exogenous variables involved that no one can predict with much accuracy.

Perhaps some day I will categorize them more cleanly and attempt to lay them out. But for now it is enough work to know what to look for. Watch the UK as I have said, as it may be a bellwether for various reasons of size and composition, and continental Europe, to see if they will accept the role of a ‘patsy’ for the Gold Pool. And of course watch China and Russia, and the areas of tensions around them.

What happens next is that one way or the other change will come. Of that I am sure.

KRUGMAN – DISGRACED INTELLECTUALLY CORRUPT STATIST

Paul Krugman On Money: Why Economics Has Become a Disgraced Profession

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

“I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.

Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.”

James K. Galbraith

There are several somewhat surprising assertions in this piece below from Paul Krugman, which left me almost speechless. But not quite.

I might be unfair in taking it seriously, or more seriously than one should do with what could be just a politically motivated puff piece. The Western central banks seem to be ‘in a jam’ as it were, and now is the time for all their men to come to the aid of the financial status quo.

First, Krugman is touting the fiat petro-dollar as somehow humanitarian, as compared to apparently the worst mine he could find, in order to throw stones at the gold industry. Or presumably anything real that comes out of or off of the ground for that matter, including natural resources and agricultural products, because one can find abuse of labour in all of them.

This is so off handed hypocritical as to be mind-boggling.

I think we can stipulate that abuses of capital and power can and do exist in any human endeavor, and the proper but occasionally underutilized role of government is to mitigate them.

Considering the carnage that the financial industry and the Banks have wreaked on the real economies of the world, I hope the hypocrisy here is obvious to anyone with any sense of current events whatsoever. Certainly we have no excuse to blind ourselves to the all too recent and terrible role of crony capitalism in destroying lives around the world in the endless pursuit of power, and the supremacy of greed. And that power is based largely on the dollar.

This is the great failing in Modern Monetary Theory. It assumes that if we make the creation of money easy enough, it will make the people who hold that power naturally virtuous, because it takes less effort to be good and so they will choose to be good.

This is the Zimbabwe school of public policy, and the John Law Institute of Economic Thought. The ‘scholar-gentry’ somehow imagine themselves as nature’s virtuous wise men, operating for the objective good, but the serial bubbles and crises in the West over the past twenty years show how this assumption is part of the efficient market hypothesis: a romantic canard.

Then Paul Krugman takes on Bitcoin. He posits it as based on a great mine located in Iceland that creates bit coins because it is cold there and electricity is cheap. I thought he might be speaking sardonically, but I’m not so sure.

Engineering students I know and their college friends mine bitcoins and litecoins from their dorm rooms, which are not particularly cold, but where electricity is essentially free. However the amount of electricity used is so minimal that it really doesn’t matter. But this is besides the real point.

What threw me for a loop was his snarky punch line designed to put the whole idea of Bitcoin to bed.

“we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold” that consists of nothing but strings of digits…”

If this is not the very description of the modern dollar, except for the burning up resources line, used by Ben Bernanke in his famous speech in which he says that deflation is not a problem for a Fed that ‘owns a printing press,’ I don’t know what is. I might say misallocating resources to the financial sector rather than burning up resources, but that may be a nicety.

Krugman derides Bitcoin as ‘virtual gold’ but in reality it is much closer to ‘virtual dollars’ because both are created out of essentially nothing but a few key strokes and cycles on a computing machine.

Bitcoin has a limiting factor built in to it. Gold has a limiting factor in its natural scarcity.

The primary difference is that the dollar is backed by the power of the state, and bitcoins are relatively stateless, which is their weakness. Gold’s power is that the state cannot create it, merely abuse it.

This whole ‘progress’ concept is just a canard, as is the localizing of the view of gold to a few eccentric gold bugs.

If China and a few other central banks were not buying gold, and in size, there would be no issue here, and the status quo based on the Western dollar would not feel so threatened. Are China and these others merely ignorant gold bugs? Or are they reacting to a situation in a way that people have done throughout history?

They are seeking a refuge from the abuse of power by a status quo.

There is a classic policy disagreement about the international monetary system underway, which some have taken to calling a currency war, and most establishment economists are ignoring it, or talking it down. And this is why the next financial crisis is going to hit them smack in the face, like the last two crises which they aided and abetted, if nothing by their silent acquiescence.

Fiat money has been tried many, many times in the past, especially over the last few centuries. It has ended in the same manner every time.

As Bernard Baruch himself observed, ‘gold has worked since the times of Alexander.’ Baruch understood money and markets. But he was no servile economist, caught in a credibility trap.

Rather than dealing with reality, and understanding why people throughout history seems to be ‘voting’ in certain ways when there is a choice, and why China and other Asian and Mideastern nations and their central banks are buying gold in sizable quantities, Mr. Krugman just writes this off as some eccentricity, because it does not fit his model of how things should be.

And this is the stance of a statist, and it requires increasing use of force as people reject its falsity. It appears to be mere sophistry in the service of power, and it is unworthy. But this is economics today, cheerleaders for their favorite brand of political power. It is after all a social science more often used to rationalize rather then explain, except in its most basic elements and in its practical microeconomic applications.

Arguing for stimulus without acknowledging and addressing the flaws and obvious policy mistakes in the system that have led to multiple and increasingly destructive asset bubbles is beyond reckless, and almost wanton. But it is politically advantageous.

If Mr. Krugman were to honestly study what money is, rather than what he wishes it to be, things might be clearer and his thinking might be richer. Alan Greenspan has done this, but then he subordinated his knowledge to his careerist aspirations.

And perhaps this is what exercised me to write this more than anything else. As an academic economist and ‘very serious person,’ Krugman is arguing like a Fox news anchor, assaulting knowledge to score his political points. He is cloaking his policy advocacy in the trappings of his profession, and he thereby cheapens it. And this is why it has become disgraced.

Let me be clear on this. I am not proposing that gold become a new monetary standard. I think that a new international monetary regime will evolve, and that gold will play some part.

But I am saying that the public policy proposals put forward by economists are too often stuff and nonsense, merely rationales used to promote whatever ideology or power group they believe in, or seek to curry favour with, in the first place. And that the power to create money and distribute it is a deadly power, and has led to failures repeatedly over and over again. So safeguards must be taken with it.

And if gold is such a dead issue, then why does Krugman need to argue so bitterly against it, resorting to sophistry and ridicule and appeals to authority? It is because he is trying to force an argument against the will of a sizeable portion of the world’s people. It is a policy battle, with good points and bad points. But he chooses not to argue it honestly, exposing the good and the bad, but politically and cheaply.

These economic ‘laws’ are almost always arguments, but not proofs. But cloaked as proofs they help to overturn common sense all too often, and this has proven to be a tragedy as is so common with all quack scientific theories.

As I noted a few weeks ago:

“Economics is a profession that succumbed almost en masse, whether by individual actions or the complicit silence of careerism, to the pervasive corruption of financial fraud, and of the persuasive power of Wall Street, the Banks, and big money. The only group that approaches their failure is the national political and financial class, including the accountants and the regulators.

For the most part this has not yet changed because of the unreformed state of the financial system, combined with the snare of the credibility trap. And they cover their shame by calling themselves the ‘scholar-gentry’ and tut tutting about the failure of the public in much the same tones that the plutocrats of past colonial empires would agonize over the plight of the victims of their perfidy in terms of the white man’s burden.”

I strongly suspect that some of the Western central banks, led on by the bullion banks, have made some awful policy errors in the disposition of their nation’s resources over the past ten years. They have committed resources to what they considered a just cause without sufficient diligence, things do not rightly belong to them, thinking that they could retrieve them at some future date without too much effort.

And like any other client of the banks, they have been taken. With the inability to return the national gold to Germany as their people requested, they were staring into the abyss. So they seek to cover this up, and thereby keep digging themselves into an ever deeper hole. And this will prove to be worse than the original deed. It will destroy careers.

The would-be ruling class envisions a relatively unconstrained money supply as a tool amenable to the beneficent use of themselves as philosopher-kings. And it is a romantic falsehood like efficient market theory. Whose fiat?

Such a monetary authority gives the power to determine and distribute value and worth to a relatively small group of people who act on their own authority, and too often in secrecy. Well, we essentially have had that for some time, and as Dr. Phil might say, ‘And how’s that been working for you?

Like so many other romantic notions of the past, the implementation of romantic ideals in pursuit of a paradise would quite likely result in a hell on earth. The resort to force will become increasingly predatory, self-serving, and relentless.

Addendum: I have address Paul Krugman’s ‘quote’ from Adam Smith in more detail here.

NYT Times Op-Ed Columnist
Bits and Barbarism
By Paul Krugman
December 22, 2013

This is a tale of three money pits. It’s also a tale of monetary regress — of the strange determination of many people to turn the clock back on centuries of progress.

The first money pit is an actual pit — the Porgera open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s top producers. The mine has a terrible reputation for both human rights abuses (rapes, beatings and killings by security personnel) and environmental damage (vast quantities of potentially toxic tailings dumped into a nearby river). But gold prices, while down from their recent peak, are still three times what they were a decade ago, so dig they must.

The second money pit is a lot stranger: the Bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland. Bitcoin is a digital currency that has value because … well, it’s hard to say exactly why, but for the time being at least people are willing to buy it because they believe other people will be willing to buy it. It is, by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.

Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use. (Paul K. does not understand how Bitcoin works.

The third money pit is hypothetical. Back in 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that increased government spending was needed to restore full employment. But then, as now, there was strong political resistance to any such proposal.

Clever stuff — but Keynes wasn’t finished. He went on to point out that the real-life activity of gold mining was a lot like his thought experiment. Gold miners were, after all, going to great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner was gold dug up than much of it was buried again, in places like the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where hundreds of thousands of gold bars sit, doing nothing in particular.

Keynes would, I think, have been sardonically amused to learn how little has changed in the past three generations. Public spending to fight unemployment is still anathema; miners are still spoiling the landscape to add to idle hoards of gold. (Keynes dubbed the gold standard a “barbarous relic.”) Bitcoin just adds to the joke. Gold, after all, has at least some real uses, e.g., to fill cavities; but now we’re burning up resources to create “virtual gold” that consists of nothing but strings of digits…

Read the entire op-ed here.

Posted by Jesse

WE THE STATE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU

Hugo believes the ruling class will retain their control and power by re-setting the world monetary system, with gold as part of the new system. I believe the ruling class will attempt this “solution” to their reckless destruction of the existing monetary system, but they will likely lose control and havoc, war, and revolution will occur before some new system is put in place. Solutions based on consensus and compromise DON’T happen in Fourth Turnings.

The Siren-song of Welfare State

Hugo Salinas Price

Our world is run – and has been run for some time now – by a relatively very small group of individuals who have it in their power to manage, as they think, the economies of nations. Managing the affairs of a nation implies making people behave in ways in which they would not otherwise behave. National management of an economy thus means making millions of individuals do what they wouldn’t do if left to themselves.

There is not one single national economy in the world today whose people are free to do as they wish; it is not so much that people are forbidden to do what they think best, as that their choices are being narrowed, day by day, to being able to do only what is allowed.

One of the very first choices which free individuals made thousands of years ago was the choice of the money they would use in their exchanges of goods and services; after using other substances such as salt, or copper, or sea-shells, they finally chose gold and silver for use as money, because all humanity valued these metals above all other substances, and consequently gold and silver were the most convenient substances to use as money.

The fact that today we are deprived of the possibility of using these metals as money indicates that we are worse off than our ancestors who lived several thousand years ago. We are forced to use fictitious money provided by our managers and masters. One important consequence of using fiat money is that it inevitably leads to making bad investment decisions.

It is clear that if we are not allowed to do what we think best, anything else we do must be second, or third, or fourth best for our interest, and anyone who takes second best for what is in his interest, is incurring a loss. Our economic world has been so weakened and distorted by accumulated losses and false investments that it is now beyond repair.

More than 7.3 billion human beings live in today’s world, and except for those living in the jungles or the deserts, not one of us can act freely to further his interest. We are all of us incurring losses, whether we are conscious of this fact or not.

Add up all these losses and mistaken investments and you have the present world, avoiding bankruptcy and total collapse by skating over thin ice.

The idea that national economies can and should be managed prevails throughout the world. Thus, the world is being “managed” into instability; at some point an accident will happen, and we shall fall through the thin ice into the deathly cold water.

We are witnessing the failure of efforts to restore “growth” to the economies of the West; China’s economy appears to be headed for serious trouble in the near future; the Japanese leadership is resorting to desperate measures to revive the economy of Japan. The US is in the grip of an outlandish policy to monetize $85 billion dollars a month out of nothing, and it is likely that the monetization will soon increase in volume.

In 1956 the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev uttered his famous prophecy, “We will bury you!” at a reunion with Western diplomats.

His prophecy is coming true, for there is precious little difference between a world of managed economies, and a Socialist world. All Socialist economies are managed economies, and all managed economies are on the way to becoming full-fledged Socialist economies. The difference is that a “managed economy” sounds acceptable, or even quite normal, to a large number of people, whereas the word “Socialism” is repellent to many people. The words have changed, but not the substance.

In the 1920’s, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian intellectual, wrote about how political institutions are supported by a hegemony made up of people who hold the same views and values. Since “the managed economy” enjoys the support of a hegemony throughout the world today, we must understand that Socialism is not some threat that vanished with the fall of the USSR; we are living in a world that is in the process of becoming Socialist. Khrushchev was right!

Gramsci was a dwarfish hunchback and in my opinion, he attempted to compensate for his deformity by taking up Communism and applying his intellect to destroying the world which regarded him as defective. He spent most of his last days in a jail to which Mussolini consigned him and died an early death in 1937.

Gramsci’s method for introducing Socialism was not by means of violent revolution, but by creating the hegemony which would support Socialism. The hegemony would be created by using the right words to gather popular support for Socialism. This is what we are seeing today: people are satisfied with the concept of “the managed economy” when what it really leads to is Socialism. Thus, the hegemony for Socialism is in fact installed in the whole world.

We know what happened to the Soviet Union: it collapsed in bankruptcy. The USSR, which deluded intellectuals hailed as “the moral light of the world” while they turned blind eyes to its mass starvations, its Gulags and the terror of its secret services, turned out to be unsustainable. The difference between the Soviet Union and the world today is only one of degree, not of essence. Our world awaits the same collapse which overtook the Soviet Union.

It seems likely to me that a new international monetary order will be implemented, either before or after the final inevitable collapse of the present monetary system. It seems probable, as of now, that any new monetary order will have to include gold in some way. Gold will re-acquire importance, which will be reflected in a much higher price for gold, incorporated into a new international monetary system. The extraordinary accumulation of gold by China indicates that it is preparing for this change, and this cannot be taking place without the consent of those who dominate the West: the low price of gold is deliberately facilitating the process of preparation for the coming change.

However, a return to an unadulterated Gold Standard in conjunction with the re-introduction of the system of Real Bills, as advocated by Antal E. Fekete, seems highly unlikely to me. Such a change seems impossible, given that there is no hegemony, to use Gramsci’s term, to support such a political move: it would be politically impossible to institute such a system, because it would require discarding, at enormous human cost, all the uneconomic structures which have been imposed upon the world, as well as the elimination of the powerful group that now governs the world through those structures. Those who rule the world are certainly not going to reform themselves out of power; it would be a mistake to think otherwise.

The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, has called for the “de-americanization” of the world. What that implies is clear: the Chinese intend to have a say in how the world is ruled.

As I interpret reports, it seems to me that those who run China are quite unaware of the problem of misallocation of resources which arises from three causes: a) a fractional-reserve system of banking which expands fiat money credit beyond real savings; b) a fiat-issuing central bank which “fixes” interest rates and c) banking which indulges in mismatching maturities, by granting long-term credits matched against supposedly sight liabilities to depositors. China applies these conventional modern banking practices on a massive scale, proportionate to the enormous population of China.

If China manages its economy according to the same fallacious principles that prevail in the rest of the world, what different, healthy measures could we expect from China, as a leading power addressing the profound damage suffered by the world’s economic structure during the past century?

The inclusion of gold into a new international monetary order can only mean a re-distribution of the power enjoyed by those who rule. This implies that gold will not return as money used by individuals. The world will be told that the new monetary system is “backed” by gold; individuals may buy and sell gold, but they will not have gold in their hands as money. We shall have a new monetary system which will instill renewed confidence, but which will remain fundamentally flawed.

The use of gold in the new international monetary system will be reflected in increased power over the management of individual national economies.

The long-term outcome – World Socialism – will remain the same, as long as the hegemony responds favorably to the familiar strains of the siren-song: “Do not worry, do not strive; do not think for yourself; do not attempt to provide for yourself and your dear ones; do as you are told and we – the State – will take care of you.”

It may be some time before humanity ceases to listen to that song.

WHAT YOUR OWNERS REALLY THINK ABOUT GOLD

They don’t care about you. They care about their wealth, power and control. Always remember that. They are your owners. You are their property.

What A Confidential 1974 Memo To Paul Volcker Reveals About America’s True Views On Gold, Reserve Currency And “PetroGold”

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/11/2013 22:09 -0500

Just over four years ago, we highlighted a recently declassified top secret 1968 telegram to the Secretary of State from the American Embassy in Paris, in which the big picture thinking behind the creation of the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (rolled out shortly thereafter in 1969), or SDRs, was laid out. In that memo it was revealed that despite what some may think, the fundamental driver behind the promotion of a supranational reserve paper currency had one goal in mind: allowing the US to “remain masters of gold.”

Specifically, this is among the top secret paragraphs said on a cold night in March 1968:

If we want to have a chance to remain the masters of gold an international agreement on the rules of the game as outlined above seems to be a matter of urgency. We would fool ourselves in thinking that we have time enough to wait and see how the S.D.R.’s will develop. In fact, the challenge really seems to be to achieve by international agreement within a very short period of time what otherwise could only have been the outcome of a gradual development of many years.

This then puts into question just what the true purpose of the IMF is. Because while its stated role of preserving the stability in developing, and increasingly more so, developed, countries is a noble one, what appears to have been the real motive behind the monetary fund’s creation, was to promote and encourage the development of a substitute reserve currency, the SDR, and to ultimately use it as the de facto buffer and intermediary, for conversion of all the outstanding “barbarous relic” hard currency, namely gold, into the fiat of the future: the soon to be newly created SDR. All the while, and increasingly more so as more countries converted their gold into SDR, such remaining hard currency would be almost exclusively under the control of the United States.

Well, in the intervening 44 years, the SDR never managed to take off, the reason being that the dollar’s reserve currency status was exponentially cemented courtesy of both the great moderation of the 1980s and the derivative explosion of the 1990s and post Glass Steagall repeal 2000s, when the world was literally flooded with roughly $1 quadrillion in USD-denominated derivatives, inextricably tying the fate of the world to that of the dollar.

However, back in 1974, shortly after Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system, and cemented the dollar’s fate as a fiat currency, no longer convertible into gold, the future of the SDR was still bright, especially at a time when the US seemed set to suffer a very unpleasant date with inflationary reality following the 1973 oil crisis, leading to a potential loss of faith in the US dollar.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s article: the international monetary system, reserve currency status, SDRs, and, of course, gold… again.

Below is a memo written in 1974 by Sidney Weintraub, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Finance and Development, to Paul Volcker, when he was still just Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs and not yet head of the Federal Reserve. The source of the memo was found in the National Archives, RG 56, Office of the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Files of Under Secretary Volcker, 1969–1974, Accession 56–79–15, Box 1, Gold—8/15/71–2/9/72. No classification marking. A stamped notation on the note reads: “Noted by Mr. Volcker.” Another notation, dated March 8, indicates that copies were sent to Bennett and Cross. It currently resides in declassified form in Document 61, Foreign Relations Of The United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI Foreign Economic Policy, and is found at the Office of the Historian website.

The memo is a continuation of the US thinking on the issue of the then brand new SDR, the fate of paper currencies, and the preservation of US control over reserve currency status. Most importantly, it addresses several approaches to dominating gold as well as the US’ interest of banning gold from monetary system and capping the free market price, contrasted by the opposing demands of various European deficit countries (sound familiar?) on what the fate of gold should be at a time when the common European currency did not exist, and some European countries were willing to fund their deficits with gold: something the US naturally was not happy about.

While we urge readers to read the full memo on their own, here the two punchlines.

First, here is what the S intentions vis-a-vis gold truly are when stripped away of all rhetoric:

U.S. objectives for world monetary system—a durable, stable system, with the SDR [ZH: or USD] as a strong reserve asset at its center — are incompatible with a continued important role for gold as a reserve asset.… It is the U.S. concern that any substantial increase now in the price at which official gold transactions are made would strengthen the position of gold in the system, and cripple the SDR [ZH: or USD].

In other words: gold can not be allowed to dominated a “durable, stable system”, and a rising gold price would cripple the reserve currency du jour: well known by most, but always better to see it admitted in official Top Secret correspondence.

We continue:

To encourage and facilitate the eventual demonetization of gold, our position is to keep the present gold price, maintain the present Bretton Woods agreement ban against official gold purchases at above the official price and encourage the gradual disposition of monetary gold through sales in the private market. An alternative route to demonetization could involve a substitution of SDRs for gold with the IMF, with the latter selling the gold gradually on the private market, and allocating the profits on such sales either to the original gold holders, or by other agreement…. Any redefinition of the role of gold must be based on the principle stated above: that SDR must become the center of the system and that there can be no question of introducing a new form of gold– paper and gold–metal bimetallism, in which the SDR and gold would be in competition.

And there, in three sentences, you have all the deep thinking behind the IMF’s SDR: simply to use it as a vehicle through which a select few can accumulate gold (namely those who can create fiat SDRs d novo), while handing out paper “profits” to the happy sellers.

And just in case it was not quite clear, here it is again, point blank:

Option 3: Complete short-term demonetization of gold through an IMF substitution facility. Countries could give up their gold holdings to the IMF in exchange for SDRs. The gold could then be sold gradually, over time, by the IMF to the private market. Profits from the gold sales could be distributed in part to the original holders of the gold, allowing them to realize at least part of the capital gains, while part of the profits could be utilized for other purposes, such as aid to LDCs. Advantages: This would achieve our goal of demonetization and relieve the problem of gold immobility, since the SDRs received in exchange could be used for settlement with no fear of foregoing capital gains. Disadvantages: This might be a more rapid demonetization than several countries would accept. There would be no benefit from the viewpoint of financing oil imports with gold sales to Arabs (although it is not necessarily incompatible with such an arrangement).

One wonders just who in the “private market” would be stupid enough to convert their invaluable paper money into worthless, barbaric relics?

And finally, was there the tiniest hint of a proposed alternative system to the PetroDollar. Namely, PetroGold?

There is a belief among certain Europeans that a higher price of gold for settlement purposes would facilitate financing of oil imports… Although mobilization of gold for intra-EC settlement would help in the financing of imbalances among EC countries, it would not, of itself, provide resources for the financing of the anticipated deficit with the oil producers. For this purpose, it would be useful if the oil producers would invest some of their excess revenues in gold purchases from deficit EC countries at close to a market price. This would be an attractive proposal for European countries, and for the U.S., in that it would not involve future interest burdens and would avoid immediate problems arising from increased Arab ownership of European and American industry. (The Arabs could both sell the gold and use the proceeds for direct investment, so that the industry ownership problem would not be completely solved.) From the Arab point of view such an asset would have the advantages of being protected from exchange-rate changes and inflation, and subject to absolute national control.

One wonders if the price of gold is “high enough” now for Arab purposes, and just where the Arabs are now in their thinking of converting oil into gold… or alternatively into a gold-backed renminbi. And if not now, soon, once the pent up inflation in the Fed’s $4 trillion, and rising, balance sheet inevitably start to leak out?

The full Volcker memo can be found here.

h/t Koos Jansen

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, OR COINCIDENCE?

With some volatility, the price of gold had tracked the national debt and the debt ceiling from 2000 through 2012. It doesn’t take a goldbug to figure out that if you increase your debt from $5.7 trillion to $16.7 trillion over 12 years by printing paper fiat dollars, those dollars will become worth less in relation to a scarce commodity that has functioned as money for over 2,000 years. The price increase of gold is simply a matter of supply and demand versus the USD.

But something unusual has happened in 2013. The national debt has continued to soar. Just because the government stopped counting on May 21 doesn’t mean it hasn’t continued to go up by $2.5 billion per day. Your government says the national debt stands at $16.747 trillion today, which is $48 billion higher than the official debt limit. In reality, the national debt has reached $17 trillion. By the time Obama leaves office it will be $20 trillion.

Despite the rhetoric in Washington DC, no one will be cutting anything. Obamacare will cost far more than any CBO projections. The economy is in recession, so tax receipts will be far lower than projections. We will surely fight another war or two between now and 2016.

So was the 12 year increase in gold prices that tracked our increase in debt just a coincidence? Does the 2013 disconnect prove that gold prices have no correlation to debt and dollar debasement? Or has there been a concerted effort by the Federal Reserve, the government and the Wall Street banks to suppress the price of gold artificially through the paper gold markets and use of derivatives? Do they know that the price of gold reveals their debasement scheme?

If you believe that artificial suppression will fail and that gold truly is correlated to the amount of debt being accumulated by your political leaders and money printing (QEternity) being done by Ben and his boys, then you will conclude that gold would be fairly valued at $1,800 per ounce today. It will be fairly valued at $2,200 per ounce by the end of Obama’s term.

Do you believe Bernanke and Wall Street will win this battle? Or do you believe the market will ultimately prevail?

TAPER MY FAT A$$

I’ve been saying for weeks that Bernanke needed a Syrian War to give him an excuse to not taper. The American people and Vlad Putin put the kabosh on that plan. Soon to retire Ben was left with no choice but to just prove he is a tool for Wall Street and the corporate interests by announcing he has no plans to taper. His goal is to get out of Washington DC in January before the entire thing implodes. He’ll let Yellen or some other idiot take the fall. Ben is a ball-less wonder.

His bosses on Wall Street have begun their ticker tape parade by setting their HFT supercomputers to buy. Only thoughtful people are stepping back to question this surprise move. How bad is the true situation that Bennie can’t even taper by $5 billion per month? The suppression of gold and silver prices by Wall Street and Bennie has been a high priority because rising precious metals prices reveals how bad things are. We now know that Bennie thinks the situation is so dire, he is even willing to let gold and silver go wild. Bennie will inflate and debase until the cows come home.

Gold is up $50 from its lows on the day, or 3.9%

Silver is up 5.8% from its low on the day.

All you plebs who need to fill up your gas tank on a weekly basis will be thrilled to know oil jumped by 2.6% to over $108 a barrel.

Do you think Bennie works for you or Wall Street?

Party on Garth!!!

FOMC Shocker: No Taper

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/18/2013 14:01 -0400

It seems the Fed is so scared about something (despite every long-only asset manager telling us day after day that the economy is recovering and the US doesn’t need crisis support… oh and can withstand higher rates) that they have gone against consensus and decided that Tapering now is premature:

*FED REFRAINS FROM QE TAPER, KEEPS MONTHLY BUYING AT $85 BLN
*FED: RISE IN MORTGAGE RATES, FISCAL POLICY RESTRAIN GROWTH
*FED: `TIGHTENING OF FINANCIAL CONDITIONS’ COULD SLOW GROWTH
*MOST FED OFFICIALS SEE FIRST INTEREST-RATE RISE IN 2015

Pre-FOMC: S&P Futs 1696, VIX , 10Y 2.865%, MTG Spread 72.5bps, USD 81.00, WTI $107.00, Gold $1310

We await Cramer and Liesman to explain what to do next…

Consensus was for a $6bn taper in TSYs and $3bn taper in MBS

TRYING TO STAY SANE IN AN INSANE WORLD – AT WORLD’S END

In the first three parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of this disheartening look back at a century of central banking, income taxing, military warring, energy depleting and political corrupting, I made a case for why we are in the midst of a financial, commercial, political, social and cultural collapse. In this final installment I’ll give my best estimate as to what happens next and it has a 100% probability of being wrong. There are so many variables involved that it is impossible to predict the exact path to our world’s end. Many people don’t want to hear about the intractable issues or the true reasons for our predicament. They want easy button solutions. They want someone or something to fix their problems. They pray for a technological miracle to save them from decades of irrational myopic decisions. As the domino-like collapse worsens, the feeble minded populace becomes more susceptible to the false promises of tyrants and psychopaths. There are a myriad of thugs, criminals, and autocrats in positions of power who are willing to exploit any means necessary to retain their wealth, power and control. The revelations of governmental malfeasance, un-Constitutional mass espionage of all citizens, and expansion of the Orwellian welfare/warfare surveillance state, from patriots like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden has proven beyond a doubt the corrupt establishment are zealously anxious to discard and stomp on the U.S. Constitution in their desire for authoritarian control over our society.

Anyone who denies we are in the midst of an ongoing Crisis that will lead to a collapse of the system as we know it is either a card carrying member of the corrupt establishment, dependent upon the oligarchs for their living, or just one of the willfully ignorant ostriches who choose to put their heads in the sand and hum the Star Spangled Banner as they choose obliviousness to awareness. Thinking is hard. Feeling and believing a storyline is easy.

A moral society must be inhabited by an informed, educated, aware populace and governed by honorable leaders who oversee based upon the nation’s founding principles of liberty, freedom and limited government of, by and for the people. A moral society requires trust, honor, property rights, simple just laws, and the freedom to succeed or fail on your own merits. There is one major problem in creating a true moral society where liberty, freedom, trust, honor and free markets are cherished – human beings. We are a deeply flawed species who are prone to falling prey to the depravities of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Men have always been captivated by the false idols of dominion, power and wealth. The foibles of human nature haven’t changed over the course of history. This is why we have 80 to 100 year cycles driven by the same human strengths and shortcomings revealed throughout recorded history.

Empires rise and fall due to the humanness of their leaders and citizens. The great American Empire is no different. It was created a mere 224 years ago by courageous patriots who risked their wealth and their lives to create a Republic founded upon the principles of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; took a dreadful wrong turn in 1913 with the creation of a privately held central bank to control its currency and introduction of an income tax; devolved into an empire after World War II, setting it on a course towards bankruptcy; sealed its fate in 1971 by unleashing power hungry psychopathic elitists to manipulate the monetary and fiscal policies of the nation to enrich themselves; and has now entered the final frenzied phase of pillaging, currency debasement, war mongering, and ransacking of civil liberties. Despite the frantic efforts of the financial elite, their politician puppets, and their media propaganda outlets, collapse of this aristocracy of the moneyed is a mathematical certainty. Faith in the system is rapidly diminishing, as the issuance of debt to create the appearance of growth has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Increase in Real GDP per Dollar of Incremental Debt

“At the root of America’s economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America’s political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world.” – Jeffrey Sachs

Five Stages of Collapse

The day of reckoning for a century of putting our faith in the wrong people with wrong ideas and evil intentions is upon us. Dmitry Orlov provides a blueprint for the collapse in his book – The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivors’ Toolkit:

Stage 1: Financial Collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings wiped out and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial Collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political Collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social Collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural Collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

The collapse is occurring in fits and starts. The stages of collapse do not necessarily have to occur in order. You can recognize various elements of the first three stages in the United States today. Stage 1 commenced in September 2008 when this Crisis period was catalyzed by the disintegration of the worldwide financial system caused by Wall Street intentionally creating the largest control fraud in world history, with easy money provided by Greenspan/Bernanke, fraudulent mortgage products, fake appraisals, bribing rating agencies to provide AAA ratings to derivatives filled with feces, and having their puppets in the media and political arena provide the propaganda to herd the sheep into the slaughterhouse.

The American people neglected their civic duty to elect leaders who would tell them the truth and represent current and future generations equally. They have neglected the increasing lawlessness of Wall Street, K Street and the corporate suite. The American people have lived in denial about their responsibility for their own financial well-being, willingly delegating it to a government of math challenged politicians who promised trillions more than they could ever deliver. The American people have delayed tackling the dire issues confronting our nation, including: $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, the military industrial complex creating wars across the globe, militarization of our local police forces, domestic spying on every citizen, allowing mega-corporations and the financial elite to turn our nation from savings based production to debt based consumption, and allowing corporations, the military industrial complex, Wall Street, and shadowy billionaires to pick and control our elected officials. The civic fabric of the country is being torn at the points of extreme vulnerability.

“At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where, during the Unraveling, America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action. Anger at “mistakes we made” will translate into calls for action, regardless of the heightened public risk. It is unlikely that the catalyst will worsen into a full-fledged catastrophe, since the nation will probably find a way to avert the initial danger and stabilize the situation for a while. Yet even if dire consequences are temporarily averted, America will have entered the Fourth Turning.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

Our Brave New World controllers (bankers, politicians, corporate titans, media moguls, shadowy billionaires) were able to avert a full-fledged catastrophe in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009 which would have put an end to their reign of destruction. To accept the rightful consequences of their foul actions was intolerable to these obscenely wealthy, despicable men. Their loathsome and vile solutions to a crisis they created have done nothing to relieve the pain and suffering of the average person, while further enriching them, as they continue to gorge on the dying carcass of a once thriving nation. Despite overwhelming public outrage, Congress did as they were instructed by their Wall Street masters and handed over $700 billion of taxpayer funds into Wall Street vaults, under the false threat of systematic collapse. The $800 billion of pork stimulus was injected directly into the veins of corporate campaign contributors. The $3 billion Cash for Clunkers scheme resulted in pumping taxpayer dollars into the government owned union car companies, while driving up the prices of used cars and hurting lower income folks.

Ben Bernanke has peddled the false paradigm of quantitative easing (code for printing money and airlifting it to Wall Street) as benefitting Main Street. Nothing could be further from the truth. He bought $1.3 trillion of toxic mortgage backed securities from his Wall Street owners. He has pumped a total of $2.8 trillion into the hands of Wall Street since September 2008, and is singlehandedly generating $5 billion of risk free profits for these deadbeats by paying them .25% on their reserves. Drug dealer Ben continues to pump $2.8 billion per day into the veins of Wall Street addicts and any hint of tapering the heroin causes the addicts to flail about. Ben should be so proud. He should hang a Mission Accomplished banner whenever he gives a speech. Bank profits reached an all-time record in the 2^nd quarter, at $42.2 billion, with 80% of those profits going to the 2% Too Big To Trust Wall Street Mega-Goliath Banks. It’s enough to make a soon to retire, and take a Wall Street job, central banker smile.

“The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger. The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.” – Henry Hazlitt – 1946

Any serious minded person knew Wall Street had too much power, too much control, and too much influence in 2008 when they crashed our economic system. When something is too big to fail because it will create systematic collapse, you make it smaller. Instead we have allowed our sociopathic rulers to allow these parasitic institutions to get even larger. Just 12 mega-banks control 70% of all the banking assets in the country, with 90% controlled by the top 86 banks. There are approximately 8,000 financial institutions in this country. Wall Street will be congratulating themselves with record compensation of $127 billion and record bonuses of $23 billion for a job well done. It is dangerous work making journal entries relieving loan loss reserves, committing foreclosure fraud, marking your assets to unicorn, making deposits at the Fed, and counting on the Bernanke Put to keep stocks rising. During a supposed recovery from 2009 to 2011, average real income per household grew pitifully by 1.7%, but all the gains accrued to Bernanke’s minions. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Therefore, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery. This warped trend has only accelerated since 2011.

The median household income has fallen by $2,400 to $52,100 since the government proclaimed the end of the recession in 2009. Real wages for real people continue to fall. A record 23.1 million households (20% of all households) are receiving food stamps. After four years of “recovery” propaganda, we are left with 2.2 million less people employed (5 million less full time jobs) and 22 million more people on SNAP and SSDI. A record 90.5 million working age Americans are not working, with labor participation at a 35 year low. Ben’s money has not trickled down, but his inflation has fallen like a load of bricks on the heads of the middle class. Bernanke’s QE to infinity constitutes a transfer of purchasing power away from the middle class to the bankers, mega-corporations and .1%. This Cantillon effect means that newly created money is neither distributed evenly nor simultaneously among the population. Some users of money profit from rising prices, and others suffer from them. This results in a transfer of wealth (a hidden tax) from later receivers to earlier receivers of new money. This is why the largest banks and largest corporations are generating the highest profits in history, while the average person sinks further into debt as their real income declines and real living expenses (energy, food, clothing, healthcare, tuition) rise.

Ben works for your owners. Real GDP (using the fake government inflation adjustment) since July 2009 is up by a wretched 5.6%. Revenue growth of the biggest corporations in the world is up by a pathetic 12%. One might wonder how corporate profits could be at record levels with such doleful economic performance. One needs to look no further than Ben’s balance sheet, which has increased by 174%. There appears to be a slight correlation between Ben’s money printing and the 162% increase in the S&P 500 index. With the top 1% owning 42.1% of all financial assets (top .1% own most of this) and the bottom 80% owning only 4.7% of all financial assets, one can clearly see who benefits from QE to infinity.

The key take away from what the ruling class has done since 2008 is they have only temporarily delayed the endgame. Their self-serving exploits have guaranteed that round two of the financial collapse will be epic in proportion and intensity. This Fourth Turning Crisis is ongoing. The linear thinkers who control the levers of power keep promising a return to normalcy and resumption of growth. This is an impossibility – mathematically & socially. Fourth Turnings do not end without the existing social order being swept away in a tsunami of turmoil, violence, suffering and war. Orlov’s stages of collapse will likely occur during the remaining fifteen years of this Crisis. We are deep into Stage 1 as our national Detroitification progresses towards bankruptcy, with an added impetus from our trillion dollar wars of choice in the Middle East. Commercial collapse has begun, as faith in the fantasy of free market capitalism is waning. The race to the bottom with currency debasement around the globe is reaching a tipping point, and the true eternal currencies of gold and silver are being hoarded and shipped from the West to the Far East.

Monetary Base (billions of USD)

When the financial collapse reaches its crescendo, the just in time supply chain, that keeps cheese doodles and cheese whiz on your grocery store shelves, Chinese produced iGadgets in your local Wal-Mart Supercenter, and gasoline flowing out of gas station hoses into your leased Cadillac Escalade, will break down rapidly. The strain of $110 oil is already evident. The fireworks will really get going when ATM machines run dry and the EBT cards stop functioning. Within a week riots and panic will engulf the country.

“At some point we are bound to hear, from across two oceans, the shocking words “Your money is no good here.” Fast forward to a week later: banks are closed, ATMs are out of cash, supermarket shelves are bare and gas stations are starting to run out of fuel. And then something happens: the government announces they have formed a crisis task force, and will nationalize, recapitalize and reopen banks, restoring confidence. The banks reopen, under heavy guard, and thousands of people get arrested for attempting to withdraw their savings. Banks close, riots begin. Next, the government decides that, to jump-start commerce, it will honor deposit guarantees and simply hand out cash. They print and arrange for the cash to be handed out. Now everyone has plenty of cash, but there is still no food in the supermarkets or gasoline at the gas stations because by now the international supply chains have broken down and the delivery pipelines are empty.” – Dmitry Orlov – The Five Stages of Collapse

We are witnessing the beginning stages of political collapse. The government and its leaders are being discredited on a daily basis. The mismanagement of fiscal policy, foreign policy and domestic policy, along with the revelations of the NSA conducting mass surveillance against all Americans has led critical thinking Americans to question the legitimacy of the politicians running the show on behalf of the bankers, corporations and arms dealers. The Gestapo like tactics used by the government in Boston was an early warning sign of what is to come. Government entitlement promises will vaporize, as they did in Detroit, with pension promises worth only ten cents on the dollar. Total social and cultural collapse could resemble the chaotic civil war scenarios playing out in Libya and Syria. The best case scenario would be for a collapse similar to the Soviet Union’s relatively peaceful disintegration into impotent republics. I don’t believe we’ll be this fortunate. The most powerful military empire in world history will not fade away. It will go out in a blaze of glory with a currency collapse, hyper-inflation, and war on a grand scale.

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

In Whom Do You Trust?

“Use of money concentrates trust in a single central authority – the central bank – and, over extended periods of time, central banks always tend to misbehave. Eventually the “print” button on the central banker’s emergency console becomes stuck in the depressed position, flooding the world with worthless notes. People trust that money will remain a store of value, and once the trust is violated a gigantic black hole appears at the very center of society, sucking in peoples’ savings and aspirations along with their sense of self-worth. When those who have become psychologically dependent on money as a yardstick, to be applied to everything and everyone, suddenly find themselves in a world where money means nothing, it is as if they have gone blind; they see shapes but can no longer resolve them into objects. The result is anomie – a sense of unreality – accompanied by deep depression. Money is an addiction – substance-less and unreal, and sets itself up for a severe and lengthy withdrawal.” – Dmitry Orlov – The Five Stages of Collapse

Our modern world revolves around wealth, the appearance of wealth, the false creation of wealth through the issuance of debt, and trust in the bankers and politicians pulling the levers behind the curtain. The entire world economic system is dependent on trusting central bankers whose only response to any crisis is to create more debt. The death knell is ringing loud and clear, but people around the globe are desperately clinging to their normalcy biases and praying to the gods of cognitive dissonance. It seems the only things that matter to our controllers are stock market levels, the continued flow of debt to the plebs, continued doling out of hush money to those on the dole, and of course an endless supply of brown skinned enemies to attack. With every country in the world attempting to the same solution of debasing their currencies, we are rapidly approaching the tipping point. India is the canary in the coal mine.

Government, Household, Financial & Non-Financial Debt (% of GDP)

An exponential growth model built upon cheap plentiful energy and debt creation has its limits, and we’ve reached them. With the depletion of inexpensive, easily accessible energy resources, higher prices will continue to slow world economies. Demographics in the developed world are slowing the global economy as millions approach their old age with little savings due to over consuming during their peak earnings years. Bernanke has already quadrupled his balance sheet with no meaningful benefit to the economy or the financial well-being of the average middle class American. Financial manipulation that creates nothing has masked the rot consuming our economic system. The game has been rigged in favor of the owners, but even a rigged game eventually comes to an end. Americans and Europeans can no longer maintain a façade of wealth by buying knickknacks from China with money they don’t have. The US and Europe are finding that their credit is no longer good in the exporting Far East countries. This is a perilous development, as the West has depended upon foreigners to accommodate its never ending expansion of credit. Without that continual expansion of debt, the Ponzi scheme comes crashing down. As China, Japan and the rest of Asia have balked at buying U.S. Treasuries with negative real yields, the only recourse for Ben has been to monetize the debt through QE and inflation. The doubling of ten year Treasury rates in a matter of three months due to just talk of possibly slowing QE should send shivers down your spine.

We are supposedly five years past the great crisis. Magazine covers proclaimed Bernanke a hero. If we are well past the crisis, why are the extreme emergency measures still in effect? If the economy is growing and jobs are being created, why do we need $85 billion of government debt to be monetized each and every month? Why are the EU, Japan, and China printing even faster than the Fed? The answer is simple. If the debt was not being monetized, it would have to be purchased out in the free market. Purchasers would require an interest rate far above the 2.9% being paid today. The debt levels in the U.S., Europe and Japan are so large that a rise in interest rates of just a few points would explode budget deficits and lead to a worldwide financial collapse. This is why Bernanke and the rest of his central banker brethren are trapped by their own ideology of bubble production. Just the slowing of debt creation will lead to collapse. Bernanke needs a Syrian crisis to postpone the taper talk. Those in control need an endless number of real or false flag crises to provide cover for their printing presses to keep rolling.

There are a couple analogies that apply to our impending doom. The country is like a 224 year old oak tree that has been slowly rotting on the inside due to the insidious diseases of hubris, apathy, selfishness, dependence, delusion, and debasement. The old oak gives an outward appearance of health and stability. Winter has arrived and gale force winds are in the forecast. One gust of wind and the mighty aged oak will topple and come crashing to earth. I think an even more fitting analogy is the sandpile with grains of sand being added day after day. Seven out of ten Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. Goliath corporations and the uber-wealthy use the tax code and legislation to syphon hundreds of billions from the national treasury every year. We spend $1 trillion per year on past, current and future wars of choice. Annual interest on the debt we’ve racked up in the last few decades already approaches $400 billion per year. The entire Federal budget totaled $400 billion in 1977. The sandpile grows ever higher, while its instability expands exponentially. One seemingly innocuous grain of sand will ultimately cause the pile to collapse catastrophically. Will it be an unintended consequence of a missile launch into Syria? Will it be a spike in oil prices? Will it be the collapse of one of the EU PIIGS? Will it be an assassination of a political figure or banker? No one knows. But that innocuous grain of sand will trigger the collapse of the entire pile.

Worried people are looking for solutions. They often get angry at me because they don’t think I provide answers to the issues I raise about our corrupt failing system. They want easy answers to intractable problems. Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that our system and majority of citizens are too corrupted to change our course through the ballot box or instituting policies along the lines of those proposed by Ron Paul and many other thoughtful liberty minded people. We are experiencing the downside of a representative democracy. Once a person is democratically elected a gulf is created between the electors and the person they elected, as the representative becomes corrupted and bought by moneyed interests. Elected officials become a class unto themselves. The political class grows to be puppets that resemble human beings but are nothing but cogs in a vast corporate run machine, pawns in an enormous game of chess played by powerful vindictive immoral men.

There are no cures for our disease. It’s terminal. Anyone telling you they have the answers is either lying or trying to sell you something. More people and organizations are on the take than are playing by the rules. The producers are being overrun by the parasites. The barbarians are at the gate. An implosion of societal trust is underway. The next stage of this crisis, which I believe will materialize within the next twelve months will try the souls of the weary.

“As the Crisis catalyzes, these fears will rush to the surface, jagged and exposed. Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things. This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust. This might result in a Great Devaluation, a severe drop in the market price of most financial and real assets. This devaluation could be a short but horrific panic, a free-falling price in a market with no buyers. Or it could be a series of downward ratchets linked to political events that sequentially knock the supports out from under the residual popular trust in the system. As assets devalue, trust will further disintegrate, which will cause assets to devalue further, and so on.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

As a nation we have squandered our inheritance, born of the blood of patriots. A freedom loving, liberty minded, self-responsible, courageous people have allowed ourselves to fall prey to selfishness, apathy, complacency and dependency. Once we allowed our human appetites of greed, power seeking, and control to override the moral responsibility for our own lives and the lives of future unborn generations, collapse was inevitable. The danger now is what happens after the unavoidable collapse. Will the millions of dependency zombies beg for a strong dictator to protect them, provide for them and lead them into further bondage? Or will the spark of liberty and freedom reignite, allowing citizens to throw off the shackles of banker and corporate control? I believe most of the people in this country are good hearted. We are merely pawns in this game of Risk being played by those seeking power, wealth and world domination. We are all trapped in our own forms of normalcy bias. Have I cashed out my retirement funds, sold my suburban house and built a doomstead in the mountains? No I haven’t. Do I second guess myself sometimes? Yes I do. But even the aware have families to support, jobs to go to, bills to pay, laundry to do, lawns to mow, and lives to live. I can’t live in constant fear of what might happen. We only get 80 or so years on this earth, if we’re lucky. The best we can do is leave a positive legacy for our children and their children. A drastic change to our way of life is coming, but most of us are trapped in a cage of our own making.

Each living generation will need to do their part during this Crisis if we are to survive the coming storm. Since no one knows the nature of how the next fifteen years will unfold, it would be wise to at least make basic preparations for food, water, heat and protection. This is easier for some than others, but you don’t have to star on Doomsday Preppers in order to stock up on items that can be purchased at Wal-Mart today, but won’t be available when the global supply chain breaks down. Make sure you have neighbors and family you can rely upon. A small community of like-minded people with varied skills is more likely to succeed in our brave old world than rugged individualists. With no financial means to maintain our globalized world, living locally will take on a new meaning. After much turmoil, chaos, violence, and likely mass casualties the best outcome would be for the Great American Empire to break into regional republics, incapable of waging global war, led by law abiding moral liberty minded individuals, and willing to trade freely and honestly with their fellow republics. Daily life would revert back to a simpler Amish like time. Would that be so bad?

This Fourth Turning could end with a whimper or a bang. There are enough nuclear arms to obliterate the world ten times over. There are enough hubristic egomaniacal psychopathic men in power, that the use of those weapons has a high likelihood of happening. It will be up to the people to not allow this horrific result. I love my country and despise my government. The Declaration of Independence clearly states that when a long train of abuses and usurpations lead toward despotism, it is our right and duty to throw off that government and provide new guards of liberty. My family comes first with my country a close second. I will fight with whatever means necessary to protect my family and do what I can to influence the future course of our country. Time is running out. Will we have the courage, fortitude and wisdom to make the right decisions over the next fifteen years? Will we choose glory or destruction? The fate of our nation hangs in the balance. Are you prepared? Are you ready to fight for your family and your rights?

The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale. – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

IT’S OUR CHOICE.

THIS IS WHY YOU OWN PHYSICAL GOLD

I love listening to the anti-gold nitwits who call it a barbaric relic. They put their faith in pieces of paper produced by central bankers and politicians. Do you need any more proof than what is happening to the people of India? Their politicians have been running large deficits over the last few years. They have been able to do this because Bennie and his fellow central banker buddies have been printing prodigious quantities of paper money. The hot money crowd was willing to fund India’s deficits, hoping for a better return than the .50% they could get in US Treasuries. It seems even the talk of tapering was enough to scare the hot money crowd out of the emerging markets. The Indian Rupee has fallen 30% against the USD in the last five months. India imports all of their oil and a large amount of their food – all priced in dollars. How do you think the average Indian is doing now?

The government is in disarray. They are scrambling around with price controls, laws against buying gold, etc. This is what politicians across the world do. They create problems and then create solutions that create worse problems. If you were an Indian with $100,000 worth of Rupees in March, 2013 and converted it into gold you would have gold worth $106,000 today. By holding onto your Rupees, you have Rupees valued at $70,000 today. Do you get it?

Gold is not an investment. It is an insurance policy against the idiocy of central bankers and politicians. Keep believing the USD will always be the world’s reserve currency. Just because Bennie is printing $120 million of new dollars per hour doesn’t mean the USD will be worth less in the coming years. Right? Have some faith. Don’t buy that barbaric relic with your fiat dollars just because every paper currency in history has reached its true intrinsic value of zero. Believe the propagandists for the state who tell you gold is nothing but a giant bubble. Everyone knows that when gold makes up 0.5% of all global assets, it surely is in an epic bubble.

Some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual, academic, central banker, politician or Wall Street shill could believe it.

SHADES OF 1929

For those not paying attention, we have entered a global deflationary depression. The nutjobs running the world’s central banks and the moronic politicians elected by the sheep have tried Keynesian fiscal pork, zero interest rates, fraudulent accounting, printing money at hyper-speed, propaganda, austerity for the peasants, bonuses for the criminal bankers and crony capitalism for the super rich. It is five years later and it hasn’t worked. The grand experiment has failed. Bernanke and Krugman’s theories have been discredited. The world is on the edge. Bad shit is happening. Behind the scenes, the oligarchs are panicked and scrambling to retain their wealth and power. They are criminally inept. Their solution will be to accelerate what has already failed. This is how deflationary depressions turn into hyper-inflationary collapses. The massive buying of physical gold and silver by individuals and Far East countries is rational and prudent. The oligarchs won the battle in the past week. They may win a few more battles, because they have many weapons, but they will lose the war. This Fourth Turning is about to get really interesting.

Fed and Bank of Japan caused gold crash

Commodity prices have been falling since September, culminating in a rout over the past two weeks. That is a classic warning for the global economy.

Traditionally shaped pure raw gold bars stacked in a secure bullion room safe

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

7:22PM BST 17 Apr 2013

It is becoming ever clearer that the roaring boom in global equities since last summer has priced in an economic recovery that does not in fact exist. The International Monetary Fund has had to nurse down its global growth forecasts yet again. We are still stuck in an old-fashioned trade depression, with pervasive over-capacity in manufacturing plant and a record global savings rate of 25pc of GDP.

German car sales fell 17pc in March. That should puncture the last illusions that Germany is about to pull Europe out of a self-inflicted slump.

As you can see from the chart below, the divergence between stock markets and the Deutsche Bank index of raw materials is astonishing to behold, so like the pattern in early 1929.

Steel has fallen 31pc this year. Brent crude is off 17pc since early February, and copper 15pc.

You have to be careful reading too much into commodities, distorted by China. The time-honoured cycle is a surge of investment that comes on stream at once with a lag. America’s shale drive has turned the gas market upside down, diverting liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia. Copper output in Chile rose 7pc last year. The crash in the Baltic Dry Index for shipping rates is partly a tale of too many ships.

Yet excess supply does not explain the collapse in gold over the past week. Cyprus may have been an incidental trigger. If the EU-IMF Troika is determined to strong-arm the Cypriots into selling most of their pint-sized holding of 14 tonnes, it may do the same to Portugal when the time comes, and then you are talking about the world’s 14th biggest holding of 382 tonnes.

Bank of America says the gold crash since Friday has already discounted sales of the entire Cypriot, Portuguese and Greek gold reserves combined. “As we believe additional gold selling in the European periphery is highly unlikely, we find it hard to fully justify the sell-off,” it said.

The central banks of China and the emerging powers bought 535 tonnes last year to escape dollars and euros, the biggest wave of state purchases since 1964. Their strategy is to buy the dips, and they are no fools. The head of China’s reserve manager “SAFE” used to run a US hedge fund.

They won’t try to catch a “falling knife”, prefering to wait until the dust settles. The upward trend of the great bull market has been broken. The technical damage is brutal. Bank of America expects a further drop to $1,200. Be patient.

My view is that the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan “caused” the gold crash. The rest is noise. The Fed assault began in February when it published a paper warning that the longer quantitative easing continues, the harder it will be for the bank to extricate itself.

The report was co-written by former Fed governor Frederic Mishkin, often deemed Ben Bernanke’s “alter ego”. It said the Fed’s capital base could be wiped out “several times” once borrowing costs climb. The window will start shutting by 2014, with trouble then compounding at a “dramatic” pace.

This was a shock. It suggested that the Fed has lost its nerve, and will think long and hard before launching a fresh blitz of money if growth falters.

Then came last week’s Fed Minutes, with hints of tapering off QE earlier that expected. That was the next shock. What they seemed to be saying is that the US economy is groping it way back to normality, that the era of silly money is over, that the dollar will stand tall again.

If that were the case, gold should fall. But it is not the case. The US economy is growing below the Fed’s own “stall speed” indicator. Half a million people fell out of the workforce in March. Retail sales fell in March. So did manufacturing.

The US faces fiscal tightening of 2.5pc of GDP this year, the most since 1946. Ex-labour secretary Robert Reich said the effects have been disguised so far, but a “stealth sequester” is just starting: $51m of grant cuts to Brandeis university; $1m for schools in Syracuse; and so on, the reverse of the stealth stimulus before.

My guess is that the Fed will be forced to row back smartly from its exit talk, but first we must look deflation in the eyes.

As for the Bank of Japan, it had been assumed that the colossal monetary stimulus of Haruhiko Kuroda would revive the yen-carry trade, leaking $1 trillion into world asset markets. But the early evidence is the opposite. Japanese investors brought money home last week.

“Mrs Watanabe” is selling her Kiwi and Aussie bonds to bet on stocks and property at home. And she is selling gold like never before. That too is a shock.

Japan’s “Abenomics” may prove a net drag on the world over coming months. It is exporting deflation through trade effects. This already visible in Korea and China, where soaring wages have eroded competitiveness. “Investors may have forgotten that yen weakness was one of the immediate causes of the 1997 Asian currency crisis and Asia’s subsequent economic collapse,” said Albert Edwards from Societe Generale.

China’s growth rate fell to 7.7pc in the first quarter. It will fall further, though the catch-up boom in the hinterland cities of Chengdu, Chonquing, Changsa and Xi’an may have further to run.

Fitch Ratings says credit has surged from €9 trillion to €23 trillion over the past four years, a rise equal to the entire US banking system. Beijing pumped up loans yet again after its recession scare in the summer, but is gaining less traction. The GDP growth effect of credit has halved. It is the classic sign of an economy sated on debt. China too will have to deleverage.

The world is still in a contained depression. Sliding commodities tell us global money is if anything too tight. “There is a threat of deflation almost everywhere. A lot of central banks will have to follow the Bank of Japan, whatever they say now,” said Lars Christensen form Danske Bank

The era of money printing is young yet. Gold will have its day again.

FISCAL FARCE, FAILURE, FANTASY & FORNICATION

I’ve put off writing an article about what is likely to happen in 2013 so I could peruse the thousands of other articles by reputable bloggers, paid pundits, Wall Street shills and captured charlatans to gather their wisdom. It’s essential that I make predictions for 2013 so I can write another article in December rationalizing why 90% of my predictions failed to materialize. Reading all of these 2013 prediction articles made things much clearer for me. I now know for sure:

The stock market will reach an all-time high.
The stock market will fall 42%.
The economy will strengthen as the year progresses.
The economy will descend into a depression.
The USD will strengthen.
The USD will collapse.
Gas prices will set new highs.
Gas prices will fall below 2012 levels.
Gold will rise to $10,000 per ounce.
Gold will drop below $1,000 per ounce.
We will experience hyperinflation.
We will experience horrific deflation.
Obama will compromise with the Republicans and put the country on a path to prosperity.
Obama will create a debt ceiling crisis and assume dictatorial powers as a result.
Snooki will be a better mother than Kim Kardashian.
Honey Boo Boo will beat I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant in the Neilson ratings.

The majority of 2013 prediction articles are written to support the agenda of the writer. Many are trying to sell newsletter subscriptions or investment services. Their predictions will match the theme of their newsletter. Others are Wall Street paid shills who will predict what they are paid to predict by their owners. Then there are the political hacks who tow the party line with their predictions. But no one can top the predictive powers of the CBO. They just put out their ten year updated forecast reflecting the fabulous fiscal cliff deal that saved the country. According to the CBO, the “compromise” to reduce our deficits will add a mere $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. I’m sure this will prove to be accurate. Just take a look at their 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:

The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.

The actual FY12 results were:

The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased – not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
GDP was $15.8 trillion.

Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections. The entire fiscal cliff kabuki theater fictitious crisis reveals the politicians and mainstream media pundits to be liars, fools and frauds. The tax the rich to cut the deficit storyline was sold to the public and won the day. Of course, the highly accurate CBO immediately revealed that the Orwellian named American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 adds $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Based on the accuracy of their previous predictions, it’s a guarantee the national debt goes up by $8 trillion, as the rich take advantage of the thousands of loopholes in the IRS code they paid for to avoid paying the taxes expected by the CBO.

Hypocrisy abounds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC and on the media company propaganda channels. As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to $16.4 trillion today, I heard shrieking liberal talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Liberals held protest marches across the country against Bush’s wars and burned him in effigy. Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan. You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order. Liberals shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Corzine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obamacare law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Neo-Con hypocrisy.

The Neo-Con controlled Republican Party is a pathetic joke. They have the guts to declare themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, after Bush’s eight year reign of error. He and his fiscally responsible party were handed a budget in surplus and managed to add $4.9 trillion to the national debt by waging undeclared wars, encouraging Wall Street to create the biggest fraudulent financial bubble in history, creating a new $16 trillion unfunded entitlement (Medicare Part D), cutting taxes without paying for them, and creating a massive new government agency (DHS) to take away our liberties and freedom. Federal government spending grew from $1.9 trillion to $3.0 trillion under Bush and the Republicans. Does that sound fiscally responsible?

Does anyone believe the Republican Party is serious about cutting anything? Tough guy Republicans like Big Chris Christie preach fiscal responsibility when going to war with teachers’ unions, but he squeals like a stuck pig when a $60 billion pork filled, unpaid for, Sandy Relief bill is held up in Congress. The courageous fiscally responsible Congress critters passed the entire pork filled, unfunded, bloated, vote buying joke. It included $28 billion to mitigate future disasters, $3 billion to repair or replace Federal assets, and $6 billion for transportation projects completely unrelated to Sandy damage. The hypocrisy of politicians who proclaim the $50 billion of 2013 fiscal cliff tax revenue as deficit cutting, and then immediately piss it away by paying people to rebuild their houses yards from the Atlantic Ocean while funding billions of non-disaster related projects is disgusting to behold. There is nothing like compromise to add another $60 billion to the national debt.

Our entire economic and political system is a farce. The American people are being played by the powerful interests that provide them with an illusion of choice. Both parties serve the interests of their masters and the fiscal cliff show and debt ceiling show are a form of reality TV to keep the masses alarmed, fearful, and believing there is actually a difference between the policies of the ruling class. The charade has played out in its full glory in the last few weeks with Obama convincing the masses he had stuck it to the rich, while in reality the working middle class got it good and hard when they got their January paychecks. This chart details the tax changes that went into effect on January 1.

The funniest part this fiscal fiasco farce is watching the reaction of the sheep who believed Obama and the mainstream media storyline. Obama was able to raise the published top rate on people making over $400,000. The newly defined “rich” laughed heartily as they know only fools pay anywhere near the top rate. The rich just call their tax advisor and instruct them to use one of the thousands of tax loopholes in the 75,000 page IRS tax code to “legally” avoid the new Obama rates. Meanwhile, both parties and their mainstream media mouthpieces downplayed the 2% payroll tax increase on every working American. This tax increase has been a complete surprise to the reality TV zombies and Facebook aficionados. Even college educated professionals in my office had no idea their next monthly paycheck was going to be $150 to $200 lighter. This will wipe out most, or all, of the annual raise they received. The tax will fall heavily on the 75% of households that make less than the $113,700 Social Security cutoff. For a struggling family of four earning the median income of $50,000, the $1,000 less in their paychecks will mean less food, putting off trips to the doctor, driving on bald tires, or not taking the family on a vacation to the Jersey shore. The $2,274 increase in taxes (.57%) for the Wall Street banker making $400,000 probably won’t put too much of a crimp in his Hamptons lifestyle.

The joke is on the American people as the rich will ante up maybe $50 billion of taxes in 2013, while the working middle class will be skewered for $125 billion. How’s that “Tax the Rich” slogan working out for you?

Only in the Orwellian capital of Washington DC would a bill that was supposed to provide tax relief to the middle class and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, actually increase the tax burden of a median household by $1,000 and perpetuate the pork spending payoffs to campaign contributors and friends of the slimy politicians that slither through the halls of Congress. The list of pork and bribes should be nauseating to hard working Americans across the country:

$30 billion extension of the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, even though we are supposedly in the 3^rd year of economic recovery. Continuing to pay people to not work for two years will surely boost employment.

$14.3 billion for a two-year extension of the corporate research credit benefiting large technology companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard.

$12.2 billion one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind power.

$11.2 billion two- year extension of the active financing exception, which lets GE, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Citigroup Inc. (C), among others, defer taxes on financing income they earn outside the U.S.

$1.9 billion extension of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring workers from disadvantaged groups, benefitting mega-restaurant chains like McDonalds.

$1.8 billion extension of the New Markets Tax Credit for investments in low- income areas, benefitting JP Morgan and other Wall Street shyster banks.

$650 million tax credit for manufacturing energy-efficient appliances, benefitting mega-corps like Whirlpool.

$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects. NBC thanks you.

$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50% of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

$248 million in special expensing rules for films and television programs.

$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

$78 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.

$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

So when you see the cut in your take home pay, just comfort yourself knowing that JP Morgan, Citigroup, GE and hundreds of mega-corporations were able to retain their tax breaks. As they have done for decades, Congress and the President agreed to address spending cuts at a future date. Of course, a government spending cut isn’t actually a cut. It’s a lower increase than their previous projection. Nothing is ever cut in Washington DC. The austerity storyline is a lie. Not a dime has been cut from the Federal budget. Intellectually dishonest ideologues try to peddle the wind down of the Obama $800 billion porkulus program as a cut in Federal spending. They sold this Keynesian “shovel ready” crap to a gullible public as stimulus to jumpstart the economy. Federal spending was $3.0 trillion before the Obama stimulus. After the two year stimulus was pissed away without helping the economy one iota, the baseline should have been back in the $3.2 trillion range. Instead, FY13 Federal spending will be $3.8 trillion. This hasn’t kept liberal ideologues like Krugman and his minions in the mainstream media from blaming crazy Tea Party Republicans for inflicting horrendous austerity measures on the poor and disadvantaged.

The chart above reveals a few truths:

The country has been blessed with two of the worst presidents in U.S. history over the last twelve years.
When Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is beyond two standard deviations over the normal range during the last sixty years, your problem is not lack of tax revenue.
Obama and the current Congress are spending at a level of 24% of GDP versus the 18% of GDP when Clinton left office. This amounts to a nose bleed altitude $950 billion higher than the level Clinton was spending in his final year in office.

The Op-eds in liberal rags across the land decry the lack of civility in Washington DC and plead for politicians on both sides of the aisle to come together and compromise for the good of the country. This line of bullshit would be laughable if it wasn’t so wretched in its falsity. Compromise is what has left this country with a $16.4 trillion national debt, $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. Democrats have compromised and let the Republicans create a warfare state. Republicans have compromised and let Democrats create a welfare state. The two headed monster living in the swamps of Washington DC just voted to increase taxes on all Americans. They voted to hand criminal Wall Street banks $700 billion. They voted to pass the Patriot Act. They voted to pass the NDAA. They’ve allowed the President to wage undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran. They voted for a $663 billion Defense bill that includes tens of billions the Secretary of Defense doesn’t even want. They will vote to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months. The last thing this country needs is more compromise. We can’t afford any more compromise. The chart above proves what can happen when gridlock ensues, spending restrictions are enforced, and confrontation displaces compromise. After the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, gridlock ensued for the next six years. PAYGO restrictions in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 didn’t allow unfettered spending increases. The result was Federal spending falling from 22% of GDP to 18% of GDP and a budget surplus. The Pay-Go restrictions expired in 2002 and Democrats and Republicans have compromised to the tune of a $10.2 trillion increase in the national debt in ten years. The hypocrisy of pandering deceitful politicians is boundless and shows utter contempt for the intelligence of the American populace.

“Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to. If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks, and veterans benefits will be delayed. We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialist who track down loose nuclear materials wouldn’t get their paychecks. Investors around the world will ask if the United States of America is in fact a safe bet. Markets could go haywire, interest rates would spike for anybody who borrows money – Every homeowner with a mortgage, every student with a college loan, every small business owner who wants to grow and hire. We are not a deadbeat nation.

It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession. And ironically it would probably increase our deficit. So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd. Republicans in Congress have two choices here. They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” – President Barack Obama – January 14, 2013

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. The Senate continues to reject a return to the common sense Pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts.

The Senate had to abide by the common sense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” – Senator Barack Obama – March 16, 2006

I could have shown quotes from George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign talking about a non-interventionist foreign policy and no need for the U.S. to get involved in nation building and then proceeding to pre-emptively attack sovereign countries while wasting trillions and impoverishing unborn generations trying to create “democracy” in the Middle East at the point of a gun as a cover to protect “our” oil. The point is that we are being given the illusion of choice. Everyone knows the debt ceiling will be raised after another episode of Washington DC Kabuki Theater, presented by the corporate mainstream media in breathtaking detail, because the politicians are beholden to their owners and those owners want more of our money. That is why spending will never be willingly cut by the spineless puppet congressmen, as their strings are pulled by the corporate puppet masters and they dance to the tune of the banking oligarchs that own this country.

After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth. The American Dream is dead. We’ve allowed a rich, privileged, elite few to achieve hegemony over our economic and political system with their control of the media and manipulation of our financial markets. They will collapse the country because they will never be satisfied with the amount of wealth and power they’ve accumulated. Their voracious greed will be their downfall. The sooner we can channel the anger of George Carlin, the sooner we can put an end to this corporate fascist reign of terror.

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – George Carlin

I never did get around to making my 2013 predictions. I’ll give it a stab in my next article: Apparitions in the Fog.

2012 – YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY IN REVIEW

On January 8 of this year I posted my annual prediction article for this year – 2012 – The Year of Living Dangerously. Now it’s time to assess my complete and utter cluelessness when it comes to predicting things within a given time frame. Despite the fact that myself and everyone else acting like they know what lays ahead are proven wrong time and time again, we continue to make predictions about the future. It makes us feel like we have some control, when we don’t. The world is too complex, too big, too corrupt, too lost in theories and delusions, and too dependent upon too many leaders with too few brains to be able to predict what will happen next. This is the time of year when all the “experts” will be making their 2013 predictions. I haven’t seen too many of these experts going back and honestly assessing their 2012 predictions, which didn’t happen.

What I’ve learned is that “experts” usually have an agenda. Their predictions are designed to convince you to buy the stocks they recommend or purchase their newsletter. Many of these “experts” work for Wall Street, the corporate MSM, a political party or corporate interest. Half of the “experts” represent the status quo and want the masses to think everything is just fine and will steadily improve. The other half are fear mongers that want to scare you into buying their products with predictions of impending collapse at any moment. I like to read the predictions of a wide variety of pundits, bloggers, and so called journalists, while understanding they probably have an agenda.

Personally, I try to make my predictions based on the facts I observe and try to gather. My agenda is to prepare my family for whatever these facts tell me is likely to happen. My website is just a place for me to post my thoughts. I don’t depend upon it for a living and I have nothing to sell. That doesn’t mean that my biases, hopes, and desires do not color my predictions. As I reread my article yesterday, I found myself thinking, “when is this long winded gasbag going to actually make some predictions?” My article was supposed to make 2012 predictions but ended up trying to tie 2012 into the Fourth Turning Crisis paradigm. When I eventually got to the predictions, I realized that a monkey throwing darts could have done just as well. If I was one of those “experts”, I’d say that I wasn’t wrong, I was just early. Of course, that is a cop-out. Being early is the same as being wrong.

I’m more interested in why I was wrong. It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system. But enough excuses. Let’s see how wrong I was:

All the episodes which will occur in 2012 will have at their core one of the three elements described by Strauss & Howe in 1997: Debt, Civic Decay, or Global Disorder.

This was a generic prediction. Those are a lot easier to take credit for as being right. Considering the country is about to go over the fiscal cliff, I’d say that debt has had a major impact in 2012. The disgusting political campaign, the anger over efforts to ban guns, urban violence, 20% of nation on food stamps, and real unemployment rate of 23% certainly prove that civic decay is accelerating. Uprisings in Egypt, Syria and across the Middle East intensified. Israel and Iran got closer to inevitable war. Japan and China are on the verge of conflict. The U.S. is still bogged down in Afghanistan and has failed miserably in efforts to democratize the Middle East. I’d say we have had a bit of global disorder.

At best, the excessive levels of sovereign debt will slow economic growth to zero or below in 2012. At worst, interest rates will soar as counties attempt to rollover their debt and rolling defaults across Europe will plunge the continent into a depression.

The best case scenario for European bankers and politicians came to pass in 2012. The GDP for the European Union went negative in the 3rd quarter of 2012. The southern European nations are experiencing depression level conditions with soaring unemployment, social unrest, and higher interest rates. But even Germany is experiencing a dramatic slowdown. The bankers continue to call the shots, with various debt schemes designed to keep the bankers whole, while throwing the people to the wolves. They have postponed the day of reckoning, but it is coming. They do not have a liquidity problem. They have a solvency problem. You cannot resolve a debt problem by creating more debt.

The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is the standard of living for every person in Europe, the United States and Japan will decline. The choice is whether the decline happens rapidly by accepting debt default and restructuring or methodically through central bank created inflation that devours the wealth of the middle class. Debt default would result in rich bankers losing vast sums of wealth and politicians accepting the consequences of their phony promises. Bankers and politicians will choose inflation.

This was an easy one. Bankers and politicians will never choose pain for themselves when they can shift it to the people. Bernanke and the rest of the world’s central bankers, in cooperation with their captured politicians, have chosen to inflate the debt away by printing money. They trust in the shallowness and ignorance of the masses to not notice as their standard of living steadily declines.

Controlling the distribution of data allows the oligarchs to falsify the true level of inflation and the corporate MSM dutifully spews the propaganda to the masses.

The European Union will not survive 2012 in its current form. Countries are already preparing for the dissolution. Politicians and bankers will lie and print until the day they pull the plug on the doomed Euro experiment.

I was 100% wrong in this assessment. The politicians and bankers are most certainly lying, but they have succeeded in keeping the EU intact. The dissolution would imperil too many bankers. Whether they can keep it intact through 2013 is another question.

The National Debt will be $16.5 trillion when the next president takes office in January 2013.

Barack Obama will be inaugurated on January 20, 2013. As of December 26, 2012 the National Debt stood at $16.34 trillion and according to Turbo Tax Timmy will hit the debt limit of $16.4 trillion on December 31. He will use accounting gimmicks and not fund government pensions to not exceed the limit, but the debt will continue to accumulate at a rate of $3.5 billion per day. The National Debt will be at approximately $16.47 trillion when Obama starts his 2nd term. Close enough for government work.

As debt servicing grows by the day, the economy losses steam. The excessive and increasing debt levels will lead to a renewed recession in 2012.

Despite the fact that the government and corporate media continue to report economic growth and a barely positive GDP, a recession did begin this past summer. Using a true level of inflation, GDP has been negative since 2006.

The horrific Christmas retail sales and declining corporate profits reveal the truth. Fourth quarter GDP will be negative and the government will eventually adjust the prior quarters lower. Excel spreadsheet models, fake inflation figures and seasonal adjustments cannot deny reality or the facts.

As foreclosures rise a self-reinforcing loop will develop. Home prices will fall as banks dump houses at lower prices, pushing millions more into a negative equity position. Home prices will fall another 5% to 10% in 2012, with a couple years to go before bottoming.

Another 100% wrong prediction. I again underestimated the willingness of corrupt Wall Street bankers, in cahoots with the Federal government, to fraudulently boost home prices by withholding foreclosures from the market and creating a fake housing shortage. The Feds have willingly used Fannie, Freddie and the FHA to guarantee more bad mortgage loans and put the taxpayer further on the hook for the billions of bad debt. Bennie has swooped in and bought up billions of toxic mortgage debt from the criminal Wall Street banks, while driving mortgage rates to record low levels. With this massive intervention, they have managed to increase home prices by 4% and increase home sales to levels 60% below the peak. Job well done.

The working age population will increase by 1.7 million, the number of people employed will go up by 1 million, but the official unemployment rate will drop to 7% as the BLS reveals that 10 million people decided to relax and leave the workforce. Surely I jest. The government manipulated unemployment rate will rise above 9%, while the real rate will surpass 25%.

I made what I thought was an outrageous prediction as an attempt at humor, but my outrageous prediction was closer to the truth. The working age population has grown by 3.7 million people, the number of employed people has gone up by only 2.7 million, 2.4 million people decided to kick back and leave the workforce, resulting in the unemployment rate “plunging” from 8.7% to 7.7%.

Measuring unemployment on par with the method used during the 1930s would put the level at 23% today. But you should trust the BLS. Why would they lie?

Ben Bernanke, Wall Street shysters and Barack Obama want you to be drawn in by the allure of short-term gains based on hopes of QE3. The stock market will be volatile in 2012 with stocks falling 20% when it becomes evident the country is going back into recession. Ben will try to ride to the rescue with QE3 as he buys up more toxic mortgage debt. Wall Street will do their usual touchdown dance celebration, but the bloom will fall off this rose fast, as quantitative easing has proven to be a failure in stimulating economic growth.Gridlock in Washington D.C., chaotic national conventions, and the implosion of Europe will contribute to the market finishing down by at least 15% for the year.

I hope you didn’t follow my stock market advice as it looks like I missed by only 25% or 30% with this prediction. It is amazing what zero interest rates for Wall Street banks, QE to infinity, high frequency trading supercomputers, and fake Wall Street earnings can do for a stock market. Since the recession has not been acknowledged and rigged corporate profits still sit near their peak, the stock market has continued to rise. I applaud the oligarchs for their ability to extract every last dime from the pockets of the middle class in their avaricious plundering of America. Bernie Madoff is proudly admiring their work from his prison cell.

The average price of oil will exceed $100 during 2012 resulting in the highest average gas price in history for American drivers. These high prices, along with various weather related issues will keep food prices elevated, with 5% or higher increases likely. This should spur a few more peasant revolutions around the globe.

I nailed this prediction. Americans paid the highest average price for a gallon of gasoline in history during 2012. Agricultural commodities like corn, wheat and soybeans soared by 7% to 20%, as the high oil prices and drought drove food prices higher. Meat prices will rise in 2013 as herds had to be thinned in 2012 because of the high feed costs. But don’t worry. The BLS will just adjust the food inflation away as they assume you switch from hamburger to cat food.

Gold will finish the year higher. As always, it will be volatile and manipulated by the powers that be. A drop below $1,500 in the beginning of the year is possible, but when Ben announces QE3, it will be off to the races. I expect gold to reach $1,900 by year end. Silver will be more volatile, but will likely reach $40 by year end.

Gold will finish the year higher for the twelfth consecutive year. It was volatile, with a high of $1,796 and a low of $1,527. It will finish the year in the mid $1,600s. Silver was equally volatile, but also up for the year. It ranged between $37.50 and $26. It will finish the year in the $30 range. The powers that be know that rising gold and silver prices reveal their deceitful inflationary master plan, so they use all of their market manipulative powers to suppress the prices of these metals. The higher our debt, the higher their prices will go. When the confidence game is revealed to be a Ponzi scheme, the prices of gold and silver will be unleashed.

Old line mall based retailers like Sears and J.C. Penney die a slow agonizing death as they stagger into the sunset like Montgomery Ward, Circuit City and thousands before them.

I was wrong about JC Penney. They are dying a fast agonizing death as the idiot savant from Apple has driven them straight into the ground, with sales plunging by 26% versus last year. It isn’t a matter of if, but when this employer of 159,000 declares bankruptcy. The “brilliant” (Jim Cramer says so) Eddie Lampert has Sears on a glide path to liquidation. This Christmas season will reveal these CEOs to be frauds.

The Occupy Movement will become more extreme with more disruptions of the economic system with less warning so the authorities don’t have time to prepare. I expect more cyber hacking into Wall Street, government, and media computer networks, causing disarray and uncertainty regarding financial information. I expect the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions to be overrun by protestors. The authorities will respond with excessive force, resulting in further violent protests in other cities.

Another 100% miss. The Occupy Movement splintered and petered out after being brutally dismantled by the armed mercenaries of the status quo. There were some cyber-attacks, but they caused minimal disruption. The masses are satiated with their techno-gadgets and reality TV shows. No one protested. No one cared.

The Federal government grows ever more panicked by the knowledge that its Ponzi scheme economy is going to collapse. This is why passage of the NDAA and the future passage of SOPA are so important to them. Imprisonment of citizens without charge and shutting down the only remaining means of truth – the Internet – are essential to retaining their power and control over the masses. At the same time, gun sales are at record levels. Critical thinking Americans can see the writing on the wall and no longer trust corrupt politicians of either party. Arming yourself and buying physical gold and silver is a prudent act in today’s world.

The outrage over SOPA, led by the alternative online media, stopped it from being passed. The tyrants continue their efforts to suppress free speech on the internet, as Facebook shuts down pages that do not conform to the corporate fascist government agenda. Gun sales are off the charts, as critical thinking people no longer trust the corrupt government. Physical gold and silver sales are soaring as critical thinking people no longer trust our corrupt economic system.

The ruling elite hand selected puppets for the 2012 presidential election are Obama and Romney. They are virtually interchangeable and both are acceptable to the Wall Street oligarchs. The monkey wrench in the gears is Ron Paul. He will run as a 3^rd Party candidate and focus a light on the crony capitalism that passes for free markets in America today. He will be vilified by both parties and their media mouthpieces, but if he gains traction I fear an unfortunate accident will befall him. Either way, he will have a dramatic impact on the debate and the outcome of the 2012 election.

With this prediction I allowed my hope to overcome reason. The oligarchs are too powerful. Ron Paul’s grassroots campaign made the oligarchs extremely uncomfortable. He drew huge crowds of young people on college campuses across the country. His message of liberty and freedom resonated with millions, but he was no match for the billionaires that call the shots in this country. He was silenced by the Republican establishment and chose not to run as a 3rd party candidate. The puppet on the left won the election. The puppet on the right retreated to one of his six mansions. Ron Paul rode off into the sunset knowing he gave it his best shot.

It seems more likely by the day that someone will do something stupid in or around Iran and the Persian Gulf will explode into a virtual hell on earth. The unintended consequences of such a development will far outweigh the intended consequences. The revolutions, protests, and brewing civil wars in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iraq will flare up even if Iran doesn’t explode into a shooting war. The tensions in the Middle East will keep oil prices above $100, despite a world plunging into recession.

The showdown between Israel and Iran did not happen in 2012, despite increasingly angry rhetoric. The stealth war with Iran began, as economic sanctions and cyber warfare have begun to destroy their economy and impoverish their people. Revolutions, riots, protests and civil war spread across the Middle East throughout 2012 resulting in high oil prices and a worldwide economic contraction which is picking up speed as 2012 comes to a conclusion.

China’s hard landing will arrive in 2012. Keynesianism on steroids has failed as they’ve built more than enough vacant malls, vacant cities, vacant condo towers, and bridges to nowhere. Property prices will plunge, exports will decline, and peasants will revolt as food and energy prices push them over the edge.

China has come in for a hard landing. With a government more corrupt than even ours, their reported economic data would make a BLS drone blush with pride. Property prices are falling. Exports are falling. But somehow they report economic growth of 7%. And the MSM dutifully reports this gibberish as truth. Unrest and protests are a daily occurrence in China, but they are immediately crushed. The Chinese authorities continue to clamp down on the internet and media. China’s economic system is a rotting Keynesian nightmare.

I also raised the generic possibilities of earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics and terrorist attacks. I noted that a terrorist attack in a public venue might cause a government over-reaction. Even though the slaughter of young school children by a deranged mental defective doesn’t constitute a terrorist attack, the reaction by government officials and their liberal control freak allies in the mainstream media are exactly what I feared. Every tragedy is used to gain more control over our lives and take away our Constitutional rights in the name of safety and security. The ignorant masses willingly give up their freedom and liberty, believing their Orwellian government protectors will look out for them. As we enter 2013, time grows shorter. The power hungry psychopaths continue to pillage and plunder. Our unsustainable economic system struggles under the weight of debt, despair and delusion as the endgame approaches. The willfully ignorant populace is lost in their techno-narcissistic dream world.

Will 2013 be the year it all collapses in a flaming heap of rubble? I don’t know. Maybe you should ask an “expert”.

It guarantees to be an interesting year. I’ll be hiring Bonzo the chimp to help me make my 2013 predictions in the next week or so.

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Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave

If this doesn’t piss you off, nothing will. Let’s just solve all our problems by making the BIG LIE official policy of the Government (as if it isn’t already!). Now the FED is going to set it QE4EVA policy based on unemployment – which figures are just as big lies as the “official” CPI rate which understates inflation by a minimum of 7% (Official CPI year over year: 2%, true year over year is 9%). So what do we do? Modify the way the CPI is figured, yet once again, so any adjustments to payments made based on the “official” CPI will be lower – saving the Goobermint money and putting the greased pole to anyone receiving benefits.

Now benefits from Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Obamaphones, SNAP and Social Security are going to have to be reformed and probably cut. But WHY IN HELL CAN’T THE GOVERNMENT BE HONEST AND SAY, “Hey guys and girls, we’re going broke and can’t afford these entitlements.” instead of LYING about it, not reducing Gooberment spending, fraud and abuse, cut Federal salaries (especially the automatic pay raises CONgress awarded themselves) and everyone share the pain?

This “suggestion” sucks and John Rubino calls them on it..

Hat tip to John Rubino

By the age of 12 or so, most people have learned through bitter experience that dishonesty is hard to pull off, because one lie tends to require more lies, until the complexity of the situation exceeds the liar’s ability keep everything straight.

This is just as true for governments as for individuals, especially when it comes to money. A currency that holds its value over long periods of time is nice but restrictive, because it limits a government’s ability to fight multiple wars and buy votes with generous social programs. So every government eventually resorts to monetary inflation, which is a combination of theft and deceit – or fraud, as it’s known in legal circles. By creating large amounts of new currency, a country lowers the value of each piece of currency in the hands of citizens, thus secretly taxing them to run the government. Then, to mask the effects of this stealth tax, governments distort their reported economic statistics to portray a world that’s healthier than the one most people experience. The goal is to siphon off as much wealth as possible while keeping the victims docile for as long as possible. The longer the con runs, the richer the people at the top become.

Eventually the gap between government reports and individual experience grows so wide that the lie is revealed and the scam ends, either through some sort of revolution or a financial collapse or both. A sign that we’re approaching that point is the following article, in which Time Magazine advocates making a heretofore-unspoken part of the con explicit government policy:

Fixing Inflation Adjustments Is the Smart Way to Shrink the Deficit

Let’s face it: There’s no way to reduce America’s budget deficit that won’t hurt someone, and that pain can’t be limited only to the rich. A payroll tax, passed in 2010, is scheduled to expire at the end of this year, for example, and that will cost middle-class households anywhere from $600 to $1,200. In addition, more than 20 million taxpayers could become subject to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), adding several hundred dollars to their annual tax bills on average. On the spending side, budget cuts would not only reduce government services but could also eventually cost tens of thousands of Americans their jobs.

But there are other ways to make progress on the deficit over the long term that would be a lot less painful and would also be politically viable. In my last column, I wrote about the estimated $30 billion a year that the Federal government could save by getting really tough on fraud. Even more could be done, though, by changing the inflation adjustments for government spending.

Cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) are used throughout the U.S. economy – for union contracts and income tax brackets, as well as for government entitlements. It may seem only fair to adjust contracts and government programs for inflation – otherwise recipients would see their standard of living steadily erode over time. But there are a lot of ways to adjust for inflation. Moreover, the most commonly used gauge, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), may overstate the adjustment needed. Switching to a more conservative measure could save as much as $200 billion over the coming decade.

The most commonly proposed change is to replace the CPI with another index called the “chained CPI.” Basically, inflation is calculated based on putting together a basket of commonly bought goods and services and then tracking the price increases for them. In reality, though, people don’t consistently buy the same things. If one particular item – steak, for example – gets very expensive, people will typically buy something cheaper instead, such as chicken. The chained CPI takes into account the substitution of cheaper items for things that get too expensive, and is therefore arguably more accurate than the regular CPI. It also rises a little bit more slowly.

The result of replacing the regular CPI with the chained CPI would be slightly slower increases in monthly Social Security payments and some other government benefits. The new measure would also modestly boost tax revenues. The reason: tax brackets are indexed to inflation and would ratchet up more slowly if the chained CPI were used to adjust them. For many taxpayers, that would mean that some of their income would fall in a higher bracket.

Further savings could come from changing the formula used to calculate initial Social Security benefits. Because Social Security was originally designed to mimic a pension plan rather than look like a welfare entitlement, initial benefits are pegged to retirees’ earnings over their working lives. Because the general standard of living improves over time, wages and salaries normally outpace inflation – and so do initial Social Security benefits. (After benefits have begun, further increases are based on a more usual cost-of-living adjustment.) Some economists have long argued for altering the formula for initial benefits. Keeping the current more generous earnings-based calculation for lower-income retirees but switching to an inflation-based calculation for the more-affluent half of the population could eliminate half of the Social Security deficit over the next 75 years.

Such fixes to benefit plans are not uncontroversial. When a recent Republican budget proposal included changes to the way the Federal government calculates inflation, the idea was swiftly rejected by some Democrats. Opponents of the idea objected that retirees face higher inflation than the average American because of health-care costs and that some of the tax increases would fall on the middle class. It’s true, of course, that altering inflation adjustments will limit future benefit increases and cause an upward creep in income taxes. But the idea that the Federal deficit can be brought down to sustainable levels without anyone giving up anything is simply unrealistic. Hiking tax rates on the rich alone will raise enough revenue to cut the deficit only by about 8%. In the end, simple arithmetic ensures that the bulk of deficit reduction will come from the middle class – the challenge is to minimize the pain.

Unfortunately, tinkering with inflation adjustments will be little help with other runaway costs – most significantly health care, which presents even greater long-term budget problems than Social Security does. Advances in medicine often make treatment more expensive. In addition, health care is labor intensive, and in all service sectors it’s hard to offset rising labor costs with the sort of productivity gains that can be achieved in manufacturing. Doctors can only see so many patients an hour, teachers can only correct so many papers, and there’s a limit to how fast a pianist can play the minute waltz.

But where rising costs are chiefly the result of inflation adjustments, fine-tuning those mechanisms may be the least painful way to start bringing down the long-term deficit. The spending cuts that are currently scheduled to go into effect next year in the absence of a budget deal look horrific and could result in 7% to 9% reductions in a broad range of Federal programs. Surely it seems more rational to minimize the need for such sudden, deep, and indiscriminate cuts in the near term by accepting smaller increases in government spending over the coming decades.

Some thoughts:
This is a perfect example of how lying sometimes corrupts both liar and victim. The honest approach to a situation where there’s not enough wealth would be to explain that everything from the military empire to the welfare state will henceforth have to live smaller. But that’s both hard to say and hard to hear, which makes the lie relatively painless for both sides. Just keep telling citizens that they’ll get everything they expect, while actually giving them a little less each year. Government gets the inflation-generated resources it wants, and the recipients of government spending get to pretend for a while longer that they’re taken care of. The problem is pushed into the future for tomorrow’s leaders and the children of today’s recipients to deal with.

Put more clearly, US voters are enabling the liars because – despite the mounting evidence that the lies are coming at our expense – we prefer the comfort of those lies to the harsh reality of no more free money for the lifestyles we thought were our birthright.

The result of dishonest public policy being enabled by voters in denial is a corrupt society, where lying – as in the article reprinted above – becomes acceptable public policy. We’re not far from the old Soviet joke, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

ARE YOU SEEING WHAT I’M SEEING?

Is it just me, or are the signs of consumer collapse as clear as a Lowes parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Sometimes I wonder if I’m just seeing the world through my pessimistic lens, skewing my point of view. My daily commute through West Philadelphia is not very enlightening, as the squalor, filth and lack of legal commerce remain consistent from year to year. This community is sustained by taxpayer subsidized low income housing, taxpayer subsidized food stamps, welfare payments, and illegal drug dealing. The dependency attitude, lifestyles of slothfulness and total lack of commerce has remained constant for decades in West Philly. It is on the weekends, cruising around a once thriving suburbia, where you perceive the persistent deterioration and decay of our debt fixated consumer spending based society.

The last two weekends I’ve needed to travel the highways of Montgomery County, PA going to a family party and purchasing a garbage disposal for my sink at my local Lowes store. Montgomery County is the typical white upper middle class suburb, with tracts of McMansions dotting the landscape. The population of 800,000 is spread over a 500 square mile area. Over 81% of the population is white, with the 9% black population confined to the urban enclaves of Norristown and Pottstown.

The median age is 38 and the median household income is $75,000, 50% above the national average. The employers are well diversified with an even distribution between education, health care, manufacturing, retail, professional services, finance and real estate. The median home price is $300,000, also 50% above the national average. The county leans Democrat, with Obama winning 60% of the vote in 2008. The 300,000 households were occupied by college educated white collar professionals. From a strictly demographic standpoint, Montgomery County appears to be a prosperous flourishing community where the residents are living lives of relative affluence. But, if you look closer and connect the dots, you see fissures in this façade of affluence that spread more expansively by the day. The cheap oil based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary of consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The clues are there for all to see and portend a bleak future for those mentally trapped in the delusions of a debt dependent suburban oasis of retail outlets, chain restaurants, office parks and enclaves of cookie cutter McMansions. An unsustainable paradigm can’t be sustained.

The first weekend had me driving along Ridge Pike, from Collegeville to Pottstown. Ridge Pike is a meandering two lane road that extends from Philadelphia, winds through Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Norristown, past Ursinus College in Collegeville, to the farthest reaches of Montgomery County, at least 50 miles in length. It served as a main artery prior to the introduction of the interstates and superhighways that now connect the larger cities in eastern PA. Except for morning and evening rush hours, this road is fairly sedate. Like many primary routes in suburbia, the landscape is engulfed by strip malls, gas stations, automobile dealerships, office buildings, fast food joints, once thriving manufacturing facilities sitting vacant and older homes that preceded the proliferation of cookie cutter communities that now dominate what was once farmland.

Telltale Signs

I should probably be keeping my eyes on the road, but I can’t help but notice the telltale signs of an economic system gone haywire. As you drive along, the number of For Sale signs in front of homes stands out. When you consider how bad the housing market has been, the 40% decline in national home prices since 2007, the 30% of home dwellers underwater on their mortgage, and declining household income, you realize how desperate a home seller must be to try and unload a home in this market. The reality of the number of For Sale signs does not match the rhetoric coming from the NAR, government mouthpieces, CNBC pundits, and other housing recovery shills about record low inventory and home price increases.

The Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury charade of foreclosure delaying tactics and selling thousands of properties in bulk to their crony capitalist buddies at a discount is designed to misinform the public. My local paper lists foreclosures in the community every Monday morning. In 2009 it would extend for four full pages. Today, it still extends four full pages. The fact that Wall Street bankers have criminally forged mortgage documents, people are living in houses for two years without making mortgage payments, and the Federal Government backing 97% of all mortgages while encouraging 3.5% down financing does not constitute a true housing recovery. Show me the housing recovery in these charts.

Existing home sales are at 1998 levels, with 45 million more people living in the country today.

New single family homes under construction are below levels in 1969, when there were 112 million less people in the country.

Another observation that can be made as you cruise through this suburban mecca of malaise is the overall decay of the infrastructure, appearances and disinterest or inability to maintain properties. The roadways are potholed with fading traffic lines, utility poles leaning and rotting, and signage corroding and antiquated. Houses are missing roof tiles, siding is cracked, gutters astray, porches sagging, windows cracked, a paint brush hasn’t been utilized in decades, and yards are inundated with debris and weeds. Not every house looks this way, but far more than you would think when viewing the overall demographics for Montgomery County. You wonder how many number among the 10 million vacant houses in the country today. The number of dilapidated run down properties paints a picture of the silent, barely perceptible Depression that grips the country today. With such little sense of community in the suburbs, most people don’t even know their neighbors. With the electronic transfer of food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other welfare benefits you would never know that your neighbor is unemployed and hasn’t made the mortgage payment on his house in 30 months. The corporate fascist ruling plutocracy uses their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream corporate media and government agency drones to misinform and obscure the truth, but the data and anecdotal observational evidence reveal the true nature of our societal implosion.

A report by the Census Bureau this past week inadvertently reveals data that confirms my observations on the roadways of my suburban existence. Annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, to an inflation-adjusted $50,054. The median income — meaning half earned more, half less — now stands 8.9% lower than the all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999. It is far worse than even that dreadful result. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1989. When you understand that real household income hasn’t risen in 23 years, you can connect the dots with the decay and deterioration of properties in suburbia. A vast swath of Americans cannot afford to maintain their residences. If the choice is feeding your kids and keeping the heat on versus repairing the porch, replacing the windows or getting a new roof, the only option is survival.

All races have seen their income fall, with educational achievement reflected in the much higher incomes of Whites and Asians. It is interesting to note that after a 45 year War on Poverty the median household income for black families is only up 19% since 1968.

Now for the really bad news. Any critical thinking person should realize the Federal Government has been systematically under-reporting inflation since the early 1980’s in an effort to obscure the fact they are debasing the currency and methodically destroying the lives of middle class Americans. If inflation was calculated exactly as it was in 1980, the GDP figures would be substantially lower and inflation would be reported 5% higher than it is today. Faking the numbers does not change reality, only the perception of reality. Calculating real median household income with the true level of inflation exposes the true picture for middle class America. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1970, just prior to Nixon closing the gold window and unleashing the full fury of a Federal Reserve able to print fiat currency and politicians to promise the earth, moon and the sun to voters. With incomes not rising over the last four decades is it any wonder many of our 115 million households slowly rot and decay from within like an old diseased oak tree. The slightest gust of wind can lead to disaster.

Eliminating the last remnants of fiscal discipline on bankers and politicians in 1971 accomplished the desired result of enriching the top 0.1% while leaving the bottom 90% in debt and desolation. The Wall Street debt peddlers, Military Industrial arms dealers, and job destroying corporate goliaths have reaped the benefits of financialization (money printing) while shoveling the costs, their gambling losses, trillions of consumer debt, and relentless inflation upon the working tax paying middle class. The creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of the individual income tax in 1913, along with leaving the gold standard has rewarded the cabal of private banking interests who have captured our economic and political systems with obscene levels of wealth, while senior citizens are left with no interest earnings ($400 billion per year has been absconded from savers and doled out to bankers since 2008 by Ben Bernanke) and the middle class has gone decades seeing their earnings stagnate and their purchasing power fall precipitously.

The facts exposed in the chart above didn’t happen by accident. The system has been rigged by those in power to enrich them, while impoverishing the masses. When you gain control over the issuance of currency, issuance of debt, tax system, political system and legal apparatus, you’ve essentially hijacked the country and can funnel all the benefits to yourself and costs to the math challenged, government educated, brainwashed dupes, known as the masses. But there is a problem for the 0.1%. Their sociopathic personalities never allow them to stop plundering and preying upon the sheep. They have left nothing but carcasses of the once proud hard working middle class across the country side. There are only so many Lear jets, estates in the Hamptons, Jaguars, and Rolexes the 0.1% can buy. There are only 152,000 of them. Their sociopathic looting and pillaging of the national wealth has destroyed the host. When 90% of the population can barely subsist, collapse and revolution beckon.

Extend, Pretend & Depend

As I drove further along Ridge Pike we passed the endless monuments to our spiral into the depths of materialism, consumerism, and the illusion that goods purchased on credit represented true wealth. Mile after mile of strip malls, restaurants, gas stations, and office buildings rolled by my window. Anyone who lives in the suburbs knows what I’m talking about. You can’t travel three miles in any direction without passing a Dunkin Donuts, KFC, McDonalds, Subway, 7-11, Dairy Queen, Supercuts, Jiffy Lube or Exxon Station. The proliferation of office parks to accommodate the millions of paper pushers that make our service economy hum has been unprecedented in human history. Never have so many done so little in so many places. Everyone knows what a standard American strip mall consists of – a pizza place, a Chinese takeout, beer store, a tanning, salon, a weight loss center, a nail salon, a Curves, karate studio, Gamestop, Radioshack, Dollar Store, H&R Block, and a debt counseling service. They are a reflection of who we’ve become – an obese drunken species with excessive narcissistic tendencies that prefers to play video games while texting on our iGadgets as our debt financed lifestyles ultimately require professional financial assistance.

What you can’t ignore today is the number of vacant storefronts in these strip malls and the overwhelming number of SPACE AVAILABLE, FOR LEASE, and FOR RENT signs that proliferate in front of these dying testaments to an unsustainable economic system based upon debt fueled consumer spending and infinite growth assumptions. The booming sign manufacturer is surely based in China. The officially reported national vacancy rates of 11% are already at record highs, but anyone with two eyes knows these self-reported numbers are a fraud. Vacancy rates based on my observations are closer to 30%. This is part of the extend and pretend strategy that has been implemented by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB, and the Wall Street banking cabal. The fraud and false storyline of a commercial real estate recovery is evident to anyone willing to think critically. The incriminating data is provided by the Federal Reserve in their Quarterly Delinquency Report.

The last commercial real estate crisis occurred in 1991. Mall vacancy rates were at levels consistent with today.

The current reported office vacancy rates of 17.5% are only slightly below the 19% levels of 1991.

As reported by the Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on commercial real estate loans in 1991 were 12%, leading to major losses among the banks that made those imprudent loans. Amazingly, after the greatest financial collapse in history, delinquency rates on commercial loans supposedly peaked at 8.8% in the 2^nd quarter of 2010 and have now miraculously plummeted to pre-collapse levels of 4.9%. This is while residential loan delinquencies have resumed their upward trajectory, the number of employed Americans has fallen by 414,000 in the last two months, 9 million Americans have left the labor force since 2008, and vacancy rates are at or near all-time highs. This doesn’t pass the smell test. The Federal Reserve, owned and controlled by the Wall Street, instructed these banks to extend all commercial real estate loans, pretend they will be paid, and value them on their books at 100% of the original loan amount. Real estate developers pretend they are collecting rent from non-existent tenants, Wall Street banks pretend they are being paid by the developers, and their highly compensated public accounting firm pretends the loans aren’t really delinquent. Again, the purpose of this scam is to shield the Wall Street bankers from accepting the losses from their reckless behavior. Ben rewards them with risk free income on their deposits, propped up by mark to fantasy accounting, while they reward themselves with billions in bonuses for a job well done. The master plan requires an eventual real recovery that isn’t going to happen. Press releases and fake data do not change the reality on the ground.

I have two strip malls within three miles of my house that opened in 1990. When I moved to the area in 1995, they were 100% occupied and a vital part of the community. The closest center has since lost its Genuardi grocery store, Sears Hardware, Blockbuster, Donatos, Sears Optical, Hollywood Tans, hair salon, pizza pub and a local book store. It is essentially a ghost mall, with two banks, a couple chain restaurants and empty parking spaces. The other strip mall lost its grocery store anchor and sporting goods store. This has happened in an outwardly prosperous community. The reality is the apparent prosperity is a sham. The entire tottering edifice of housing, autos, and retail has been sustained by ever increasing levels of debt for the last thirty years and the American consumer has hit the wall. From 1950 through the early 1980s, when the working middle class saw their standard of living rise, personal consumption expenditures accounted for between 60% and 65% of GDP. Over the last thirty years consumption has relentlessly grown as a percentage of GDP to its current level of 71%, higher than before the 2008 collapse.

If the consumption had been driven by wage increases, then this trend would not have been a problem. But, we already know real median household income is lower than it was in 1970. The thirty years of delusion were financed with debt – peddled, hawked, marketed, and pushed by the drug dealers on Wall Street. The American people got hooked on debt and still have not kicked the habit. The decline in household debt since 2008 is solely due to the Wall Street banks writing off $800 billion of mortgage, credit card, and auto loan debt and transferring the cost to the already drowning American taxpayer.

The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.

The Faces of Failure & Futility

My fourteen years working in key positions for big box retailer IKEA has made me particularly observant of the hubris and foolishness of the big chain stores that dominate the retail landscape. There are 1.1 million retail establishments in the United States, but the top 25 mega-store national chains account for 25% of all the retail sales in the country. The top 100 retailers operate 243,000 stores and account for approximately $1.6 trillion in sales, or 36% of all the retail sales in the country. Their misconceived strategic plans assumed 5% same store growth for eternity, economic growth of 3% per year for eternity, a rising market share, and ignorance of the possible plans of their competitors. They believed they could saturate a market without over cannibalizing their existing stores. Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowes have all hit the limits of profitable expansion. Each incremental store in a market results in lower profits.

My trip to my local Lowes last weekend gave me a glimpse into a future of failure and futility. Until 2009, I had four choices of Lowes within 15 miles of my house. There was a store 8 miles east, 12 miles west, 15 miles north, and 15 miles south of my house. In an act of supreme hubris, Lowes opened a store smack in the middle of these four stores, four miles from my house. The Hatfield store opened in early 2009 and I wrote an article detailing how Lowes was about to ruin their profitability in Montgomery County. It just so happens that I meet a couple of my old real estate buddies from IKEA at a local pub every few months. In 2009 one of them had a real estate position with Lowes and we had a spirited discussion about the prospects for the Lowes Hatfield store. He assured me it would be a huge success. I insisted it would be a dud and would crush the profitability of the market by cannibalizing the other four stores. We met at that same pub a few months ago. Lowes had laid him off and he admitted to me the Hatfield store was a disaster.

I pulled into the Lowes parking lot at 11:30 am on a Saturday. Big Box retailers do 50% of their business on the weekend. The busiest time frame is from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm on Saturday. Big box retailers build enough parking spots to handle this peak period. The 120,000 square feet Hatfield Lowes has approximately 1,000 parking spaces. I pulled into the spot closest to the entrance during their supposed peak period. There were about 70 cars in the parking lot, with most probably owned by Lowes workers. It is a pleasure to shop in this store, with wide open aisles, and an employee to customer ratio of four to one. The store has 14 checkout lanes and at peak period on a Saturday, there was ONE checkout lane open, with no lines. This is a corporate profit disaster in the making, but the human tragedy far overrides the declining profits of this mega-retailer.

As you walk around this museum of tools and toilets you notice the looks on the faces of the workers. These aren’t the tattooed, face pierced freaks you find in many retail establishments these days. They are my neighbors. They are the beaten down middle class. They are the middle aged professionals who got cast aside by the mega-corporations in the name of efficiency, outsourcing, right sizing, stock buybacks, and executive stock options. The irony of this situation is lost on those who have gutted the American middle class. When you look into the eyes of these people, you see sadness, confusion and embarrassment. They know they can do more. They want to do more. They know they’ve been screwed, but they aren’t sure who to blame. They were once the very customers propelling Lowes’ growth, buying new kitchens, appliances, and power tools. Now they can’t afford a can of paint on their $10 per hour, no benefit retail careers. As depressing as this portrait appears, it is about to get worse.

This Lowes will be shut down and boarded up within the next two years. The parking lot will become a weed infested eyesore occupied by 14 year old skateboarders. One hundred and fifty already down on their luck neighbors will lose their jobs, the township will have a gaping hole in their tax revenue, and the CEO of Lowes will receive a $50 million bonus for his foresight in announcing the closing of 100 stores that he had opened five years before. This exact scenario will play out across suburbia, as our unsustainable system comes undone. Our future path will parallel the course of the labor participation rate. Just as the 9 million Americans who have “left” the labor force since 2008 did not willfully make that choice, the debt burdened American consumer will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality of a dramatically reduced standard of living.

Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing?

A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” – Chris Hedges

SOME CURRENT COMMENTS ON MAKING MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET

For the first time in a long time (since 12/2010 for gold: March 2011 for the general stock market) we have a simultaneous “Buy It ALL” situation on our hands. (Actually I call it “The Big Hedge”)

Remember, usually, the general stock market and the precious metals move in opposite directions. The DOW goes up and XAU goes down and vice versa.

Precious metals and the general stock market march to different drummers most of the time and while it is very true that should the general stock market take a nose dive, it will also drag down precious metals stocks, miners and metal alike – although that set of circumstances doesn’t last long. If the general markets continue to show weakness, very shortly, general market positions will start to be liquidated and funds moved into “safe haven” areas such as gold, silver, miners, foreign currency, etc..

XAUWeeklyChart.jpg?t=1330045086

As you can see from the VTI chart (VIPER – represents the entire general market), the general market gave a sale back in August of 2010 and had a good run through March of 2011 where it entered a corrective phase, eventually falling back to a low of 60 in September/October of 2011. Since October, 2011, it has been on a tear and one never “fights the tape” or argues with Mr. Market when he’s on a rip! Just quietly take a long position and add to it as things keep going up.

XAU (precious metals index proxy) has been doing just fine from October, 2008 to December, 2010 when it entered a correction. Note that this correction was not a big downer for the index but a correction that has worked it way out by moving sideways with ever lower highs and ever lower lows. This is a perfectly valid technical correction and tends to show great underlying strength with very few sellers.

You will please note that XAU has now penetrated the UP trend running back to 10/08 and promptly climbed right back to its’ current position above the trend line in quite a bullish show of strength.

XAU gave a short term BUY in late December and has generated a steeper uptrend in addition to piercing the long term uptrend going back to 2008. It has just given a further “strength” signal in both of the last two days.

So we are in a most interesting situation where both the VTI and the XAU (plus all of the other precious metals, miners, most commodities) are also on a BUY.

So what does one do in this rather odd situation?

You hedge, that’s what.. “Hedge” in this case means buy the broad PM ETFs or mutuals (GDX, PHYS, PRPFX and so on) while at the same time taking a position in those stocks considered general market (VTI, QQQ, some stronger specialized ETFs like XLE, XLK).

Just for your information, the list below is part of my current open positions. I run charts daily on each one and several positions are based on other market forces than just “hedge” possibilities.

VTI
QQQ
FCX
GDX
PRPFX
PHYS
PSLV
TBF
UDN
USO

TBF is a short against long term US Treasuries and will be expanded when 20 year Treasuries climb above 3.22%

UDN is a VERY SPECULATIVE bet against the dollar. This one has made me a pile of money trading in and out between UDN and UUP but is subject to instant sale if the default of Greece/et al causes a run out of the Euro. A run out of the Euro can’t help but be mostly in the direction of the Dollar and when that happens, the dollar will strengthen significantly until things calm down and buyers realize the Dollar is in worse shape than the Euro. Then it will be rush to the door from more and more currencies until there’s no other door except those labeled “Gold” and “Silver” or other assets such as farmland (which – if you didn’t know, has risen 30% in Nebraska over the past year!)

USO is self explanatory and with what’s going on in the ME, everyone should have a position in Oil.. It has nowhere to go but up and benefits from every rumor, car bomb, and hijacked tanker.

We don’t get many chances to be long PMs and long hedges in the general market that are also in full BUY modes but when we get the chance, it would be dumb to ignore the chance.

Just remember, these are (with the exceptions of my core PM positions) short term positions and subject to dumping on any signs of extended weakness of the general market.

There are a LOT of market bears out there right now who expect a general market crash and are preaching even more gloom and doom than usual. Please remember that bull action “climbs a wall of worry” with everyone preaching a fall and yet the markets just keep moving up. When everyone turns bullish, then take some of your profits and watch out!

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CENTRAL BANKS IN LAST DITCH DESPERATE MOVE TO SAVE BANKERS AND SCREW YOU AGAIN

When you see such coordinated action by all the major Central Banks in the world, you know the situation is much worse than you are being told by the ruling oligarchy. The confidence and trust is gone. Every major bank in the world is insolvent, whether it be in the U.S., Europe or China. These Central Banks are owned and controlled by the very banks they are bailing out. They are telling you they have it under control. They do not. They have lost control. The debt is too great and will destroy the economic system of the world.

This is a last ditch effort by those in power to grab the last vestiges of middle class wealth. The stock market will soar today, benefitting bankers, politicians, and the 1%. They have solved nothing. The debt remains. The debt will not be paid.

Oil, food and commodity prices immediately soared on this announcement. Again, the wealthy will get richer and the average American will be destroyed by inflation on the things they need to live. The game goes on.

Gold jumped $20 in seconds. It is your only defense against the looting by the evil banking syndicate.

Here Comes The Global, US-Funded Liquidity Bail Out

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/30/2011 08:02 -0500

As expected, the Fed has just bailed out the world once again:

FED, ECB, BOJ, BOE, SNB, BANK OF CANADA LOWER SWAP RATES – BBG
ECB, FED other major central bank to lower the pricing of existing USD liquidity swaps by 50BPS

And as we have been writing every single day, the worldwide dollar crunch is now confirmed:

At present, there is no need to offer liquidity in non-domestic currencies other than the U.S. dollar

And finally, a promise to bailout Bank of America when it hits $4.00 again:

U.S. financial institutions currently do not face difficulty obtaining liquidity in short-term funding markets. However, were conditions to deteriorate, the Federal Reserve has a range of tools available to provide an effective liquidity backstop for such institutions and is prepared to use these tools as needed to support financial stability and to promote the extension of credit to U.S. households and businesses.

This means that the global situation is far, far more dire than the talking heads have said. Luckily, when this step fails, which it will, Mars can always come and bail us out.

For release at 8:00 a.m. EDT

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank are today announcing coordinated actions to enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system. The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity.

These central banks have agreed to lower the pricing on the existing temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangements by 50 basis points so that the new rate will be the U.S. dollar overnight index swap (OIS) rate plus 50 basis points. This pricing will be applied to all operations conducted from December 5, 2011. The authorization of these swap arrangements has been extended to February 1, 2013. In addition, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank will continue to offer three-month tenders until further notice.

As a contingency measure, these central banks have also agreed to establish temporary bilateral liquidity swap arrangements so that liquidity can be provided in each jurisdiction in any of their currencies should market conditions so warrant. At present, there is no need to offer liquidity in non-domestic currencies other than the U.S. dollar, but the central banks judge it prudent to make the necessary arrangements so that liquidity support operations could be put into place quickly should the need arise. These swap lines are authorized through February 1, 2013.

Federal Reserve Actions
The Federal Open Market Committee has authorized an extension of the existing temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangements with the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank through February 1, 2013. The rate on these swap arrangements has been reduced from the U.S. dollar OIS rate plus 100 basis points to the OIS rate plus 50 basis points. In addition, as a contingency measure, the Federal Open Market Committee has agreed to establish similar temporary swap arrangements with these five central banks to provide liquidity in any of their currencies if necessary. Further details on the revised arrangements will be available shortly.

U.S. financial institutions currently do not face difficulty obtaining liquidity in short-term funding markets. However, were conditions to deteriorate, the Federal Reserve has a range of tools available to provide an effective liquidity backstop for such institutions and is prepared to use these tools as needed to support financial stability and to promote the extension of credit to U.S. households and businesses.

2011 – THE YEAR OF CATCH-22

I wrote this on January 3. It was my outlook for 2011. Whenever I think I’m too pessimistic about the world, I go back and read old articles. This article is less than 4 months old and the situation has gotten much worse, much faster than I anticipated. The economy has slowed dramatically, even with the payroll tax cut and Ben’s QE2. I now think the 2nd half of 2011 will be outright recession. Again, my own words prove than I’m actually an optimist compared to what really happens. Think about that the next time you get depressed by one of my articles.

As I began to think about what might happen in 2011, the classic Joseph Heller novel Catch 22 kept entering my mind. Am I sane for thinking such a thing, or am I so insane that asking this question proves that I’m too rational to even think such a thing? In the novel, the “Catch 22” is that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy”. Hence, pilots who request a fitness evaluation are sane, and therefore must fly in combat. At the same time, if an evaluation is not requested by the pilot, he will never receive one (i.e. they can never be found “insane”), meaning he must also fly in combat. Therefore, Catch-22 ensures that no pilot can ever be grounded for being insane – even if he were. The absurdity is captured in this passage:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed. – Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

The United States and its leaders are stuck in their own Catch 22. They need the economy to improve in order to generate jobs, but the economy can only improve if people have jobs. They need the economy to recover in order to improve our deficit situation, but if the economy really recovers long term interest rates will increase, further depressing the housing market and increasing the interest expense burden for the US, therefore increasing the deficit. A recovering economy would result in more production and consumption, which would result in more oil consumption driving the price above $100 per barrel, therefore depressing the economy. Americans must save for their retirements as 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 every day, but if the savings rate goes back to 10%, the economy will collapse due to lack of consumption. Consumer expenditures account for 71% of GDP and need to revert back to 65% for the US to have a balanced sustainable economy, but a reduction in consumer spending will push the US back into recession, reducing tax revenues and increasing deficits. You can see why Catch 22 is the theme for 2011.

It seems the consensus for 2011 is that the economy will grow 3% to 4%, two million new jobs will be created, corporate profits will rise, and the stock market will rise another 10% to 15%. Sounds pretty good. The problem with this storyline is that it is based on a 2010 that gave the appearance of recovery, but was a hoax propped up by trillions in borrowed funds. On January 1, 2010 the National Debt of the United States rested at $12.3 trillion. On December 31, 2010 the National Debt checked in at $13.9 trillion, an increase of $1.6 trillion.

The Federal Reserve Balance Sheet totaled $2.28 trillion on January 1, 2010. Today, it stands at $2.46 trillion, an increase of $180 billion.

Over this same time frame, the Real GDP of the U.S. has increased approximately $350 billion, and is still below the level reached in the 4th Quarter of 2007. U.S. politicians and Ben Bernanke spent almost $1.8 trillion, or 13% of GDP, in one year to create a miniscule 2.7% increase in GDP. This is reported as a recovery by the mainstream corporate media mouthpieces. On September 18, 2008 the American financial system came within hours of a total meltdown, caused by Wall Street mega-banks and their bought off political cronies in Washington DC. The National Debt on that day stood at $9.7 trillion. The US Government has borrowed $4.2 since that date, a 43% increase in the National Debt in 27 months. The Federal Reserve balance sheet totaled $963 billion in September 2008 and Bernanke has expanded it by $1.5 trillion, a 155% increase in 27 months. Most of the increase was due to the purchase of toxic mortgage backed securities from their Wall Street masters.

Real GDP in the 3rd quarter of 2008 was $13.2 trillion. Real GDP in the 3rd quarter of 2010 was $13.3 trillion.

Think about these facts for one minute. Your leaders have borrowed $5.7 trillion from future unborn generations and have increased GDP by $100 billion. The financial crisis, caused by excessive debt creation by Wall Street and ridiculously low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve, 30 years in the making, erupted in 2008. The response to a crisis caused by too much debt and interest rates manipulated too low was to create an immense amount of additional debt and reduce interest rates to zero. The patient has terminal cancer and the doctors have injected the patient with more cancer cells and a massive dose of morphine. The knowledge about how we achieved the 2010 “recovery” is essential to understanding what could happen in 2011.

Confidence Game

Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama, the Wall Street banks, and the corporate mainstream media are playing a giant confidence game. It is a desperate gamble. The plan has been to convince the population of the US that the economy is in full recovery mode. By convincing the masses that things are recovering, they will begin to spend and buy stocks. If they spend, companies will gain confidence and start hiring workers. More jobs will create increasing confidence, reinforcing the recovery story, and leading to the stock market soaring to new heights. As the market rises, the average Joe will be drawn into the market and it will go higher. Tax revenues will rise as corporate profits, wages and capital gains increase. This will reduce the deficit. This is the plan and it appears to be working so far. But, Catch 22 will kick in during 2011.

Retail sales are up 6.5% over 2009 as consumers have been convinced to whip out one of their 15 credit cards and buy some more iPads, Flat screen TVs, Ugg boots and Tiffany diamond pendants. Consumer non-revolving debt for autos, student loans, boats and mobile homes is at an all-time high as the government run financing arms of GMAC and Sallie Mae have issued loans to anyone that can fog a mirror with their breath. Total consumer credit card debt has been flat for 2010 as banks have written it off as fast as consumers can charge it. The savings rate has begun to fall again as Americans are being convinced to live today and not worry about tomorrow. Of course, the current savings rate of 5.9% would be 2% if the government was not dishing out billions in transfer payments. Wages have declined by $127 billion from the 3rd Quarter of 2008, while government transfer payments for unemployment and other social programs have increased by $441 billion, all borrowed.

Both the government and its citizens are living the old adage:

Everybody wants to get to heaven, but no one wants to practice what is required to get there.

The government politicians and bureaucrats promise to cut unsustainable spending as soon as the economy recovers. The economy has been recovering for the last 6 quarters, according to GDP figures, but there are absolutely no government efforts to cut spending. This is proof that politicians always lie. It will never be the right time to cut spending. Another faux crisis will be used as a reason to continue unfunded spending increases. Having consumer spending account for 70% of GDP is unbalanced and unsustainable. Everyone knows that consumer spending needs to revert back to 65% of GDP and the Savings Rate needs to rise to 8% or higher in order to ensure the long-term fiscal health of the country. Savings and investment are what sustain countries over time. Borrowing and spending is a recipe for failure and bankruptcy. The facts are that consumer expenditures as a percentage of GDP have actually risen since 2007 and Congress and Obama just cut payroll taxes in an effort to encourage Americans to spend even more borrowed money. Catch 22 is alive and well.

The first half of 2011 is guaranteed to give the appearance of recovery. The lame-duck Congress “compromise” will pump hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the economy. The continuation of unemployment benefits for 99 weeks (supposedly to help employment) and the 2% payroll tax cut will goose consumer spending. Ben Bernanke and his QE2 stimulus for poor Wall Street bankers is pumping $75 billion per month ($3 to $4 billion per day) directly into the stock market. Since Ben gave Wall Street the all clear signal in late August, the NASDAQ has soared 25%. Despite the fact that there are 362,000 less Americans employed than were employed in August 2010, the mainstream media will continue to tout the jobs recovery. The goal of all these efforts is to boost confidence and spending. Everything being done by those in power has the seeds of its own destruction built in. The Catch 22 will assert itself in the 2nd half of 2011.

Housing Catch 22

Ben Bernanke, an Ivy League PhD who should understand the concept of standard deviation, missed a 3 standard deviation bubble in housing as ironically pointed out by a recent Dallas Federal Reserve report.

Home prices still need to fall 23%, just to revert to its long-term mean. That is a fact that even Bernanke should be able to grasp (maybe not). Anyone who argues that housing has bottomed and will resume growth either has an agenda (NAR) or is a clueless dope (Bernanke). A new perfect storm is brewing for housing in 2011 and will not subside until late 2012. You may have thought those bad mortgages had been all written off. You would be wrong. There will be in excess of $200 billion of adjustable rate mortgages that reset between 2011 and 2012, with in excess of $125 billion being the dreaded Alt-A mortgages. This is a recipe for millions of new foreclosures.

According to the Dallas Fed, in addition to the 3.9 million homes on the market, there is a shadow inventory of 6 million homes that will be coming on the market due to foreclosure. About 3.6 million housing units, representing 2.7% of the total housing stock, are vacant and being held off the market. These are not occasional-use homes visited by people whose usual residence is elsewhere but units that are vacant year-round. Presumably, many are among the 6 million distressed properties that are listed as at least 60 days delinquent, in foreclosure or foreclosed in banks’ inventories.

The coup de grace for the housing market will be Ben Bernake’s ode to Catch 22. In his November 4 OP-ED piece he had this to say about his $600 billion QE2:

“Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance.” – Housing sage Ben Bernanke

On the day Bernanke wrote these immortal words 30 Year Mortgage rates were 4.2%. Today, two months later, they stand at 5.0%. This should be a real boon to refinancing and the avalanche of mortgage resets coming down the pike. It seems that money printing and a debt financed “recovery” leads to higher long-term interest rates. The more convincing the recovery, the higher interest rates will go. The higher interest rates go, the further the housing market will drop. The further housing prices drop, the number of underwater homeowners will grow to 30%. This will lead to more foreclosures. Approximately 50% of all the assets on banks books are backed by real estate. Billions in bank losses are in the pipeline. Do you see the Catch 22 in Bernanke’s master plan? The Dallas Fed sees it:

This unease highlights the housing market’s fragility and suggests there may be no pain-free path to the eventual righting of the market. No perfect solution to the housing crisis exists. The latest price declines will undoubtedly cause more economic dislocation. As the crisis enters its fifth year, uncertainty is as prevalent as ever and continues to hinder a more robust economic recovery. Given that time has not proven beneficial in rendering pricing clarity, allowing the market to clear may be the path of least distress. – Dallas Fed

Quantitative Easing Catch 22

Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing (dropping dollars from helicopters) is riddled with Catch-22 implications. Bernanke revealed his plan in his 2002 speech about deflation:

“The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.”

The expectations of most when reading Ben’s words were that his helicopters would drop the dollars across America. What he has done is load up his helicopters with trillions of dollars and circled above Wall Street for two years continuously dropping his load. Bernanke’s quantitative easing, which will triple the Fed’s balance sheet by June of 2011, began in earnest in early 2009. The price for a gallon on gasoline was $1.62. Today, it is $3.05, an 88% increase in two years. Gold was $814 an ounce. Today, it is $1,421 an ounce, a 61% increase in two years. In the last year, the prices for copper, silver, cotton, wheat, corn, coffee and other commodities have risen in price by 30% to 90%.

Quantitative easing has been sold to the public as a way to avoid the terrible ravages of deflation. The fact is there are less jobs, lower wages, lower home prices, zero returns on bank deposits, higher fuel costs, higher food costs, higher real estate taxes, higher medical insurance premiums and huge jaw dropping bonuses for the bankers on Wall Street. Somehow the government has spun this toxic mix into a CPI which has resulted in fixed income senior citizens getting no increases in their pitiful Social Security payments for two years. You can judge where Ben’s Helicopters have dropped the $2 trillion. Quantitative easing has benefited only Wall Street bankers and the 1% wealthiest Americans. The $1.4 trillion of toxic mortgage backed securities on The Fed’s balance sheet are worth less than $700 billion. How will they unload this toxic waste? The Treasuries they have bought drop in value as interest rates rise. Quantitative easing’s Catch 22 is that it can never be unwound without destroying the Fed and the US economy.

The USD dollar index was at 89 in early 2009. Today, it stands at 79, an 11% decline, which is phenomenal considering that Europe has imploded over this same time frame. Bernanke’s master plan is for the USD to fall and ease the burden of our $14 trillion in debt. He just wants it to fall slowly. Foreigners know what he is doing and are stealthily getting out of their USD positions. This explains much of the rise in gold, silver and commodities. The rise in oil to $91 a barrel will not be a top. The Catch-22 of a declining dollar is that prices of all imported goods go up. If the dollar falls another 10%, the price of oil will rise above $120 a barrel and push the economy back into recession. Then there is the little issue of at what level of printing and debasing the currency does the rest of the world lose its remaining confidence in Ben and the USD.

A few other “minor” issues for 2011 include:

The imminent collapse of the European Union as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are effectively bankrupt. Spain is the size of the other three countries combined and has a 20% unemployment rate. The Germans are losing patience with these spendthrift countries. Debt does matter.
State and local governments were able to put off hard choices for another year, as Washington DC handed out hundreds of billions in pork. California will have a $19 billion budget deficit; Illinois will have a $17 billion budget deficit; New Jersey will have a $10.5 billion budget deficit; New York will have a $9 billion budget deficit. A US Congress filled with Tea Party newcomers will refuse to bailout these spendthrift states. Substantial government employee layoffs are a lock.

There is a growing probability that China will experience a hard landing as their own quantitative easing has resulted in inflation surging to a 28 month high of 5.1%, with food inflation skyrocketing to 11.7%. Poor families spend up to half of their income on food. Rapidly rising prices severely burden poor people and can spark civil unrest if too many of them can’t afford food.
The Tea Party members of Congress are likely to cause as much trouble for Republicans as Democrats. If they decide to make a stand on raising the debt ceiling early in 2011, all hell could break loose in the debt and stock markets.

The government’s confidence game is destined to fail due to Catch-22. Will the consensus forecast of a growing economy, rising corporate profits, 10% to 15% stock market gains, 2 million new jobs, and a housing recovery come true in 2011? No it will not. By mid-year confidence in Ben’s master plan will wane. He is trapped in the paradox of Catch-22. When you start hearing about QE3 you’ll know that the gig is up. If Bernanke is foolish enough to propose QE3 you can expect gold, silver and oil to go parabolic. Enjoy 2011. I don’t think Ben Bernanke will.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22.” -Yossarian