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https://www.bitchute.com/video/Xxqs6...0-T8fIm7UGK50E
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My Answer is ‘Yes,’ But Keep Capitalism
By Ira Katz
April 3, 2021
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I posted a question on LRC, Is it inherent in the nature of free market capitalism for the most wealthy individuals and/or corporations to capture government power? I received several interesting comments via email. The great Bionic Mosquito has answered the question in a 3-part post (part 2 part 3). L. On LRC L. Reichard White has posted in response a magisterial piece on the Sociobiology of Liberty. I am honored and informed by these responses, but to be honest I had my own sense of an answer somewhat making this a rhetorical question. I imagined the question in conversation with both progressives, conservatives and hard core libertarians as a means to formulate limited agreement in today’s divisive political environment. Anyway, My Answer is ‘Yes,’ But Keep Capitalism. I will explain.
In a recent podcast James Corbett and Keith Knight discussed “red pill moments” in their lives. Knight described reading an eye opening 1990 essay by Hans Hoppe titled Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis. In this essay Hoppe notes that Marxists can be correct on their historical observations but false in their reasoning. Now, virtually all people from all political factions can observe the evil intentions of some of the most wealthy individuals and/or corporations even if their reasoning about what to do about it differ and are faulty. I quote Hoppe at length for this directly pertinent passage on the subject at hand.
And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state elite-even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit in addition to its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelied banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nerve centers of civil society-not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites, and the state.
Not only does Hoppe exactly affirm the danger stated in my question; but the rhetorical move that he employs, to first recognize agreement before critiquing, is the pretext to my question as an approach to dialogue. For example, progressives typically suggest more and more government regulation and higher taxes to combat the evil influence we agree on. But perhaps some of these progressives can be persuaded that any government power created will eventually be captured, sooner rather than later, by the very entities to be regulated. For conservatives and libertarians there is a tendency to give bad corporate behavior a pass as the free market in action. But perhaps they can be persuaded that these corporate entities are in practice one and the same as the government. Thus there could be agreement across the political spectrum.
Capitalism (Hoppe uses the term ‘free capitalism,’ White uses ‘voluntary exchange’) consists specifically and only of respect for property rights and free and voluntary exchange. As defined, capitalism is absolutely necessary for a free society. Thus, in spite of the dangers of government capture we must keep capitalism. But is capitalism sufficient, and is it stable? According to Hoppe in 1990 perhaps. He ends his essay “….the end of exploitation and the beginning of liberty and unheard of economic prosperity, means the establishment of a pure private property society regulated by nothing but private law.” I think such well known libertarians as Walter Block and Robert Wenzel would wholeheartedly agree with Hoppe’s statement. My original question and my answer imply that I do not believe so.
Can there be a virtuous government without a virtuous people? Can a virtuous government coerce (or be nudged by the Cass Sustiens of the world) people to be virtuous? This is where the Bionic Mosquito’s response is relevant. He states that “If we are after free market capitalism and liberty – to say nothing of living the best of human possibilities – there must be something of a value held in common, something higher than free market capitalism or the non-aggression principle (or equality, or diversity, or inclusion); something outside of human reach, and something that only becomes less tainted the better we climb the hierarchy.” Or in other words, something that leads to virtue. I agree with one of his commentators who notes, “This series of posts is a beautiful summation of all the exhaustive work you’ve done on this site that I personally have benefitted so much from.” The “something outside of human reach” Bionic advocates is Christianity and I for one agree. But I also do not preclude the possibility of other belief systems meeting this need. Hoppe’s solution largely consists of a vanishingly small government. I concur with his solution. But even if remotely possible today, returning to my original question, would the pure private property society be stable?
I posit without proof here that our current overlords located in government or corporations are at work to create a society of deracinated, atomized individuals to allow for easy control. Why? Because they know organized resistance is the greatest threat to their plans. Thus, what we need are people who live in, act in, and nourish communities of all kinds that they enter by inheritance or by free choice. They can be religious communities, families, neighborhood communities, intellectual communities like the writers and readers of LRC, freedom cells, internet communities, professional societies, craft guilds; maybe even local governments; the list is endless.
So, to conclude, it is inherent in the nature of free market capitalism for the most wealthy individuals and/or corporations to capture government power. Thus, I advocate capitalism, but populated by virtuous people, cultivated in a matrix of virtuous communities that are jealous of their rights to obtain and maintain a free society.
Ira Katz [send him mail] lives in Paris and works as a research engineer for a French company. He is the co-author of and .
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Previous article by Ira Katz: An Important Social/Political/Economic Question of Our Time
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Gold Rises as Financial Faith Weakens
April 4, 2021
By Matthew Piepenburg
An Ode to Law School
In recent weeks, I’ve authored many reports pointing toward the certainty of both current as well as rising inflation ahead, which, of course, is favorable to the long-term price direction in gold.
That said, I also joked that the only thing certain in life is uncertainty; and yet I stuck to my inflationary certainty.
With this paradox openly confessed, one of my former law professors sent me a polite yet challenging email to make a contrary case for inflation, as he had taught me (and many others) to do as part of a 3-year legal education in seeing two sides to every fact pattern.
And so, in deference to a wise professor, as well as the humility of seeing more than one’s own certainty, let’s give deflation a fair look, as well as fair argument.
In the end, fortunately, the net result is the same for gold: Its best days are still ahead.
The Case for Deflation
Despite all the reasons discussed in preceding reports (i.e., money supply, commodity super cycles, deficit spending, and governmental credit guarantees to commercial banks) as to what we see as the current as well as future inevitability of rising inflation, there are many credible individuals, including those who strongly favor gold, who see a very different horizon.
That is, there are many who see a deflationary rather inflationary setting ahead.
The key arguments made by deflationary thinkers are not to be mocked or disregarded.
Their primary argument in favor of deflation boils down to one simple idea, namely: When economies and markets stall (or even collapse), this leads to dramatic slow-downs in consumer demand, and hence dramatic declines in consumer pricing—ie. deflation.
Needless to say, current economic conditions are anything but robust, which favors a deflationary premise.
By the turn of 2020’s in general, and during the global pandemic in particular, the world witnessed extreme levels of excess capacity (i.e. surplus rather than demand) in labor, manufacturing, retail and commercial real estate.
Banks this year, for example, are already telegraphing that in a post-COVID world, they will require 40% less office space as more and more systems have since been put in place to manage operations outside of traditional office settings.
All of these factors of excess capacity, from retail to commercial office space, one could sanely argue, point toward continued deflationary rather than inflationary forces going forward.
As to the staggering growth of the money supply unleashed by global central banks printing trillions of fiat currencies at record levels since 2008 in general, and the 2020 COVID period in particular, the deflation camp can further (and sanely) argue that such extreme money creation has not led to rising inflation, including hyper-inflation.
This, they legitimately argue, is for the simple reason that all those printed fiat currencies never enter the real economy, but remain contained within a closed-circuit loop of Treasury departments, central banks, commercial banks and Wall Street—not the real (i.e. Main Street) economy where money velocity truly can do its inflationary damage.
In short, so long as central banks act as insider-lenders of last resort to government treasury departments and overpaid CEOs, all that printed money is safely contained behind a Hoover-like dam of bank balance sheets, not the real economy where such levels of money growth would and can do their inflationary damage.
Fair enough. Good points.
In fact, these deflationary views, make logical sense, and it would be arrogant to simply discount them.
That said, there are some key mistakes, I contend, in the premises behind such logic.
In short, let me now switch hats from a deflationary defense to a deflationary prosecutor.
Holes in the Deflation Case…
First, the broader deflationary argument that all this central bank money can and will stay contained within a closed-loop circuit outside of Main Street is not factually the case.
By 2020, for example, the Fed pivoted from being a lender of last resort into a spender of last resort, making direct purchases into various credit ETF’s and even specific corporate bond issuances.
This means central bank money was beginning to leak outside of the foregoing “Hoover-dam” (cemented together by central banks, treasury departments and commercial banks) and hence directly into the real world.
Such a trend, by the way, is highly inflationary rather than deflationary.
Additionally, the deflationary camp ignores the massive (and rising) amounts of fiat currencies going directly into the real economy on the heels of unprecedented fiscal stimulus (i.e. deficit spending) as governments, most notably in the U.S., send trillions of dollars directly into the hands of consumers and businesses in the form of COVID relief checks, PPP loans and other “Care Package” policies.
Such “hand-out money” travels straight into Main Street.
Of course, trillions of dollars flowing directly into Main Street leads to an increase in the velocity of that money, which again, is an inflationary rather than deflationary force.
Finally, it is worth repeating to all deflationary thinkers that the very scale used to measure inflation in the U.S., namely the Consumer Price Index published by the creative writers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is an open charade.
As I’ve argued in prior reports, the real measure of CPI inflation by 2021 was closer to 9% not the creative and fictional 2% rate promulgated out of a truth-challenged (i.e. desperate) Washington DC.
Stated otherwise, inflation is not a debate; it’s already here.
In short, the deflation and inflation arguments, as well as debate, will continue to rage, and although I see a distinctly inflationary future, I am not blind to deflationary forces or those who foresee more of the same.
Does Gold Really Care About the Inflation/Deflation Debate?
As importantly, and perhaps most dramatically, we have to also raise an additional, and perhaps even blasphemous question when it comes to gold pricing, namely: Does gold even care about this inflation/deflation debate?
That is, it’s worth underscoring here that gold price movements in general, and the role of gold as counterforce to increased currency debasement in particular, is and can be relatively agnostic to whether the world turns inflationary or deflationary in the near or long term.
Yes, of course, inflation still matters, in so far is that gold prices rise highest when the rate of inflation exceeds the nominal yields on 10-Year government bonds.
Such negative real yields, as I argued in a separate report, are absolutely ideal settings for gold pricing.
But keep in mind, all that is required for such an ideal gold setting is not that inflation shoots to the moon (i.e. hyperinflation), but simply that inflation rates be higher than nominal yields/rates, which is a future I see as both inevitable and consistent—and hence a major tailwind for gold over the long term.
Are Rising Rates Really a Threat to Gold?
Despite hysterical fears of rising rates, which are a clear headwind to gold pricing, most realists have little to no doubts that in the near term, governments will continue to create liquidity to purchase bonds and hence keep nominal yields compressed.
This is because global government debt levels are at such record highs that their central banks will have no choice, at least near term, but to do “whatever it takes” to artificially keep the cost of that debt (i.e. rates and yields) down so that global governments, including in the U.S., do not become insolvent in a world of naturally rising rates.
And as for nominal rates, people may be scurrying, screaming and worrying about so-called “spiking” yields, but folks, 1.6% or even 2% yields on the U.S. 10-Year is hardly nosebleed territory (and still negative when adjusted for even mis-reported inflation).
Thus, compared to more normal eras, yields in this broken “new normal” are remarkably low, and for all the Realpolitik reasons discussed above, won’t be going much higher any time soon.
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Given such historically low nominal rates, most informed investors see very little upside in bonds, and as such continue to buy silver and gold.
In fact, nominal yields would have to climb to at least 3% for gold investors to exit the precious metals space in large numbers, and we don’t expect nominal yields to reach such levels, again, because governments like the U.S. (or corporations on the S&P) could not afford such sustained rates.
In short, don’t fight a desperate Fed.
Furthermore, even if the central banks implode tomorrow under the weight of their own grotesque debt and mismanagement, and yields and rates were to shoot to the moon, so too would inflation, and hence so too would gold prices.
Either way: Gold wins.
In the meantime, most of us also know that the Fed serves Wall Street not Main Street. Always has; always will.
Needless to say, the current (and dangerous) stock market bubble is about the only thing the U.S. can brag about, and more low rates are the rotten wind beneath the wings of this rotten market, which the Fed will still fight to support, Main Street be damned.
Don’t forget as well that CEOs within this rotten and rigged-system get paid based upon share price, not profits and earnings.
More artificial low rates, compliments of their Rich Uncle Fed, will thus help the spoiled nephews on the S&P continue to borrow cheap and buy back their own shares to make their otherwise zombie-like stocks rise on debt rather than free cash flow.
In case you think I’m just a cynic, see for yourselves:
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Gold’s Real Tailwind: Direct Consumer Demand
Furthermore, and with specific reference to gold pricing, the real driver for its price has been, and always will be, direct consumer demand.
Such demand is in fact driven by variables that go well beyond interest rates and inflation/deflation debates.
In fact, such demand is driven far more by emotion than math or lofty market reports like this.
More specifically, demand for gold rises when faith in political & social stability, economic policies and currency value falls further and further toward the basement of time.
And as we’ve all discovered over many years and many objective market reports, faith in each of these critical areas has sunk, and will continue to sink, toward further lows, as all debt-saturated systems do.
Such declining faith in the total mismanagement of the global financial system helps to explain why gold (despite all the maniacal enthusiasm for BTC and fears of rising rates or even muted inflation) continues to attract consumer demand.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...21/04/inv0.png
In short, and despite all the complex technical, mathematical and academic discourse regarding inflationary and deflationary forces, faith in the financial system, or rather a growing lack of faith in it, will always be among the strongest forces behind gold demand.
Needless to say, our faith at Matterhorn Asset management in the global financial system has been openly weak for decades, which is why we created our unique precious metals service in Switzerland years before this ever-growing storm in the monetary, commercial banking and currency systems began to make headlines.
Nor were we alone in this growing lack of faith, including our open lack of faith in paper currencies and the paper traded (in the futures markets) to mis-price the paper price of gold, which has nothing to do with actual demand for physical gold and hence physical gold pricing when measured against ever-debased currencies.
Strangely, this critical faith indicator, and the fact that the global financial system is so openly broken (from Elon’s Tweets to Powell’s double-speak, or from COMEX price fixing to the CPI lie) serves as a primary reason behind our confidence that gold will reach far higher highs in the years ahead.
Stated even more simply, as awareness of the growing mismanagement of the global banking, financial, economic and currency system increases, faith in the same decreases.
And from this lack of faith, our conviction in the golden days ahead for gold only rises with each passing day.
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Egon von Greyerz
Founder and Managing Partner
Matterhorn Asset Management
Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: +41 44 213 62 45
Matterhorn Asset Management’s global client base strategically stores an important part of their wealth in Switzerland in physical gold and silver outside the banking system. Matterhorn Asset Management is pleased to deliver a unique and exceptional service to our highly esteemed wealth preservation clientele in over 70 countries.
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24 World Leaders Openly Call For The Great Reset
- [COLOR=var( --e-global-color-secondary )]Richie Allen[/color]
- [COLOR=var( --e-global-color-secondary )]March 30, 2021[/color]
- [COLOR=var( --e-global-color-secondary )]8:36 am[/color]
- [COLOR=var( --e-global-color-secondary )]43 Comments[/color]
World leaders are calling for an end to nationalism and isolationism in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic. 24 countries have come together to call for a global settlement like the one reached after the second world war to “protect countries” and build cross border co-operation.
The call by the 24 world leaders is made in today’s Daily Telegraph and other newspapers around the world including, Le Monde in France and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany.
The leaders claim that a new international settlement is necessary ahead of the next international health crisis. They described Covid as the biggest threat to the global community since the 1940’s.
“A treaty on pandemics “should lead to more mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system and with its rules and norms”, the leaders said.
According to The Telegraph today;https://richieallen.co.uk/wp-content...38-300x178.jpg
The 24 world leaders warned that regardless of the origins of the outbreak, a future global pandemic was an inevitability.
The group, also including Charles Michel, the European Council president, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, and the presidents of South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Tunisia and Senegal, said the key question was not “if but when” the next health crisis would strike.
They warned that “no single government or multilateral agency can address this threat alone”, arguing: “Together, we must be better prepared to predict, prevent, detect, assess and effectively respond to pandemics in a highly co-ordinated fashion.”
Other central aims of a pandemic agreement would be to enhance international co-operation around alert systems, data-sharing and research, as well as the local, regional and global production and distribution of vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protective equipment.
The new treaty would be rooted in the constitution of The World Health Organization. “At a time when Covid-19 has exploited our weaknesses and divisions, we must seize this opportunity and come together as a global community for peaceful cooperation that extends beyond this crisis,” the leaders said.
This is terrifying. For many years, I have been featuring writers, researchers and academics who warned us that this would happen. This is the end game.
International treaties are about one thing and one thing only, that is, concentrating power in the hands of a tiny elite. It’s what globalists have been working towards for decades.
It’s much more convenient for corporations and banks to do business with 24 countries who agree to regulatory alignment, than if those corporations have to deal with 24 individual countries whose rules and regulations are different.
This is what the EU was always about. I’ve been banging that drum for years.https://richieallen.co.uk/wp-content...d1-300x202.jpg
Bill Gates, through his subsidiaries the WHO, CEPI and GAVI, and pharma giants like AstraZeneca, GSK and Pfizer, wants to vaccinate the world’s population against every illness you can name. AZ, GSK and Pfizer have received billions of dollars in grants from Gates.
June Raine, head of the UK’s medicine regulator MHRA, is on the record as saying that countries would be moving away from the traditional approach of treating illnesses when they arise, to a new era where the focus will be on prevention.
It’s claimed that new mRNA technology has opened up a world of possibilities for preventing illness. Vaccines are in development for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancers and allergies. Imagine what the vaccination schedule for children could look like in ten years?
Bill Gates wants these vaccines to be approved and rolled-out quickly. The proposed pandemic treaty, which promises “mutual accountability shared responsibility and co-operation” between 24 countries, will make it easy for him.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been criticised for his government’s failure to approve coronavirus vaccines as quickly as the UK. France is being locked down again. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has faced similar criticism.
A global pandemic treaty would solve that problem. A new vaccine wouldn’t need to be assessed for safety and efficacy by regulators in 24 countries. It would only need to pass one inspection.
There will be alignment on travel and vaccine passports too. The world leaders, in today’s article said;https://richieallen.co.uk/wp-content...rt-300x178.jpg
It (the treaty) would also include recognition of a “One Health” approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet. And such a treaty should lead to more mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system and with its rules and norms.
Over time, the treaty will inevitably be amended to deal with Climate Change. It will be repeated more frequently, that global warming has an impact on health, and therefore, regulatory alignment to deal with it will be necessary.
The article, published in today’s Daily Telegraph and newspapers around the world, is signed by;
. V. Bainimarama, prime minister of Fiji; António Luís Santos da Costa, prime minister of Portugal; Klaus Iohannis, president of Romania; Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom; Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda; Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya; Emmanuel Macron, president of France; Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany; Charles Michel, president of the European Council; Kyriakos Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece; Moon Jae-in, president of the Republic of Korea; Sebastián Piñera, president of Chile; Carlos Alvarado Quesada, president of Costa Rica; Edi Rama, prime minister of Albania; Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa; Keith Rowley, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands; Kais Saied, president of Tunisia; Macky Sall, president of Senegal; Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain; Erna Solberg, prime minister of Norway; Aleksandar Vučić, president of Serbia; Joko Widodo, president of Indonesia; Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation
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- Edited 1:27pm Apr 4, 2021 10:29am | Edited 1:27pm
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,569 Posts
In his famous Great Dictator movie, Charlie Chaplin played with the world so recklessly that the world itself popped, reduced to a lifeless relic. Just so, Obama/Biden and their gang of arrogant incompetents now endanger us all. Will we all go down with them in a war waged against Russia and China under the worn British banner of “democracy” vs. “autocracy.” Will we remember, in time, that we are a Republic, not a democratic tyranny?
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- Edited 10:41am Apr 4, 2021 10:30am | Edited 10:41am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,569 Posts
Wise Up Mr. Biden: America is a Republic, Not a Democracy
March 29, 2021 · Bruce Director
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Toward the end of the cartoonish theatrics passed off as a press conference last week, America’s avatar President mumbled his belief that the strategic conflict in the world today is between “democracy and autocracy.” As with everything Biden, there is nothing original in his remark. It is merely the widespread, and completely false opinion held by most wings of the American and European elites. It is the same foolishness that brought on World Wars I, II and all the endless wars that followed. The only thing new in today’s version is the lower level of stupidity of today’s elites compared to their equally misguided predecessors.
Unfortunately, even Biden’s opponents accept the terms “democracy vs. autocracy” he ejaculated on that occasion. Hence, a persistent effort to correct the discussion is necessary to save our republic.
As every school child once was taught, until the imposition of the British-originated revisionist history in the 1960’s--which spawned the farcical “wokeness” movement currently prevailing--the founding fathers of the United States feared democracy as the greatest threat to our new republic. Plato had placed democracy as the closest thing to tyranny and, after witnessing the murder of Socrates by the democrats of Athens, spent his life advocating for the republic, that is, a form of government based on the consent of the governed, dedicated to improving the conditions of society by developing the creative powers of the human mind. Plato’s concepts were further developed by St. Augustine, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz, whose ideas formed the basis for the American constitutional republic through the minds of, most notably, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton wrote, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”
Biden’s mumblings are echoes of more erudite analyses espoused by all stripes of the academic and foreign policy establishment. Leading the liberal side are those like Hillary Clinton who advocates for a new cold war with China and Russia in the name of “democracy vs. autocracy.” More sophisticated is the recent proposal put forward by Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan in the Council of Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs. Differing from Clinton, Haass and Kupchan argue for a revival of Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik in the form of a new international arrangement modeled on the Concert of Europe. Rather than an all-out conflict between democracies and autocracies, Haass and Kupchan advocate that the leading nations of both “camps” should form an arrangement among China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia and the U.S., to manage world affairs in the same way that Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria did following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
What Haass and Kupchan don’t mention, and are probably ignorant of, is that the Concert of Europe was not created to keep the peace among European empires, most notably the two biggest powers at that time, the British Empire (falsely identified as liberal and democratic) and the Russia Empire (the autocracy). It was an agreement among the Empires to keep the ideas of the American Republic from spreading to Europe, and eventually to destroy the United States itself. This was borne out most clearly during the American Civil War, when the so-called “liberal,” “pro-democratic” regime of Britain and its puppet, France, backed the slavocracy of the Confederacy--while the leaders of Germany and Russia, Otto von Bismarck and Czar Alexander II, respectively, who had begun to adopt American system economic policies, took measures to support Lincoln’s U.S.A.
On the European continent, the British backed the revolutionary/reactionary movements of Young Europe (from which Karl Marx and the communist movement emerged), which ultimately led to the re-establishment of revanchist regimes in France and elsewhere. Rather than keep the peace, the British Empire’s efforts to weaken the pro-American developments in Germany and Russia ultimately brought about World War I, a war that Woodrow Wilson declared was fought to make the world “safe for democracy,” and its continuation into World War II.
Franklin Roosevelt made it clear that the U.S. was fighting World War II to defeat, not defend the Empires. He pledged to use the methods of the American system to transform the formerly colonized areas of the world into sovereign, economically advancing republics. FDR was committed to building on the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union to recruit Russia into cooperation in the endeavor. Similar efforts were made vis-a-vis the Republic of China.
Roosevelt died, and the British reasserted the “democracy vs. autocracy” ploy (i.e. the free world vs. communism). Again, the British goal was to dismantle the revival of the United States accomplished by FDR. The Anglophile elites of Wall Street and Boston enthusiastically embraced their British soul-mates. The result was nearly 70 years of endless wars, deindustrialization, and the economic disaster now known as globalization.
Lyndon LaRouche often stated that all world politics since approximately 1766 has been a conflict between the emergence, and continued existence, of the United States as a constitutional republic, versus the British Empire.
This is emphatically true today. The American people must be organized to reject Biden’s foolishness. This includes Republicans and the so-called “conservative” establishment, who are so easily lassoed into the “democracy vs. autocracy” fantasy.
This means rejecting the current efforts by big-tech and Wall Street oligarchs to impose a tyrannical “democracy” on the country, be it through voting reform, woke education, big-tech censorship, or any other fascist reforms in the name of “democracy.” It means reforming U.S. economic policy according to the principles set forth by Lyndon LaRouche in his “Four Laws.” It means U.S. foreign policy must be guided by the proposal of LaRouche to establish a four-power agreement among, the U.S., Russia, China and India--each of which has an existential interest in eliminating the British Empire--to establish a New Bretton Woods system based on the principle of the development of the productive powers of labor. This agreement is not to manage conflicts, but to organize cooperation among these, and other, nations for high-technology scientific development based on the founding principles of the United States. LaRouche set out the principles on which this can be accomplished in his 2009 book-length essay The Coming Eurasian Word.
Fortunately, the citizens catalyzed by President Trump, who intersect the movement built by Lyndon LaRouche over the last half-century, have had their bellies full of the Anglophile elites and are in no mood to go “save the world for democracy.” The immediate issue is to save America from democracy and restore it as a republic.
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https://www.bitchute.com/video/Xxqs6...0-T8fIm7UGK50E
Constitutional Lawyer Rocco Galati & Catherine Austin Fitts: Money & Finance Under Covid – Historical Manipulation of Humanity via Money
As a service to protect and share the truth, this video is mirrored here from Constitutional Rights
https://www.amazon.ca/Edge-World-How...76P9KSZFNNZ3FE
Michael Pye's The Edge of the World is an epic adventure: from the Vikings to the Enlightenment, from barbaric outpost to global centre, it tells the amazing story of northern Europe's transformation by sea. The last three chapters reveal exactly what is going on now with the Global Reset coming soon and the Corona Virus 19 and lockdowns in Canada and around the world.
Notes from Bruce...
This video interview between Attorney Rocco Galati and Catherine Austin Fitts - Money & Finance Under Covid reveals to whomever that takes the 2 hours and 19 minutes and 49 seconds what exactly is going on in our country Canada and the world and MUST be watched and understood.
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The Bank of Canada should be reinstated to its original mandated purposes
Few people understand the Canadian government’s relationship with the Bank of Canada or its original purpose
John Ryan / March 21, 2018
CANADIAN BUSINESS
https://canadiandimension.com/images...800_534_90.jpg
The Bank of Canada’s headquarters on Wellington Street in Ottawa. Photo from Flickr.
Few people understand the Canadian government’s relationship with the Bank of Canada or the nature of the Bank’s original raison d’être. Back in 2011, a lawsuit was filed in the Federal Court by the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform against the Government of Canada and the Bank of Canada. The lawsuit attempted to:
[R]estore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, by exercising its public statutory duty and responsibility. That purpose includes making interest-free loans to the municipal/provincial/federal governments for ‘human capital’ expenditures (education, health, other social services) and/or infrastructure expenditures.
After nearly five and a half years of contentious litigation, and after five court hearings resulting in contrary decisions, on May 4, 2017 the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the appeal case, in “deference” to the political process. In other words, their decision was that the matter appeared to be more of a political issue than a judicial one. However, strong arguments can be made to the contrary and further court procedures may still take place. But in the meantime, since it appears that the issue at present cannot be resolved through a judicial process, there is now an urgent need to deal with this in the political arena.
The Bank of Canada was established in 1934 under private ownership but in 1938 the government nationalized the bank and, since then, it has been publicly owned. It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government but to the provinces as well. To help bring Canada out of the Great Depression, debt-free money was injected into various infrastructure projects. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it was the Bank of Canada that financed the enormously costly war effort—Canada created the world’s third largest navy and ranked fourth in production of allied war materiel. Afterwards, the Bank financed programs to assist veterans with vocational and university training and subsidized farmland.
For the next 30 years following the Second World War, it was the Bank of Canada that helped to transform Canada’s economy and lift the standards of living for Canadians. It was the Bank that financed a wide range of infrastructure projects and other ventures. This included the construction of the Trans-Canada highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, airports, subway systems, and financial assistance to a corporation that placed Canada in the forefront of aviation technology—a project that was scuttled and destroyed by a controversial federal government decision. In addition, during this period seniors’ pensions, family allowances, and Medicare were established, as well as nation-wide hospitals, universities, and research facilities.
The critical point is that between 1939 and 1974 the federal government borrowed extensively from its own central bank. That made its debt effectively interest-free, since the government owned the bank and got the benefit of any interest. As such Canada emerged from the Second World War and from all the extensive infrastructure and other expenditures with very little debt. But following 1974 came a dramatic change.
In 1974 the Bank for International Settlements (the bank of central bankers) formed the Basel Committee to ostensibly establish global monetary and financial stability. Canada, i.e., the Pierre Trudeau Liberals, joined in the deliberations. The Basel Committee’s solution to the “stagflation” problem of that time was to encourage governments to borrow from private banks, that charged interest, and end the practice of borrowing interest-free from their own publicly owned banks. Their argument was that publicly owned banks inflate the money supply and prices, whereas chartered banks supposedly only recycle pre-existing money. What they purposefully suppressed was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. And as banking specialist Ellen Brown states:
The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be reinvested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.
The effect of such a change would remove a powerful economic tool from the hands of democratic governments and give such control to a cabal of foreign bankers. This was one of Milton Friedman’s radical free market ideas.
At that time it seems that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came under the influence of neoliberalism, promulgated by Frederich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Then, while attending the Basil Committee sessions, he probably came under further influence of fellow Bilderberg attendees and as a result he accepted the partisan flawed logic from the world’s top banks. Apparently on the basis of this, he decided that Canada should dramatically reduce borrowing interest-free money from Canada’s own bank and instead borrow the bulk of its money from chartered banks and pay interest on the loans. It appears that this decision was made without informing Canada’s parliament. This was such a fundamental change of policy that it should not only have been debated in parliament, this should have been put to a national referendum. Strangely, even when this became known, this was apparently never questioned by the opposition parties, especially the NDP, and never revealed in the media. Strange indeed.
Since the Coyne affair in the early 60s, the long-standing debate about the autonomy of the Bank of Canada from so-called government control has been ignored. Central banks around the world are supposed to be autonomous, concerned only with monetary policy while the governments are to be concerned with fiscal policy. What many elected representatives do not realize is that fiscal policy and monetary policy interact with each other and can supplement each other. This is acknowledged in the Bank of Canada Act where the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Finance Minister must consult regularly with each other.
Successive Canadian governments have surrendered sovereign control over monetary policies and money supply to the beliefs of the international neoliberal private bankers and investors. As a result, Canadians have been saddled with government debt at all levels—debt that has risen exponentially since 1974. During the time that the Bank of Canada provided additional money, interest-free, to federal and provincial governments when it was needed, according to data supplied by Jack Biddell (accountant with Clarkson-Gordon, the first commissioner on the federal anti-inflationary board representing the province of Ontario and the chairman of the Ontario Inflation Restraint Board), the federal debt remained very low, relatively flat, and quite sustainable during all those years. (See his chart below.) In fact, in 1974 the country’s debt totalled only 18 billion dollars. When Canada stopped relying on its own bank it launched the country on a staggering deficit accumulation path. In 2016/17 the combined federal and provincial debt was $1.4 trillion, of which the federal debt was $728 billion. It appears that perhaps as much as 90 percent of the $1.4 trillion is the result of compound interest charges created by investors and private banks.
https://canadiandimension.com/images...800_406_90.jpg
Canada’s net federal government financial debt from confederation to 2011. Source: Statistics Canada, Table 385-0010
The above chart illustrates the history of Canada’s federal debt; obviously something went terribly wrong after 1974. Over a 108-year period (1867-1974) the accumulated debt shows as nearly a flat line growing to only $18 billion. But around 1974, the debt began to grow exponentially and, over a mere 43 years, it reached to $728 billion in 2017.
The debt curve that began its exponential rise in 1974 tilted toward the vertical in 1981, when interest rates were raised by the US Federal Reserve to 20 percent. At 20 percent compounded annually, debt doubles in less than four years. Canadian rates went as high as 22 percent during that period. Canada has now paid over a trillion dollars in interest on its federal and provincial debt—at least more than twice the actual debt itself.
A further example of this is that in the early 1990s, at the height of the media’s deficit hysteria and the demand to cut social programs, 91 percent of the $423-billion debt at that time was due to interest charges. As revealed by an Auditor-General’s report to parliament (section 5.41), our real debt (revenue minus expenditures) was just $37 billion.
In other words, from 1867 to 1992 the federal government accumulated a net debt of $423 billion. Of this, $37 billion is the actual debt, which represents the accumulated shortfall in meeting the cost of government programs since 1867. The remainder, $386 billion, represents the amount the government has borrowed to service the debt, essentially a payment of interest on interest to the private sector. If the government had borrowed, interest-free, from the Bank of Canada to service the actual shortfall of $37 billion, a debt to private sector and banks of $386 billion would have never been created.
Although other points could still be presented, or some matters debated, the essence of this issue has been made clear. What now remains are a series of questions that need answers.
Why did both the Conservative and Liberal federal governments oppose the lawsuit in Federal Court that would have obliged the government to resume borrowing the bulk of extra needed money, interest-free, from the Bank of Canada? Why did these governments oppose this? Was this opposition to the lawsuit based on an agreement that may have been made by Prime Minister Trudeau in 1974 with Bank for International Settlements to henceforth reduce borrowing at no interest from the Bank of Canada?
Why did the Bank of Canada oppose the lawsuit that would have required the government to borrow the bulk of its extra needed money from the Bank of Canada interest-free as mandated under the Bank of Canada Act?
After its meeting with the international bankers’ Basel Committee in 1974, the federal government proceeded to borrow the bulk of its needed money, with interest charges, from private investors including banks and dramatically reduced dealing with its own bank that had no interest charges. This was done in secret and without the approval of parliament. Once this dereliction of duty to parliament and Canada’s people became known, why didn’t the opposition parties, especially the NDP, complain and make a major issue of this matter?
Why is it that Canada’s mainstream media has never brought any of these matters to the public’s attention? After the Supreme Court declined to deal with this case, citing specious reasoning that this was more of political issue than a judicial one, the media boycotted the story and therefore hardly anyone in Canada knows of this case. Canada’s top constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati who handled this lawsuit has always gotten major media attention, except for this case, which he considers to have been his most important lawsuit. Prior to this, Galati had been best known for stopping the Supreme Court appointment of Judge Marc Nadon, whose nomination had been put forward by Stephen Harper. Although Galati is unable to identify his sources, he states that he was informed that the government instructed the mainstream media to give this case, and prior lawsuits on this matter, limited coverage. And they complied. The story trickled out through alternative news sources.
In the course of five court hearings dealing with this case, Rocco Galati, as the lead lawyer, maintained that since Canada joined the Bank of International Settlements all their ensuing meetings have been kept secret. Their minutes, discussions and deliberations are secret and not available nor accountable to Canada’s Parliament, notwithstanding that the Bank of Canada policies emanate directly from these meetings. As Galati has stated: “These organizations are essentially private, foreign entities controlling Canada’s banking system and socio-economic policies.” As such, private foreign banks and financial interests, contrary to the Bank of Canada Act, dictate the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy.
It was hoped that these court hearings would have led to civil proceedings on behalf of Canadians, to reveal matters and make them crystal clear to the public and politicians, but the mainstream media have effectively ignored these proceedings and have never revealed any of this vitally important information to the Canadian public. Why?
If the federal government needs additional funds to those collected by taxes, it should borrow ALL these funds from its own bank, basically interest-free. This is especially important since cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the average cost of public projects by about 40 percent. Why should the government be borrowing from private investors and chartered banks whose rapacious compound interest charges then result in horrendous federal debt? It’s not that this is something novel and unheard of. The state of North Dakota has had a state-owned bank for almost a hundred years, the Bank of North Dakota—the only such bank in the US, although it should be noted that many other American jurisdictions are now looking at this option. The BND holds all of the state’s revenues as deposits by law. As Ellen Brown has stated:
The BND is able to make 2 percent loans to North Dakota communities for local infrastructure—half or less the rate paid by local governments in other states. For example, in 2016 it extended a $200,000 letter of credit to the State Water Commission at 1.75 percent … Since 50 percent of the cost of infrastructure is financing, the state can cut infrastructure costs nearly in half by financing through its own bank, which can return the interest to the state … The profits return to the bank, which either distributes them as dividends to the state or uses them to build up its capital base in order to expand its loan portfolio.
In the case of China where the government owns most of the country’s banks, China has managed to fund massive infrastructure projects all across their country, including 12,000 miles of high-speed rail built just in the last decade. These state-owned banks return their profits to the government, making the loans interest-free; and the loans can be rolled over indefinitely. If China can do this, why can’t Canada with its own Bank of Canada?
If North Dakota can have a publicly owned bank, why can’t each of Canada’s provinces have their own banks? It appears that because of Canada’s constitution, current laws and regulations, this at present is not possible—until appropriate amendments are made.
Alberta in the 1930s attempted to establish a publicly owned bank but this was blocked by the federal government. Instead, the province then formed the Alberta Treasury Branch in 1938. Although this is technically not a bank, it provides virtually every service that a bank can do. In 2015 it had assets of $43 billion and provided financial services to about 700,000 Albertans in 243 communities. Hence this still continues to play a vital role in the province.
In 1975 the NDP government in British Columbia set out to establish a ‘super bank,’ but to avoid problems with the federal Bank Act, this was called the BC Savings & Trust. The NDP government was defeated in the next election and nothing came of this endeavour.
Ontario used to have the Province of Ontario Savings Office (POSO) and during the Rae years, one MPP, Jim Wiseman, chair of the first finance committee, attempted to persuade the provincial finance minister, Floyd Laughren, to fund the provincial deficits through the POSO. His efforts were unsuccessful and in the next election the government was defeated, and there was never a public debate on this matter. The governments of Harris and McGuinty sold POSO to the private sector, as part of their neoliberal “age of austerity.”
Ed Schreyer, while premier of Manitoba from 1969 to 1977, was thwarted in his efforts to form a publicly owned bank or a treasury branch; he continues to support the idea that the federal government should obtain its loans, interest-free, for infrastructure purposes from the Bank of Canada.
As it stands, profits from chartered banks can be siphoned into offshore tax havens, but with publicly owned banks, in addition to providing interest-free loans, profits would be recycled to the government and thereby to Canadian society.
Although resolutions calling for a return to government borrowing from the Bank of Canada instead of the private banks have been passed at NDP conventions, it does not appear that the NDP has ever pursued this matter in Parliament. Why is this? This is a fundamentally important question. Has this been the result of lack of sufficient information or has there been some other reason? The NDP should pose the questions I have raised in this article in Parliament, and demand answers.
Since the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case, contending that this is more of a political issue than a judicial one, and before the case is pursued further in the courts, surely it behooves the NDP to pursue this matter. Not just pursue it, the NDP should make this a cause célèbre. Although the NDP is now in a distinct minority in Parliament, they should nevertheless pose questions to the government about its position on this critically important matter. Let the government try to defend its position, which in many ways is untenable and certainly not in the best interests of the Canadian public. The media would then have no choice but to reveal this to the public.
In any case, this issue should become a major plank in the NDP platform. If properly and fully pursued it could be of great help in getting support from the electorate. As it stands, it seems that the international banking cabal appears to have such a grip on Canada’s current capitalist government that it has refused to act in Canada’s best interests. As in the case of getting Medicare enacted in Canada, it may be up to a social democratic party to eventually get the Bank of Canada reinstated as the country’s bank.
This article was revised on April 9, 2018 to add some additional material and to correct an inadvertent error in the previous version.
John Ryan, Ph.D., is a retired professor of geography and a senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg.
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DISORDER WILL COME – AS CONFUCIUS WARNED
March 31, 2021
By Egon von Greyerz
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...21/03/conf.jpgWhen bubbles burst, we will discover how very few superior men there actually are – as defined by Confucius:
“The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.” – Confucius
Superior man can exist at many different levels in society, not necessarily linked to money or investments. There will be many people without money who are prepared at an intellectual or psychological level. These people are probably the happiest since sadly many wealthy people worry about their money all the time rather than enjoy it.
In this piece I am talking primarily about preparedness in relation to one’s wealth.
PS Important Postscript at the end of the article.
FOCUS ON WEALTH PRESERVATION
The investors we meet in our business are people who are risk averse and therefore very much focus on wealth preservation. These investors buy physical gold because they are concerned about the excessive risks in markets. They want to protect and insure their wealth against unprecedented financial and currency risk. Like ourselves, these investors consider physical precious metals, stored outside a fragile banking system, as the ultimate form of wealth preservation.
But investment gold represents less than 0.5% of world financial assets. This means that a minuscule percentage of investors insure their wealth in gold. This is clearly surprising bearing in mind that over 5,000 years gold is the only money that has survived.
INFLATION IS COMING
There are of course other real assets like land and property that have held their values very well over time. As we expect major inflation in food prices, agricultural land is likely to do well in coming years. As I have pointed out in recent articles, we are already seeing high inflation in agricultural and other commodities. See chart below.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...21/03/info.jpg
BOND YIELDS DO NOT REFLECT THE MASSIVE RISK
But commercial and residential property is a different matter. The incessant creation of credit since 1971 has driven property prices ever higher. In addition, central banks have given borrowers the best leg up ever by charging virtually nothing for money.
In Switzerland for example you can get a 15 year fixed mortgage at a fixed rate of 1%. This is like handing out money for free. But low interest rates in no way represent the generosity of governments or central banks. Instead it is the consequence of their profligate spending.
With incessant deficit spending, governments must finance the new debt at virtually no cost to avoid default. That is why we are seeing $18 trillion of negative yielding government bonds with no Western borrower paying above 2% for any maturity.
How absurd rates are is reflected by for example Greek versus US rates for 30 year bonds. Greece just launched a 30 year massively oversubscribed bond issue at 1.95%. For comparison, US 30 year bonds yield 2.36%. Both these borrowers are virtually bankrupt but it is absurd that a very financially weak Greece can borrow at a lower rate than the US.
So the government bond market is biggest bubble of them all. That won’t stop it from expanding further.
Just take the US. When Trump was elected in November 2016, US debt was $20 trillion. Based on history I forecast that it would reach $28t in January 2021 and $40t in 2025. At the time most market observers found this forecast preposterous but sadly they hadn’t studied history which told us what would happen.
US GOVERNMENT DEBT $50 TRILLION IN 2025
Based on the current situation of the US economy and the forecasted deficits and credit expansion, $40 trillion in 2025 is too low and we are now looking at a US debt of $50t.
Remember that when Reagan took over in 1981, US debt was under $1t. So 44 years later the debt is forecast at $50t in 2025. That is an astounding compound annual growth rate of 28% of US debt between 1981 and 2025. And this figure doesn’t include potential defaults in credit or derivative markets which could increase the $50t exponentially. Total US debt of $84 trillion can never be repaid and nor can it be serviced at non-manipulated market rates.
When bubbles burst, the domino effect is incalculable. In addition to debt default of $10s of trillions, derivative defaults, which are very likely, could add $100 of trillions and more.
I am sure that the Fed and other central banks are already cranking up the printing presses or expanding the memory of their computers to cope with all the additional zeros.
HYPERINFLATION IS A CURRENCY EVENT
There are a number of respected market observers who believe that we will not see high inflation or hyperinflation. In their analysis they conveniently avoid the currency effect.
As I point out regularly, every single event of hyperinflation in history has arisen as a result of the currency collapsing. It is not the increase in demand for goods and services, nor central bank interest rate policy that causes hyperinflation.
No, it is the total mismanagement of the economy and the consequent debasement of the currency that creates hyperinflation.
Just look at the table below. All the major currencies have lost 80-86% in real purchasing power (gold) since 2000 and 96-99% since 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.
And if we look at a hyperinflationary economy like Argentina, the Argentinian Pesos has lost 99.99% since 2000.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte.../03/bottom.png
FEW ARE PREPARED FOR DISORDER, RUIN OR HYPERINFLATION
Whether it is ordinary people or the so called experts, everybody believes ruin won’t happen to them. Therefore they are not in a Confucius state of preparedness for the coming economic and currency collapse.
Let me describe a very recent anecdote about hyperinflation in Europe. Last year, in a small town in Ticino, (Italian part of Switzerland) I dined with my wife and friends in a small restaurant. The owner came up to me and said he knew me. It appeared that he followed my articles and interviews. He told us he fled from Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He and his family had lost an important part of their money during the 1992-94 hyperinflation.
The annual level of inflation in Yugoslavia in January 1994 reached 116 billion percent!
Below is a 500 billion Yugoslav Dinar note.
Fortunately the restaurant owner had some savings in gold and this allowed him to start afresh in Switzerland. He told our friends never to keep any money in the bank but to only hold physical gold.
So this former Yugoslav man was prepared for the “possibility of ruin”, as Confucius warned, and told us that he would never trust the banking system again.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...21/03/note.jpg
EPIC OVERVALUATION OF STOCKS
My friends who were at the restaurant still don’t hold any gold. They like 99.5% of investors believe that trees grow to heaven together with stocks and property.
Based on the stock market in the last 40 years, most investors could of course not avoid making money. Therefore very few are in a Confucius state of preparedness and will be totally taken by surprise when the next major crash starts.
Initially they will expect central banks to save them again. But when the V recovery doesn’t happen and the market just continues down, most investors will ride the market all the way to the bottom.
I would be surprised if markets in the next few years fall by less than 90% like in 1929-32.
The Buffett indicator of market cap to GDP is now giving us a major warning. As the graph below shows stocks are now at an all time high valuation in relation to GDP.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte.../03/buffet.png
If we look at the Shiller Cape index, it is now at a historical high (excluding the Dot Com bubble) and 2X the historical average. Yes, overbought positions can extend but the subsequent crash will be long and vicious.
SELL STOCKS AND BUY GOLD – A SEMINAL DECISION
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...3/shiller6.png
Finally another picture that reminds us of Confucius’ warning that “danger, disorder and ruin may come”.
The Dow peaked against gold in 1999. The ratio came down from 44 to 6 or by 87% in 2011. We have now seen a 10 year correction with the compliment of the Fed and massive money printing combined with credit expansion.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...21/03/dowr.png
The rise in the Dow could end tomorrow or we could see a continued meltup for a limited period. Regardless, the time for Confucian preparedness is now and here.
We know that stocks are massively overbought on every measure. To catch the last few points of the rise is an extremely dangerous exercise that could lead to ruin.
Now is the time to take profits in stocks and protect your assets from total annihilation.
As I showed in last week’s article, gold is today as cheap in relation to money supply as it was in 1970 at $35 and as cheap as in 2000 when gold was $290.
The short term correction in gold is now finishing and the next move up will be the strongest for a few years.
The rise in gold and fall in stocks will mean that the Dow will fall another 99% (see chart above) from here to reach the long term trend line (not shown).
So getting out of stocks and holding physical gold will not only be a seminal decision but it will also heed 2,500 years of wisdom that Confucius taught.
POSTSCRIPT
Since this article was written, a small hedge fund has lost $30 billion due to ludicrous risk taking in the derivatives market. Banks like Credit Suisse will also lose billions. I have consistently warned readers about these dangers. The whole derivative $1.5 quadrillion timebomb is at risk. More about this in the next article. Remember Confucius’ warning!
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Egon von Greyerz
Founder and Managing Partner
Matterhorn Asset Management
Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: +41 44 213 62 45
Matterhorn Asset Management’s global client base strategically stores an important part of their wealth in Switzerland in physical gold and silver outside the banking system. Matterhorn Asset Management is pleased to deliver a unique and exceptional service to our highly esteemed wealth preservation clientele in over 70 countries.
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The Tyranny of the "Enlightened" Experts
TAGS Health
3 HOURS AGO
Gregory Gordon
If you were to stroll through any typical upper-middle-income American neighborhood in 2021, the odds are very high that you’d observe at least one yard sign exuberantly proclaiming something like this: “In this house, we believe that science is real, love is love, no human is illegal … ” and other banal tautologies. There are usually six or seven examples in this litany, but really, one of the main goals of the yard sign—aside from signaling virtue—can be accomplished with just this: the curtsy to Science.
In a country where the traditional definition of virtue has “evolved” and the search for metaphysical truth has largely been sidelined, millions of Americans seem to believe that there is no higher truth than the Science and that there are no more virtuous citizens than those who deferentially submit to the experts, the societal planners, and the proclaimers of the Science. We can thank the Enlightenment for this spirit of scientism, as Science has now been fully separated from teleology (i.e., “goal directedness”) and final causality, which many elites consider to be backward Medieval thinking.
This separation—and the general idea that human beings and their interactions can be boiled down to and predicted by physical phenomena and scientific methods—has led to numerous destructive movements such as scientific socialism, historical materialism, and even progressive racialism. While Science has indeed provided wonderful breakthroughs that enhanced human flourishing, it does not engender all knowledge that is necessary for human societies.
As John Gray has documented in Seven Types of Atheism, several of the leading Enlightenment figures—including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Voltaire—infused some of their writings with a pseudoanthropological racism. This is particularly evident in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Hume’s notes accompanying his “National Characters” essay. Gray states that: “Though twenty-first century missionaries for ‘Enlightenment values’ resist the fact, modern racism emerged from the work of Enlightenment philosophes.”
Out of the Enlightenment’s penumbra of positivism, proponents of eugenics and scientific racism achieved some prominence in the late 1800’s and the Progressive Era of the early 1900’s. Eugenics notoriously sought to use Science to “purify” the human race through selective breeding practices and even forced sterilization. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” and began to apply Darwin’s work in evolution to human societies. Margaret Sanger, the well-known founder of the American Birth Control League and the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, infamously—and with a disturbing enthusiasm—worked to reduce the birth rate in African American communities as part of the “Negro Project.” Sanger also advocated for the sterilization of disabled people.
None of this is meant to imply that all Enlightenment thinkers were racists (they weren’t), or that all progressives support eugenics (they don’t). Going beyond merely calling attention to the dark underbelly of one of the West’s sacred cows, though, it’s a relatively safe assertion that the Enlightenment’s intellectual offspring—including technocrats, government science advisors, and the elite expert class of academics and commentators—have been responsible for disastrous public policy measures over the past several decades.
Thankfully, not all of their recommendations and prognostications have come to fruition. Paul Ehrlich (a professor of biology at Stanford, fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, and evangelist for population control measures) outlandishly predicted a number of neo-Malthusian horrors, including the mass starvation of hundreds of millions of humans, increases in global poverty, and an exploding world population in the 1970s and 1980s. The spread of free market ideas, advances in medicine, and other latent factors have ensured that his “Population Bomb” never went off, but impacts of his work still haunt us, in the modern Green and Build Back Better movements.
Harmful, impractical, and costly ideas of the expert class, as well as the experts themselves, often infiltrate the government’s regulatory machine, at which time they are inflicted upon the general populace. Murray Rothbard discussed this in Power and Market:
Furthermore, the government itself contains mechanisms that lead to poor choices of experts and officials. For one thing, the politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently. And, what is more, the vital criterion of “fitness” is very different in the government and on the market. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.
Despite all of their misaligned incentives, which often lead to detrimental outcomes for individuals and small communities, the technocratic expert class is still intimately involved in practically every aspect of our lives. Nothing in recent times illustrates this more poignantly than the arrival of SARS-CoV-2.
In early 2020, Americans were besieged by a tidal wave of sloppy, reckless, and malevolently pessimistic news stories and information about the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic. Medical scientists and bureaucrats at the World Health Organization overestimated covid’s mortality rate at an alarming 3–4 percent. (The infection fatality rate is now estimated at ~0.15 percent.) Public health officials took the worst-case-scenario fatality estimates of epidemiological modelers such as the now disgraced Niall Ferguson at Imperial College London, promulgated them throughout the corporate media, and began implementing draconian measures that would radically alter civil society.
In the first months of the pandemic, the government monopolized and bungled the distribution of covid tests and the Food and Drug Administration delayed approvals for new test alternatives. Then US surgeon general Jerome Adams and Dr. Anthony Fauci admonished the public that they should not be wearing masks in public, before completely reversing themselves months later. Fauci would go on to mislead Americans about threshold numbers for herd immunity, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would end up changing the scientifically conjured social distance spacing from precisely six feet to precisely three feet, coinciding with growing political pressure to reopen schools. In March of 2020, the federal government and most states coordinated a de facto national lockdown of the economy.
Millions of people were ordered to “stay home, stay safe” for the disastrous two-week “flatten the curve” crusade that would last for more than a year in some states. Government scientists and public health experts decided that the livelihoods of tens of millions were expendable, and the educational and social needs of a generation of young Americans could be sacrificed for the common good. Thousands of cancer screenings and other medical tests were postponed for several months, under the Lockdown regime. Many small businesses and restaurants will never open again. The pain caused by government experts will be felt for many years.
Of course, scientists qua scientists were never supposed to run our society. Scientific technocrats and the expert class cannot possibly possess all of the knowledge that they would need to effectively run the lives of 330 million Americans, but that will not stop them from trying. They might be Enlightened, but perhaps there is still an incorrigible, ornery remnant in the United States who will resist efforts to be managed, regulated, and perfected by the experts.
Author:
Gregory Gordon
Gregory Gordon (Twitter: @gregorysgordon) earned his Ph.D. from the Colorado School of Mines. He currently works as a geoscientist in the energy industry, and he is a lecturer in the California State University system. He resides in California with his wife and four children.
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SNIPPET:
We strongly believe:
1. It must be made clear to Ukrainian President Zelensky that there will be no military assistance from either the US or NATO if he does not restrain Ukrainian hawks itching to give Russia a bloody nose — hawks who may well expect the West to come to Ukraine’s aid in any conflict with Russia. (There must be no repeat of the fiasco of August 2008, when the Republic of Georgia initiated offensive military operations against South Ossetia in the mistaken belief that the US would come to its assistance if Russia responded militarily.)
2. We recommend that you quickly get back in touch with Zelensky and insist that Kiev halt its current military buildup in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been lining up at the border ready to react if Zelensky’s loose talk of war becomes more than bravado. Washington should also put on hold all military training activity involving US and NATO troops in the region. This would lessen the chance that Ukraine would misinterpret these training missions as a de facto sign of support for Ukrainian military operations to regain control of either the Donbas or Crimea.
3. It is equally imperative that the U.S. engage in high-level diplomatic talks with Russia to reduce tensions in the region and de-escalate the current rush toward military conflict. Untangling the complex web of issues that currently burden U.S.-Russia relations is a formidable task that will not be accomplished overnight. This would be an opportune time to work toward a joint goal of preventing armed hostilities in Ukraine and wider war.
There is opportunity as well as risk in the current friction over Ukraine. This crisis offers your administration the opportunity to elevate the moral authority of the United States in the eyes of the international community. Leading with diplomacy will greatly enhance the stature of America in the world.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
- William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
- Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer & former Division Director in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (ret.)
- Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
- Graham E. Fuller,Vice-Chair, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
- Robert M. Furukawa, Captain, Civil Engineer Corps, USNR (ret.)
- Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
- Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
- John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
- Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
- Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)
- Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East & CIA political analyst (ret.)
- Pedro Israel Orta, CIA Operations Officer & Analyst; Inspector with IG for the Intelligence Community (ret.)
- Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
- Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
- Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
- Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
- Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
- Robert Wing, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (former) (associate VIPS)
- Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington’s justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
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What You Aren’t Being Told About The World You Live In
How The “Conspiracy Theory” Label Was Conceived To Derail The Truth Movement
How Covert American Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive and Destroy Reputations
April 8, 2021
Russia Halts Diplomatic Relations With United States In Response To Declaration Of War
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A grimly foreboding new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today first noting President Putin having declared last month that Crimea is Russia’s holy land, a sacrosanct place and center of the nation’s spiritual unity, says critical to in this declaration was his stating the historical truths: “If you take a big map, Crimea and Sevastopol will look on it like a tiny spot…But we are talking about the restoration of historical justice, we are talking about the importance of this land for our people...Our ancestors have developed this territory from time immemorial and in the 10th Century a large share of it became part of the ancient Russian state…There, on that land, in Korsun and Kherson, Prince Vladimir and his troops took baptism…This means that this is a sacred place, the center of our spiritual unity, which eventually formed the basis of the Russian nation and an integral centralized Russian state…It is a very important place for our heart and soul...In 1853-1856 during an invasion by foreign hordes and in 1941-1945 during the war with Nazi Germany every inch of that soil was soaked with the blood of Russian and Soviet soldiers”.
A declaration made by President Putin on the 7th Anniversary of the The Agreement Between The Russian Federation and the Republic of Crimea on the Accession of the Republic of Crimea in the Russian Federation and on Forming New Constituent Entities within the Russian Federation signed on 18 March 2014—the result of which saw the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) explaining: “After all these years, it is becoming increasingly clear that there was no alternative to the decision taken by the Crimean people through a free expression of their will, and that it was the only correct decision that could have been taken in the tense situation around the peninsula...As a result, Crimea has not succumbed to the radical nationalists and has avoided, together with Russia, the social and political upheavals which Ukraine suffered after the Maidan revolution...Neither has Crimea become a training range for NATO manoeuvres targeting Russia”.
Preceding this declaration, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov informed the world of the irrevocable position of the Russian Federation with his official statement saying: “Crimea’s future is to be with Russia forever…Whether one likes it or not…No actions taken by the Western nations led by the United States can change this reality, either from the point of view of international law, or from the political or moral points of view”.
Six days following the 7th Anniversary of Crimea’s reunification with the Russian Federation, however, on 24 March, it saw President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signing into force Decree No.117/2021 [English]—which in substance and in fact is a declaration of war by Ukraine against the Russian Federation, as in Section 2 it orders “The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine within three months to develop and approve an action plan for the implementation of the Strategy of deoccupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol”—sees this declaration of war stating: “Ukraine does not recognize and will not recognize the results of the so-called “referendums and election” held in the temporarily occupied territory in violation of Ukrainian law and international law”—and whose reason for this declaration of war claims: “The Crimean peninsula is gradually becoming a military base by the Russian Federation, becoming a source of danger and threat to the stability of Europe and the world…And if tactical nuclear weapons and their means of delivery are placed on the territory of the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian Federation will destroy the international non-proliferation regime, turn the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol into a potential military target”.
The absurdity of this claim lies in the fact that that Sevastopol and the Crimea peninsula has been the main Russian naval and marine base on the Black Sea since 1772, and since the Cold War has been a military target of the Americans because it was the port of Soviet nuclear armed submarines—and today sees Sevastopol being one of the most heavily defended places on the planet impervious even to a NATO attack.
Instead of rebuking Ukraine for declaring a war against the Russian Federation it can never possibly win, Supreme Socialist Leader Joe Biden and his warmongering socialist forces have instead flooded the leftist mainstream media with propaganda screaming about “Russian aggression”—screams caused by Russia doing what any normal country does when war is declared against them, mobilizing their military forces—but whose true realities of this war sees experts noting such things like “Washington and NATO want a war fought to the last Ukrainian…The Americans do not give a damn whether Ukraine will hold out for any time or whether it will be blown to pieces in an instant...They believe they stand to gain from either outcome” and “The open “secret” whispered only in informal dinners in Brussels, and chancelleries across Eurasia is that NATO puppets do not have the balls to get into an open conflict with Russia”.
With Ukrainian President Zelensky having arrived at the front lines a few hours ago to meet with his military commanders, the Foreign Ministry followed by revealing it has no plans to restore full diplomatic representation in Washington until it sees evidence that the US is interested in building constructive relations between the two countries—and in knowing the true grave peril their nation is in, now sees in America the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity organization of former top US intelligence officials delivering to socialist leader Biden an urgent letter stating:
1. It must be made clear to Ukrainian President Zelensky that there will be no military assistance from either the US or NATO if he does not restrain Ukrainian hawks itching to give Russia a bloody nose — hawks who may well expect the West to come to Ukraine’s aid in any conflict with Russia. (There must be no repeat of the fiasco of August 2008, when the Republic of Georgia initiated offensive military operations against South Ossetia in the mistaken belief that the US would come to its assistance if Russia responded militarily.)
2. We recommend that you quickly get back in touch with Zelensky and insist that Kiev halt its current military buildup in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been lining up at the border ready to react if Zelensky’s loose talk of war becomes more than bravado. Washington should also put on hold all military training activity involving US and NATO troops in the region. This would lessen the chance that Ukraine would misinterpret these training missions as a de facto sign of support for Ukrainian military operations to regain control of either the Donbas or Crimea.
3. It is equally imperative that the U.S. engage in high-level diplomatic talks with Russia to reduce tensions in the region and de-escalate the current rush toward military conflict. Untangling the complex web of issues that currently burden U.S.-Russia relations is a formidable task that will not be accomplished overnight. This would be an opportune time to work toward a joint goal of preventing armed hostilities in Ukraine and wider war.
[Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (above) arrives at front lines on 8 April 2021…
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…and who might soon know what Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (above) felt like as he pleaded for NATO help that never was going to come as overwhelming Russian military might smashed his invading army in 2008.
According to this report, with the European continent having already been twice destroyed over the past 100-years by two world wars costing hundreds-of-millions of lives, yesterday Moscow offered the European Union an alternative by inviting them to join the Russian-backed “Great Eurasian Partnership” if they see value in turning to the East—an invitation followed with a solemn pledge given by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Russia and China won’t create an Eastern military bloc to rival NATO because exclusive clubs are “counter-productive”—and was followed by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev stating: “It is important to cooperate with Europe, but being together with Europe at any cost is not idee fixe of Russian geopolitics…Nevertheless, we keep the doors open since we are well aware that there is a current situation which Western politicians are focused on, but at the same time there are historical ties that have been forging between the Russians and the Europeans throughout centuries...It would be unwise to sever them just because the state of affairs has changed...We will not be knocking at closed doors, but we stay ready for cooperation”.
As was to be expected, this report notes, the United States is enraged about this invitation to the point they’re behaving like a spoiled baby-child and not even communicating with Russia about the Open Skies Treaty—then saw news emerging that socialist leader Biden is preparing to expel Russian diplomats from America for some made up excuse no one really knows about yet—in response to sees Russian-American defense expert Dr. Pavel Felgenhauer warning: “The West is waging hybrid war against Russia on many fronts: in Belarus, in Ukraine, and Russia must not sit defensively, but actively counter-attack”—and saw Foreign Minister Lavrov stating: “We will take note of any unfriendly steps and this is for sure…So far, I haven’t seen any particular decisions and nothing has been declared. I’ve read the reports that the US administration has completed the review of Russia’s ‘hostile steps’…They somehow managed to do this rather quickly because usually when we are accused of so many misdeeds, it’s hard to deal with this in a couple of weeks or even in a couple of months, but they did…They will probably punish us in other ways”.
When viewing exactly why the United States wants to “punish” Russia, this report concludes, it is due to the threat it poses to their “Petrodollar System” that props up the US Dollar—a threat that sees Biden and his socialist warmongers targeting for destruction the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany that will free the European Union from having to buy worthless US Dollars to pay for their dire energy needs—a threat so dire to the US it is insanely willing to ignite a catastrophic needless war in Ukraine so they can impose sanctions to shut it down—but for Russia sees experts noting such truthful things like: “Nord Stream 2 is not a big deal for Moscow; it’s a Pipelineistan inconvenience at best…After all the Russian economy did not make a single ruble out of the not yet existent pipeline during the 2010s – and still it did fine…If Nord Stream 2 is canceled, there are plans on the table to redirect the bulk of Russian gas shipments towards Eurasia, especially China”—and are experts noting other factual realities like:
In parallel, Berlin knows very well that canceling Nord Stream 2 will be an extremely serious breach of contract – involving hundreds of billions of euros; it was Germany that requested the pipeline to be built in the first place.
Germany’s energiewende (“energy transition” policy) has been a disaster. German industrialists know very well that natural gas is the only alternative to nuclear energy. They are not exactly fond of Berlin becoming a mere hostage, condemned to buy ridiculously expensive shale gas from the hegemon – even assuming the hegemon will be able to deliver, as its fracking industry is in shambles. Merkel explaining to German public opinion why they must revert to using coal or buy shale from the US will be a sight to see.
As it stands, NATO provocations against Nord Stream 2 proceed unabated – via warships and helicopters.
Nord Stream 2 needed a permit to work in Danish waters, and it was granted only a month ago. Even as Russian ships are not as fast in laying pipes as the previous ships from Swiss-based Allseas, which backed down, intimidated by US sanctions, the Russian Fortuna is making steady progress, as noted by analyst Petri Krohn: one kilometer a day on its best days, at least 800 meters a day. With 35 km left, that should not take more than 50 days.
Conversations with German analysts reveal a fascinating shadowplay on the energy front between Berlin and Moscow – not to mention Beijing. Compare it with Washington: EU diplomats complain there’s absolutely no one to negotiate with regarding Nord Stream 2.
And even assuming there would be some sort of deal, Berlin is inclined to admit Putin’s judgment is correct: the Americans are “not agreement-capable.” One just needs to look at the record.
Behind the fog of war, though, a clear scenario emerges: the deep state/NATO combo using Kiev to start a war as a Hail Mary pass to ultimately bury Nord Stream 2, and thus German-Russian relations.
At the same time, the situation is evolving towards a possible new alignment in the heart of the “West”: US/UK pitted against Germany/France. Some Anglosphere exceptionals are certainly more Russophobic than others.
The toxic encounter between Russophobia and Pipelineistan will not be over even if Nord Stream 2 is completed. There will be more sanctions. There will be an attempt to exclude Russia from SWIFT. The proxy war in Syria will intensify. The hegemon will go no holds barred to keep creating all sorts of geopolitical harassment against Russia.
What a nice wag-the-dog op to distract domestic public opinion from massive money printing masking a looming economic collapse.
As the empire crumbles, the narrative is set in stone: it’s all the fault of “Russian aggression.”
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April 8, 2021 EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com. Freebase content licensed under CC-BY and GFDL.
[Note: Many governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagree with in believing that it is every human being’s right to know the truth. Due to our mission’s conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit us, and others like us, that is exampled in numerous places, including HERE.]
[Note: The WhatDoesItMean.com website was created for and donated to the Sisters of Sorcha Faal in 2003 by a small group of American computer experts led by the late global technology guru Wayne Green (1922-2013) to counter the propaganda being used by the West to promote their illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.]
[Note: The word Kremlin (fortress inside a city) as used in this report refers to Russian citadels, including in Moscow, having cathedrals wherein female Schema monks (Orthodox nuns) reside, many of whom are devoted to the mission of the Sisters of Sorcha Faal.]
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