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- Post #10,201
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- Nov 30, 2021 7:57am Nov 30, 2021 7:57am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
- Post #10,202
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- Edited 11:50am Nov 30, 2021 11:39am | Edited 11:50am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
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
November 30, 2021
Russia Issues Biden “Very Dangerous Delusion” Warning As Germany Plots European Takeover
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A troubling new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today first noting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that the United States and its allies are hatching confrontational schemes in the Asia-Pacific region, says he further warns that NATO military equipment is being moved to the Russia border, and stated: “President Putin spoke about this on 18 November... he stressed that we do not need conflicts but if the West cannot hold Ukraine back, but, on the contrary, encourages it, of course, we will take all the necessary steps to ensure our security”—warnings causing Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov to issue a direct warning to Supreme Socialist Leader Joe Biden that Russia won't back down in a NATO standoff, and directly stated: “There are suggestions expressed that some desperate head may appear in Ukraine or a group of fighters who will try to test the strength of the Russian defense, counting on the fact that we will not respond…I would like to say and emphasize unequivocally: this is a very dangerous delusion”.
This transcript next sees Security Council Members reviewing the latest war bulletins issued by the Ministry of Defense (MoD), one of which reveals that full-scale production of the unstoppable 6,670 MPH nuclear weapons capable Zircon hypersonic missile that can evade “all” Western defense systems has begun, and another one states: “Almost every week, our objective monitoring tools track more than 50 reconnaissance aircraft and drones cruising along our borders...The NATO alliance apparently has no other problems...Terrorism, threats to security from other regions do not have the same significance as the danger allegedly emanating from Russia”.
As war draws ever nearer by the day, this report continues, the socialist Biden Regime has begun severing all diplomatic ties with Russia and lying about it, thus causing Ambassador Antonov to slam Biden’s State Department as “cunning” and accuse it of making statements that have “nothing to do with reality”, with him stating: “The US is deliberately distorting the facts regarding the departure of 55 Russian diplomats in order to mislead the international community”—in response to this war provocation saw Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov declaring that Russia “will hit back” at the Biden Regime, and stated: “We will respond to this, and we warned the Americans, that in order to prevent further reduction in our staff we can’t not respond”—a warning Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov joined with the factual observation: “Ill-wishers never stop trying to contain the development of our country, to influence our domestic and foreign policy by means of sanctions, blackmail and information warfare...Using non-profit international organizations among other tools, Washington is spending considerable funds to destabilize the situation in Russia...Information wars, where, according to the Americans and some of their allies, anything goes, involve all spheres, including social networks and messengers...The target audience is the youth”.
Security Council Members in this transcript note that instead of Biden spending his nation’s money on attempting to socialist indoctrinate Russian children, he’d be better advised to pay attention the Brown University scientists whose just released a beyond shocking study found that social distancing measures and face masks are suspected of causing young American childrens’ cognitive development to drop by a staggering 23 percent—a cognitive decline that’s also being displayed in the US Senate, where yesterday warmongering socialist lawmakers stopped the passage of their nation’s yearly defense bill because it didn’t contain anti-Russia measures against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—and are anti-Russia measures the German government issued a warning about to the US Congress stating: “US Sanctions targeting Nord Stream 2 would undermine the commitment given to Germany in the Joint Statement, weaken the credibility of the US government, and endanger the achievements of the Joint Statement, including the provisions supporting Ukraine”.
Over the past 107-years, since 1914, this report details, Germany ignited World War I and World War II in its failed bid to subjugate Europe under its rule, and whose master plan to do so again was laid out yesterday in an agreement that was fleshed out in a 178-page document, which ran to 52,000 words, agreed upon by all of its ruling political parties—an agreement that in 10-days time will see Olaf Scholz becoming the German Chancellor—then it will see Chancellor Scholz turning German sovereignty over to the European Parliament and forcing all other European nations to do likewise—if happens would create a de facto United States of Europe under the iron grip control of Germany—and is why today soon-to-be Chancellor Scholz has been branded a “major threat” to the European Union, whose members like France, Poland and Hungary will fight to death to make sure this never happens.
As Germany plots its takeover of Europe, this report notes, its greatest present fear is the socialist Biden Regime embroiling the entire European continent in an unwinnable catastrophic war against Russia over Ukraine—a war whose igniter is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that’s already filled with Russian natural gas waiting for Germany to turn it on—is desperately needed Russian natural gas for a Europe whose gas prices have started rising again as a colder-than-normal start to winter makes unusually large inroads into the already meager volume of gas in storage—whose volume of gas in storage across the 27 countries of the European Union and Britain has fallen by the equivalent of 58 terawatt-hours compared with the start of October, one of the largest drawdowns over the last decade—today sees futures prices for gas delivered in January-2022 via the Dutch Title Transfer Facility have climbed to more than 93 euros per megawatt-hour, up from a recent low of 65 euros a month ago—all of which is occurring at the same time a “slow disaster is playing out” in Germany causing energy experts to warn “Dear Germans, buy warm clothes, food, water, and candles” because, by the end of 2022, the German government will have shut down another 6 nuclear power plants with a total capacity of 8.54 gigawatts.
The stark choice Germany now faces, and by extension the entire European Union, this report continues, is to either open Nord Stream 2 to keep this “slow disaster” from occurring, and in doing so enrage the socialist Biden Regime, or continue to rely on Russian natural gas transiting through Ukraine—the latter of which isn’t a viable choice, as last month President Putin warned that Ukraine could not handle any boost in gas supplies, noting that the country’s gas transport system “might burst” due to an increase in pressure because the infrastructure built over 50-years ago by the former Soviet Union has “not been repaired for decades”—is a factual reality underlying why Russia does not want to extend its gas transit contract with Ukraine after 2024 when the current deal ends—because Russia won’t talk to Ukraine about something that’s never going to happen today sees them screaming: “We are discussing it with the Americans and the Germans that all of us would like the transit to continue, but the Russians are reluctant to start these discussions”—a frantic scream from Ukraine quickly responded to by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who plainly stated: “As for transit affairs, certainly, we need to address the question to Gazprom...I just want to remind you of President Putin’s statement that in order to transit something, you need to sell it, you need to have final buyers in Europe, for whom this transit will be carried out...Negotiations on transit will remain a second priority...First, you need to sell gas”.
With Russian energy giant Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas producer, warning today that the massive rally in European gas prices isn't likely to fade anytime soon, the conclusion section of this transcript sees Security Council Members agreeing it would take highly skilled mental health professionals to figure out the lunatic socialist energy policies of these Western nations—most particularly the United States, where the lunatic energy policies of “climate change hero” socialist leader Biden have exploded the price of coal to levels not seen since “climate change hero” socialist leader Obama sent them to the stratosphere when he was in power—today sees US coal prices having climbed to their highest level in more than a decade amid dwindling stockpiles—and are American coal stockpiles so depleted, today it’s being grimly reported: “Supplies are so low that PJM Interconnection LLC, which runs the electricity grid serving about one-fifth of all U.S. residents, has taken action to conserve coal for the coldest days this winter…PJM said that until April the organization will allow steam plants to shut down if they reach less than 10 days’ worth of coal on hand…The trigger is normally 32 hours of coal supply in PJM’s territory, which includes all or part of 13 eastern states and the District of Columbia...Inventories in the U.S. power sector are about two-thirds of the five-year average for this time of year, and Richard Nixon was in the White House the last time there was so little on hand”. [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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November 30, 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 is 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.]
Biden Has American Troops Poised For “Holiday War” Invasion
Embrace The Chaos—Live In The Madness
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- Post #10,203
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- Nov 30, 2021 12:52pm Nov 30, 2021 12:52pm
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
From Gold Manipulation to DC’s Latest Lies, Absolute Distortion Continues
https://i2.wp.com/goldswitzerland.co...=80%2C80&ssl=1
By Matthew Piepenburg
November 30, 2021
Below we look at the latest official fantasies from DC as well as the same ol’ big-boy gold manipulation tricks meant to keep precious metal markets anything but free or natural.
From Dumb to Dumber: DC’s Latest Inflation Solution, More Spending…
In a recent report from The Hill, we discover that the Biden advisory team is now accepting that inflation is not only a financial reality (rather than “transitory blip”), but far more importantly (to them), a political problem.
It will come as no surprise to many that politics and politicians are driven by re-election not candid honesty, and certainly not economic expertise or even a rudimentary grasp of financial (or even grade school) history.
Unfortunately for the self-preservation-driven dunces helming our financial Titanic, the math of inflation can no longer be masked with more words.
In short, and given rapidly falling poll numbers, the White House has to rev up its “inflation strategy.”
D.C.’s Comical Inflation Strategy
And if you are hoping it’s going to be an effective strategy, well…please: Don’t hold your breath.
In fact–and we promise that we are not making this up–the Biden administration’s answer to the inflation problem (which is driven and defined by too much money in the system) boils down to this: Spending and creating more money.
Really?
Yes. Really
The economic advisors actually maintain that the new Biden spending package will, “not add to inflationary pressures,” and effectively “pay for itself.”
As I like to say: That’s rich.
If anyone on the White House staff took economics in high school or read a single case study on prior inflationary cycles, they would know better; but for now, the lords are hoping that the serfs won’t know any better either.
But folks here’s a spoiler alert: Expanding spending with expanded money creation is the very essence of inflation.
Then again, and as we’ve warned for months, politicians say one thing and mean another.
No shocker there.
And as we’ve also warned for months, inflation is what these desperate policymakers are after, despite public signaling to combat the same.
To repeat (and worth repeating): Inflating away debt is and was their real (and only) plan all along.
DC’s History of Putting Political Lipstick on Financial Pigs
But in case you think lying to cover up a bad plan is something unthinkable in the corridors of DC, let us harken back to that other political and financial disaster otherwise known as the Iraq War as a simple lesson (and additional case study) in DC fantasy over facts.
As early as 2002 and well into 2003, the following list of “advisory” double-speakers repeatedly told the world and the White House that a war in Iraq, with its oil-rich resources, would “pay for itself.”
This list includes such well-known luminaries of deliberate dishonesty as Richard Perle, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence Lindsey, Ari Fleischer, Paul Wolfiwitz, Ken Pollack, Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney.
As for “paying for itself,” the war in Iraq cost the U.S. well over $7T, and that’s being conservative.
And as for who paid for this, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, then the answer is you, not Iraq.
But as Cheney defended, hey, at least we got $14B in international “assistance,” which would be like me tossing you a penny to “assist” in your purchase of a luxury yacht.
But as all students of failed regimes have learned in history class, the extreme cost of extended wars, unless paid for with taxes (think Truman in Korea), is the first inflationary domino to fall before those same nations and their currencies implode further down the road.
Same Spin, Different Story
Returning to the familiar paradigm of spin coming out of the Biden advisory team, we see that nothing has changed when it comes to replacing hard math and simple truth with linguistic fantasy and political white-wash.
In short: Biden’s latest spending plan won’t be paying for itself.
If you are wondering where the money to pay for the new spending plan is coming from, let us be blunt: The U.S. doesn’t have the money.
Even the most recent report from the Congressional Budget Office confirms that Biden’s social safety net and climate change legislation will increase the budget deficit by at least $367B.
But in an era where money can be created with a Fed mouse-click rather than a productive economy, what’s a $100B here or another $100B there?
In other words, it will come as no surprise where the needed new money will come from: Out of thin air.
Again, such an open and insane combination of increased fiscal and monetary stimulus is by definition inflationary. Period. Full stop.
That said, there’s also no denying that more spending and “stimulus” as set forth in the Biden plan will inflate nominal GDP to some extent, which might help offset some of the pain of tax receipts not being sufficient to cover interest expenses on Uncle Sam’s Treasury obligations (IOUs).
But regardless of whatever GDP upticks come in the land of the global reserve currency, let us be more honest than DC’s politicians or economic advisors.
More Gold Tailwinds
Specifically: The only way forward to “borrow-&-buy” (i.e., “stimulate”) more GDP is in a new and scary world where inflation rips well (and intentionally) ahead of controlled interest rates.
In short, all of the foregoing is just another way of saying, yet again, that all twisted roads point toward negative real rates and hence gold as currency insurance in a world drowning even deeper in an ocean of debased dollars.
Media Spin Complimenting Political Spin
Meanwhile, the Main Stream Media (MSM), which by every poll, metric, and dinner conversation is becoming more and more of an open and distrusted joke by the day, desperately continues lying at the same pace as the policymakers.
That is, they keep telling the world that inflation is merely a supply-chain rather than a broad money supply story, and hence “not to worry.”
Instead, the fear-porn pushers of the corporate-owned and politically-directed MSM want you to worry more about the endless war on Covid (and it's variant de jour), which much like the endless war on terror, has become a wonderful pretext (guise) to pursue more inflationary policies while pretending, virtuously, to combat the same.
Thus, as Austria shuts down, and Australia loses its mind, even Germany is only a small step away from further lockdowns ahead, of both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, which by every honest measure of the viral case spread among the vaccinated, essentially makes both categories a distinction without a difference.
More Lipstick on More Pigs,
Again, and whatever one’s individual views on COVID policy, we can expect more controls and constraints from on high, whose impact on the global economy, in addition to everything else going sideways, is anything but a growth tailwind.
As controversial and political (as opposed to science-based) lockdowns continue, a growing number of otherwise “flat-earthers” are leaving the workforce.
The latest numbers for the month of September alone confirm that 4.4M U.S. workers simply quit.
Again, and regardless of individual views on mandates and lockdowns, we can all agree that they will add to supply chain and economic disruptions, which just adds more fuel to the inflationary fire we’ve been tracking all year.
And the Gold Manipulation Continues…
Of course, no discourse on faking it, lying, or market distortion would be complete without a quick look at the latest artificial boot to the neck of rising gold prices.
As you’ve likely noticed, manipulated gold recently lost more than $45 in price last week. What you might not have noticed is why.
No mystery.
It boils down to some mysterious entity (i.e., central bank…) dumping $1.25B worth of gold futures (twice) in less than a minute each on that oh-so-nefarious web of market price fixing otherwise known as the COMEX.
In other words, the same policymakers who lie to us by the day (see above), are spending their evening hours practicing gold manipulation (see below).
https://i0.wp.com/goldswitzerland.co...01%2C437&ssl=1
Their motives are as simple as their means: The emperors with no clothes are terrified of honest price discovery in gold and silver for no other reason than such honesty would make a mockery of the lies that otherwise pass for sovereign currencies.
As always, we know such tricks can’t last, but it’s flattering to know how terrified the liars are of the truth, and despite gold manipulation, we still see gold as history’s most honest asset.
Soon, the truth, as well as the gold price, will prevail. It always does.
Tags: Gold Inflation
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 80 countries.
GoldSwitzerland.com
Contact Us
Articles may be republished if full credits are given with a link to GoldSwitzerland.com.
- Post #10,204
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- Nov 30, 2021 1:55pm Nov 30, 2021 1:55pm
Is there a way to simplify Money flow in terms of chart or indicator observation or a relatable Currency strength Meter.
Thanks
- Post #10,205
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- Edited 3:09pm Nov 30, 2021 2:50pm | Edited 3:09pm
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
NEWS &VIEWS
Forecasts, Commentary & Analysis on the Economy and Precious Metals
Celebrating our 48th year in the gold business
December 2021
“On Wall Street he and a few others – how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe.” – Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The Masters of the Universe and Gold
‘A bond issued by God’
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That small group of investment bankers – those Tom Wolfe dubbed the Masters of the Universe – made its fortune trading U.S. Treasuries. It still plays the same role today it always has but no longer occupies the center stage for Wall Street’s bond market. Instead, that role now belongs to the Federal Reserve. Since the introduction of quantitative easing in 2008, it has built a $5.57 trillion stockpile of U.S. Treasuries – a holding equal to almost 20% of the nearly $29 trillion national debt. Even more troubling, it purchased a mind-boggling 60% t0 80% of the federal debt issued since 2010, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
“At 10:10 a.m. most workdays on Wall Street,” writes Liz McCormick in a recent Bloomberg column (under the unsettling headline, One Trader Calls the Shots in the Treasury Bond Market) officials at the Federal Reserve wade into the Treasury bond market. For the next 20 minutes, they proceed to snap up bonds of all shapes and sizes. They’re impervious to price moves, and they never sell. An indiscriminate bond-buying machine, they’ve now amassed a $5.5 trillion stockpile of the debt.” Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe have been replaced by one omnipresent, spectacularly powerful, and as it turns out, fickle Master of the Universe – America’s central bank.
“For almost two years,” says Gillian Tett, in a recent Financial Times editorial, “a frightening question has haunted the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve. No, this is not whether the Fed can engineer a smooth exit from quantitative easing; nor whether this is the right moment to switch the governor (and policy). The question I am referring to is whether the U.S. Treasuries market is robust enough to handle the shocks that might arise from those first two problems. For while the U.S. government bond market used to be considered to be the world’s most liquid and deep asset class, in March 2020 that cozy assumption was smashed apart.”
The bond market, in short, has become a much more dangerous place to park one’s money than it was in 1987 when Wolfe wrote Bonfire of Vanities. That vulnerability, in turn, has elevated the appeal of the bond market’s chief competitor for safe-haven capital – gold. As of the third quarter of 2021, the World Gold Council reports the strongest global year-to-date increase in gold coin and bullion demand since 2013, including a 31% year-over-year increase in U.S. demand.
London-based market analyst Charlie Morris says we should, in fact, view gold as a kind of bond in its own right. “In asking what kind of bond it is,” he says, “I came up with five answers:
• It is a zero-coupon because it pays no interest.
• It has a long duration because it lasts forever.
• It is inflation-linked, as historic purchasing power has demonstrated.
• It has zero credit risk, assuming it is held in physical form.
• It was issued by God.
That means gold is simply a zero-coupon, long-duration inflation-linked bond. It compensates you against past debasement and is impacted by the expectation of how rates and inflation will change in the future. It works.”
At the moment, an eerie calm prevails in the bond market. The question, however, is, will it last once the Fed withdraws its monumental support? Some economists think tapering will succeed simply because the federal government will require less financing now that the Covid-related spending storm has passed. Others are not convinced. As pointed out above, the Fed has purchased the lion’s share of the national debt issued since 2010. It was a significant player in the bond market long before the pandemic became a problem.
“Frankly,” asks Bloomberg’s Vince Cignarella, “given the biggest buyer of bonds since the financial crisis is slowing purchases, why would anyone else want them? The Fed not buying bonds is defacto selling.” In the same editorial linked above, Gillian Tett raises another possibility: “[W]hen markets awake from dreamland and reprice Treasuries, there is every chance we will see another nasty market jolt. Unless, of course, the Fed keeps acting as a trillion-dollar-a-day market maker of last resort. Which is not, of course, how free-market finance is supposed to work.”
https://www.usagold.com/wp-content/u...1-1024x567.png
Click to enlarge
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The six keys to successful gold ownershipThis eye-opening, in-depth introduction to precious metals ownership will help you avoid many of the pitfalls that befall first-time investors. Find out who invests in gold, what role gold plays in serious investors’ portfolios, and the when, where, why, and how of adding precious metals to your holdings. To end right, it is critical that you start right, and the six keys to successful gold ownership will point you in the right direction.
Open Access
https://www.usagold.com/wp-content/u...-1024x576.jpeg
Short & Sweet
LEGENDARY INVESTOR Jim Rogers says, “inflation is here, and it’s going to get worse.” He adds that the next economic crisis will be the worst in his lifetime. “Stay with what you know,” he says, and “become knowledgeable because there are going to be difficult times.”“ACROSS FOUR DECADES of work in the financial markets,” writes analyst John Hussman in the latest issue of his newsletter, “and over a century of historical data, I’ve never observed as many historical indications of a market peak occurring simultaneously. … Emphatically – and this is important – my intent here is not to ‘call the top of this bubble. Yes, this is a bubble in my view. Yes, I believe it will end in tears. Yes, the price investors pay for a given stream of future cash flows is inseparable from the long-term returns they can expect. Yes, if this bubble is ever to actually have a top, this would be a perfectly reasonable moment to expect one. Still, my present intent is simply to share what we’re observing.”
RAY DALIO HAS NOT DEVIATED much from the “cash is trash” theme that garnered considerable attention last year. Now with inflation digging in, he is adamant as ever. One of the investments Dalio recommends in lieu of cash is gold, and he has been advocating it for many years. “Yesterday’s inflation report,” he writes in a recent Linked-in piece, “showed inflation raging so you are now seeing inflation erode your wealth. That is no surprise. At this time 1,) the government is printing a lot more money, 2) people are getting a lot more money, and 3) that is producing a lot more buying that is producing a lot more inflation. Some people make the mistake of thinking that they are getting richer because they are seeing their assets go up in price without seeing how their buying power is being eroded. The ones most hurt are those who have their money in cash.”
“I LOVE GOLD with the same intensity that I am frustrated by it, which is considerable. That is a rather poetic expression of my opinion. So let me get you a more down to earth answer: Gold is unusual in that it is kind of outside this speculative whirlwind.” – James Grant, Interest Rate Observer/Christoph Gisiger interview theMarketNZZ
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ECONOMIST Jeremy Siegel is calling for a “serious pullback” in the stock market driven by a “drastic change” in Fed policy to combat high inflation. In a recent CNBC interview, he says, “you have to be wanting to hold real assets in this scenario, and stocks are real assets.” We would question Siegel’s assumptions given the stock market’s poor performance during the runaway inflation-stagflation of the 1970s – a period increasingly likened to our own. The combination of economic stagnation and double-digit inflation made that decade a bearish one for stocks and bullish for gold. Siegel sees inflation rising by a cumulative 20% to 25% over the next several years. Also, though the Fed might hope to come off as an inflation fighter, it is not likely to follow in the footsteps of Paul Volcker. Instead, it will be inclined to keep interest rates below the inflation rate in order not to derail the already fragile recovery.
https://www.usagold.com/wp-content/u...-1024x694.jpeg
Cartoon courtesy of MichaelPRamirez.com
SPEAKING OF INFLATION, Bloomberg’s Mark Cudmore says inflation is reaching a boiling point, “yet markets don’t really seem to care too much. Sure, U.S. yields and the dollar both surged while stocks tumbled. But there’s no panic about the enormity of what we’re seeing.” Cudmore focuses on the repercussions of runaway inflation being signaled on a global basis, saying that barely anyone bothered commenting on Japan’s wholesale inflation rate coming in an 8% last week. China, by the way, reported its October producer price index up 13.5% year over year. He says, “the metaphor of frogs in a pot of water has never been a more apt analogy” and that “the year ahead will see immense asset-price dislocations.” Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary, the President, and the Federal Reserve chairman do not seem worried about the frog in boiling water analogy. Cudmore is a macro-strategist at Bloomberg.
“THE SCENARIO FEW PORTFOLIOS would be well-positioned for is pandemic stagflation. Returns generated in this scenario by long-term assets like real assets or natural resource equities would be heavily dependent on the extent to which market fears of inflation translate into higher discount rates and lower valuations. We expect commodity-related strategies or gold to provide more reliable protection.” – Mercer Investments, a division of Marsh McLennan
“FIAT MONEY IS EASILY WEAPONIZED to fund a crowd-pleasing, vote-grabbing, and unrest-soothing Welfare State. Roman majoritarianism and interventionism systematically hindered voluntary exchanges, crippled the productive class, and led to a bloated bureaucracy and an empire of dependents. As ancient historian Lactantius described it, ‘The number of recipients began to exceed the number of contributors by so much that, with farmers’ resources exhausted by the enormous size of the requisitions, fields became deserted and cultivated land was turned into forest.’” – Claudio Grass, Gavekal
SPROTT ASSET MANAGEMENT raises a point we have made frequently in this newsletter: Investors now view silver in very much the same way they do gold – as financial insurance stored for asset preservation purposes. “Silver,” it writes, “has been used throughout the ages as a medium of exchange. Today, as governments continue to debase fiat currencies, silver’s hard asset and store of value qualities should help protect investor wealth. Silver also has many industrial uses and is critical in manufacturing many of the technologies of tomorrow. This makes silver not just an attractive store of value, but one that stands to benefit alongside major technological shifts.” With that, Sprott sums up the basic rationale for silver ownership. At USAGOLD, the silver rush is still in full swing and doesn’t seem to be letting up. Investors often cite the advantageous pricing of silver compared to other investments, its upside potential, and its emergence as an alternative store of value as reasons for stockpiling the metal. We offer an allocated, low-cost, independent storage program for high net worth investors – buy and sell with a quick phone call.
Silver price
(1971 to present)
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Chart courtesy of TradingView.com • • • Click to enlarge
MORGAN STANLEY’S CHIEF GLOBAL STRATEGIST, Ruchar Sharma, offers some down-to-earth practicality in an environment when speculation about what the Fed will do or won’t do is running off the rails. In a Financial Times editorial, Sharma wrote a while back that “it is difficult not to be a gold bug right now.” If Sharma is right, real rates will continue to trend negative and that’s a positive for the yellow metal. “No matter what happens to near-term inflation and growth,” he says, “the world is too indebted for rates to rise much higher.
INVESTMENT MANAGER MICHAEL LEBOWITZ says the Fed is not tightening in reality through its Q.E. tapering program. In short, he says in an analysis posted at Advisor Perspectives, “it has expanded its mandate from full employment and stable inflation to include, as stated by Chairman Powell, “our responsibilities to promote the stability of the financial system.” As a result, in Liebowitz’ view, it won’t tighten “because doing so would harm the financial markets, and that trumps everything at the Fed.” We will add that cutting back on quantitative easing now does not prevent policymakers from reverting to the old policy later at the first sign of financial system danger.
LEBOWITZ GOES ON TO QUOTE Andrew Huszar, who said in 2013: “I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin Q.E. as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”
BILLIONAIRE SAM ZELL’S INTEREST in gold tracks back to his family’s escape from Nazi Germany. His father’s stash of gold coins financed their flight to freedom. “So from my perspective,” he says in an interview published at Virginia Commonwealth University News, “the assault on fiat currencies is somewhat disturbing. I don’t think that I’m ever going to get enough gold exposure to have any meaningful – nor would I want it – percentage of my net worth. But at the same time, when I see the kind of printing that’s going on, the idea of starting to put together a pool of liquid resources, mostly because I don’t know what happens. The world changes and there’s time for certainty.”
“THERE’S GOING TO BE A REALIZATION in early 2022 that the Fed is not going to be able to be aggressive. People need to realize that this Fed is very tentative. It’s a Fed that has a lot of political pressure to favor the employment side of its mandate over inflation. … I don’t think it’s going to be a runaway where you’re talking about $4,000 gold, but you know, $2,200, $2,300 or $2,400, somewhere in that range, I think in sort of a corresponding moving silver, I think it is likely on the table. And again, it’s going to come from the release of that Fed fear, pressure valve, whatever that’s been keeping people from, getting involved.” – Mike Larson, Weiss Ratings in a report posted at Finbold
FIRST EAGLE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, a New York City-based investment firm with over $100 billion under management, takes an old-school approach to gold ownership that we find amenable with our own. “We have a distinctive philosophy around gold,” says Thomas Kertsos, its portfolio manager, in an analysis posted at GoldHub. “We believe gold has unique risk/reward characteristics that enable it to help preserve real value over the long term. We use gold as a potential hedge and do not speculate on its price over the next six to 12 months. We believe it is not possible to forecast the price of gold or, for that matter, the price of other investment assets.”
WHILE COMMODITY PRICES ARE IN AN UPTREND – the CRB Index is up over 40% year to date – gold and silver have remained stubbornly in a range. In a recent interview posted at the ZeroHedge website, Equity Management Associates’ Lawrence Lepard was asked why precious metals seem to be the only commodities that haven’t caught the inflation bug as yet. “The metals were early to the party,” said the highly regarded fund manager, “and are now taking a breather while all the other commodities catch up. Gold was up over 50% in a two-year window. It is down 15% in the past year. It is crazy and partly due to price suppression by the central banks, but they cannot hold it down forever and the next run will take it to new all-time highs quickly in my opinion.”
Final Thought
Past gold bull markets have begun with a surge in the money supply
If the Fed is looking for inflation, it will find it in the money supply – something that did not happen with authority in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis. From early 2020, the money supply has grown by a factor of five – from $4 trillion to $20 trillion. Recently, the rapid growth moderated its uptrend but is still surging at an accelerated rate, as you can see in the accompanying chart. During the financial crisis that began in 2008, the Fed sterilized its money creation by routing liquidity back to its coffers in the form of commercial bank excess reserves. This strategy kept the inflation rate from running out of control. As you can see, the money supply growth this time around goes beyond anything that occurred during the earlier crisis. And now, unlike that period, it is translating to price inflation – and not just in the United States but around the world.
“Every gold bull market over the last 50 years has begun with a catalyst that propelled significant growth in the money supply,” writes Manning & Napier, the money management firm, in a report posted at Seeking Alpha titled The Value of Gold in a Portfolio. “Each of those prior bull markets was proceeded by substantial U.S. dollar money supply growth, making monetary expansion a key indicator. It is important to note that this alone does not guarantee a gold bull market, as there are many other variables at play.… We see the status of each of these economic factors, money supply growth, inflation, and real interest rates, as supportive of higher gold prices ahead.”
https://www.usagold.com/wp-content/u...V-1024x709.png
Sources: St. Louis Federal Reserve [FRED], Board of Governors Federal Reserve System, ICE Benchmark Administration
Click to enlarge
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https://www.usagold.com/wp-content/u...marginNV-2.pngMichael J. Kosares is the founder of USAGOLD, author of The ABCs of Gold Investing – How To Protect and Build Your Wealth With Gold [Three Editions], and the firm’s publications editor.
- Post #10,206
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- Edited 12:50am Dec 3, 2021 12:37am | Edited 12:50am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
Escobar: The NATOstan Clown Show
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpg
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, DEC 03, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,
American hysteria over the “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine has exploded every geopolitical Stupid-o-Meter insight – and that’s quite an accomplishment.
What a mess. Sections of the U.S. Deep State are in open revolt against the combo that remotely controls Crash Test Dummy, which impersonates POTUS. The neocon-neoliberal axis is itching for war – but has no idea how to sell it to an immensely fractured public opinion.
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=wM9tFjnT
UKUS, which de facto controls the Five Eyes spy scam, excels only in propaganda.
So in the end it’s up to the CIA/MI6 intel axis and their vast network of media chihuahuas to accelerate Fear and Loathing ad infinitum.
The Russophobic U.S. Think Tankland would very much cherish a Russian “invasion”, out of the blue, and could not give a damn about the inevitable trouncing of Ukraine. The problem is the White House – and the Pentagon – must “intervene”, forcefully; otherwise, that will represent a catastrophic loss of “credibility” for the Empire.
So what do these people want? They want to provoke Moscow by all means available to exercise “Russian aggression”, resulting in a lightning-fast war that will be a highway to hell for Ukraine, but with zero casualties for NATO and the Pentagon.
Then the Empire of Chaos will blame Russia; unleash a tsunami of fresh sanctions, especially financial; and try to shut off all economic links between Russia and NATOstan.
Reality dictates that none of the above is going to happen.
All exponents of the Russian leadership, starting with President Putin, have already made it clear, over and over again, what happens if the Ukro-dementias start a blitzkrieg over Donbass: Ukraine will be mercilessly smashed – and that applies not only to the ethnic-fascist gang in Kiev. Ukraine will cease to exist as a state.
Defense Minister Shoigu, for his part, has staged all manner of not exactly soft persuasion, featuring Tu-22M3 bombers or Tu-160 White Swan bombers.
The inestimable Andrei Martyanov has conclusively explained, over and over again, that “NATO doesn’t have forces not only to ‘counter-act anything Russia does but even if it wanted to it still has no means to fight a war with Russia.”
Martyanov notes, “there is nothing in the U.S. arsenal now and in the foreseeable future which can intercept Mach=9-10+, let alone M=20-27, targets. That’s the issue. The same analytical method applies to a situation in 404. The only thing U.S. (NATO) can hope for is to somehow provoke Russia into the invasion of this shithole of a country and then get all SIGINT it can once Russia’s C4ISR gets into full combat mode.”
Translation: anything the Empire of Chaos and its NATO subsidiary try in Donbass, directly or indirectly, the humiliation will make the Afghanistan “withdrawal” look like a House of Gucci dinner party.
No one should expect clueless NATO puppets – starting with secretary-general Stoltenberg – to understand the military stakes. After all, these are the same puppets who have been building up a situation that might ultimately leave Moscow with a single, stark choice: be ready to fight a full-scale hot war in Europe – which could become nuclear in a flash. And ready they are.
It’s all about Minsk
In a parallel reality, “meddling in 404” – a delightful Martyanov reference to a hellhole that is little more than a computer error – is a totally different story. That perfectly fits American juvenilia ethos.
At least some of the adults in selected rooms are talking. The CIA’s Burns went to Moscow to try to extract some assurance that in the event NATO Special Forces were caught in the cauldrons – Debaltsevo 2015-style – that the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, with Russian help, will concoct, they would be allowed to escape.
His interlocutor, Patrushev, told Burns – diplomatically – to get lost.
Chief of the General Staff, Gen Valery Gerasimov, had a phone call with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen Mark Milley, ostensibly to ensure, in Pentagonese, “risk-reduction and operational de-confliction”. No substantial details were leaked.
It remains to be seen how this “de-confliction” will happen in practice when Defense Minister Shoigu revealed U.S. nuclear-capable bombers have been practicing, in their sorties across Eastern Europe, “their ability to use nuclear weapons against Russia”. Shoigu discussed that in detail with Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe: after all the Americans will certainly pull the same stunt against China.
The root cause of all this drama is stark: Kiev simply refuses to respect the February 2015 Minsk Agreement.
In a nutshell, the deal stipulated that Kiev should grant autonomy to Donbass via a constitutional amendment, referred to as “special status”; issue a general amnesty; and start a dialogue with the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Over the years, Kiev fulfilled exactly zero commitments – while the proverbial NATOstan media machine incessantly pounded global opinion with fake news, spinning that Russia was violating Minsk. Russia is not even mentioned in the agreement.
Moscow in fact always respected the Minsk Agreement – which translates as regarding Donbass as an integral, autonomous part of Ukraine. Moscow has zero interest in promoting regime change in Kiev.
This charade has come to a point that – diplomatically – is quite unprecedented: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lost his Taoist patience.
Lavrov was forced, under the circumstances, to publish 28 pages of correspondence between Moscow on one hand, and Berlin and Paris on the other, evolving around the preparation of a high-level meeting on Ukraine.
Moscow was in fact calling for one of the central points of the agreement to be implemented: a direct dialogue between Kiev and Donbass. Berlin and Paris said this was unacceptable. So yes: both, for all practical purposes, destroyed the Minsk Agreement. Public opinion across NATOstan has no idea whatsoever this actually happened.
Lavrov did not mince his words: “I am sure that you understand the necessity of this unconventional step because it is a matter of conveying to the world community the truth about who is fulfilling, and how, the obligations under international law that have been agreed at the highest level.”
So it’s no wonder that the leadership in Moscow concluded it’s an absolute waste of time to talk to Berlin and Paris about Ukraine: they lied, cheated – and then blamed Russia. This “decision” at the EU level faithfully mirrors NATO’s campaign of stoking the flames of imminent “Russian aggression” against Ukraine.
Armchair warriors, unite!
Across NATOstan, the trademark stupidity of U.S. Think Tankland rules unabated, congregating countless acolytes spewing out the talking points of choice: “relentless Russian subversion”, “thug” Putin “intimidation” of Ukraine, Russians as “predators”, and everything now coupled with “power-hungry China’s war on Western values.”
Some Brit hack, in a twisted way, actually managed to sum up the overall impotence – and insignificance – by painting Europe as a victim, “a beleaguered democratic island in an anarchic world, which a rising tide of authoritarianism, impunity, and international rule-breaking threatens to inundate”.
The answer by NATOstan Defense Ministers is to come up with a Strategic Compass – essentially an anti-Russia-China scam – complete with “rapid deployment forces”. Led by who, General Macron?
As it stands, poor NATOstan is uncontrollably sobbing, accusing those Russian hooligans – scary monsters, to quote David Bowie – of staging an anti-satellite missile test and thus “scorning European safety concerns”.
Something must have got lost in translation. So here’s what happened: Russia conclusively demonstrated it’s capable of obliterating each and every one of NATO’s satellites and blinding “all their missiles, planes and ships, not to mention ground forces” in case they decide to materialize their warmongering ideas.
Obviously those deaf, dumb, and blind NATOstan armchair warrior clowns – fresh from their Afghan “performance” – won’t get the message. But NATOstan anyway was never accused of being partial to reality.
- Post #10,207
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- Dec 3, 2021 12:39am Dec 3, 2021 12:39am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
Wall Street exposed!
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=AZ-m-Vmi
BY KINESIS MONEY
THURSDAY, DEC 02, 2021 - 12:27
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This week, Andrew Maguire sits down with ‘The Paradigm of Money’ director, Peter Antico, and narrator, Sean Stone, for a deep dive into the failings at the heart of the American financial system.
The trio takes aim at market manipulation at large, with Andrew’s special guests revealing the shocking findings of their feature documentary on Wall Street corruption.
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- Post #10,208
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- Edited 5:34pm Dec 4, 2021 5:23pm | Edited 5:34pm
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
When Fiat Currency Stops Being Money
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpgBY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, DEC 04, 2021 - 04:30 PM
Authored by Daniel Lacalle via The Mises Institute,
Most emerging and developed market currencies have devalued significantly relative to the United States dollar in 2021 despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive monetary policy. Furthermore, emerging economies that have benefitted from rising commodity prices have also seen their currencies weaken despite strong exports. As such, inflation in developing economies is much higher than the already elevated figures posted in the United States and the eurozone.
The main reason behind this is a global currency debasement problem that is making citizens poorer.
Most central banks globally are implementing the same expansionary policies of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve System but the results are disproportionately hurting the poor as inflation rises, particularly in essential goods and services, while fiscal and monetary imbalances are increasing.
Many emerging economies have implemented a very dangerous policy of boosting twin deficits—fiscal and trade deficits—under the misguided idea that it will accelerate growth. Now growth and recovery estimates are coming down but monetary imbalances remain.
Therefore, most currencies are falling relative to the US dollar. The policies implemented by global central banks are as aggressive or even more so than those of the Federal Reserve but without the global demand that the US dollar enjoys. If global nations with sovereign currencies continue to play this dangerous game, local and international demand for their currency will evaporate and dependence on the US dollar will rise. More importantly, if the Federal Reserve continues to put its global reserve status to the test, all fiat currencies may suffer a loss of confidence and a move to other alternatives.
If the private sector does not accept this currency as a unit of measure, a generalized means of payment, and a store of value backed by reserves and demand from the mentioned private sector, the currency becomes worthless and ceases to be money. Ultimately, it becomes useless paper.
Examples of state currencies that are neither a store of value nor a generally accepted means of payment are many. From the sucre in Ecuador, which disappeared, to the Argentine peso or the Venezuela bolivar, the examples in history are innumerable.
In Cuba, inflation is now estimated at 6,900 percent due to the lack of demand for a worthless currency with no real demand or reserves to back it.
Once this sort of thing happens, the state does not create money, it simply issues a means of payment—the currency—using the credibility of private sector demand to issue its promissory note. Like a debt issuer who loses repayment credibility, the value of this promise fades if the currency does not have private backing.
More importantly, the value of the currency and its use is not decided by the government. It is decided by the last private sector agent who accepts the promise of payment because they assume that it will maintain its value and its acceptance as a medium of payment.
As such, when a government creates many more of these increasingly worthless promissory notes, far outstripping the real local and international demand, the effect is the same as a massive default. The government is simply impoverishing the citizens, who are forced to use the currency, and destroying the credibility of the value of the government’s promissory notes.
When a state creates a currency without real reserve backing or demand, it destroys money.
When the government issues currency—promises of payment—that are neither a store of value nor a generally accepted means of payment nor a unit of measure, it not only does not create money, it destroys it by sinking the purchasing power of the poor captive citizens, who are forced to accept its notes and little pieces of paper (government officials, pensioners, etc.).
This is what we are seeing in many nations all over the world, a massive salary and savings slash created by government intervention on the monetary balance to its own benefit. Governments benefit from inflation because they pay their debt in a currency of diminishing value and they impose a cut to the price they pay for wages and the services of the sectors that provide service to the issuer of currency. Even in developed nations with relatively stable currencies, inflation is a big benefit for governments that collect higher revenues from the money-based taxes (wage, profit, and sales taxes) … and a big negative for savers and real wages.
Some say that workers may benefit because wages will rise in tandem with inflation. This is simply incorrect. Wages, at best, may rise with the consumer price index, which is a very weak measure of inflation and is a basket created by government bodies to lower real inflation in an average of combined goods and services. However, even if you consider the consumer price index, the vast majority of workers do not even see a rise in wages that compensates for the index rise. That is why median real wages are falling in the United States.
Those who say that the state can always “create money and spend it”—and only has to create the money it needs to finance the public sector because it will be accepted by the rest of the economic agents—should be obliged to receive their salaries in Argentine pesos and enjoy the experience.
- Post #10,209
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- Edited 7:53am Dec 5, 2021 7:40am | Edited 7:53am
- | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 11,421 Posts
Now Or Never: The Great 'Transition' Must Be Imposed
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BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, DEC 04, 2021 - 11:30 PM
Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A new wave of restrictions, more lock-downs, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect...
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=kJ1KiJwJ
Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.
Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.
Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lock-downs, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lock-downs, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.
The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Elite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.
Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, robotised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.
A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.
It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.
Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.
The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.
It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.
Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.
It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.
This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).
And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.
Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focused on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.
The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.
When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.
Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. Elites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.
This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.
Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.
These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).
This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.
But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?
This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practising attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.
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DislikedHi BenjaminIs, Is there a way to simplify Money flow in terms of chart or indicator observation or a relatable Currency strength Meter. ThanksIgnored
Each day around 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, I determine whether we have RISK ON or RISK OFF.
There is no indicator that can do this just as no technical indicator can effectively predict what will happen moment to moment as one MAJOR fundamental fact whether GEOPOLITICAL or FINANCIAL or now SUPPLY CHAIN or some New Covid 19 variant can cause the markets to go down 1000 points as the Dow 30 has been doing recently and will continue to do.
That is why my Unique Method of Forex trading developed during 2003 when I started trading Forex and later on during 2012 when I added to my business model and started teaching my unique 100% proven method of Money Flow trading.
If you want to know how you can sign up and benefit from my knowledge and experience please post on my thread or send me an Email to [email protected]
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https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?ur...akQXWI_2ng--~D
By Robert Lambourne
Monday, December 6, 2021
From time to time I am fortunate enough to have conversations with Chris Powell of GATA, who discusses his opinions on all matters concerning the gold market. Powell and Bill Murphy have done so much to expose the manipulation of the gold markets by the U.S. monetary authorities, which always seem to be trying to keep the gold price suppressed. This year seems to have been an extreme, almost maniacal example of this policy, which impairs price discovery by the international gold market.
Anyone who is prepared to read the material that GATA has archived on its internet site can have little doubt that things are not as they should be in the gold market.
For example, see Powell's presentation from the October 2021 New Orleans conference:
https://www.gata.org/node /21512
Or read Murphy's regular commentaries at LeMetrpoleCafe.com. Here is his presentation to the New Orleans conference, covering the peculiar trading patterns so often seen in gold:
https://www.gata.org/node/21509
One of my more interesting discussions with Powell involves estimating what might happen to the gold price if the suppression ever ends. The comments below set out briefly the reasons for gold price suppression, some of the corroborations for it being a policy still being implemented, and the apparent stupidity of it as the U.S. Treasury bond markets already seem hopelessly overvalued.
The onset of inflation with extremely low-interest rates and massive debt seems certain to smash bond values at some point.
The branch of modern mathematics known as catastrophe theory points to the possibility that there will be a very fast unraveling of this valuation anomaly, despite the best effo rts of the Federal Reserve to maintain its grip on these markets. The G30 report cited below, while written in relatively supportive language, demonstrates how febrile the background of the U.S. Treasury bond markets is.
Our discussions usually start by going back to basics, at least as far as GATA supporters are concerned, and reviewing the principal reasons for gold price suppression. Keeping the gold price under control has clearly been important for much of the 20th century, and the London gold pool, which collapsed in 1968, provides plenty of historical context.
For a brief reprise of the main events with the gold pool see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool
This effort to control the gold market and keep the price down ended on March 18, 1968, when the U.S. Congress repealed the requirement for a gold reserve to back the U.S. dollar. This essentially marked the beginning of the end of gold's being the anchor for the global monetary system, with President Nixon completing this process in 1971.
The principal modern reason for controlling the gold price even after gold had ceased to be the anchor for the world monetary system was first examined outside official channels by Reginald Howe, who produced a report in 2005 --
http://goldensextant.com/gibsonsparadox/
-- examining a relatively obscure economic study published in August 1985 authored by Professors Robert B. Barsky and Lawrence H. Summers titled "Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard":
https://www.gata.org/files/GibsonsPa...nalVersion.pdf
As the study explains, Gibson's Paradox was the observation that the price level and nominal interest rates were positively correlated over long periods. In essence this paper claims to have found empirical evidence of an inverse relationship between the real price of gold and the real interest rate, a relationship that was examined by the authors over long periods both including and excluding operation of a gold standard.
Essentially the paper suggests that lower interest rates are correlated to higher gold prices. This implies that if gold prices are surreptitiously suppressed with the financial markets unaware of the suppression, then the market comes to accept that interest rates are sufficiently high, and it then becomes much easier for the monetary authorities to sustain lower real interest rates.
In Reg Howe's paper is a chart suggesting that around 1995 the Gibson relationship between gold prices and interest rates broke down and this seems to have been the result of a policy decision by the U.S. monetary authorities, Perhaps not coincidentally, Professor Summers was deputy Treasury secretary at the time.
GATA has collected more evidence that since the 1990s gold prices have been suppressed by way of gold leasing by central banks and the use of gold derivatives, plus the occasional dumping by central banks of physical gold. This period has coincided with a sharp fall in both nominal and real interest rates.
In a recent paper published by the Bank for International Settlements, "The Natural Rate of Interest Through a Hall of Mirrors --
https://www.bis.org/publ/work974.pdf
-- it is asserted that real interest rates have fallen by 5% since the 1980s, fitting with the original analysis by Howe concluding that gold price suppression started in 1995 with the objective of reducing interest rates.
In this context, it is also sensible to consider a book by Sidney Homer, "A History of Interest Rates," whose second edition was published in 1977. In the preface to the revised edition, the author writes that during the 14 years since his first edition was published, "interest rates, both here and abroad, have made more history than they did in several preceding centuries."
The chapter titled "Interest Rates in Western Europe and North America since 1900," which was revised for the 1977 edition, contends that the 20th century provided both peak bond yields, higher than anything ever experienced in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, while "the lowest rates of the 20th century were likewise below the earlier low rates."
It is easy enough to deduce from this statement and the remarks from the BIS paper above that current interest rates in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and North America have never been lower in more than 400 years. While this in itself proves nothing about gold price suppression, it is, in GATA's view, persuasive that a policy of gold price suppression is being carried out by U.S. financial authorities. This policy is almost certainly being supported at least tacitly by other W estern countries and international financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the BIS.
Another BIS paper --
https://www.bis.org/publ/work851.pdf
-- demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has a long history of using dollar swap lines to central banks, often making use of the BIS to provide liquidity to overseas dollar money markets and that the Fed conveyed dollars through swaps "to alleviate funding liquidity shortages in the offshore dollar market. Finally, the archival evidence speaks clearly to the U.S. interest in swaps as a means to provide funding to the eurodollar market, to manage yields there, and to prevent interest rate spillovers in the global dollar market at the source."
Hence extensive efforts have been made for many years by the Fed to keep dollar interest rates low.
Hence GATA considers that there is plenty of corroboration that efforts to reduce dollar int erest rates via the policy of gold price suppression have been continuing right through to current times. Anybody following the gold market in 2021 has to accept that trading patterns are entirely consistent with a policy of pushing down gold and silver prices more or less throughout the year and that most of the effort seems to involve the amassing of concentrated short positions in gold and silver futures contracts on the New York Commodities Exchange.
Lately, this concentration of short futures positions has been so blatant that little attempt is being made anymore to hide what is going on. This alone may well indicate that the suppression is fast approaching a tipping point where sufficient numbers of market participants will start gaming the suppression for their own profit.
Before proceeding with the main thrust of this note, it is appropriate to make some observations about the extent of public knowledge of what is really happening in the gold market. </ p>
Documents about gold holdings and policies by governments and central banks are often treated as state secrets. For example, freedom-of-information requests to the U.K. Treasury and the Bank of England regarding gold leasing are not answered. Despite the treasure trove of information archived by GATA at the links above, public knowledge of the activities of central banks and governments in the gold market is at best highly limited, and there are tremendous gaps that are not easy to fill.
Because of this intense reluctance to provide information it can be readily deduced that gold is still seen as crucial by the U.S. financial authorities regardless of their occasional comments that gold is unimportant or a relic. Given the evidence and the silence about gold, is it any surprise that a period of record-low interest rates with sky-high government debt, as we have today, is linked with massive efforts to suppress gold prices?
Today the U.S. Debt Clock internet si te shows that the federal debt now exceeds $29 trillion:
https://www.usdebtclock.org
Of this amount, more than $5 trillion is owned by the Federal Reserve itself via its massive "quantitative easing" program. (See the appendix below for an attempt to conceptualize how vast $29 trillion is.)
While policy decisions taken more recently to counter the virus pandemic have contributed to this debt buildup, it is clear that for decades a number of U.S. government administrations have allowed this buildup to occur while interest rates have been suppressed. Not only has gold price suppression been used, but the measures of inflation have been distorted. For example, the internet site Shadowstats details many changes made to the calculation of official consumer price statistics to make inflation look lower than it is:
http://www.shadowstats.com
The market distortions created by the se efforts to deceive financial market participants have apparently resulted in a massively inflated valuation of the overall Treasury bond market. For example, a report on the valuation of the full portfolio of Treasury bonds, which was updated and republished in April 2021 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled "The U.S. Public Debt Valuation Puzzle," written by Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Z. Xiaolan, argues that the entire U.S. Treasury market is substantially overvalued:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26583
The startling conclusion from this report is that the effective interest rate on the Treasury bond portfolio is lower than the relevant interest rate bond investors should be earning. The paper calls this the "government debt risk premium puzzle." Further on in the report, it is asserted that the effective interest rate on the entire debt should be at least 3% higher than it is. The paper suggests that all U.S. federal public expenditure would need to be cut by 40% to sustain the current bond market valuation.
Hence it is already being debated in academic circles whether the Treasury market valuation is markedly out of line with rational expectations.
Even more evidence of unease among mainstream economists about the U.S. Treasury debt market is in a July 2021 report by the G30 group of economists. There is a key sentence in their recommendations -- namely, that "access to repo financing from the Federal Reserve be widened substantially beyond the small group of primary dealers.'"
This is an admission that in effect current holders of US Treasury debt want to be able to turn them into dollars virtually on demand. This is not the behavior of satisfied long-term investors. It implies that much of the U.S. Treasury market is already effectively financed by the promise of money printing over and above the amo unt already financed by QE. See:
https://group30.org/images/uploads/p...ilience__1.pdf
Meanwhile, the BIS seems to be busy producing research that highlights problems with a low-interest-rate environment. An example published recently was titled "Losing Traction? The Real Effects of Monetary Policy When Interest Rates Are Low":
https://www.bis.org/publ/work983.htm
Again unease is expressed about low-interest rates in the U.S.
It is arguable how far the effective monetization of U.S. Treasury debt has already gone with QE, but the sustainable level of U.S. Treasury debt with anything like the present maturity profile seems to be way below the current market value. Unless the authorities are prepared to see a debt d efault by the U.S. Treasury or a collapse in the market value of the debt, keeping interest rates low can be achieved only by monetizing government debt -- "QE to infinity."
As bond investors become more nervous, especially about longer-term bonds, because of things like the G30 report, who else is going to lend to the government at such low rates of interest? It will have to be the Fed, even if it acts through intermediaries.
Monetary history teaches us that this will result in serious inflation and probably hyperinflation if allowed to run too far. "The Economics of Inflation," a book published in 1931 by Constantino Bresciani-Turroni, was one of the first studies of the depreciation of the German mark from 1914-23. The author concludes in Chapter XI: "German experiences show us the fundamental importance in the determination of the level of internal prices and of the currency's external value of the quantity of money issued by the government."
< p>Neither the Federal Reserve nor the U.S. Treasury seems to agree with this conclusion in view of the size of the borrowings they have overseen and the use of QE to assist this expansion.
Sensible monetary policymakers at central banks like the Fed or at the U.S. Treasury should already have managed the end of the super-low-interest-rate bubble by revaluing gold or perhaps by ceding control of the world reserve currency to the IMF. Maybe the latter course is unacceptable politically, but something should already have been done to halt what many knowledgeable market analysts are expressing concern about.
Perhaps some sort of diversionary tactic involving cryptocurrencies will be tried, but despite reams of papers by central bankers and the BIS on introducing their own cryptocurrencies, the elephant in the room continues to be ignored. Bitcoin is based on the issue of a strictly limited number of coins, and no central bank so far seems to be prepared to accept any such lim it on their own new cryptocurrencies. So who will prefer these currencies to bitcoin?
Gold revaluation is essentially what President Franklin D. Roosevelt did all those years ago while confiscating the public's gold holdings. Imagine the fire and fury if this was attempted today, especially after years of official trashing of gold.
No doubt there will be strenuous efforts to pretend that gold hasn't been revalued, but when it happens it will be clear enough. It seems that any first effort at a gold revaluation initiated by U.S. monetary authorities is unlikely to be enough, as it would be an admission that forcing interest rates down was a huge policy error.
It is doubtful if the so-called masters of finance will be willing for the world to see how much they have held back gold. Hence further revaluations are probably going to be forced on these officials as the market reclaims control.
As already noted, we do not understand enough of the real sta te of the gold market to know if price suppression policy has already eaten deeply through reported levels of gold reserves. How much gold do the Fed and U.S. Treasury really own or control? With gold leases and other gold derivatives seemingly too important to disclose, it is reasonable to fear that things are bad in this respect, even really terrible.
So let's look at a few indications of where gold prices might be headed once suppression ends and gold returns, even unofficially, to a role in the world financial system. Because knowledge of the real state of the physical gold market is so scarce, these should not be considered as forecasts, more like straws in the wind.
The most recent published balance sheet of the Federal Reserve reveals liabilities of $8.6 trillion. If a classical gold standard was in place, these liabilities should be covered by gold. The U.S. monetary authorities currently report holding 286,852,641 troy ounces of gold. A gold price of $29,981 would be needed to effect a complete level of cover. That is a massive leap from today's gold price, and it highlights perversely the long success of gold price suppression.
An argument could be made that these liabilities would be reduced by selling the assets held by the Federal Reserve. The trouble is that such sales would almost certainly cause massive losses.
There is talk that a less onerous gold standard might be introduced, which might cover, say, 25% of the Fed's liabilities. If this was the case, then a gold price of $7,500 still would be required, well above today's price.
If, as suspected, much of the gold supposedly owned by U.S. monetary authorities are already leased out, then both of the figures would be far too low.
So this points to big upside potential at the gold price almost regardless of what monetary authorities do for a financial reset. The uncomfortable fact is that under both the Trump and Biden administrations the growth in the US, dollar debt because of the government's spending vastly more than its income has driven the relationship between the dollar and gold to an extreme.
Unless the gold price rises soon, this is going to worsen to the extent that more thorough questioning of Fed Chairman Jay Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will occur. It seems doubtful now that either would be prepared to commit to a denial of gold price suppression if questioned under oath.
Things are probably already even worse than this. It is arguable how far the effective monetization of U.S. Treasury debt has gone so far, but the sustainable level of Treasury debt without Fed intervention is apparently much lower than the existing total of around $23 trillion. So perhaps the real sustainable value in the Treasury bond market is maybe 60% of the current level.
This may imply that instead of $8.6 trillion, the real monetary liabilities of the Federal Reserve are perhaps $12 trillion. This would turn the indicated gold price of $29,981 into an indicated price of $41,833.
Because our knowledge of the real state of the official gold market is so uncertain, we cannot hope to make sensible price predictions. But things are clearly massively out of step in terms of where the gold price should be if historical norms are applied and, crucially, things are worsening because of the incessant unfunded spending. It seems credible that gold at $50,000 per troy ounce is much nearer than seems possible. And maybe silver should be over $2,000 if the gold-to-silver price ratio returns to, say, 25 times.
* * *
Appendix
Such large numbers are particularly difficult to grasp. But one way to help understand them is to use time.
Consider a printing press creating one dollar a second. It will produce $60 in one minute and $3,600 in an hour. This becomes $86,400 per day and $31,536,000 per annum.
To produce 29 trillion dollar bills would take 919,583,968 years. So to print the number of dollar bills needed to repay the U.S. federal debt would require the printing press to have started before 900,000 B.C., even as apparently been on Earth only for 20,000 years or so.
Movie buffs may recall Raquel Welch starring in the 1960s movie "One Million Years B.C., a clip from which is here:
Going by current trends, it may seem ironic that by the spring of 2023 it would have taken the U.S. monetary printing press more than a million years to produce this number of dollar bills. To celebrate this achievement, perhaps the next face on the dollar bill should be Raquel's.
-----
Robert Lambourne is a retired business executive in the United Kingdom who consults with GATA about the involvement of the Bank for International Settlements in the gold market.
* * *
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"Rigged" is a concise explanation of the government's currency market rigging policy and extensively credits GATA's work exposing it. Ten percent of sales proceeds are contributed to GATA. Buy a copy for $14.99 through Amazon --
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Benjaminis
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Interest rates, money supply, and GDP
By Alasdair Macleod
Goldmoney Staff December 09, 2021
That the world is on the edge of a monetary and economic cliff is becoming increasingly obvious. And becoming more obviously permanent than transient, price inflation will almost certainly lead to rising interest rates. Rising bond yields, falling equity markets, and debt-triggered insolvencies will naturally follow.
According to the economists prevalent in official circles, a prospective mix of so-called deflation and rising prices are contradictory, should not happen at the same time, and therefore cannot be explained. Yet that is the prospect they now face. The errors in their lack of economic judgment have evolved from the time when central banks began to manipulate their currencies to achieve economic objectives and then to subsequently dismiss the evidence of policy failure. It has been a cumulative process for the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England since the 1920s, which can only now end in a final catastrophic failure.
The denial of reasoned economic theory, embodied in a preference by state actors for state-driven outcomes over free markets, has led to this cliff edge. This article explains some of the key errors in economic and monetary theory that have taken the world to this point — principally the relationships between interest rates, money supply, and GDP.
Introduction
Following the First World War, central banks have not only acted as lender of last resort, which was the role the Bank of England and its imitators took on for themselves in the preceding decades, but they have increasingly tried to manage economic outcomes. The trail-blazer was pre-war Germany which grasped Georg Knapp’s state theory of money as justification for Prussia’s socialism by currency, eventually ending with the collapse of the paper mark in the post-war years. But the genesis of today’s monetary policies has its foundation in the then newly constituted Federal Reserve Bank, chaired by Benjamin Strong, who in the 1920s collaborated with Norman Montague at the Bank of England who was struggling to contain Britain’s post-WW1 decline.
Domestically, Strong was an advocate of monetary expansion, a policy that fuelled the Roaring Twenties, the excessive speculation that culminated in the Wall Street Crash, and the severe depression that followed. You would think that the experience of those times would have caused central bankers to reflect and consider the causes of failure, perhaps realizing that it was Strong’s earlier inflationary policies that were responsible for the depression. They did reflect but concluded that it was markets, not their policies that were at fault. If anything, they concluded that their remedies for the depression had not been imposed vigorously enough.
Having more sympathy with Knapp and the Prussian historicists than for free markets, the Fed and the Bank of England continued to seek inspiration from interventionist policies between the two world wars. A body of intellectual work grew up to support their suppositions, downgrading and eventually dismissing policies based on sound money. At the London School of Economics, Keynes triumphed over Hayek, who gave up criticizing Keynes as a thankless task, doubly made a waste of his time when Keynes responded to Hayek‘s criticism that he no longer believed in the theories he had previously promoted.[i]
In the 1970s, when price inflation threatened to get out of control, mainstream economics had devolved into Keynesianism, which was then becoming discredited, and the monetarism of Milton Friedman gained attention. The monetarists resuscitated David Ricardo’s equation of exchange explaining why the expansion of currency and credit led to rising consumer prices. But the monetarists were too mechanistic in their approach, failing to appreciate the importance of subjectivity of a currency’s purchasing power in the hands of the public. Furthermore, Friedman believed in managing inflation rather than stopping it. Both sides of the economic debate were therefore exposed by unsound or incomplete theoretical arguments from which the party expressing beliefs most suited to statist objectives would inevitably triumph.
From the 1980s the drift back into Keynesianism led to increasing suppression of free markets by governments and their central banks. From the original belief that the private sector would need a helping hand from time to time through deficit spending, policies have evolved towards full-time intervention and regulation. Today, the state believes that private sector actors cannot be trusted to do anything without firm state control. That is how far removed from market reality the state has become.
The irony in all this is that the state depends on private sector actors for its revenues. And as a source of revenue, they now have their limitations. After increasing taxes to the point of diminishing returns, burdening everyone with the expense and irrelevance of regulation, and having plucked the goose of all its feathers there must be no doubt that debasement of the currency is now a permanent and growing source of funding for modern governments.
That is the background that consciously or unconsciously drives both monetary objectives and the economic beliefs to justify them. Policymakers have dug deep holes for themselves, and they only know to keep digging.
This article explains the fallacies central to a looming monetary and economic disaster — the use of interest rates as a means of controlling inflation, official blindness to the cause of a currency’s failure, and the reliance on a statistic which in economic terms is meaningless: interest rates, money supply, and GDP.
Erroneous beliefs over the role of interest rates
Central bankers and the entire investment community believe the relationship between prices and money is governed by interest rates. In other words, to contain inflation, by which the establishment means increases in the consumer price index, interest rate management is the key. For empirical evidence, it is often referred to Paul Volcker, when as Fed Chairman he raised interest rates to unprecedented levels to kill inflation and to stop it accelerating even more.
But empirical evidence on its own is insufficient — a proper analysis is required. The Volcker story ignores the actual relationship between interest rates and the quantity of money, which is shown in Figure 1.
https://www.goldmoney.com/images/med...es/supply1.png
Expectations of continually rising prices were suppressed in the early 1980s by near 20% Fed Funds Rates. But money supply continued to expand unabated —even increasing its rate of expansion to accommodate higher interest payments.
To the extent that increases in the quantities of money and credit continued, interest rate policy was an abject failure. This failure was not widely appreciated at the time, when the focus, as it is today, was on the consequence for prices. But measurement of prices as an indication of inflation is subjective to the statistician compiling the statistics, with method subject to change. And when the cost of indexation threatened to destabilize government finances, methods of statistical suppression of the consumer price index increases were applied.
But the evidence from Figure 1 raises other important questions. Should policy planners stick with managing interest rates as the primary method of inflation control? Why is it that interest rates do not correlate with the quantity of money and credit: does that mean that interest rates do not represent the price of credit? Does this lack of correlation portend a policy failure?
Resolving these questions is now an urgent priority. Price inflation everywhere is increasing at a time when economies in all the major jurisdictions are stalling. Undoubtedly, the policy response will be to raise interest rates, however reluctantly, while remaining free to expand the quantities of currency and credit to support economic activity, government spending and to resolve systemic failures.
But as I postulated in an article on the condition of the Eurozone, even a modest rise in euro interest rates will almost certainly lead to a substantial contraction of its bloated repo market, which would be reflected in a collapse of outstanding bank credit in a banking system riddled with concealed bad debts, and where banks from large to small have a total asset to equity ratios of over twenty times. The ECB is effectively trapped. The US will have a different crisis on its hands, whereby rising interest rates will undermine financial asset values, upon which the Fed has relied to keep economic confidence intact. It will destabilize heavily indebted government finances. And zombie corporations, overloaded with unproductive debt, will likely fail, all potentially leading to depression levels of unemployment.
Put succinctly, we have moved on from the Volcker years and today the overall debt situation, which has become hyper-sensitive to interest rate rises, is more serious than it has ever been. The solution whereby central banks print their way out of interest rate increases without collapsing their currencies is an illusion when the role of interest rates is properly understood. To understand why we must answer the question posed in Figure 1 above about the non-correlation between interest rates and the quantities of currency and credit. Only then can we truly see the extent of the fallacies driving contemporary monetary policies?
Interest rates reflect the time, not cost
If there is one reason why the state will always fail in its monetary policies, it is the inability of the bureaucratic mind to incorporate time into its decision-making. In the productive market economy, which is little more than a name for the collective actions of transacting individuals and their businesses, time is central. A producer incorporates time in his profit calculations, and a consumer in his needs and desires, whether wanting something immediately or being prepared to defer his purchase. And because money is the link between both earnings and spending and savings and investment, time is of the essence for money as well. It is this irrefutable fact that leads to a preference for money to be possessed sooner rather than later. And if a human is to part with it temporarily to be returned later, naturally he or she will expect compensation for the loss of its utility.
Fundamentally, this is what interest rates in the market economy represent. It is the time preference factor, set between transacting humans, which values possession in the future less than possession today. To pure time preference, we can add an element for counterparty risk. And when transacting humans anticipate a fall in purchasing power before money owed is returned, that is yet another factor.
The common central bank target for price inflation of 2% implies that interest compensation to include an element of time preference and monetary depreciation suggests a base case without counterparty risk for a minimum of a 3% interest rate. But already, dollar prices are rising at 6.2%, so we should be seeing annualized interest rates of perhaps over 7%. Even that 6.2% rate is heavily doctored, so perhaps it should be a minimum of 10% or even more. See Figure 2 and think about the time preference implications if John Williams at Shadowstats.com is only half right in his analysis of consumer price inflation, which he calculates is approaching 15%.
https://www.goldmoney.com/images/med...es/supply2.png
And then there is counterparty risk — the possibility that interest won’t be paid. Without placing any reliance on government statistics, or anyone else’s for that matter, it is obvious that the gap between officially imposed interest rates and market reality is probably greater than it has ever been.
We cannot know what the interest compensation for temporarily parting with money should be; that is a matter for transacting individuals. But clearly, keeping interest rates suppressed at the zero bound is inhibiting the deployment of capital for productive purposes funded by genuine savings. We should not be surprised at this development, because replacing savers with the state as the source of investment capital was Keynes’s ultimate objective expressed in his General Theory.[ii] But it means that the state must be able to evaluate the terms of providing capital, to judge to whom it is to be provided, and then to provide it. It requires a judgment in the absence of economic calculation incorporating time, the latter which, as pointed out above, is wholly beyond bureaucratic contemplation.
Now let’s look at the situation without the state’s monetary planning. In free markets with sound money, having identified a possible venture, a business can calculate its anticipated costs, and from its knowledge of market prices can estimate the interest cost that it is prepared to pay to permit the project to be profitable. If a proposed investment is deemed profitable, the business must then be prepared to bid up the interest rate sufficiently to entice consumers to defer some of the fruits of their labor from immediate spending. It is this demand for capital that effectively sets the interest rate in the context of the time preference demanded by prospective savers to attract the necessary capital. And market factors also ensure it is generally allocated for its most productive use.
Critics of time preference theory might say that businesses regard interest only as a cost and that as a cost it makes sense to give the state an intervening role to keep the rate as low as possible, to stimulate business activity. But this ignores the fact that businessmen also regard interest as a reference against which profitability must be judged. Even if he doesn’t borrow to fund a production project, an entrepreneur will still measure the anticipated return on his capital against the time preference he can achieve by parting with his funds to other borrowers.
It is therefore a relatively simple matter to understand the role of savings for the provision of capital in a free market. The mistake that Keynes made was to regard interest as usuary charged by savers so they could enjoy a life of ease living off their savings. He ignored the inconvenient truth that not possessing it makes money less valuable. Keynes’s was a belief that favored his theories of state intervention.
But when one considers the state’s attempts to manage interest rates and ensure capital is made available to the profitable enterprises which will not waste it, we run into insuperable problems. State agencies are not equipped to do the necessary economic calculations, which as we have seen is central to rate-setting. Compared with economies run on free-market lines without monetary intervention, the policies of governments using monetary inflation and interest rate management have proved to consistently fail.
With the purchasing power of unbacked currencies now declining at an accelerating pace, the reluctance of the states’ monetary policymakers to permit rates to rise has sprung upon them a debt trap. Central banks have now gone too far down this rabbit hole to backtrack. Their dilemma is beginning to be noticed by homo economicus, who collectively decides the relative values between currencies and consumer goods. As a currency’s purchasing power is undermined by being increasingly discarded relative to possession of goods, markets will eventually force the central bankers’ hands. Until then, the suppression of interest rates will ensure the purchasing power of unbacked state currencies will continue to decline at an increasing pace, measured against commodities, producer input prices, labor and logistics costs, producer output prices, and finally consumer prices.
Putting aside the unrelated problem of logistics disruptions, the output will be restricted because of price pressures on production, ensuring there will be shortages of essential goods, even relative to falling consumer demand. As an economy enters this slump in business conditions, attempts by the state to stimulate flagging demand by further monetary inflation will only make the situation deteriorate further, with markets demanding yet higher discounts for the future value of money — being time preference reflected in yet higher interest rate compensation.
Ahead of these developments, we should expect financial asset prices to start anticipating the prospect of continuingly rising interest rates and bond yields. Falling financial asset values will undermine the collateral which is central to banking systems. In the Eurozone, there is the additional fear that collateralized repo markets, believed to be more than €10 trillion — larger than the combined balance sheets of the ECB and satellite national central banks — will contract severely in the face of positive interest rates. This repo market has become bloated by zero repo rates, meaning that a bank can pass doubtful debts into the euro system as collateral for credit balances at no cost.
While the tendency of bank credit to contract due to falling collateral values will be common to all banking systems it could lead to an initial banking crisis developing in the Eurozone where banks are also frighteningly over-leveraged.
A systemic crisis, combined with a debt trap being sprung on both governments and over-indebted businesses, has now become the certain outcome of interest rate suppression when it fails. The mistake has been to confuse time preference with a price for credit. It is an error as old as the religions that banned usuary, which were also based on this misunderstanding. Having made the error and believe that interest is the wage of usurious sin and therefore can and should be suppressed or banned, there is now no escape from the consequences. When market actors increasingly respond to interest rate suppression by disposing of state currencies, central banks seem bound to drag their heels, initially refusing to accept this reality. For them to do so would make indebted governments, businesses, and consumers insolvent as a matter of official policy. And as economic actors begin to learn the difference between money, which is physical gold and silver, and unbacked currencies, the flight out of currencies will surely gather pace. Arguably, this is already beginning to be reflected in speculative cryptocurrency valuations.
With respect to interest rates, central banks have boxed themselves in. But it is important to understand that permitting interest rates to rise to reflect time preference is not the same thing as stopping inflation. There is no guarantee that on its own sufficiently high-interest rates will do more than temporarily stabilize the purchasing power of currencies. But even that course of action would appear to be ruled out today.
The inflation problem
Now that we have put interest rates into context, we can tackle the inflation issue. In the 1920s mainstream economics began to drift away from classical quantity theories of money and free markets under the growing influence of Marxist doctrines. The communist socialism of the Soviets was gaining traction, seen simplistically as the only alternative to European fascist socialism, with the established free-market approach dismissed as an option. Socialism of the left reinforced arguments in favor of state intervention in the economy and the use of the currency to further socialist objectives. Subsequent evolution of monetary policies has been to remove all constraints on how it is deployed by the state. And today, policymakers have now disassociated inflation of prices entirely from increased quantities of currency and credit.
Recent FOMC statements from the Fed do not mention the quantity of money in circulation at all, sticking to commentary about targets for prices and interest rate policy. Nor are the changes in the dollar’s purchasing power ever mentioned. The drip-feed of wealth transfer to the state from the productive economy through currency debasement is never mentioned: instead, monetary policy is claimed to be a necessary stimulant. It is as if an illness has become no more than a rash, and not due to an underlying condition. But even empirical evidence clearly shows the link between increasing quantities of currency in circulation and a fall in its purchasing power.
Knowledge of elementary mathematics points in the same direction. Other things being equal if you increase the quantity of something, the utility of each unit diminishes in proportion to the increase. Thus, if as the monetary policy supremo, you chose to pursue the course illustrated in Figure 3 below, you can expect the purchasing power of your currency to fall significantly — which is why prices measured in a declining currency rise.
https://www.goldmoney.com/images/med...es/supply3.png
From the state’s point of view issuing currency is like shaking olives off an olive tree, and it is not about admitting to any consequences. The public is being kept in a state of ignorance. Further obfuscation comes from new currency and credit being indistinguishable from existing currency. Describing unbacked fiat currency as money is a further smokescreen.
It takes time for new currency and credit to enter the economy as it is spent in circulation. And if the public was aware of the wealth transfer effect, whereby the state, licensed banks, big business, the rich, and the indebted benefit having got initial possession of new currency and credit, while savers, pensioners, the poor, and those on low fixed incomes lose out, this dishonest system would collapse in a people’s revolution. But as it is and if the history of monetary inflations is our guide, these losers will only find out too late to save themselves.
The loss of public credibility for a currency as a circulating medium is its death knell. At that point, the mathematics of quantity no longer matter. If the public collectively decides to get rid of all its currency liquidity while it has any purchasing power left, preferring to own goods instead, the currency will be rendered completely valueless. It is also a vote on the credibility of the issuer — usually a central bank or government treasury department. And with the demise of the currency, tax revenues become worthless as well.
The situation is easy to resolve. The first step is to stop issuing currency and credit. Interest rates do not come into it, as Figure 1 towards the beginning of this article demonstrates. But governments are always reluctant to adopt this solution. Promoting interest rates as the mechanism for controlling inflation is basically a smokescreen that has the effect of allowing inflationary funding to continue for the benefit of the state.
Statistical misinterpretation of GDP and currency inflation
Mathematical economists rely on statistics to guide monetary and economic policy without realizing the confirmatory biases and tautologies involved. An example of the former is already remarked upon in this article in connection with the measurement of prices, which has been subject to alteration since 1980 to reduce the costs of indexation — that was even publicly admitted the first time the consumer price index was overhauled in the early 1980s. Today, deflated CPI figures are accepted as a true reflection of a currency’s purchasing power. The deception has permitted currency inflation to run at a higher level than otherwise would be tolerated.
Probably the most dangerous tautology leading to a confirmation bias is a denial of the true relationship between the gross domestic product as a measure of the total economy and increases in the money quantity. Figure 4, of the annual end of fiscal year statistics for the US, illustrates an extremely close correlation between the two. The grey line, which shows the difference in their rates of increase, shows only a minor divergence most of the time.
https://www.goldmoney.com/images/med...es/supply4.png
There have only been two notable variations in this correlation. In the great financial crisis thirteen years ago, there was a mild slowing in the pace of M3’s growth rate —affected by falling bank credit during the banking crisis — while the economy entered a brief slump. It was rescued from that slump by currency expansion. More recently, the economy has emerged from covid lockdowns, reflected in a stalling of GDP for fiscal 2020 (to September). At the same time, there was a substantial acceleration in M3 growth — reflecting deliberate official deficit spending and quantitative easing. And the correlation has now resumed.
The times of non-correlation can be explained by temporary variations in the savings rate, which when growing defers an increased proportion of total consumer spending, impacting GDP.
Theoretically, GDP is the total of final sales of all new consumer goods and services, which are distinctive in that, unlike assets they are not subject to valuation. All consumer products have a limited utility, extinguishing their purchase value. For the purposes of GDP statistics, second-hand goods have already been paid for and incorporated in GDP at an earlier date. If the product is a service, its value is fully extinguished once it has been provided.
GDP, therefore, records direct consumer spending. It also captures increases in savings, but with a variable time lag depending on how those savings are redeployed. When deposited in a bank, they support a bank’s lending, conventionally of working capital for businesses and for loans to other consumers.
Savings directed to bond and equity issues are spent by the issuer in the course of its business. The balance that remains while business expenses are discharged stays in the banking system as deposits, the counterpart through double-entry bookkeeping being assets in the banking system, which ends up being redeployed as unrelated credit or investments. Again, these funds are eventually spent.
Alternatively, if a saver chooses to buy a financial asset in the secondary markets, the seller pockets the proceeds, some of which may be spent, and some of which may be reinvested. Net savings flowing into secondary markets are delayed in their impact on GDP, which is particularly true during bull markets involving growing public participation.
The effect of covid lockdowns reduced direct consumer spending and increased cash and deposit balances, logged as deferred consumption (savings) at a time when substantial monetary stimulus accounted for much of the deviation in Figure 4 from the correlation between M3 and GDP.
Additionally, the US Treasury took the opportunity of increased public savings to overfund its deficit. This withdrew much of the increase in M3 temporarily from public circulation by growing the balance on its General Account at the Fed from under $400bn in March 2020 to $1,817bn only four months later. That increase of $1.4 trillion accounts for a significant portion of the $3.7 trillion dips in the grey line on the chart in Figure 4 for fiscal 2020. The subsequent unwinding of the General Account balance through government spending and disbursements into the economy reversed the initial effect, bolstering the GDP statistic, and effectively allowing it to reflect earlier monetary expansion.
To summarise, if you increase the quantity of currency and credit in circulation and allow for any changes in the circuitous routes between its issue and final deployment it approximates the increase in nominal GDP.
A moment of further reflection confirms that this must be so because in an economy where the quantity of currency and credit does not alter, irrespective of whether economic activity changes for the better or worse, being a currency total GDP cannot change. Whether existing currency and credit is deployed in changes in allocation between consumption or recycled as capital funded by savings and bank deposits is immaterial, as the change in spending patterns on imports, so long as foreign payments balance — a condition of unchanged total money and credit. Therefore, increases in the GDP statistic can only reflect increases in the quantities of money and credit.
The only minor exceptions to this rule are changes in the level of hoarded currency, changes in the level of purchases of second-hand goods relative to the new, and changes in the levels of unrecorded and exempted activities, most of which are temporary factors.
These exceptions aside, we can expect changes in GDP, which starts from a previously existing higher level, to be closely tracked by changes in the broad money quantity. This is confirmed in Figure 4, even to the extent that the rapid expansion of M3 during the covid lockdowns has subsequently been fully reflected in the increase in GDP.[iii] This is illustrated by the grey line charting the difference. Admittedly, there was considerably greater variation in the quarterly statistics, but they have compensated each other on an annual basis.
The confirmation bias, whereby on the basis of recovery in GDP monetary policy planners claim that economic activity has been rescued by their monetary stimulations, is clearly a statistical tautology. And through their ignorance, the investment management industry, led by the mathematical economists, has also fallen for the delusion. They fail to question why, when the US economy effectively shut down for much of the US’s fiscal years straddling 2020/2021, GDP hardly reflected it on balance.
The consequences of monetary policy errors
This article has focused on two egregious errors behind the monetary policy: the role of interest rates and the belief that increases in GDP mean anything other than monetary inflation. It is true that these are not the only errors driving monetary policy. Associated with the interest rate fallacy is the belief that price inflation can be managed by varying interest rates, a mistake concealed when the policy fails by merely suppressing the evidence, as Figure 2 above of official CPI shows, compared with Shadowstats.com’s version stripped of the statistical changes in the calculation method.
The result is that almost everyone has been misled into believing that interest rate adjustments of a mere one or two percent will be sufficient to deal with “inflation”, incorrectly defined as rising prices.
Instead, the official definition of inflation is the consequence of unprecedented increases in quantities of currencies and credit. And it is not confined to just a few jurisdictions. Monetary expansion is common to the policies of all major central banks. Therefore, the purchasing powers of the dollar, euro, pound, yen, and yuan are coordinated, declining, and have further declines in prospect. Furthermore, with the dollar acting like all the other central banks’ currency standards, deviations into less inflationary monetary policies than those of the Fed are discouraged.
Measuring the consequences of policy errors through foreign exchange rate changes is therefore akin to betting which stone will sink fastest when thrown into the currency pool. Declines in purchasing power will become the dominant component of time preference for all these currencies. Any dispassionate analysis points to rises in the future discount rate for currencies being not reflected by interest rates of just a few percentage points, but by substantially more.
However, there is a growing but so far generally incoherent understanding that all is not right in the fiat currency world, epitomized by excessive speculation in cryptocurrencies. Fans of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are searching for protection from a currency condition they only partly understand. But they are ahead in the game of understanding what is happening to fiat currencies compared with earlier generations.
The sheer weight of excess currency, led by raw injections of new deposit money into investing institutions by the Fed, the Bank of England, the ECB, and the Bank of Japan, has driven financial asset values globally to unheard-of levels. The risk exposure to these asset values from the inevitable failure of monetary policy is most acute in dollar-denominated assets, ensuring that when interest rate increases are more correctly anticipated, the subsequent bear market will almost certainly be ubiquitous and substantial. And it is in dealing with this that the Fed’s erroneous belief that they can continue to issue new currency to support financial asset values will come back to bite the Fed’s policymakers, even if they acknowledge significantly higher interest rates instead of stopping the expansion of currency and credit.
[i] This happened after Hayek wrote an essay criticizing Keynes’s A Treatise on Money. See https://mises.org/library/reflection...y-mr-jm-keynes
[ii] See Keynes’s chapter on Concluding Notes, Section II in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money where he claims that with the euthanasia of the rentier will come available through taxation the services of the entrepreneur more cheaply “because they are fond of their craft”.
[iii] M3 is no longer reported by the US monetary authorities, M2 being the widest official measure of money. But the OECD still estimates US M3 for purposes of international comparison.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of Goldmoney unless expressly stated. The article is for general information purposes only and does not constitute either Goldmoney or the author(s) providing you with legal, financial, tax, investment, or accounting advice. You should not act or rely on any information contained in the article without first seeking independent professional advice. Care has been taken to ensure that the information in the article is reliable; however, Goldmoney does not represent that it is accurate, complete, up-to-date, and/or to be taken as an indication of future results and it should not be relied upon as such. Goldmoney will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage, or inconvenience caused as a result of any information or opinion contained in this article and any action taken as a result of the opinions and information contained in this article is at your own risk.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of Goldmoney unless expressly stated. The article is for general information purposes only and does not constitute either Goldmoney or the author(s) providing you with legal, financial, tax, investment, or accounting advice. You should not act or rely on any information contained in the article without first seeking independent professional advice. Care has been taken to ensure that the information in the article is reliable; however, Goldmoney does not represent that it is accurate, complete, up-to-date, and/or to be taken as an indication of future results and it should not be relied upon as such. Goldmoney will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage, or inconvenience caused as a result of any information or opinion contained in this article and any action taken as a result of the opinions and information contained in this article is at your own risk.
Benjamin Israel Margolese
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- Dec 11, 2021 9:48am Dec 11, 2021 9:48am
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- Dec 11, 2021 1:12pm Dec 11, 2021 1:12pm
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December 11, 2021
Redneck-Intelligentsia “War To The Death” Engulfs America
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A gobsmacking new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today sees this transcript showing Security Council Members discussing stunning revelations made yesterday by President Putin, who while addressing the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights about the infiltration of the Russian government by operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stated: “In the early 2000s, I had already cleaned everyone out, but in the mid-1990s, we had, as it later turned out, cadres of the US Central Intelligence Agency sitting as advisers and even official employees of the Russian government...They were later prosecuted in the United States for violating US law and taking part in privatization while they were CIA employees working for us...Some American specialists were stationed at Russian nuclear weapons facilities and even sat at a desk with a US flag...They lived and worked there…They didn’t need such subtle instruments of interference in our political life because they controlled everything anyway”.
In a shocking report to Security Council Members last year, this report notes, Parliament Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov revealed that the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was “surrounded by hundreds of CIA agents who told him what to do throughout his tenure as leader”, and further revealed that Yeltsin would send security officials and heads of departments to the US so the Americans could “examine them and give conclusions”.
The mass infiltration of the Russian government by operatives of the CIA, this report details, was a plot engineered by the socialist Democrat Party regime of President Bill Clinton—but to defend the sovereignty of Russia saw United States Senator Bob Dole leading the charge against this Clinton-CIA outrage, who also tried to oust socialist leader Clinton from power in the 1996 presidential election—in 2001, saw Senator Dole initiating the first contact between President Putin and newly elected Republican Party leader President George W. Bush, and after meeting saw Bush saying about Putin: “I looked the man in the eye…I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul”—in 2003, as a private citizen, saw Senator Dole registering as a foreign agent to represent the interests in America of Oleg Deripaska, who is one of Russia’s richest industrialists and runs the nation’s largest charitable organization—and when the “absolute legend” World War II hero Senator Dole passed away this week at the age of 98, his farewell letter humorously chided socialist Democrats for gaining power using the votes of dead people, and stated: “As I make the final walk on my life’s journey, I do so without fear…Because I know that I will, again, not be walking alone...I know that God will be walking with me...I also confess that I’m a bit curious to learn and find if I am correct in thinking that heaven will look a lot like Kansas and to see, like others who have gone before me, if I will still be able to vote in Chicago”.
The humor displayed by Senator Dole in his farewell letter, this report continues, was the hallmark of the Republican Party conservative movement that led America away from the abyss of socialist ruin in the 1980s—one of whose conservative movement founders was the late President Ronald Reagan, who while near death from an assassin’s bullet said to the surgeons frantically trying to save his life: “Please tell me you’re all Republicans”—and with Senator Dole’s passing, sees the last remaining founding giant of the Republican Party conservative movement being 91-year-old legendary icon Norman Podhoretz.
The critical importance of noting conservative movement giant Norman Podhoretz, this report explains, is due to a rare interview he gave this week to the Wall Street Journal, which they documented in their just-published article “Norman Podhoretz On The Spiritual War For America”—an article wherein Podhoretz describes his American journey from a Jewish tenement in New York City to his travels throughout the country during World War II, and as a young soldier got to know the “rednecks” that forged and formed the spine of the country—and after the war saw Podhoretz becoming intimately acquainted with the elite socialist “intelligentsia”, and in whose secret conversations hated and longed for the total destruction of the United States.
Instead of the antiquated term “rednecks” he grew up hearing in the 1930s, this report notes, Podhoretz now says he uses the word “deplorables” to mean Americans of all classes who refuse to be told what to do and how to live by the nation’s well-heeled progressive elite—after these “deplorables” stormed to the polls last month to throw socialist Democrats out of power in Virginia, and nearly out of power in New Jersey, sees Podhoretz stating: “The question for me was whether the sources of health and vitality I used to know existed in this country were still there”—in knowing the long arc of American history and where everything is heading sees Podhoretz declaring: “This ‘woke’ business—critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, all of it—is just pure anti-American hatred…And I think its proponents would admit that…Which is why I keep saying it’s a war…If you don’t understand that, you don’t know what the hell is going on”—a declaration of truth and fact Podhoretz added to with the grave warning: “People make everything complicated, when mostly it’s simple...We’re in a war, and it’s a war to the death...Now they actually admit it...They used to pretend...Not anymore”.
During the late 1970s, this report continues, Podhoretz and the other founders of the conservative movement waged an existential war against the socialist Democrats plunging America to the brink of ruin and collapse—a collapse caused by socialist Democrat policies deliberately crushing the lifeblood from the American economy through monetary inflation—saw this destruction stopped when President Reagan’s top economic official Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker slammed the brakes on the economy by raising interest rates to the historic and astronomical level of 20%--after which America recovered and began its greatest economic revival in history—that was joined by President Reagan being reelected in 1984 after he won 49 of the 50 States.
In the United States, this report explains, inflation is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), that is the price index of a weighted average market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households—during the Clinton Regime saw socialist Democrats in the US Congress changing the CPI so it didn’t reflect the true cost of consumer goods—in spite of this deceitful CPI change saw inflation surging to 39-year high on Friday of 6.8%—but when using the same CPI used in the late 1970s, sees the real rate of inflation having just hit the soul crushing level of 28%.
Responding to the rampaging inflation sucking the lifeblood out of the American economy, this report notes, yesterday it saw Supreme Socialist Leader Joe Biden ranting like a madman saying such things like “Not everyone is looking for a used automobile”—after which his White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki insanely ranted “The only Americans who look at economic data live in New York and other places”—but whose truth about what’s really happening is being told about by those like top American businessman Robert Kiyosaki, who yesterday warned investors that the stock markets are about to crash and the US economy is heading into a depression.
As this “war to the death” engulfing America rages on, this report concludes, yesterday it saw world renowned Yale University epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch declaring: “Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear…And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few”—a declaration of fact coming from one of the world’s top disease experts quickly met by socialist Democrat Party leader Governor Kathy Hochul slamming a mandatory mask mandate on all citizens in New York State with $1,000 fines for anyone breaking them—that was quickly followed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court striking back against these socialist Democrats to order an immediate end to school mask mandates—then yesterday it saw socialist Democrat officials in New York City releasing without bail the deranged madman who burnt down the Christmas tree in front of the Fox News building—and at near the exact same time this madman arsonist was let loose, yesterday it saw a socialist Democrat Party judge in Minnesota throwing a young woman restaurant owner into jail for 90-days and fining her $1,000 because she tried staying open to feed her family—all of which shows how truly insane this conflict has become. [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
https://www.whatdoesitmean.com/ais21.jpg
December 11, 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.]
Biden Has American Troops Poised For “Holiday War” Invasion
Embrace The Chaos—Live In The Madness
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- Dec 11, 2021 7:50pm Dec 11, 2021 7:50pm
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December 10, 2021
Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
The biggest enemy of the basic democratic rights is the U.S. government – and yet we have this Biden conference declaring support for democracy.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s two-day “summit for democracy” was a farce even before it began this week. Now it has turned into a vile circus for Cold War hostility that greatly threatens world democracy, human rights, and peace – the very antithesis of what the hubristic Americans claim.
On the second day of this video conference hosted by Biden, news emerged of the British High Court ruling in favor of the U.S. government that Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States to face trumped-up charges of espionage which could result in a death sentence. Assange is being persecuted for exposing massive U.S. war crimes, crimes against humanity, global espionage felonies, and corruption. His case is a hideous warning that free speech and independent journalism are under ruthless attack by the U.S. authorities. In other words, the biggest enemy of the most basic of democratic rights in the United States government – and yet at the same time, we have this grotesque conference hosted by Biden declaring support for democracy.
Our own journal, Strategic Culture Foundation, is also coming under sustained attack from Washington. Several of our American contributors have been banned from writing for this journal under the threat of massive financial penalties. This is because the U.S. government makes the slanderous claim that SCF is directed by Russian state intelligence. See this recent interview by one of our former contributors Daniel Lazare who has denounced what he calls a move to censor free speech and critical thinking.
It, therefore, is truly absurd – and nauseating – for American leaders to pontificate on such rights. From the video conference hosted by Biden, one image said it all.
Biden was seen addressing a blur of TV screens each displaying the face of leaders of nations invited by Washington to the “summit for democracy”. It resembled more a scene from a satirical movie. The self-appointed leader of the free world warned about the “backsliding of democracy” caused by “autocrats” (meaning China and Russia). Biden called for the protection of voting rights and free speech. This while his administration is seeking to incarcerate Julian Assange for the rest of his life because he dared to exercise his inalienable right of free speech. Assange should be honored by the world for his exposing of massive U.S. crimes and for his heroic contribution to truth. He revealed to the world the real and brute nature of Washington’s pursuit of global power. And for that, he is being viciously, mercilessly persecuted. It is outrageous that the leader of such a criminal government should be lecturing the world about the supposed virtues of democracy and human rights. It is deeply disturbing that such an insult to morals and intelligence seems to be even tolerated as if normal. Biden or any other U.S. leader should be scorned, not indulged.
The list of participants invited to Biden’s circus is shot through with inconsistencies and double standards. Even the normally dutiful U.S. media were obliged to note the incongruities and lack of principle in the virtual gathering of 110 countries. Some of those attending were classified as less democratic than some of those excluded noted the U.S.-based Freedom House.
It is blatant that the convocation by Biden was aimed at self-serving geopolitical power-play. The territory of Taiwan was invited as a representative of democracy while China was excluded. Under U.S. law, the One China policy deems Beijing as having sovereignty over Taiwan. So, the pointed invitation of Taipei over Beijing is an astounding provocation to China by the U.S.
Ukraine was invited to attend while Russia was also excluded. Since the U.S.-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 against an elected government, Ukraine has become a byword for corruption and the killing of journalists. The farcical invite by Biden is another geopolitical provocation that will embolden the Kiev regime to escalate further its hostilities towards Russia.
What Biden’s jamboree is all about is a flagrant attempt to divide the world into a Cold War demarcation. Russia and China have rebuked the initiative for harming international cooperation and increasing conflict.
There is not a scintilla of substance in what the Biden administration is attempting. The meaning and purpose of the “summit for democracy” is the opposite. It is about creating tensions, conflict, undermining democracy, and fomenting war.
But it really shows the absolutely dangerous hubris of Washington. It somehow is deluded in thinking that it is uniquely endowed to host a conference on democracy when in fact it has no shame about being a ringmaster for conflict and war.
The United States’ history of genocide against native Americans, its decades of illegal foreign wars of aggression and destruction of nations, its relentless subversion of foreign governments – all of this and more are glaring proof that Washington is the center of global criminality. In order to manipulate the world under its hegemony, we have the risible attempt to corral nations into enemy camps of supposed democracy and autocracy.
Ultimately, however, this charade is doomed to fail. The objective reality is of a changing world, whereby U.S. capitalist, hyper-militarized power is failing amid the emergence of a multipolar international order. That fundamental historic development cannot be countered by futile machinations.
Of immense importance, too, the spectacle of hypocrisy seen this week also fatally undermines the authority of the U.S. governing system in the eyes of its own people. Biden offering blandishments about democracy comes across as crass Marie-Antoinette stuff when so many American citizens are dying from a pandemic that their government won’t spend money on to properly eradicate; when so many citizens are struggling with poverty and trying to feed their families; when Congress passes an annual military budget of $770 billion; and when millions of Americans are being barred from voting by new racist election laws. Biden’s summit for democracy is disgusting in its fraudulence, not just towards the wider world but towards his own nation. This is not just about Joe Biden and the Democrats. The Republican Party is even more unhinged from the realities of U.S. citizens and the world. The entire political class in the United States is bankrupt: morally, politically, and economically.
This vile circus of Cold War theatrics that Biden oversaw this week is really a Swansong of failed American “democracy”.
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- Edited 8:08am Dec 12, 2021 7:40am | Edited 8:08am
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Bitcoin Is Self Preservation
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpg
BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, DEC 11, 2021 - 08:30 PM
Authored by Alex McShane via BitcoinMagazine.com,
Central planning has been so pervasively normalized that the whole sector of society has become dependent on the largesse of the fiat monster. Bitcoin fixes this.
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=T3aPWPe0
All living organisms share a universal behavior set called self-preservation. Self-preservation is the set of behaviors that ensures the survival of an organism. Bitcoin is financial self-preservation. Many hold Bitcoin to increase the longevity and appreciation of their wealth and therewith their health. Buying Bitcoin is trading time now for time later. Its price appreciation and value preservation allow one more time to attend to physical and mental health needs.
One function of Bitcoin is to release us from the tyranny of fiat money. The problem with government money by mandate is that it has no integrity, and is debased at will, indefinitely. This is true of all fiat monetary systems. Through taxation, inflation, and confiscation, the government can tightly control, as well as steal from the wealth of its citizens. Central planning has been so pervasively normalized that the whole sector of society has become dependent on the largesse of the fiat monster.
Fear is an integral part of all organisms' survival mechanisms. Think of a deer in the woods that bolts away from you. Pain is just as important as the teacher. Pain motivates one to withdraw from dangerous and deadly situations. Most populations on the planet have suffered the abuses of fiat systems, which are often introduced slowly, acquiring power steadily, until suddenly the population and their property has been extorted by degrees.
Bitcoin was invented to undermine and obsolete systemic monetary oppression by governments. If pain reminds us to protect our wounds until they heal, the irresponsible and corrupt actions of governments worldwide have taught Bitcoin holders and advocates to never trust another to be the wardens of our health, our wealth, or our property. Global governments’ disastrous misallocation of resources and power encourages us to avoid outsourcing money creation as well as wealth custody and management in the future.
Bitcoin will grant many the prosperity to vote in a way that matters, with their unconfiscatable capital and with their feet. The actionable and justified response to government overreach and theft by mandated money is to exit your local fiat currency through buying Bitcoin.
When the cause of pain is removed from a body and the body has healed, in most cases, the pain ceases. It will be a while before the world is healed of the financial and broader devastation wrought by governments, their fiat money, and their central planning. Though each year Bitcoin adoption grows, and we move closer toward hyperbitcoinization.
Many experiences not only a cessation of the excess financial burden when they convert to a Bitcoin standard, but they feel elated even at the prospect of work, because they can now preserve the value of their work and their time, and the value of their wealth appreciates long term through Bitcoin. They are accumulating a digital capital resource that can be preserved or reallocated at their will, without permission or fear of debasement or confiscation.
When it comes to pain, financial or ordinary, in some cases phantom pain and fear persist despite the removal of the stimulus and the body’s healing. Sometimes pain occurs in absence of any detectable stimulus, injury, or disease. In the case of individual financial security and human behavior in aggregate, fiat will always be remembered as the catalyst for the long and arduous transition to a healthy global Bitcoin standard.
In terms of self-preservation, fear can cause an organism to seek safety and even release adrenaline. Adrenaline (or epinephrine) is a hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter involved in regulating things like respiration. You can think of Bitcoin as monetary adrenaline, digital energy that can be stored anywhere and that can be spent at will. Bitcoin is a pain response through which humans have engineered their way out of centuries-old money and energy problems.
Adrenaline plays a big part in fight-or-flight survival responses through pupil dilation, blood sugar level, the output of the heart, and increasing blood flow to muscles. Adrenaline is even found in some single-celled organisms. In the case of Bitcoin, this monetary adrenaline can be applied to all facets of society, through permissionless transactions, and pseudonymous holdings, at any scale. Bitcoin is accessible to virtually anyone, and there is enough immutable supply that everyone on the planet can afford to hold it and deploy the world’s most robust form of purchasing power and monetary adrenaline as they choose.
Today we have the same capacity for knowledge that they had in ancient Egypt. One major difference is that today we have engineered far more sophisticated means of self-protection, and developed better means of acquisition and defense of our private property through Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a lasting digital reminder of the biological lesson of self-preservation.
By distancing oneself from the fiat realm through Bitcoin, one can see that not only is the fiat system adversarial at all levels, but it actively does harm to the populace. You are in competition. Through Bitcoin, you can at the very least carry out your capital competitions with a transparent and immutable ruleset.
On a biological level, the only evidence of life is change. Spreading Bitcoin adoption is the most dynamic, effective, and peaceful revolution we can have in response to fiat’s widespread though centrally controlled oppression.