"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,
but pretty soon... everything's different."
- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, October 26, 2020
"Perhaps It Is Better..."
"Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Stock Market Craters, Gold Target Price, Treasury Bubble, MORE!"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Alert! Stock Market Craters, Gold Target Price, Treasury Bubble, MORE!"
"The Coming of Corporate Collectivism"
"The Coming of Corporate Collectivism"
by Jeff Thomas
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest "
"Benito Mussolini stated that "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." Quite so. Interestingly, many, and perhaps most people today, lack an understanding as to the system under which they are ruled.
In the US in particular, most people who vote Republican take pride in believing that the US is a capitalist state. Democrats, too, regard the US as a capitalist state, and take the view that that’s what’s wrong with America today. Increasingly, they seek a move in the socialist (or collectivist) direction to save them from the perceived evils of capitalism.
Interestingly, though, the evils to which they refer are the socio-economic inequalities that exist and the fact that those on the lower levels of society have decreasing opportunity to improve their lot in life. And, of course, since they believe they live under a capitalist system, they assume that capitalism must be the problem. But this is not the case.
It can be said that the first major introduction of corporatist collectivism occurred in 1913, with the introduction of the Revenue Act and the Federal Reserve Act. These were enacted under President Woodrow Wilson and were peddled to the American public as being anti-corporatist. The Revenue Act, which introduced income tax, was touted as creating a tax primarily for the rich, which would even out income disparities. The Federal Reserve was claimed to be a government agency that would ride herd over the greedy banking interests on Wall Street.
However, those few who actually read the bill learned that the Federal Reserve was neither federal nor a reserve. It was to be owned by the larger banks and would give them the power to control the currency of the US. By promising collectivist changes, the goals of corporatism were advanced.
And so it is today. Virtually all the ills of American society, as described by liberals, have been caused by the introduction of collectivist concepts, capitalized upon by the plutocracy of the US.
The US is not a capitalist state. If we were to define it accurately, the economic system is corporatist and the social system is collectivist. It is, however, true that there exist the remnants of a free market, or capitalism. Yet, to most – either liberal or conservative – this would seem impossible. We’ve been taught to regard Wall Street as a denizen for greedy capitalists. Surely, they would never support collectivism – the savior of the masses.
Well, yes and no. Wall Street has dominated the American economy for over one hundred years. And in all of that time, they’ve sought a greater level of collectivism. They understand that collectivism (under any of its guises of socialism, fascism or communism) is a highly effective means by which to rule over others.
Collectivism does not raise up the masses, as Karl Marx suggested. Instead, it evens out the classes by lowering the great majority of people to an equal level of poverty. The premise is a simple one: Promise largesse from the government, with the stipulation that basic freedoms must be relinquished in order to receive the largesse. Then, once all have been subjugated under collectivism, the largesse is steadily diminished. Corporate leaders convince the people to give up their rights, but then fail to deliver on their end of the bargain: to bestow riches upon the now-subjugated populace.
And again, this is nothing new. In 1917, one Leon Trotsky was hosted in New York by the most prominent banking and industrial firms. He was provided with funding, along with a US passport, courtesy of President Wilson. A contingent then went with Mister Trotsky to Russia with the funds necessary to wrest control of the new Soviet Union – to replace the Mensheviks with the Lenin/Trotsky-led Bolsheviks. The bargain was that the Soviet Union would be collectivist and that the goods needed by Russians would be supplied from New York, in perpetuity, unseen by the public in either Russia or the US.
Within a decade, the same firms began funding an up-and-coming Adolf Hitler. They funded his rise to power in 1933 and spent the remainder of the decade taking control of much of German industry, in addition to installing American-owned plants in Germany. Prior to Hitler’s rise, Germany was flat broke and heavily in debt, but the massive monetary shot in the arm from Wall Street firms ensured that Germany would rise quickly and come to dominate Europe. Indeed, without US funding, the creation of the German war machine would have been impossible.
The term "Nazi" is an abbreviation for Nationalsozialistische – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Like the Russian people, the German people had been sold the collectivist promise, believing that their lives would somehow be better if they agreed to give up their liberties and accept totalitarian rule. What they received was the totalitarian rule without the promised largesse.
The effort to create the same situation in the US has long been in the works. In the 1930s, great strides were made toward collectivism under the New Deal. However, post-war prosperity made Americans unwilling to give up liberties for largesse. But today, increased governmental regulation has diminished the free market, diminishing opportunities for the average American. This has created a condition in which roughly half of Americans now buy into the empty promise of collectivism.
America no longer has true "liberal" and "conservative" parties. They now have "liberal" and "liberal-light" parties. Regardless of who is president, the US is on course to go full-bore in 2021 into dramatic social and legislative changes that will complete the transformation into Corporate Collectivism. All that’s needed is a trigger, as occurred in Germany in February of 1933.
Just two weeks prior to the 1933 German national elections, Adolf Hitler hosted a secret fundraising meeting for German and American industrialists, which netted him millions in donations, upon which he could finance a totalitarian corporate collectivist government. He then surreptitiously created the Reichstag fire, blaming it on dissidents and political opponents, ensuring that he would be elected.
In his address at that fundraiser, he stated, "There are only two possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds, and for this purpose once more we have this [upcoming] election, or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices… I hope the German people thus recognize the greatness of this hour." Germany was about to receive a totalitarian corporate collectivist rule, either through election or through the creation of civil unrest.
Similarly, the US today is about to undergo dramatic change. The remaining question is whether that will take place through election or its historic alternative. The ripple effects of a contentious US presidential election outcome are only starting to take shape. That’s not to mention the unprecedented amount of money that is being pumped into every corner of the economy by the Federal Reserve. The consequences of this could be life changing to the average person."
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 10/26/20"
Oct 26, 2020, 9:29 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 43,179,100
people, according to official counts, including 8,702,600 Americans.
Oct 26, 2020 9:29 AM ET:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count◆
OCT 26, 2020 2:47 PM: "Twitter Again Accuses Trump Of COVID-19 'Misinformation As Surgeon General Warns Some States May Cancel Thanksgiving: Live Updates"
◆
Updated 10/26/20, 11:24 AM ET
Click image for larger size.
Musical Interlude: Michael Bolton, "When I'm Back On My Feet Again"
"You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks... Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I've been uneasy all my life... I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to get their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on."
- "Penny Baxter", Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
○
Here's the truth, plain and simple. Things are really bad now, and God help us, it's going to get much, much worse. Things will never be "normal" again, face that fact. There's going to be incredible, unbelievable pain and suffering, and we're all going to take hits that don't seem survivable at times, knocking us to our knees in despair. But don't just wallow in hopeless self-pity, and don't you dare ever give up...if you're still alive your work here isn't done, and we need you. So get up, damn you, get up! You're not alone! WE will get through this horror together... and back on our feet again, better and stronger than ever... - CP
The Poet: William Stafford, "Starting With Little Things"
"Starting With Little Things"
"Love the earth like a mole,
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands -
Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.
Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.
Tomorrow the world."
- William Stafford
"It May Be Necessary..."
"You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.
In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats,
so you can know who you are,
what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it."
- Maya Angelou
"A Triumph for Democracy"
"A Triumph for Democracy"
by Bill Bonner
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "Last week, we looked at the likely election result. We’ll get back to that in a minute. But first, two stark and disturbing actualities: First, the coronavirus is not going away. Second, neither is the recession.
Delaying the Inevitable: As for the coronavirus, it can be delayed. But it can’t be defeated. Here’s Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, over the weekend: "The U.S. is “not going to control” the pandemic…"
And in Europe, ABC News reports: "Dr. Eric Caumes, head of the infectious and tropical diseases department at Paris’ Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, said the country needs to lock down again. “We have lost control of the epidemic, though it doesn’t date from yesterday,” he said on broadcaster Franceinfo."
Here in Argentina, we live with some of the toughest restrictions in the world. And the result? About the same as the U.S. – more than 600 deaths per 1,000,000 people. We don’t usually give advice to public authorities. But were we in charge, we would level with people: The government will not protect them from the coronavirus. If they are old or fat, they should take their own precautions. Others should go about their business, and not allow the virus to ruin their lives. In other words, most people should defeat the coronavirus the same way they defeated the Hong Kong Flu – by getting it… and getting over it. Then, the old folks could go about their lives, too.
Depression Ahead: Meanwhile, the lockdown recession is probably becoming a depression. Here’s CNBC: "Long-term Unemployment is On the Rise." "In September, long-term unemployment, or those that have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, jumped to 2.4 million, the highest thus far in the coronavirus pandemic-induced recession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 800,000 out of work Americans moved into the long-term unemployed category from August to September, the largest month-over-month increase ever, according to Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project." (Note these "official" figures are totally inaccurate, intentionally. - CP) And now that we have the lights turned on, let’s look at the election.
Alternative Outcome: Sleepy Joe Biden is likely to win. (I disagree - CP). Alas, with COVID-19 still on the loose… and the economy sliding towards depression… the old guy will wake up and begin a frenzy of boneheaded activism. He’ll push for more government spending, financed with more “printing press money”… which would speed America’s descent into a social, political, and economic disaster.
The good news is that there could be an alternative outcome. Nothing succeeds like failure. If Biden wins, the long faces in the GOP will shuffle about, depressed… forlorn… taking off their MAGA caps… taking down the Trump and Pence signs… and rueing the day they ever let their party be hijacked by a reality TV star, who spent most of his adult life as a Democrat.
Maybe then, they might pull a book off the shelf and dust it off… Maybe Friedrich Hayek’s "The Road to Serfdom". Or perhaps Ron Paul’s "The Revolution". (We modestly recommend our own "Win-Win or Lose", which offers a simple and novel explanation for “conservativism.”) Heck, they could even read the U.S. Constitution… although, it is shockingly radical. And who knows, they might rediscover the virtues of their political creed. Then, they might get to work…
They might even be able to stymie the Democrats’ big-spending plans... and delay America’s rendezvous with disaster.
Determined Opposition: Readers will recall that America’s best administrations have had weak presidents and strong opposition. When George Bush, senior left office, and Bill Clinton took over in 1992, the “national” debt measured 66% of GDP. Eight years later, it had been reduced to only 57%. By our reckoning, this was the peak of U.S. power, influence, and wealth.
From this perspective, we can look back on the Clinton years with nostalgia. But was this because the Democrat Clinton was more prudent, more sensible… more conservative? Of course not. It was because he faced a fiery, determined opposition – the conservatives in the GOP – which, either as a matter of principle or convenience, fought tooth and nail to stop him from spending money.
Big Spenders: Then, when their own party got into power, the Republicans forgot all about conservatism and became big-spenders… ready to improve the world and bankrupt the nation. In 2001, came Bush fils and Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney to the White House. They added more than 20 percentage points to the debt-to-GDP ratio… leaving it at nearly 80%.
Bush was succeeded by the Democrat, Obama, who did even more damage. From 80%, the national debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 107% by 2016. The conservatives who were left fought him. But too many had partaken of the forbidden fruit. In the crisis of 2008-2009, their knees buckled and they almost all crawled along with the “stimulus” claptrap.
In 2016, power went back to the Republicans. By this time, the conservatives had become extinct. And Trump added another $8 trillion in four years, bringing the ratio (as of the second quarter of 2020) to 146%. Over the last two decades, U.S. GDP doubled – from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. But federal debt rose from $6 trillion to nearly $29 trillion – more than three times as much – thanks to the combined efforts of Republicans and Democrats.
New Season:
And now, we come to another change in power. The voters may elect a new cast of characters. But the show will go on… the long-running spectacle… the 21st season of the great epic: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire…starring GWB, Obama, Trump… Cheney, Mnuchin, Greenspan, Yellen, Powell… and now, Biden, Harris… and who knows who else? And this will be a major triumph for democracy. It will succeed in replacing a big-mouthed oaf with a worn-out hack… while remaining on course for absolute catastrophe."
"Are We Going to Witness the Worst National Emotional Meltdown in U.S. History Once This Election is Over?"
"Are We Going to Witness the Worst National Emotional
Meltdown in U.S. History Once This Election is Over?"
by Michael Snyder
"Right now we are experiencing the calm before the storm. Many Biden supporters believe that a Trump victory would literally be the worst thing that could possibly happen to our country, but at the moment most of them are quite confident that Biden will win. Likewise, many Trump supporters are absolutely convinced that we will plunge into a horrifying socialist abyss if Biden wins, but for now most of them are convinced that the polls are wrong and that Trump will pull out another victory in November. So with just a little over a week until Election Day, most Americans that really care about politics are pacified because they believe that a positive outcome is right around the corner.
But soon that will change, and tens of millions of Americans will simultaneously melt down emotionally right in front of our eyes. I think that just about everyone realizes that this national temper tantrum is coming. It is just that most of those that deeply care about politics assume that it will happen to the other side.
At this point, even Facebook is preparing for the worst. In fact, they are getting ready to implement “emergency measures” that are usually reserved for the most “at-risk” countries: "As the U.S. braces for election-related unrest next month, Facebook executives are implementing emergency measures reserved for “at-risk” countries in a company-wide effort to bring down the online temperature. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the social media giant plans to limit the spread of viral content and lower the benchmark for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts using internal tools previously deployed in Sri Lanka and Myanmar."
So what would those “emergency measures” look like? Well, that could potentially even include manipulating your news feed to alter what sort of content you are allowed to see: "Facebook has a number of options it could take including “slowing the spread of viral content and lowering the bar for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts” and “tweaking the news feed to change what types of content users see,” the Wall Street Journal reported."
Of course Facebook has already been manipulating our news feeds for a very long time, but that is a topic for another article. Personally, I absolutely detest all of the censorship that the big social media companies have been doing, and I am not surprised that they are preparing to go even further.
"According to Facebook, these new “emergency measures” will be implemented if there is “election-related violence”: "However, the social media colossus only plans to put these restrictions in place in the event of election-related violence (something many others are fearful of and preparing for). However, during a staff meeting CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “a decisive victory from someone” could “be helpful for clarity and for not having violence or civil unrest after the election” which would reduce Facebook’s need to step in."
Considering the fact that we are seeing election-related violence almost constantly now, I would say that there is a pretty good chance that Facebook will actually proceed with these emergency measures.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is also deeply concerned about what this election may do to our nation. In a very long article that they just published, they discussed the fact that both sides are convinced that “the wrong outcome will bring disaster”: "One week before Americans choose their path forward, the quadrennial crossroads reeks of despair. In almost every generation, politicians pose certain elections as the most important of their time. But the 2020 vote is taking place with the country in a historically dark mood - low on hope, running on spiritual empty, convinced that the wrong outcome will bring disaster.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican political consultant who has been convening focus groups of undecided voters for seven presidential cycles. “Even the most balanced, mainstream people are talking about this election in language that is more caffeinated and cataclysmic than anything I’ve ever heard.”
Emotions were definitely running high in 2016, but we have never seen anything quite like this. Most Democrats believe that Trump and his supporters are deeply evil, and likewise most Republicans believe that Biden and his supporters are deeply evil. And of course there are also many that are entirely convinced that all of them are deeply evil.
When you have a nation that is this deeply divided, how is anyone ever going to be able to bring us together in unity? It has been said that a house divided with surely fall, and at this point our divisions have brought us to the verge of national collapse. Here is more from the Washington Post: "But now, the worry on the right that a Democratic win would plunge the nation into catastrophic socialism and the fear on the left that a Trump victory would produce a turn toward totalitarianism have created “a perilous moment - the idea that if the other side wins, we’re in for it,” said Peter Stearns, a historian of emotions at George Mason University. “The two sides have come to view each other not as opponents, but as deeply evil,” he said. “And that’s happening when trust in institutions has collapsed and each group is choosing not to live near each other. It seems there’s no middle ground.”
But as I pointed out at the beginning of this article, for now both sides are relatively calm because they both believe that they are going to end up winning. In 2016, the big national polls were dead wrong and Trump pulled out a close victory when the mainstream media had assured everyone that it was inevitable that Hillary Clinton would win. And once again this year there are indications that the big national polls may be flawed and that Trump may be doing significantly better than the mainstream media is telling us.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton never came close to the 50 percent mark in most national polls in 2016, and Joe Biden has consistently been above that level in recent weeks. Democratic operatives would have us believe that indicates that there are far fewer undecided voters this time around. So I guess we will just have to wait until the real results start coming in to see who was right and who was wrong.
Because so many Americans are voting by mail, it is going to take a lot longer than usual to count all the votes, and a number of key swing states are likely to be very close. If the results are close enough, it may take weeks before we have an official winner. Once an official winner is finally declared, there will be tens of millions of Americans in deep emotional pain. When all of those deeply hurting people start lashing out, you won’t want to be anywhere around."
"Market Fantasy Updates 10/26/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 10/26/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Updated live.
○
Oct. 26, 2020, 10:30 AM: "Global Stocks Tumble as Investors Dump Risk with COVID-19 Cases Rocketing and no US Stimulus Seal"
○
OCT 26, 2020 12:15 PM: "Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed Growing"
OCT 26, 2020 11:55 AM: "Creditors Finally Wake Up To An Apocalyptic Reality: Bond Losses As High As 99%"
○
○
Daily Update (October 25th to 26th)
○
○
And now. The End game...
Sunday, October 25, 2020
“Fiscal Insanity On Steroids; Middle Class Going Extinct; Markets Fragile; Stimulus Emergency”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Fiscal Insanity On Steroids; Middle Class Going Extinct;
Markets Fragile; Stimulus Emergency”
"Next Up: Global Depression"
"Next Up: Global Depression"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"
Let's revisit the pandemic projection chart I prepared on February 2, 2020, nine days after authorities publicly acknowledged the Covid virus outbreak in China. Wave 2 shown on the chart is now underway with a vengeance and next up is Global Depression.
This projection was based on two well-known dynamics:
1. History offers a basic template for viral pandemics in which the initial wave dies back in summer and then re-ignites in a second larger Wave 2 in autumn and winter.
2. Humanity's default responses to novel crises: denial, fantasy, magical thinking and manipulating data to support a simplistic, emotionally satisfying ideological position.
Each of these predictable dynamics has manifested in all their perverse glory. A number of cognitive/logical errors are manifesting as well. False binaries i.e. false perceptions of the situation being either/or. For example: you get the virus and either recover or die. We only count those two options. This false binary conveniently ignores:
A. the third category - you get the virus and become a long-hauler (a.k.a. Long Covid) who is debilitated for months by exhaustion and other post-viral conditions; (Long COVID slide presentation)
B. the fourth category - you get the virus and recover quickly but suffer major organ damage that isn't immediately visible/symptomatic;
C. the fifth category - you get the virus, recover, assume you're immune forever and then contract the virus again some months later - only this time the consequences are far more severe.
And so on. The same holds true for ideological false binaries. Those holding binary ideological positions - you are either With Me or With The Wrong Side - spend their time and energy cherry-picking and manipulating data so it supports their pre-selected ideological world view.
Those of us who simply want unmolested data so we can decide for ourselves have no recourse, as the ideologically motivated have poisoned the data (don't test don't tell, under-reporting, over-reporting, ignoring lag times in reporting, suppressing data, requiring data be reported to privately owned corporations rather than government agencies, discounting good data in favor of bogus data that reaches the "right" conclusion, and so on) in an endless profusion of manipulation for political purposes.
As with China's Communist leadership, if data that can't be gamed or manipulated enters the public domain, it's immediately suppressed. Skeptics of China's permanently miraculous "growth" statistics discovered electrical consumption figures did not reflect the miraculous "growth" in the officially sanctioned statistics, and so China moved to suppress this inconveniently factual data so it would not longer be available.
We're seeing the same politicization of data in the U.S. We're now down to public-health data collection that hasn't yet been suppressed or manipulated: hospital admissions and death certificates. Authorities suppressing Covid-related deaths can report any cause of death they want, but the peak of deaths far above the statistical norm tells us an important fact despite the suppression/obfuscation.
Confusing categories, correlations, causes and conclusions. It's widely held that the Covid pandemic is fundamentally a power-grab by elites. Fair enough; crises have long been the excuse given for "temporary emergency measures" that become permanent power-grabs.
But to accept that the pandemic is the cover for a power-grab by elites does not mean the Covid virus is a harmless chimera. The virus can be dangerous in ways that aren't measured by counting deaths and the pandemic can still be the excuse for "emergency powers" becoming permanent, i.e. a power grab. One conclusion (a power-grab) does not require a second completely different conclusion (the virus is not dangerous to anyone under the age of 70 and therefore it's no big deal).
The assumption that there's a correlation between an ideological position and wearing a mask (or other behavior) is ungrounded. An individual can reach conclusions outside rigid ideological boundaries. Personally, I found this study of which passengers caught the virus on a bus in China useful in my own decision-making: Coronavirus can travel twice as far as official 'safe distance' and stay in air for 30 minutes.
The most consequential falsity in my view is the belief that the global economy was robust before the pandemic and it will revert to that robustness once we: get a vaccine, end the lockdowns, seek herd immunity, etc. etc. The global economy was teetering on the edge of recession and financial implosion long before the pandemic appeared. Ending the pandemic cannot restore an illusion of "growth" that masked a hollowed out, fragile, brittle global economy.
The Global Depression was baked in long before the pandemic. All the pandemic did was kick out the last rotten 2X4s holding up the fading facade of "growth." As the global tsunami of Wave 2 sweeps away the sandcastles of denial, fantasy and magical thinking, it's worth recalling that the Covid-19 virus has four features that make it difficult to control:
1. It is highly contagious.
2. Carriers with no symptoms can infect others.
3. A significant percentage of older/compromised patients develop severe symptoms that require hospitalization.
4. Once the healthcare system is overwhelmed, the system cannot provide care to everyone who needs it. As a result, the death rate rises the moment the healthcare system is overwhelmed/breaks down.
We've drawn a gravely false conclusion from central bank money-printing and technology: we now assume that central banks can print up as much money as we need to buy whatever we need in whatever quantity we need. The magic of technology essentially guarantees that there will always be a substitute, "cure" or "solution" available whenever we need one.
Unfortunately, central banks can't "print" experienced doctors or nurses. When the front line of healthcare workers is depleted by illness and burnout, there are no substitutes or Big Tech robots-to-the-rescue. The healthcare system we've optimized for "creating shareholder value" (i.e. unlimited greed pathologically pursued by any means available) will break down and that will be that.
Central banks can't "print" creditworthy borrowers, solvent companies, real-world collateral, risk-free "investing," oil, jobs, trust in failed institutions, social cohesion or anything else of importance that is now scarce.
The belief that central banks printing currency can "buy/fix" everything that's broken, lost or scarce is the ultimate in denial, fantasy and magical thinking. All that was unsustainably fragile, corrupt and brittle is unraveling, and thinking that ending the lockdowns, approving a vaccine, etc. will stave off causality is the supreme indulgence in denial, fantasy and magical thinking."
"The Mother Of All Stock Market Bubbles"
"The Mother Of All Stock Market Bubbles"
by Stephen Lendman
"Never before in US equity market history was there as great a disconnect between economic reality and equity prices as now... At a time of economic collapse and likely protracted US Depression, market valuations are at or near all-time highs. David Stockman explained some of the extremes in a period he called “outright fiscal insanity.” Count the ways:
• Amazon, a company that didn’t exist pre-1994 is “43% of the S&P 500 consumer discretionary index.”
• “Nearly two-thirds of the market is underperforming so far this year.”
• “Year-to-date, only one in three stocks is actually in the green.”
• “One in five stocks is down 50% or more from its all-time high.”
• “The five largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a combined market cap that equals that of the ‘smallest’ 389 stocks.”
• “Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google - four companies - have a combined market cap (over $6 trillion) that is greater than the GDP of every country in the world, minus the US and China.”
• “Tesla, having surpassed Walmart (with one-twentieth of the revenue!), has become the ninth-largest stock in the US.”
All of the above give new meaning to the term surreal. If a Hollywood script writer presented the above scenario to a producer for filming, it would either be accepted as science fiction or rejected outright as too unrealistic. Who’d believe it? Under these conditions, it’s impossible to invest wisely because markets are dominated by speculative excess - riverboat gambling replacing what sound investing used to be.
No matter which wing of the US one-party state wins control of the White House and/or Congress, nothing will change - things more likely to worsen until an inevitable day of reckoning arrives.
Stockman asked: “How could the S&P 500 be trading at its highest multiple in 70 years when the growth rate of corporate earnings has been sinking for more than two decades? The recent S&P index value implies a PE multiple of 36.8X - a place the S&P 500 has never been before. The forward PE is now above the record high reached during the dot-com madness at the” end of the 1990s. In calendar year 2020, corporate earnings crashed. They’re “23% (below) their 2019 peak.
Yet market valuations are at levels that suggest double-digit earnings growth ahead - despite evidence indicating protracted economic Depression, mass unemployment, along with reduced business and consumer spending. In today’s world gone mad, what was unimaginable during my long ago boyhood, adolescence and youth is happening in real time."
"What 'The Great Reset' Architects Don't Want You To Understand About Economics"
"What 'The Great Reset' Architects Don't
Want You To Understand About Economics"
by Matthew Ehret
"It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Vice President of the World Bank Carmen Reinhardt recently warned on October 15 that a new financial disaster looms ominously over the horizon with a vast sovereign default and a corporate debt default. Just in the past 6 months of bailouts unleashed by the blowout of the system induced by the Coronavirus lockdown, Reinhardt noted that the U.S. Federal Reserve created $3.4 Trillion out of thin air while it took 40 years to create $14 Trillion. Meanwhile panicking economists are screaming in tandem that banks across Trans Atlantic must unleash ever more hyperinflationary quantitative easing which threatens to turn our money into toilet paper while at the same time acquiescing to infinite lockdowns in response to a disease which has the fatality levels of a common flu.
The fact of the oncoming collapse itself should not be a surprise- especially when one is reminded of the $1.5 quadrillion of derivatives which has taken over a world economy which generates a mere $80 trillion/year in measurable goods and trade. These nebulous bets on insurance on bets on collateralized debts known as derivatives didn’t even exist a few decades ago, and the fact is that no matter what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have attempted to do to stop a new rupture of this overextended casino bubble of an economy in recent months, nothing has worked. Zero to negative percent interest rates haven’t worked, opening overnight repo loans of $100 billion/night to failing banks hasn’t worked- nor has $4.5 trillion of bailout unleashed since March 2020. No matter what these financial wizards try to do, things just keep getting worse. Rather than acknowledge what is actually happening, scapegoats have been selected to shift the blame away from reality to the point that the current crisis is actually being blamed on the Coronavirus!
This Goes Far Beyond COVID-19: Let me just state outright: That while the coronavirus may in fact be the catalyzer for the oncoming financial blowout, it is the height of stupidity to believe that it is the cause, as the seeds of the crisis goes deeper and originated much earlier than most people are prepared to admit.
To start getting at a more truthful diagnostic, it is useful to think of an economy in real (vs purely financial) terms – That is: Simply think of the economy as total system in which the body of humanity (all cultures, nations and families of the world) exist. This co-existence is predicated on certain necessary powers of production of food, clothing, capital goods (hard and soft infrastructure), transportation and energy production. After raw materials are transformed into finished goods, these physical goods and services move from points A to B and are consumed. This is very much akin to the metabolism that maintains a living body.
Now since populations tend to grow geometrically, while resources deplete arithmetically, constant demands on new creative discoveries and technological application are also needed to meet and improve upon the needs of a growing humanity. This last factor is actually the most important because it touches on the principled element that distinguishes humanity from all other forms of life in the ecosystem which Lincoln identified wonderfully in his 1859 Discoveries and Inventions Speech:
“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny… Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”
In a 2016 speech by President Xi Jinping, the principles of Lincoln’s understanding were laid out by the Chinese statesman who said: “We must consider innovation as the primary driving force of growth and the core in this whole undertaking, and human resources as the primary source to support development. We should promote innovation in theory, systems, science and technology, and culture, and make innovation the dominant theme in the work of the Party, and government, and everyday activity in society. In the 16th century, human society entered an unprecedented period of active innovation. Achievements in scientific innovation over the past five centuries have exceeded the sum total of several previous millennia. Each and every scientific and industrial revolution has profoundly changed the outlook and pattern of world developmen. Since the second Industrial Revolution, the U.S. has maintained global hegemony because it has always been the leader and the largest beneficiary of scientific and industrial progress.”
What Lincoln and Xi laid 150 years apart are not mere hypotheses, but elementary facts of life which even the most ardent money-worshipper cannot get around.
Of course money is a perfectly useful tool to facilitate trade and get around the awkward problem of lugging bartered goods around on your back all day, but it really is just that: a supporting element to a physical process of maintenance and improvement of trans-generational existence. When fools allow themselves to loose sight of that fact and elevate money to the status of a cause of all value (simply because everyone wants it), then we find ourselves far outside the sphere of reality and in the Alice in Wonderland world of Alan Greenspan’s fantasy world where up is down, good is evil, and humans are little more than vicious monkeys. So with that in mind, let’s take this concept and look back upon today’s crisis.
London’s ‘Big Bang’: The great “liberalization” of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the “Savings and Loan” debacle and also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths. Volcker himself described this process as the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.
In 1986, the City of London announced the beginning of a new era of economic irrationalism with Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” deregulation. This wave of liberalization took the world by storm as it swept aside the separation of commercial, deposit and investment banking which had been the post-world war cornerstone in ensuring that the will of private finance would never again hold more sway than the power of sovereign nation-states. For those who are confused about London’s guiding hand in this process, I encourage you to read Cynthia Chung’s impeccable essay “Sugar and Spice, and Everything Vice: The Empire’s Sin City of London”.
Greenspan and the Controlled Disintegration of the Economy: When Alan Greenspan confronted the financial crisis of October1987, markets had collapsed by 28.5% and the American economy was already suffering from a decay begun 16 years earlier when the dollar was removed from the fixed exchange rate and was “floated” into a world of speculation. This departure from the 1938-1971 Industrial growth model ushered in a new paradigm of “post-industrialism” (aka: nation stripping) under the new logic of “globalization”. This foolish decision was celebrated as the consumer-driven, “white collar society” which would no longer worry about “intangible things” like “the future”, infrastructure maintenance, or “growth”. Under this new paradigm, if something couldn’t generate a monetary profit within 3 years, it wasn’t worth doing.
Paul Volcker (Greenspan’s predecessor at the Federal Reserve) exemplified this detachment from reality when he called for the “controlled disintegration of society” in 1977, and acted accordingly by keeping interest rates above 20% for two years which destroyed small and medium agro-industrial enterprises across America (and the world). Greenspan confronted the 1987 crisis with all the gusto of a black magician, and rather than re-connect the economy to physical reality and rebuild the decaying industrial base, he chose instead to normalize “creative financial instruments” in the form of derivatives (aka: “creative financial instruments”), which quickly grew from several billion in 1988 to $2 trillion in 1992 to $70 trillion in 1999.
“Creative financial instruments” was the Orwellian name given to the new financial asset popularized by Greenspan, but otherwise known as “derivatives”. New supercomputing technologies were increasingly used in this new venture, not as the support for higher nation building practices, and space exploration programs as their NASA origins intended, but would rather become perverted to accommodate the creation of new complex formulas which could associate values to price differentials on securities and insured debts that could then be “hedged” on those very spot and futures markets made possible via the destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. So while an exponentially self-generating monster was created that could end nowhere but in a meltdown, “market confidence” rallied back in force with the new flux of easy money. The physical potential to sustain human life continued to plummet.
NAFTA, the Euro and the End of History: It is no coincidence that within this period, another deadly treaty was passed called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With this Agreement made law, protective programs that had kept North American factories in the U.S and Canada were struck down, allowing for the export of the lifeblood of highly skilled industrial workforce to Mexico where skills were low, technologies lower, and salaries lower still. With a stripping of its productive assets, North America became increasingly reliant on exporting cheap resources and services for its means of existence. Again, the physically productive powers of society would collapse, yet monetary profits in the ephemeral “now” would skyrocket. This was replicated in Europe with the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 establishing the Euro by 1994 while the “liberalization” process of Perestroika replicated this agenda in the former Soviet Union. While some personalities gave this agenda the name “End of History” and others “the New World Order”, the effect was the same.
Universal Banking, NAFTA, Euro integration and the creation of the derivative economy in a space of just several years would induce a cartelization of finance through newly legalized mergers and acquisitions at a rate never before seen. The multitude of financial institutions that had existed in the early 1980s were absorbed into each other at great speed through the 1990s in true “survival of the fittest” fashion. No matter what level of regulation were attempted under this new structure, the degree of conflict of interest, and private political power was uncontrollable, as evidenced in the United States, by the shutdown of any attempt by Securities and Exchange Commission head Brooksley Born to fight the derivative cancer at its early stages.
When Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall bank separation of commercial and investment banks as his last act in office in 1999, speculators had un-bounded access to savings and pensions which they used with relish and went to town gambling with other people’s money. This new bubble continued for a few more years until the $700 trillion derivatives time bomb found a new trigger and the subprime mortgage market nearly burned the system down. Just like in 1987, and the collapse of the Y2K bubble in 2001, the Mammon worshipping wizards in the ECB and Fed solved this crisis by creating a new system of “bailout” which continued for another decade.
The 2000-2008 Frenzy: With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges. Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs obscene. The obscenity swelled as the values of the houses skyrocketed far beyond the real values to the tune of one hundred thousand dollar homes selling for 5-6 times that price within the span of several years. As long as no one assumed this growth was ab-normal, and the un-payable nature of the capital underlying the leveraged assets locked up in the now infamous “sub-primes” and other illegitimate debt obligations was ignored, then profits were supposed to just continue infinitely. Anyone who questioned this logic was considered a heretic by the latter-day priesthood.
The stunning “success” of securitizing housing debts immediately induced a wave of sovereign wealth funds to come into prominence applying the same model that had been used in the case of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to the debts of entire nations. The securitizing of bundled packages of sovereign debts that could then be infinitely leveraged on the de-regulated world markets would no longer be considered an act of national treason, but the key to easy money.
The Ugly Truth of Today’s Crisis: New “sub-prime” bubbles have been created in the Corporate Debt sector which has risen to over $13.8 trillion (up 16% from the year earlier). A quarter of which is considered junk, and another half graded at BB by Moodies (a step above junk).
Household debt, student and auto debt has skyrocketed and since wages have not kept up with inflation causing even more unpayable debts have been incurred in desperation. Industrial jobs have collapsed consistently since 1971, and low paying service jobs have taken over like a plague.
The last report from the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded that America desperately needs to spend $4.5 trillion just to bring its decayed infrastructure up to safety levels. Roads, bridges, rail, dams, airports, schools all received near failing grades with the average age of Dams clocking in at 56 years, and many water pipes over 100 years old, and transmission/distribution lines are well over 60 years. The factories which once supplied those infrastructure needs are long outsourced, and much of the productive workforce that had that living knowledge to build a nation are retired or dead leaving a deadly generation knowledge gap in its place filled with millennials who never knew what a productive economy looked like.
American farmers have probably been the most devastated in all this with dramatic population losses across the entire farm belt of America and the average age of farmers now 60 years. It was recently reported that 82% of U.S. Agricultural family income comes from off farms, as mega cartels have taken over all aspects of farming (from equipment/supplies, packaging and the even the actual farming in between).
Combined with the controlled destruction of global food supplies internationally, COVID has ensured that strategic food chain supplies are being ripped to shreds with the UN reporting the worst food crisis in over 50 years (and that is not accounting for the oncoming blowout of the bubble economy).
Why was this permitted to happen? Well besides the obvious intention to induce “a controlled disintegration of the economy” as Volcker so coldly stated, the idea was always to create the conditions described by the late Maurice Strong (sociopath and Rothschild cut-out extraordinaire) in 1992 when he rhetorically asked:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
How do we get back to health? Like any addict who wakes up one morning at rock bottom with the sudden terror that his death is nigh, the first step is admitting we have a problem. This means simply: acknowledging the true nature of the current economic calamity instead of trying to blame “coronavirus” or China, or some other scapegoat.
The next step is begin to act on reality instead of continuing to take heroine (a fine metaphor for the addiction to derivatives speculation). An obvious first step to this recovery involves restoring Glass-Steagall in order to 1) break up the Too Big to Fail banks and 2) impose a standard of judging “false” value from “legitimate” value which is currently absent from the modern psycho that lost all sense of needs vs wants. This would allow nations to re-create a purge of the unpayable fictitious debt and other claims from the system while preserving whatever is tied to the real economy (whatever is directly connected to life). This process is sort of akin to cutting a cancer.
This act would look very similar to what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933 which I outlined in my recent paper "Hyperinflation, Fascism and War: How the New World Order May be Defeated Once More". At this point nation states will have re-asserted their true authority over the pirates of private finance controlling the Trans-Atlantic financial system like would-be gods of Olympus (unbounded perverted vices and all).
It should be obvious to all that the United States must get its head out of its proverbial ass before it is too late by imposing these reforms onto the murderous sociopaths on Wall Street and London who would rather promote a “Great Reset” onto the world economy under the fog of COVD in order to control the terms of the blowout and also the rules of the new post-nation state operating system which they wish to see brought online as a (final) “solution”.
- https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/
Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/25/20: “Markets, A Look Ahead: Bank of America and the FED. Warning”
Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/25/20:
“Markets, A Look Ahead: Bank of America and the FED. Warning”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)