So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
"Out of Control"
"Out of Control"
by DeRisk
"I think it is a fallacy to believe central banks are in control of financial markets, or that there can be any outcome to the current situation other than hyperinflation. If we set aside for a moment the psychological need to believe someone is in control lets us take a look what is in fact some very simple logic. If the logic stands up it relieves the need to analyze much of the current information overload and helps us make better current and future financial decisions.
The logic: Central banks have two monetary instruments: interest rates and money supply. This gives them 4 options:
• Increase interest rates.
• Decrease interest rates.
• Increase money supply.
• Decrease money supply.
The situation they face is unsustainable levels of debt – government, corporate and personal.
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How do their four options play out in this context?
• Increase interest rates: Increasing interest rates increases the debt burden as more now has to be repaid. The runaway train gathers pace.
• Decrease interest rates: Decreasing bank lending rates is arguably not possible with most rates around zero or negative. But assuming rates become more negative, in effect paying for people to take on more debt, this still increases the overall debt burden. The train speed increases.
• Increase money supply: Because debt levels cannot be serviced by the real economy, since 2008 central banks have stepped in with ever increasing amounts of new money (quantitative easing) to service existing debt obligations. The money enters the system as new debt. Alternatively assets in danger of default are simply purchased. Default must be avoided at all costs. The reason for this is the systemic interdependence of the system – if one major component defaults, the consequences can bring down the entire system in a domino effect. Increasing money supply increases debt burden. The train accelerates.
• Decreasing money supply: In 2019 the Federal Reserve took tentative steps towards reducing its assets (taking money out of the system by selling assets and retiring the money). It didn’t work. In fact since inception in 1913 the Federal Reserve has never been able to reduce its balance sheet for more than a few months. To do so now would trigger debt default on a massive scale. The train has no brakes.
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Out of Control: I trust this simple analysis makes it obvious that central banks are not in control. They cannot decrease money supply without provoking the collapse of the fiat system. Keeping interest rates low increases debt. Raising interest rates and increasing money supply both increase indebtedness. Central banks are in a Catch-22 situation. Any action they take leads to the collapse of the financial system or compounds the original problem.
Destination Hyperinflation: Eventually the new money finds its way into the real economy. People cash out their shares or receive their stimulus checks. Price inflation is the result. There is nothing central banks can do. This is already happening. Inflation is higher than official figures. For example: In the United Kingdom food prices have risen 0.8 per cent according to the ONS (an annualized rate of 54 per cent). Pet food prices have risen a truly hyperinflationary 6.2 per cent (annualized: 2,575 per cent).
See also the Chapwood Index. In an effort to continue the pretense of being in control central banks “relax” their inflation targets.
Inflation rapidly becomes hyper-inflation. In extreme cases this can happen in a matter of months. Again there is nothing the two monetary tools of central banks can do. They are caught in a positive feedback loop of their own making:
Positive feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That's why there are so few of them. Germany during the Weimar Republic had a similar positive feedback loop. The central bank felt compelled to print ever increasing amounts of money in order to feed people who would otherwise starve as their money became progressively worthless.
There was a point during the Weimar Republic when the central bank still held sufficient gold reserves to replace the depreciating mark with a gold-pegged currency that would have restored financial stability. But there was never the political or commercial will to do more than take the soft option and print more money. Today we too are well beyond any political or commercial support for anything but the same soft option.
In Weimar Germany, stability only came when the train reached its final destination. However I doubt few people have any real conception of how dark the end actually is: Financially, for nearly four years, the ultimate cataclysm was always just round the corner. It always arrived, and there was always an even worse one on its way - again, and again, and again. The speeches, the newspaper articles, the official records, the diplomatic telegrams, the letters and diaries of the period, all report month by month, year by year, that things could not go on like that any longer: and yet things always did, from bad to worse, to worse, to worse. It was unimaginable in 1921 that 1922 could hold any more terrors. They came, sure enough, and were in due course eclipsed, and more than eclipsed, with the turn of the following year. (Adam Fergusson's 1975 classic "When Money Dies - The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse". page 1.)
Sound familiar? How could anything be worse than the instabilities of 2019? How can there be anything worse than the global economic shutdown of 2020? The train speeds on. But at least by now we should be in no doubt of where it is headed."
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Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"
Gregory Mannarino, "Is The Stock Market Really About To CRASH? The Bears Think So"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Is The Stock Market Really About To CRASH? The Bears Think So"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/22/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/22/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (September 22nd to 24th)
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 9/22/20"
By David Leonhardt
"The fall surge is here: Public health experts have long been worried that the end of the summer - as some students returned to school and the weather cooled - would bring a surge in coronavirus cases. That surge appears to have begun. The number of new daily confirmed cases in the U.S. has jumped more than 15 percent in the past 10 days. It is the sharpest increase since the late spring, and it has arrived just before the official start of autumn, which is today.
Unlike the earlier summer surge in the U.S., this spike also coincides with a rising number of cases in other affluent countries, like Canada and much of Europe. The increases appeared to play a role in yesterday’s stock-market decline, as investors feared the need for new lockdowns.
In Britain today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to to announce new restrictions on nightlife. In the Czech Republic yesterday, the health minister resigned. In Madrid, the authorities imposed new restrictions on almost one million residents. Across Europe, officials are hoping that these targeted restrictions will reduce new cases - and allow them to avoid imposing full lockdowns again.
The U.S. continues to be among the most vulnerable countries, because it never crushed the spread of the virus after the original outbreak. (In the chart above, you can see how much higher the red line, for the U.S., has been than the other lines since April.)
Coming weeks may bring new problems, too: The cooler fall weather will start to complicate outdoor socializing. “And if pandemic-fatigued families travel to spend the holidays together, it will get worse in late fall and winter,” The Times’s Jeneen Interlandi wrote in an article previewing the rest of the year.
There has been one big piece of good news. People infected today are roughly 30 percent to 50 percent less likely to die than those in the early spring, Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates. Still, the death toll is horrific. Today, the number of confirmed U.S. deaths will most likely surpass 200,000.
In other virus developments:
• An officer at the National Institutes of Health will leave the job after a report in The Daily Beast revealed that he had been attacking the agency and one of its leaders, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in pseudonymous posts on a right-wing website.
• Almost 90,0000 pre-K students and children with disabilities in New York City returned to classrooms yesterday.
• The organization that runs a major college-admission test - the ACT - closed more than 500 testing centers this past weekend because of the virus or the recent wildfires. The closures left many students unable to take the test."
SEP 22, 2020 12:31 AM ET:
Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 31,290,000
people, according to official counts, including 6,880,636 Americans.
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09/22/2020 - 07:20: "US Suffers Most New COVID-19 Cases In 5 Weeks As Doctors Warn Of 'Apocalyptic' Fall: Live Updates"
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Updated 9/22/20, 3:23 AM ET
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Monday, September 21, 2020
Must Watch! “FED Saves Wall St Again; Debt Clock Overheating; $Trillions Not Going to Save Markets; Cash”
Jeremiah Babe,
“FED Saves Wall St Again; Debt Clock Overheating;
$Trillions Not Going to Save Markets; Cash”
"Swamp Thang"
"Swamp Thang"
by Jim Kunstler
"There’s the Swamp teeming with scaley, slithery, sharp-toothed, many-footed predators, but then there’s the miasma hanging over the Swamp, a toxic mist of lies, misdirection, dis-info, propaganda, bad faith, and sedition, illuminated by pulsing blue gaslight that affords a toxic blanket of protection to the denizens of the Swamp. Now a storm is brewing. The critters are evacuating their mud-holes and moiling about desperately among the cypress knobs as a mighty wind rises - the election hurricane - threatening to sweep it (and them) all away!
The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. Weeks from now, as the fetid water subsides, the protective miasma above will dissipate and the people from sea to shining sea will finally get a good look at the landscape revealed and the pitiful, wriggling, dying life-forms of the order Democratica stranded on it.
Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution - his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem - as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.
The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.
The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution - all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries. This week two Senate committees (Finance and Homeland) are expected to release a joint report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It is expected to not look good. Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 - a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme. Will the committees be so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department? If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject? Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in US political history?
All of which is to say that the Democratic Party has other things to worry about besides who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. That may be hard to believe but it’s how things are now after four years of implacable, seditious perfidy from the party. A week ago, all the talk was of the Democrat’s election coup plan, as publicized stupidly by the so-called Transition Integrity Project. Nice try. What if all those mail-in ballots sent out recently have Joe Biden’s name on them and it turns out that he is no longer a candidate? Hmmmm… No doubt the recipients were so eager to fill them in and send them out that there’s no going back on that scam. Apparently, a Biden withdrawal was not one of the scenarios scrimmaged out in the Transition Integrity Project’s “war game.” What? then A do-over?
Hence, panic in the swamp. Joe Biden’s misadventures, and his pitiful fate, are but the outer rainbands of the brewing storm. There’s the threat of further and widespread riots, of course, but since when has insurrection proved to be a winning campaign strategy in a country not entirely gone to the dogs? People who are not insane usually object to their businesses being torched and their homes invaded. At this point, after months of violent antics by criminal nihilists, one can even imagine Multnomah County, Oregon, turning Trumpwise. Closer to the eye-wall of the hurricane looms the stern visage of John Durham. That’s where the most damaging winds whirl and there is reason to suppose they are heading for landfall. Whatever he’s been up to lo these many months has had a tighter lid on it than the tomb of Tutankhamen. It must be making a whole lot of political gators, centipedes, and pygmy rattlesnakes nervous. Perhaps New York Times editor and miasma generator-in-chief Dean Baquet is up at three a.m. thinking about it, puking into his wastebasket."
"2020 Has Been A "Nightmare Year" For America, And The Economic Fallout Is Just Getting Started"
"2020 Has Been A "Nightmare Year" For America,
And The Economic Fallout Is Just Getting Started"
by Michael Snyder
"Most of us have never experienced a year that has been as tough as 2020 has been for our nation. It has just been one major crisis after another, and the month of September has brought us even more trouble. The worst wildfire season in the history of the state of California has been making headlines day after day, and now the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg threatens to escalate the political turmoil in this nation to an entirely new level.
Many had such high hopes for 2020, but at this point this year has been such a disaster that USA Today is calling it “an American nightmare”, and it is difficult to argue with their reasoning: "First the pandemic, which divided us, economically devastated us, and has killed nearly 200,000 of us. Then the racial unrest, erupting at the deaths of more Black Americans at the hands of police: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude.
Now the extreme weather. For only the second time in history, the National Hurricane Center has moved into the Greek alphabet for storm names. This season’s wildfires are bigger, deadlier and more frequent than in years past. In the West, people can’t breathe.
And now a member of the U.S. Supreme Court has died with about a month and a half to go until we get to election day. The shocking death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has stunned the entire country, and I will share my analysis on where things could go from here on The Most Important News later tonight.
In this article, I want to focus on the economic impact that all of this chaos is having. Since the pandemic first started, more than 60 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and that is a threshold that has never been crossed before in all of our history. And we have also seen businesses shut down at a pace that is hard to fully grasp. If you can believe it, more than 160,000 businesses listed on Yelp say “that they have closed”: "Yelp on Wednesday released its latest Economic Impact Report, revealing business closures across the U.S. are increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic’s economic toll. As of Aug, 31, 163,735 businesses have indicated on Yelp that they have closed. That’s down from the 180,000 that closed at the very beginning of the pandemic. However, it actually shows a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July."
I was most alarmed by that last sentence. Things were supposed to be getting a lot better by now, but instead we have seen “a 23% increase in the number of closures since mid-July”. That is not good. And the percentage of businesses on Yelp that are indicating that their closures are “permanent” just keeps rising: "In addition to monitoring closed businesses, Yelp also takes into account the businesses whose closures have become permanent. That number has steadily increased throughout the past six months, now reaching 97,966, representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening."
So what this means is that none of us should be expecting a return to what we considered to be “normal” prior to 2020. In fact, it is likely that we will see large numbers of businesses continue to fail in the months ahead. According to Fox Business, a whopping 40 percent of all U.S. restaurants “could go under within the next six months”: At least 40% of restaurant operators struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic believe their businesses could go under within the next six months if there is no additional stimulus package from the federal government, according to a new survey by the National Restaurant Association. With one in every six restaurants closed permanently or for the “long term,” the industry is on track to lose $240 billion in sales by the end of the year, according to the National Restaurant Association’s findings on the impact COVID-19 has on the restaurant business."
So what do you think? Should we bail out the restaurant industry? By the way, the airline industry really wants a bailout too. And just about every other industry is looking for government help as well. The reason why almost everyone has their hands out is because we have plunged into a crippling economic depression, and everyone is starting to realize that there is no end in sight to this downturn.
Of course most average citizens also want another round of “stimulus checks” from the federal government, and we are being told that there is a really good chance that “the economy backslides” if that does not happen: "Lawmakers remain deadlocked over a measure to provide another round of $1,200 checks to most households and more aid to struggling small businesses and unemployed Americans. Most saw the money they received from Congress’s $2.2 trillion CARES Act run dry over the summer. “If they don’t” approve another stimulus, “they’re taking a huge risk, says Mark Zandi chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The odds are better than even the economy backslides.”
We have already stolen several trillion dollars from future generations of Americans so far this year to fund “stimulus packages”, and so a lot of people figure that it probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference if we stole several trillion more to fund another one. And the Federal Reserve has been flooding the financial system with so much new money that it makes everything that they have ever done in the past look completely insignificant.
In the process, our authorities are systematically destroying the reserve currency that the entire globe depends upon, but at this point very few people seem to care. So we continue to steamroll toward economic oblivion, and nobody is even thinking about hitting the brakes.
In the USA Today article that I quoted at the start of this piece, the author stated that it is “impossible to know if the worst is behind us or still lies ahead”: "Many of us are vacillating between horror and disbelief at what can only be described as an American nightmare. Devastation doesn’t cover it. It’s impossible to know if the worst is behind us or still lies ahead. Of course that is not true at all. In fact, it is exceeding clear that what is ahead of us is going to be much, much worse than what we have already experienced. But most Americans don’t want to hear that.
Most of us just want to cling to the belief that someday we will wake up and everything will have returned to normal. That may happen in fairy tales, but this is real life, and real life simply does not work that way."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed, including its nearly perfectly round ring of stars and gas, remains unknown. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished.
Click image for larger size.
The featured photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and recently reprocessed using an artificially intelligent de-noising algorithm. Observations in radio waves indicate that Hoag's Object has not accreted a smaller galaxy in the past billion years. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake (Serpens). Many galaxies far in the distance are visible toward the right, while coincidentally, visible in the gap at about seven o'clock, is another but more distant ring galaxy."
Chet Raymo, “Moments of Being”
“Moments of Being”
by Chet Raymo
“A passage from the “Pensees” of Teilhard de Chardin: “Though the phenomena of the lower world remain the same- the material determinisms, the vicissitudes of chance, the laws of labor, the agitations of men, the footfalls of death- he who dares to believe reaches a sphere of created reality in which things, while retaining their habitual texture, seem to be made out of a different substance. Everything remains the same so far as phenomena are concerned, but at the same time everything become luminous, animated, loving…”
Whatever we think of Teilhard’s Christocentric phenomenology, however much we are baffled by his vague and gushy prose, it is clear from his writing that he was a man who was in love with the world and experienced it as luminous, animated, and loving. Certainly, the experience he describes is not restricted to “he who dares to believe,” by which Teilhard means a specifically Christian faith, or at least a faith which for him involved an image of the “cosmic Christ.” No, I would suggest that the interior experience of the world he describes- as luminous, animated, and loving- is an predisposition of the human condition, part of our evolutionary makeup. It finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, and in even in the quiet contemplation of a single flower or grain of sand.
It is an experience we all consciously or unconsciously seek, with varying degrees of success. For certain people- an artist like Kandinsky or a mystic like Teilhard- the interior rhapsodic state seems more or less permanent. For most of us, its achievement is a struggle against the humdrum and superficial, the “habitual texture” of things.
The challenge is not to abjure the world of immediate sensation, but to experience the world as fully as our present knowledge allows- not just earthworms and nematodes, wind and weather, Sun, Moon and stars, but also the ineffable flow of atoms, the ceaseless dance of the DNA, the whirling of the myriad galaxies, the infinite and the infinitesimal- to see in the mind’s eye and feel in the mind’s heart the fire and the flow that animates all things. We may not experience the universe as “loving,” but we might certainly find it lovable.
“The whole universe is aflame,” wrote Teilhard. His vision was partly informed by his science and partly by his religious faith. And partly, surely, because he was born with a particularly acute sensitivity to the ineluctable wholeness of things. Those of us of a less sensitive nature will settle for the occasional moments when the gates of our senses unaccountably fling themselves open to the unspeakable and unspoken mystery of the world.
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
The Poet: Donald Justice, “The Evening of the Mind”
“The Evening of the Mind”
“Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the page
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.
Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,
Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
Your name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and the coming on.
It is the thing descending, circling, here.
And now it puts a claw out and you take it.
Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.
You said you would not go away again,
You did not want to go away - and yet,
It is as if you stood out on the dock
Watching a little boat drift out
Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish…
And you were in it, skimming past old snags,
Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky
As soundless as a gong before it’s struck-
Suspended how? – and now they strike it, now
The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,
And you must wake again to your own blood
And empty spaces in the throat.”
- Donald Justice
"Somehow..."
"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: 'The ways we miss our lives are life. '"
- Richard Ford
"The Nuclear Election"
"The Nuclear Election"
by Jeff Thomas
"On sixth August 1945, the US dropped the world’s first nuclear weapon on Japan. Not surprisingly, the devastation that it caused changed the way the US looked at its power in the world. That perception has never changed since. For Americans, though they may not know it yet, the 2020 presidential election will be an atomic bomb of sorts.
It will purposely be designed to be a close race and the stage is being set to ensure that, whoever the losers are, they will be hopping mad – convinced that the other side rigged the election. Both Democrats and Republicans have been pre-conditioned to believe that this is the big one – the one that will decide whether the US is controlled by Good or Evil.
Roughly half the population is now convinced, courtesy of the polarizing media, that the sitting president is pure evil and that they’re doomed if he is re-elected. And the other half of the population is convinced that the challengers are evil and will doom the country if elected. What’s being overlooked by each side in this quandary is that they’re both correct. The US is doomed to a socio-economic crisis, regardless of the outcome of the election.
But why should this be? Admittedly, all is not well, but surely this can be remedied? Well, unfortunately, no. In 1971, the US went off the gold standard, which had ensured that the dollar was actual money. Once it was only paper, with no gold backing, the dollar was merely a promise – no more. As long as other countries were prepared to treat the dollar as real money, the ruse could continue. And that’s just what occurred. For decades, the US printed more and more dollars, which allowed a spoiled US to operate far beyond what was economically reasonable.
But this edifice was without a foundation. Sooner or later, a building without a foundation will most certainly come tumbling down, and the higher it is built, the greater the devastation when it does fall. Today, the US debt is beyond any possible redemption. A collapse is, if anything, overdue, and when it comes, it will arguably be the greatest crash in history.
The fallout will be devastating. What remains of the middle class will be largely destroyed. This does not appear to be understood by most Americans, but it’s clear that, at this point, they feel in their gut that something is dramatically wrong, even if they can’t put their finger on it.
And the media’s handling of the upcoming election plays directly into that fear. Liberal voters are being programmed to not only disapprove of conservative voters, but to literally hate them. And conservative voters are being programmed to hate liberal voters. America is now at the point that families can no longer get together for the holidays without heated arguments ensuing between those of differing party loyalties.
In the run-up to the election, we shall see increased tensions, which will be played out on the evening news – media hosts vilifying the opposing party in the strongest possible terms – plus, on the city streets, violence and destruction that’s steadily escalating.
But despite all the unrest, I contend that we are now living in the quiet time. At present, each half of the electorate vainly hopes that the opposing bogeyman will be defeated and all will be right with the world. This will not happen. The stage has already been set for the electorate to believe that ballot box fraud will take place. Each side is accusing the other well in advance of election day. More than in the 2016 election, the entire population is being prepared to be enraged over whatever the outcome will be.
It matters little which cardboard cut-out of a candidate is elected. Come fourth November, we can expect to see televised reports that there have been numerous errors in the voting. Each side will accuse the other of stuffing the ballot boxes, mailing in false votes and improper vote-counting at the polling stations. In every state, the accusations will be rife – and they’ll be aimed at each party by the opposing party.
Far from resolving itself through a recount, or whatever other method is employed, this issue will prove impossible to resolve. The supporters of each party will claim that they are the true victors. Regardless of which party is declared the final "winner," the anger will not subside. The winners will gloat and the losers will rise up to a new level of fury. It will be after that that the real chaos is likely to begin.
But is this not mere conjecture? A fanciful "What if?" Unfortunately, no. This is much the same as a "planned demolition." The US economy is on the cusp of a government-created economic crash, and whenever governments find themselves facing a crisis of their own creation, the standard procedure is to create a distraction, so that the blame does not fall on them.
In a case where the crisis is a major one, a major distraction is needed. Above all, the people must be made to blame each other rather than blame the government itself. When an entire people realize that their government has destroyed their lives, they tend to rebel against the government. Therefore, the government must create as much hatred within the populace as possible – ideally a 50/50 hatred in which the two opposing sides are as close to equal as possible. This would ensure that each side will be committed to the notion that, unless they maximize their ire, they’re in danger of becoming the losers.
The warnings are already in place and are escalating. The president has warned many times, publicly, that he will not accept an electoral defeat, stating that, if necessary, he will place police at polling stations. Likewise, his opponents have made claims that the president plans to keep his opponents from voting, even to the extent of removing mailboxes so that mail-in voting cannot be done. In case this warning does not generate the necessary anger, the president’s opponent in the last election has issued a strong statement that her party must be just as aggressive in maximizing their position as the president and his party.
Surely, this will be a heady election season, but the real furor will begin after the election. As unlikely as it may seem, what we are presently viewing is the calm before the storm. This is no accident. The reader may wish to ponder whether the powers that be are pursuing a larger agenda – a change in US governance, ushered in by a divisive nuclear election. Disturbing economic, political, and social trends are already in motion and now accelerating at breathtaking speed."
"The Prelude to World War II: The Spanish Civil War and Today's America"
"The Prelude to World War II:
The Spanish Civil War and Today's America"
by Ammo.com
Past Is Prologue
Excerpt: "America is definitely not Europe, but we can find a number of parallels between European history and contemporary America. For example, we’ve previously written about the "Italian Years of Lead" as a possible template for urban unrest and low-level inter-tribal warfare in the United States. Another example of how things might play out in the United States is the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War is known to historians, amateur and professional alike, as the “dress rehearsal for the Second World War.” It is so termed because it pitted one side – which was equipped, armed and funded by Europe’s fascist regimes (Germany and Italy) – against a government largely funded and propped up by the Soviet Union. However, it is worth noting that General Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces were not themselves fascist (though there were fascists within their ranks) and that Spain remained neutral during the Second World War, later becoming a close ally of the United States in the fight against Communism internationally.
While there are few perfect analogs to be found anywhere in world history, there are parallels between the contemporary domestic political situation in the United States and the period immediately before and during the Spanish Civil War. And while the situation in the United States might play out in a much similar way to the Spanish Civil War, it is worth noting that our previous Civil War was the bloodiest in human history. There is little doubt that a Second American Civil War would not be significantly more destructive."
• Prologue: The Situation in Spain Prior to the Civil War
• The Coup d’Etat of July 1936
• The Spanish Red Terror
• A Spanish White Terror?
• The Course of the War
•The Relevance of the Spanish Civil War Today
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After the last 8 months and all that's happened, and is happening,
don't even dare to say, "Oh! That could never happen here!"
- CP
"For The Most Part..."
“Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.”
- Michael Crichton, “The Lost World”
"When to Fix the Roof"
"When to Fix the Roof"
By Bill Bonner
"Now is not the time to worry about shrinking
the deficit or shrinking the Fed balance sheet."
– Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, September 14, 2020
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "If not now, when? If not us, who? When is the right time to fix the leaking roof? The sun was shining in 2017 when Mr. Mnuchin joined the White House team as Secretary of the Treasury. Then, unemployment was low… and U.S. GDP had been growing for eight years straight.
At this point in the cycle, Keynesian theory tells us that the prudent thing to do is to run a budget surplus and pay down your debt. That is the essence of contra-cyclical policy; as if taken directly from the Old Testament, it seeks to flatten out the booms and busts by running deficits in the lean years and surpluses in the fat years.
Exact Opposite: Instead, the deficit for the 2017 financial year was $665 billion (inherited from the Obama team). In other words, the feds were doing the exact opposite of what Joseph recommended to Pharaoh and what Keynes recommended to policymakers. They were exaggerating the trend, not moderating it. In 2018, when the Trump team was fully in charge, unemployment went even lower. The boss said the skies had never been clearer. But instead of taking advantage of the good weather to repair their balance sheet, the feds cut taxes… and the deficit rose to $779 billion. And in 2019… it still didn’t rain. What a gift! But nobody got up on the roof. And the deficit rose to almost $1 trillion.
Time to Normalize: The gist of the following words is that the feds will never fix the damned roof. This house will fall down first. Here’s how… During those 10 sunny years from 2009-2019, instead of fixing the leaks in federal finances, Mr. Mnuchin and his predecessors punched more holes. You’ll recall that by 2015, the Federal Reserve was getting out its ladder and strapping on the tool belts. Since 2009, it had maintained that its zero interest rate and vast bond-buying scheme were “emergency measures.” The emergency over, it was now time to “normalize” its policies.
Big Mistake: But when Mr. Trump arrived, he fiercely opposed any attempt at normalization. He saw, correctly, that “normal” was a thing of the past. He wanted abnormally low rates and more printing-press money from the Fed to keep the “recovery” going. By then, it was obvious that the whole shebang was in trouble. The crisis of 2008-2009 had been followed by the most aggressive money-printing campaign in U.S. history – in which the Fed added $3.6 trillion to its balance sheet. But this produced the weakest recovery in history.
A thoughtful person might have wondered, “How come? What’s wrong with this money-printing scam?” But neither the Eccles Building (Federal Reserve headquarters) nor the White House is a safe place for thinking people. They are now places for action figures – cartoonish characters, who take action without thinking.
In 2017 and early 2018, Mr. Trump repeatedly insisted that it was a big mistake to try to “normalize” interest rates or reduce the Fed’s balance sheet. He and Mr. Mnuchin hoped to extend the boom further – at least through the 2020 election. But the Fed continued its timid baby steps up the ladder toward “normalization”… until October 2018. Then, with the federal funds rate barely above the official inflation rate… under pressure from the Trump team… and with a 3,000-point sell-off in the Dow… the Fed decided to climb down. It never got close to normal.
Four months later, the stock market crashed… the feds shut down large parts of the economy… GDP fell 32% in the second quarter… and the Fed cut rates back down to zero, and then went on another money-printing spree.
Stormy Weather: And now what? Now, there are clouds everywhere – cumulus, cirrus, and an occasional killer funnel, too. We saw on Friday that nearly 100,000 businesses have closed their doors – permanently. As for jobs… millions have been lost. Eleven million? Thirty million? The numbers are fishy.
But if these jobs come back at the same rate that they did after the crisis of 2008-2009 – 1.6 million per year, on average, over five years – it will take until 2027… or to 2038, if we base our calculations on the 30 million figure… to get them back. Most likely, many are gone for good. An economy evolves. It finds new ways of doing business. It needs new skills… new businesses… new people. The old ones are left behind… each one with a cloud over his head.
Hot Market: “It’s amazing what’s happening out here,” said friends calling from Deer Valley, Utah. “People are buying houses sight unseen. The realtors say they’ve never seen such a hot market. Everybody wants to get away from the big cities. They’re coming in from California… New York… Baltimore…” Wealthy people are enjoying their new digs. The rest are standing in lines waiting for handouts from the government. Or, they’re waiting for the helicopters.
In 2019, U.S. GDP was $21.7 trillion. This year, the Federal Open Market Committee says the final tally will be about 6.5% less. Rents are not being collected. Mortgages are not being paid. There are still some 30 million Americans on unemployment… and 44 million with student loans totaling $1.5 trillion. Senators Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren now propose forgiving $50,000 of student loans per person… (This must make students who didn’t borrow really feel good!)
No Chance: The clouds are not going away any time soon. And no matter who is in the White House, he is not going to get out on the slippery roof any time soon, either. Heck, he might get struck by lightning! 8 million people lost their jobs in the crisis of 2008-2009. And while the economy recovered over the following decade, the feds never had the brains or guts to return monetary policy to “normal.” This time, as many as 50 million people signed up for unemployment benefits. And there is almost no chance – in the next 10 years, anyway – that deficits will be reduced and interest rates will be normalized.
No Trust: So, the money-printing goes on… And it inevitably leads where it always leads – to a drop in the value of the money itself. And then, people will look for alternatives. Traditionally, in the “sh*thole” countries and banana republics, they found it readily – in the U.S. dollar. But what happens when you can’t trust the greenback either? That is what we will look at tomorrow…"
"I Have Accepted The Fact..."
"One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless. I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke Gods blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side."
"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. "
- Henry Miller
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