"I strongly urge you to pick up "Forgotten Civilization; New Discoveries on the Solar Induced Dark Age," by Robert Schoch. Schoch: In "Forgotten Civilization" covers a lot of ground, including the very important issue of the cataclysm that ended the last ice age, approximately 12,000 B.P. (before the present). Schoch shows (to my satisfaction) that it was almost certainly a solar eruption that did in the ice age mega-fauna (and almost all of our ancestors), and not a comet. Schoch is almost certainly right. Read Schoch’s book if you’re interested in this. But be forewarned: Schoch doesn’t pull any punches about the coming cataclysm. He gives us multiple lines of evidence that mean it’s overdue."
Hueyatlaco is an archeological site in the Valsequillo Basin near the city of Puebla, Mexico. After excavations in the 1960s, the site became notorious due to geochronologists‘ analyses that indicated human habitation at Hueyatlaco was dated to ca. 250,000 years before the present (my emphasis).[1][2]
These controversial findings are orders of magnitude older than the scientific consensus for habitation of the New World (which generally traces widespread human migration to the New World to 13,000 to 16,000 ybp). The findings at Hueyatlaco are the subject of continued debate by the scientific community, and have seen only occasional discussion in the literature." [3]
Tales of monetary manipulation, from Pharaohs to Fed heads...
by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
Poitou, France - "Today, we continue our uphill slog. Destination: unknown. In any society, at any time, there is always a lot of myth and BS. Often, they become fact. It may have been a myth that Pharaoh, for example, was divine. He got sick and died just like other humans. And it may have been BS that the common laborers of the Nile Valley should devote their surplus labor to building gigantic monuments.
But the sphinx…and the pyramids…are real. Facts. In dried brick, mud, and stone. Huge. As basic as dirt. Worn by sun, sand, and wind. But lasting for thousands of years. And who’s to say the sweating, heaving hordes weren’t happy with their work? Did they look at the Great Pyramid with pride and pleasure…at a job well done? Or did they feel used, abused…manipulated…or even driven by the overseer’s lash, to resentment or rage? We don’t know. But it just reminds us how adaptable we are…how flexible…and how ready to believe anything.
True Believers: Ms. Stephanie Kelton is a believer. She was on a CNBC video yesterday. The economist has been schooled to think and act rationally, sensibly…to add 2 plus 2 and get 4, never 5 or 6. This ability must have made her think that that was all there was to it. She – and other economists of her ilk – are eminently capable of dealing with the US debt, she believes. Yes, it approaches $33 trillion. Yes, it is growing by $5 billion per day. Yes, the feds will have to borrow even more to keep the show on the road.
But no. It’s no problem. The money comes from the government, she says, making the classic mistake of confusing the bits of ‘currency’ produced by the feds with real ‘money.’ And she’s not the only one to confuse ‘credit money’ with ‘real money.’ Here’s the latest, from Newsweek: "Americans Struggle to Get Credit Increases as Debt Surges." "Households have noticed that access to credit has been a struggle compared to a year ago, a trend they will likely see continue going forward.
Expectations for future credit availability also deteriorated in August, with the share of respondents expecting it will be harder to obtain credit in the year ahead increasing," the New York Fed said on Monday. Overall, "households' perceptions about their current financial situations and expectations for the future also deteriorated."
And this from CNBC: "Fears over access to credit hit highest level in more than a decade, New York Fed survey shows. Respondents indicating that the ability to get credit is harder now than it was a year ago rose to nearly 60%, the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations for August showed."
What myth is this? What BS is behind it? Why do people want to borrow more…and go even further into debt? Shouldn’t they be concerned about having more money, rather than more credit?
Money is hard to come by. You have to work for it…or, if you are an investor, wait for it. But the feds can produce all the credit they want – immediately, and at ‘negligible cost,’ as Ben Bernanke put it. And they can keep producing it until the cows come home. They can use it for good things, too. Like feeding the hungry. Housing the un-housed. Transporting the un-transported. And entertaining the bored. They certainly don’t need no stinkin’ debt ceiling. They can run up as much debt as they want; it’s up to them. And inflation? Don’t worry about that either. The feds giveth; they can take away (via taxation).
Practice vs Theory: In short, there is nothing to worry about. Clever economists can keep the system from going off the rails. Central banks can create credit. Consumers can borrow. Jacques Rueff had seen the problem years before. He identified it in the quote we presented yesterday. It wasn’t that the guardians of the money supply weren’t smart. And it wasn’t that the system mightn’t work – in theory. It was in practice that the flaws would appear.
While the Fed governors could perfectly well keep the money supply growing at a prudent and reasonable pace, (Friedman suggested 3%, roughly equal to GDP growth) they weren’t going to do it. After all, they were just human, as Nietzsche put it, ‘all too human.’ They, like the Egyptian laborers…the Massachusetts witch hunters…Napoleon’s army marching into Russia….and Americans invading Iraq, were ready to believe anything.
Rueff: “I do not believe, as a matter of fact, that the monetary authorities, however courageous and well informed they may be, can deliberately bring about those contractions in the money supply that the mere mechanism of the gold standard would have generated automatically.”
The problem wasn’t necessarily the money itself; it was the people in charge of it. Humans. Once they are given the power to create fake money, it’s a bad habit. But a hard one to beat."
o
Joel’s Note: Meanwhile, as the various theories of the pointy-headed academic class continue to collide with immovable reality… a couple more unsettling data points flit across our desk, these courtesy of BPR’s macro analyst, Dan Denning. First, inflation continues to bite. August CPI came in 3.6% higher year-over-year. Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "The all items index increased 3.7 percent for the 12 months ending August, a larger increase than the 3.2-percent increase for the 12 months ending in July. The all items less food and energy index rose 4.3 percent over the last 12 months. The energy index decreased 3.6 percent for the 12 months ending August, and the food index increased 4.3 percent over the last year."
Moreover, as Dan explained in recent notes to BPR members, these numbers have a cheeky tendency to be quietly “revised” upwards after the fact… usually when folks have moved on to other “breaking stories” in the never ending news cycle. Even so, core inflation at 4.3% is not nothing, and certainly it is much higher than the Fed’s own target rate of 2%. And this, after one of the most aggressive rate hiking campaigns in living memory. Hmmm…
Part of the driver here seems to be the other inconvenient truth Dan shared with us this morning… oil prices are at a 10-month high. “That’s good for our Trade of the Decade,” observes Dan, “But bad for CPI readings in the next few months as higher energy prices hit the index.” Of course, this should only affect prices impacted by the cost of energy… i.e., everything. “Not to worry,” says the grasshopper to the ant, “we’ll just dip into our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and… oh, wait…”
Our advice? Listen to Aesop… be like the ant. Winter is coming."
In today's vlog, we are at Publix and are noticing some outrageous price increases on groceries! Prices continue to rise due to a multitude of reasons, making it hard on many families to even put food on the table!
"The economy is taking a dark turn right now. We are getting some very serious warnings again. Business sentiment has fallen off a cliff. Bloomberg has said that there is an economic warning that we should all be concerned about. 2008 all over again."
"China is currently concealing an astonishing 3 trillion dollars in foreign currency within shadow reserves. While official reports from China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange confirmed this figure, experts believe the actual reserves might be around 6 trillion dollars. This lack of transparency in China's financial practices raises significant concerns, creating new and substantial risks to the global economy. What's even more unsettling is that over time, China's management of its currency and foreign exchange reserves has become increasingly opaque, making it difficult for the rest of the world to gauge their true intentions and strategies. It's not just about hiding a portion of their wealth; it's about the collateral damage that the world will experience. China's role as an economic giant directly affects the rest of the world, by how they manage their economy, and their currency. The lack of transparency also makes it extremely challenging to predict their next move, which has now become an even bigger problem."
The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times.
“Can the night sky appear both serene and surreal? Perhaps classifiable as serene in the below panoramic image are the faint lights of small towns glowing across a dark foreground landscape of Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand, as well as the numerous stars glowing across a dark background starscape. Also visible are the planet Venus and a band of zodiacal light on the image left.
Unusual events are also captured, however. First, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, while usually a common site, appears here to hover surreally above the ground. Next, a fortuitous streak of a meteor was captured on the image right. Perhaps the most unusual component is the bright spot just to the left of the meteor. That spot is the plume of a rising Ariane 5 rocket, launched a few minutes before from Kourou, French Guiana. How lucky was the astrophotographer to capture the rocket launch in his image? Not lucky at all- the image was timed to capture the rocket. What was lucky was how photogenic- and perhaps surreal- the rest of the sky turned out to be.”
"We are not gods, and we are not omniscient. We cannot foretell the future with certainty. Most often, cultural and political changes are terribly complex. It can be notoriously difficult to predict exactly where a trend will take us, and we can be mistaken. We do the best we can: if we wish to address certain issues seriously, we study history, and we read everything that might shed light on our concerns. We consult what the best thinkers of our time and of earlier times have said and written. We challenge everyone's assumptions, including most especially our own. That last is often very difficult. If we care enough, we do our best to disprove our own case. In that way, we find out how strong our case is, and where its weaknesses may lie.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, we cannot be certain that a particular development represents a critical turning point at the time it occurs. If we dare to say, "This is the moment the battle was lost," only future events will prove whether we were correct. We do the best we can, based on our understanding of how similar events have unfolded in the past, and in light of our understanding of the underlying principles in play. We can be wrong. "
"In today's vlog, we go over all food shortages that are happening right now, and into the Fall and Winter of 2023! We are discussing the truth on this matter and what all of our viewers are seeing in their states and beyond, as these shortages are happening all around the world!"
"The United States just faced the highest spike in homelessness rates on record, and that’s directly tied to the decline of the American middle class. New numbers suggest that middle-income families are the hardest hit by the ongoing housing crisis. Right now, the number of evictions and foreclosures is hitting sky-highs as affordability issues continue to worsen, and about 3 in 4 middle-class households can no longer afford current housing prices.
NAR released a new report that shows that more than 75% of homes on the market are now too expensive for middle-income families. Researchers highlighted that workers earning up to $75,000 per year could afford just 23% of all listed properties in the U.S. A study by Redfin found that 8.6% of listed houses in the U.S. were worth seven figures in August. These numbers underscore how in many areas of the country, million-dollar homes are not necessarily luxurious. They’re actually “normal” properties, according to LendingTree’s senior economist Jacob Channel. "There are a lot of areas, at this point where million-dollar homes have not only become more common, they've also - for lack of a better term - become more middle class," he said.
With prices rising far faster than people’s incomes, more and more families are in danger of losing their homes amid an explosion in the number of foreclosure filings. In the first half of the year alone, foreclosure starts shot up 15%, according to real estate data provider ATTOM’s Midyear 2023 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report.
Eviction rates are also climbing across the nation in the third quarter. Princeton University's Eviction Lab reported that the average number of eviction filings jumped 50% above the normal 2019 average. That’s before the pandemic and the boom that led home and rent prices to rise by more than 40% in just three years. Moody’s Analytics data indicates that the average renter is now cost-burdened, having to direct 30% of their pay towards rent, while about 25% of workers are spending 50% of their incomes on rent.
Sadly, the number of homeless Americans has just reached a new record. According to data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. homeless population has grown by 11% in the first eight months of the year, the largest increase in at least 15 years. While the number of unhoused people continues to rise, the number of middle-class families is steadily shrinking. In fact, U.S. Census Bureau data shows that just 50% of American adults lived in middle-income households last year. That’s about 15% lower than the number of middle-class families in the 1970s.
New research by AnyTime Estimate exposed that home prices have skyrocketed by 1,608% since 1970, while inflation has increased by 644%. A $20,000 starter home in 1970 would cost $341,600 today. But if home prices grew at the same rate as inflation since 1970, the median home price today would be just $177,788.
The American Dream is not only getting more expensive but also unattainable for most Americans. These figures reflect the precipitous decline in people’s purchasing power over the last five decades, especially when it comes to homeownership. And they also expose that middle-class families – considered by economists as the foundation of our country – are actually getting closer to homelessness than to fulfilling their dream of owning a home."
“Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”
"Maya Angelou born Marguerite Annie Johnson April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim."
"All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live."
- Joseph Epstein
○
"George Harrison knew something most of us didn't and still don't: there is a reality beyond the material world and what we do here and how we treat others affects us eternally. As he sings in "Rising Sun":
"But in the rising sun you can feel your life begin,
"A visual journey into mankind's favorite pastime throughout the ages."
o
"Of Army Ants and Pit Bulls:
The Biological Roots of War"
by Fred Reed
"The biological - that is, genetic - roots of human behavior have been a disputed matter at least since The Bell Curve, most heatedly regarding race. The measure of racial intelligence has been the sharpest focus with psychometrists universally, as far as I can determine, ranking races by IQ as Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks. While these findings have been used by demagogues, those making them are serious researchers, and the ranking parallels the levels of achievement of those ranked.
In support of these findings many have pointed out that human races are subspecies of Homo sapiens just as Border Collies and pit bulls are subspecies of dog. They differ in intelligence. So might human subspecies.
Racialists touting the superiority however defined of the white race point to achievements of whites to buttress this theory. These achievements do suggest high intellectual ability. Among the said achievements are: Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. The telephone. Almost every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Bearable dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Heart surgery. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. Rubber. Nylon. Skyscrapers. X-rays. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. Telecivion. Helicopters. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. RISC V. EUV lithography. Field-programmable gate arrays. The EPR Paradox. Et cetera.
These examples and thousands of others leave little doubt of the intellectual abilities of whites. The rapid ascent of the Chinese in matters technological and scientific further suggests the validity of the IQ rankings.
Less studied are the biological roots of aggressiveness: Pit bulls are more aggressive than Border Collies. In explanation of extremely high levels of violent crime among blacks, racialists have pointed to levels of testosterone, highest in blacks and lowest in East Asians. Men, they note, have higher levels than women, and are more aggressive. Other biological markers that I am incompetent to judge are said to support the hierarchy.
Yet among races it is whites, not blacks, who stand out for predatory and destructive aggressiveness. They - we - exist in a constant state of hostility, attacking each other and other peoples. Just now white Americans use white Ukrainians to fight white Russians, with help from white Europeans in a pointless war. A Eurowhite coalition prepares for war with China. Similar coalitions in various combinations attacked Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on, with white Russians taking part in opposition. Earlier there was the bombing of Yugoslavia and, remembered by grayhairs, the devastation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The list could go on almost without end. Both world wars consisted of whites fighting whites for no reason of any rationality. These interalbionic conflicts often seem insane. In the Battle of the Somme in 1916, England lost 20,000 dead in one day. It continued the war. The senselessness suggests an inherent combativeness not amenable to reason.
Other races fight wars but most of them with nothing resembling the single-minded aggressiveness or scale. In China the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 was as ghastly as anybody else’s best wars. Yet on the whole China has preferred commerce, Southeast Asia is not always at war, Latin America has had wars but not with the constancy or destructiveness of those of the white world. Correlation, as they say, is not causation, but enough correlation begins to look like it.
Throughout the colonial period, Eurowhites attacked most of the earth in an orgy of aggression. All or most of South America, India, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Africa were militarily invaded and often brutally mistreated. Go to Zacatecas in Mexico and see the conditions of the Indian slaves used by the Spanish to work the silver mines. While there, check out the instruments of torture - they are in a museum - used by the Spanish. You will be sickened.
The aggression is not always military. At the moment whites try to strangle Chinese development by cutting off technology. Venezuela is sanctioned to get control of its petroleum, Cuba for no reason, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and so on. American politicians and nativists threaten Mexico with military incursion and the US President says he will sanction the country to get control of its energy sector.
The aggressiveness is so consistent, so great, over so much time that a genetic component becomes plausible. We seem to be dealing with pit bulls. Or army ants.
Slavery, as pure a form of aggression as exists, has been the common practice of humanity through much of history, practiced with varying degrees of barbarity. Yet under Eurowhites it grew to be a trade of unexampled scale and enormous cruelty. Figures are shaky, but a common accounting puts the number of slaves extracted from Africa (captured by other Africans and sold to white slavers) at eleven million. It was not especially Southern in America, the trade being run by New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It was a Eurowhite thing, as we say, with much of Europe involved - Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, most of these calling themselves Christian, and the slaves were hideously treated by white owners in the British West Indies, Latin America, and the United States. White nationalists furiously deny much of this, but the record is solid, voluminous, and undeniable. Read "The Atlantic Slave Trade," by Hervert Klein, on Amazon.)
The unrestrained aggressiveness of Eurowhites has, and has had, consequences. Eurowhites are unloved across the world. All through Mexico there are monuments to and streets named for los Niños Heroes, the Heroic Boys who died fighting the Americans invading Mexico. Mexico of course is helpless under the American boot but other Latin countries are less helpless and welcome China and Russia as the first possible alternatives they have ever had.
We now see Indian movies, very hostile to England, about the years of British occupation. India now leans toward Russia and China. The Chinese remember their ports being occupied beneath the threatening cannon of gunboats, the opium trade forced on them, American and other Eurowhite troops rampaging through the streets of Beijing, looting, raping, and killing for sport.
I was in Vietnam and Cambodia as a correspondent during the war there, and saw what Eurowhites - in this case American and French - did to those countries. Years later in Vientiane I was chatting with a young woman who mentioned in passing her father’s death. “What happened to him?” I foolishly asked. “He died fighting the Americans,” she said.
Aggression. Unending aggression. Combined with superior technology, it produced colonialism. It produces today’s wars. Is it genetic? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way. Eurowhites have done a great deal for the world, but also to it. Let us hope that they do not give us another world war that no one else wants.
The Vulnerability, Hubris, And Illusions Of The US Regime"
by Mike Adams
"It is now resoundingly clear that U.S. and NATO forces are going to be defeated by Russia, owing in part to the delusional arrogance and incompetence that now characterizes the political leadership of the US empire. The US military will fail, the dollar currency will fail, the Biden regime will fail and the world will denounce the dollar and the punitive weaponization of the reserve currency carried out by the US empire. Today's broadcast covers this in great detail, laying out the full scenario of where this all lands as the collapse of the US empire accelerates."
Depiction of Hell, Church of St. Nicolas de Veroce
"The Monetary Sin of the West"
by Bill Bonner
“I do not believe, as a matter of fact, that the monetary authorities, however courageous and well informed they may be, can deliberately bring about those contractions in the money supply that the mere mechanism of the gold standard would have generated automatically.”
- Jacques Rueff
Poitou, France - "Say a prayer for the common foot soldier. Three cheers for the factory man. Poor fellow. He’s about to run out of money. Bloomberg: "The Mighty American Consumer Is About to Hit a Wall, Investors Say." "After staving off recession for longer than many thought possible, the US consumer is finally about to crack, according to Bloomberg’s latest Markets Live Pulse survey.
More than half of 526 respondents said that personal consumption — the most important driver of economic growth — will shrink in early 2024, which would be the first quarterly decline since the onset of the pandemic. Another 21% said the reversal will happen even sooner, in the last quarter of this year, as high borrowing costs eat into household budgets while Covid-era savings run down."
Our steps today trace the uphill struggle of the working classes. Over the years, thanks to capitalism and technology, his burden has gotten a little lighter, his steps a little easier. That is the story told by ‘time prices,’ which measure how much time it takes him, on the job, to buy basic food commodities and a roof over his head.
Modern man also expects to suffer as little physical pain as possible. Machines do the heavy lifting. Drugs dull the pain of bad teeth or sore muscles. And when there is a hurricane or a flood, we think the government should step in and step up, with blankets for the shivering…and food for the hungry.
And yet, America’s working classes may not appreciate their good fortune as perhaps they should. If they are feeling flush, they don’t know whom to thank. Nixon? Trump? Biden? If they are feeling blue, they don’t whom to blame – Keynes, Friedman…or Rueff? Mostly, they don’t know whether they are going or coming…or whose fault it is.
Remarkably, yesterday, we were invited to lunch at a neighbor’s chateau. It was a ‘old school’ social engagement – ladies in proper dresses, men in coats and ties. Champagne and hors d’oeuvres were served outside and then, we went into a sumptuous dining room, where we were seated next to a charming woman named Marie-France.
The conversation ranged over the political and social landscape -- the low birthrate in France…the need to raise retirement age…the great number of dying oak trees, and the real cause of WWI. Monetary policy, like a full stomach after a good meal, was bound to swell up. And it did, in a jolly way. “Without an anchor – like gold – money drifts,” we explained. “Pretty soon you don’t know where you are.”
Typically, having introduced monetary policy into the conversation, we might expect our ‘voisine de table’ to get a faraway look in her face, shift in her chair, and change the subject. Not this time. Instead, Marie-France smiled confidently. "Yes…we had an economist in our family, years ago, who used to say that dropping the link with gold was the biggest mistake France ever made.” “Really? Who was that?” “Jacques Rueff.” Small world.
Rueff was one of the great classical economists of the post-war era. He had been at the Banque de France in 1939, but was dismissed because of his Jewish ancestors. After the war, in 1958, in the middle of France’s war in Algeria, the economy was a mess, with runaway inflation and huge government deficits. The “Rueff Plan” set things right, by making the franc freely convertible into dollars, slicing the budget deficit in half, and reducing tariffs and exchange controls. The result was a boom that carried France into the 1970s.
But Rueff knew what time it was. He watched through the ‘60s as the US repeated, on a much larger scale, France’s errors in Indochina. He saw the outflow of dollars… and anticipated the end of the Bretton Woods system, when the US would no longer honor its obligations: “If we continue to operate under the same system, we shall some day arrive at the end of the means of external payments by the United States. This will mean that, whether it wants to or not, despite the agreement in the I.M.F. and the GAIT, it will have to establish an embargo on gold, establish quotas on imports and impose restrictions.”
It was Rueff who urged the French treasury to rush to Washington to exchange its dollars for gold while it still could. In February 1970, in his article in Le Monde, “The Monetary Sin of the West,” Rueff warned that the US would have to break the link between gold and the dollar.
Then, on August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration reneged on 200 years of solemn promises and ‘closed the gold window’ at the Treasury Department. Thenceforth, the anchor had been winched up. Neither France nor any other country could count on gold, at the statutory rate, to dispose of its surplus dollars. Instead, foreign governments had little choice; they almost had to buy US Treasuries…in effect, lending money to the US government and helping to shore up America’s proud tower of debt.
But of course, there is more to the story…more dots to connect…look what the new system did to America’s working classes. Wages had gone up more or less steadily, from the end of WWII to the mid-‘70s, at a rate of nearly 3% per year. But then, the new funny money paid off bigly for some people but not for the working stiff. After the ‘70s real wages were flat.
During this same period, after the ‘70s, financial assets were bid up by the new money. Their owners got richer and richer – not because they worked harder or increased output, but simply because they owned stocks, bonds, and real estate. While wages went nowhere, the wealth of the top 1% increased four times (from 1989 – 2022).
This drifty, shifty, anchor-less new money not only favored the rich, it undermined the economy. Even today, more than 50 years later, few people appreciate how it works or what it does. For this was a new kind of system -- a capitalism without real capital. Instead, it was capitalism on credit…where fake capitalists invested fake capital they had borrowed at fake interest rates in order to earn fake profits. Tune in tomorrow…for more!"
"We just got a major warning from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan. He said that the next 12 to 18 months are going to be very rough and that it most likely does not look like the economy will be expanding."
"Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, lending the popular name North America Nebula to the emission region cataloged as NGC 7000. To the right, just off the North America Nebula's east coast, is IC 5070, whose avian profile suggests the Pelican Nebula. The two bright nebulae are about 1,500 light-years away, part of the same large and complex star forming region, almost as nearby as the better-known Orion Nebula. At that distance, the 3 degree wide field of view would span 80 light-years.
This careful cosmic portrait uses narrow band images combined to highlight the bright ionization fronts and the characteristic glow from atomic hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen gas. These nebulae can be seen with binoculars from a dark location. Look northeast of bright star Deneb in the constellation Cygnus the Swan."
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
