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Economic pressures
Ash and I have been corresponding for quite some time. I sent him info on the economy. He has been after me to start a website,, won't happen. He wanted me to post here so, I asked him to start a thread that I would contribute to.
I've waited a couple of months but, it hasn't happened yet.
That brings us to the present. I've been in the groups for about 7 years. I've built this and that. I have great mechanical understanding but not much aptitude for electrical stuff. Like everybody else, I have lots of magnets and wheels and wire. It's just not my area of expertise.
The economy I understand better.
I saw the crash coming in summer of '05 while living in a log house in Bend, Oregon. I left Oregon to return to L.A. and get some money together. i didn't want to be pushing a shopping cart and eating dog food. I didn't start writing about the coming crash until '07. I started a thread at Burning Man.
ePlaya • View topic - The Long Cold Winter
I'll try to write on a regular basis. It is EXTREMELY difficult to explain and encompass the entire economy. There is a person who has made a very good attempt at just that.
Martin Armstrong is the best. He is a Princeton professor, same as Bernanke. The difference is that he got away from academia and knows what the real world is like. He and his undergraduates created a program that runs 23,000 variables. It also contains the economic history for much of the world for the last 2000---3000 years.
He had a very successful business around the world. U.S. GOV demanded his program and he told them to shove-it. GOV put him in prison for 7 years for contempt. After the 7 years, they convicted him of securities fraud. They convicted without the formalities of a trial. After a couple more years, they released him. They took everything. He is VERY bitter.
He never surrendered his program. It is now running with AI in real time.
He has an ENORMOUS command of history. He can tell you where any famous person was at any point in history ,,, within reason. Here is a link to get you started.
Manipulating the World Economy | Armstrong Economics
If you are interested in gold, there is a source of info that started several years ago.
"Another" has always been anonymous. It is believed that he was a central banker. After a few years of messages, Another dropped out and was followed by "friend of another" FOA. Later, FOA dropped out and was followed by "friend of friend of Another" FOFOA. FOFOA is not anonymous.
ALL 3 of the contributors are brilliant in their area. There is no detail relevant to gold that is too obscure to find. If you want the deepest understanding possible on the subject of gold, you have to read the writings of Another, FOA and FOFOA.
A writer who has an EXCELLENT understanding of economics is Antal Fekete.
Professor Antal E. Fekete - Articles
He is incomparable in his field. The "John Bedini" of details and understanding.
While it is useful to understand the economic forces that shape our world, it is imperative to understand the forces that are pulling the ultimate strings.
The bankers, the Bilderburgers, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Vatican, The U.N. et al are pulling lots of strings. These groups are also under the control of a higher level.
I'll add more as time permits. I currently post only in "comments" at the Daily Bell. The Daily Bell
I have leaned a lot there. Ingo Bischoff is an extremely informative contributor.
The Daily Bell
Bankers and Morality
Corollary #1 Gold is money
Corollary # 2 All false money is just credit.
Corollary # 3 Credit is just information
Corollary # 4 Capital never self-diminishes.
Banks don't print a bucket of money when you come in for a loan. They give you a bank chit saying that you are approved to receive goods and services from a vendor. Before a bank issues you a chit, they verify that you are a productive person AND they verify that you are likely to choose to repay the chit. The bank makes a judgment of both your prospective productivity and your character (morality).
As long as most of the currency stays in the banking system, nobody gets wise to the fact that the bank doesn't actually have the currency to back all those credits.
This power to dole out chits that can be exchanged for tangibles is a great force.
Lord Acton said that power corrupts. When this corruption occurs, bankers issue chits to people who are non-productive, dishonest or, both. Usually to themselves or to cronies.
Often to government.
The public printers of chits do the same thing. They issue chits to themselves and their cronies (voters). Productive people receive their chits from doing hard work. Non-productive people (bankers and beggars) receive their chits with only a minimum of work. The latter are a drag on society and productivity. They necessarily use subterfuge and force to get their chits. Eventually, the producers get tired of this and withdraw their productivity. The non-producers attempt to use force where genuine motivation is lacking.
Paper money is a chit stating that you have already been productive. Credit instruments are chits stating that you will be productive and moral in the future.
All paper money schemes eventually fail because the emitters of the chits invariably pass out chits to those who aren't honest or productive.
Paper money that is convertible to gold isn't susceptible to over-emission. It is much more difficult to emit gold-backed paper money to persons who are immoral and non-productive.
Gold can't be multiplied, Promises can be multiplied.
Electronic money is even more desirable to those who don't produce.
Imagine stealing $ 1 million in gold from a bank. Then, imagine stealing $ 1 million electronically from a bank. Cyber crime is flourishing.
Current "money" is just information; how productive you have been or how productive you will be in the future. The credit side of "money" is just a judgment on your productivity and morality.
"When Untermyer had J.P. Morgan on the witness stand, he asked him, "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?"
""Morgan responded, "No, sir, the first thing is CHARACTER."
Before money or property?"
Morgan reassured, "Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it. [credit]"
FOFOA: Moneyness 2: Money is Credit
Douglas MacArthur said that economic collapse always follows moral collapse. The bankers are now bringing this to fruition.
"Money" is just information and we live in the information age. Bankers created enormous piles of false money to keep their "industry" going. The approaching reality is that the financial industry will shrink to a fraction of it's current size.
In recent years, money-and-credit went up at 6 times that the rate that the GDP grew.
Much of this increase was awarded by the financial industry to,,,, themselves.
The financial industry tries to keep growing at the same time that the productive sector is shrinking. It will eventually be reduced by about 65%.
The fact is; a bank is just an information clearinghouse. They don't produce wealth. They don't store wealth. As the information-age streamlines all businesses, banking will shrink enormously. Banks are tasked with ACCURATELY dispensing credit.
Bankers took on the task of hoarding wealth. They generated loans and fees that were not an accurate representation of risk. The banking industry had become so overcrowded that banks became profit-constrained.
Financial services reached a point where they represented 19% of GDP. That is a VERY good trick for an industry that doesn't produce anything.
There was no profit to be found so, they originated liar loans to keep an income stream.
That blew up so they sold the loans to GOV.
Still looking for income, they took free money from GOV and re-deposited it with the FED at interest.
Still looking for income, they forced the FED into ZIRP in the hopes that they could find "spread" SOMEWHERE.
9 banks hold derivatives with a notional value of $ 228 trillion.
Click to view link
So, why are they lusting for a measly $ 2 trillion sitting on the sidelines?
Generating derivatives was an obvious declaration that profit was not to be found in normal bank business.
Way too many banks with way too little honest profit available. The lifeline that keeps giant zombies alive has drained the producing economy. The golden goose has been starved.
The TBTF banks are kicking and clawing their way to the surface at the expense of the little people. The enabler is the central bank.
The banks aren't the only entity that jumped on the money bandwagon.
Hegel, Marx, Keynes and D.C. have had one hell of a party. The bill is coming due.
"When the accrued expenses of the government's entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually"
Click to view link
GOV (you and me) accumulate debt at the rate of $ 100 million an hour.
$ 3.87 billion a day.
Kotlikoff says that the actual debt is $ 211 trillion.
Click to view link
This isn't going to end happily.
market fundamentals
Everyone understands market fundamentals like supply-and-demand. Often, it is difficult to see these fundamentals at work.
Towards the end of WW II, it became obvious that the allies would win. Representatives met at Bretton Woods to form a new monetary system.
Bretton Woods system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It was obvious that America would exit the war in the best shape of the allies.
It was decided that the American dollar would be backed by gold and all other currencies would be linked to the dollar. Centuries of experience had proven that only a commodity-backed currency could survive. The average life of a paper currency was only 30--40 years.
At the end of the war, America had 3% of the population and 50% of the manufacturing capacity,,, in the free world. Post-war, America held about 20,205 tons of gold. It made sense to tie the dollar to gold and all other currencies to the dollar.
Around 1964, American politicians and war profiteers got visions of grandeur and set off to build the current America. The Viet-Nam war was ignited for no particular reason other than profit. President Johnson started the "Great society" project.
America became the welfare-warfare state. GOV printed dollars to pay for all this. The dollar became overvalued compared to gold. Various countries demanded gold instead of dollars in payment. By summer of 1971, gold was flowing out of the treasury at the rate of 100 tons a day. President Nixon shut off the redemption of U.S. debt in gold.
By the late 60s, the rest of the world had rebuilt much of it's manufacturing capacity. Low-wage producers were able to compete with America in several areas of manufacturing. This caused American wages to stagnate, starting in about 1971. As more countries competed, American wages fell even further.
Unwilling to lower their standard of living, Americans borrowed 80% of the savings worldwide.
With foreign competition, American wages stagnated. This situation ended when containerized shipping was perfected. The Emma Maersk can carry 11,000 containers at one time with a crew of 11. It can move a container from China to Long Beach, Ca for the same cost as it takes to move the same container 100 miles inland. ALL U.S. manufacturing was thrown into competition with low-wage markets.
American wages in Manufacturing should have fallen to a global mean wage.
Borrowing held wages up. There are 5 main areas of value-added commerce.
Mining,,, manufacturing,,, agriculture,,,, forestry and fishing.
All of these depend on energy (the master resource) for converting resources to finished products.
The non value added sectors like GOV, banks and lawyers are parasitical on the productive sector.
In the 40s, 1/3 of Americans worked in agriculture. When agriculture was mechanized and automated, they moved to manufacturing. Later, when manufacturing was mechanized, automated and outsourced, they moved to government dependency. Currently 53% of Americans depend on a check from GOV.
U.S. GOV printed the reserve currency and was able to enjoy quite an advantage. With the closure of the "gold window", there was great danger to the U.S. dollar. It was no longer backed by gold.
Kissinger convinced the House of Saud to accept only dollars for oil. Thus, the gold-dollar morphed into the petro-dollar. This bought a few more years of life for the dollar. In 2011, the U.S. dollar reached it's 40th birthday as a fiat currency. History says that 40 years is about the limit.
History also says that wages should fall to a mean. Not wanting to reduce our standard of living downward, Americans borrowed to keep their standards.
Originally, cars were bought with cash. A house loan was 5 years. No longer having our former purchasing power, we started using credit. We used tomorrow's wages to pay for todays goods. As we got (effectively) poorer due to declining purchasing power, we had to reach further and further into the future to pay for today. We promised tomorrow's wages. This worked out OK to a point. When low-wage competitors took our jobs, we couldn't pay what we had promised. The demand for American labor just isn't there.
The producing economy is what supplies the capital for taxes and bond redemption. When the producing economy contracts or dies, the parasitic economy must do the same. This can be avoided for a time but, not forever.
Ludwig Von Mises made it very clear. The end of the credit bubble can NEVER be avoided.
China, 2012 and Von Misesâ Crack-Up Boom | Darryl Schoon | FINANCIAL SENSE
In the end, the market will dictate the outcome. The politicians delude themselves.
The State
You must look at the wider battlefield for, a battlefield it is.
In the beginning, there was man, tribes and clans. This evolved into society. Society was a pretty good idea. It allowed man more prosperity and security than the family unit.
After a time, the State reared it's ugly head. The State billed itself as an entity that was absolutely necessary to the prosperity, protection and organization of society.
While the State promised to provide for your earthly needs, religion promised to care for your eternal soul. They couldn't prove it existed so, they had to craft their message with LOTS of heavenly rewards. There is still a lot of debate.
Soul According to Tom Robbins « samadhisoft.com
The State is working mightily to postpone it's upcoming obsolescence. It screeches endlessly that only the mighty State can provide prosperity and protection. The parasitic banks have managed to undo much of the prosperity promised by the State.
The implied protection from the State doesn't seem to be covered in the case of bank fraud.
The protection from the State as far as enemies of the people rings VERY hollow when you consider that the state had to manufacture those same enemies,,,, before they could protect you. The State is becoming obsolete. Technology has made most of it's functions redundant.
The State has always known this was coming. The State managed to get a stranglehold on the important functions of commerce and society. Besides the stranglehold on commerce and society, the State has inculcated EVERYONE to believe that the State is a necessary part of all that is useful.
Frank Chodorov along with Albert Nock wrote about the State being the great deceiver and the great evil.
Rise and Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces That Underlie Social Institutions: Frank Chodorov: Amazon.com: Books
The State finds itself in the position where most of it's "functions" are better done by the private sector.. Private space-launches have perfectly illustrated the enormous efficiency gap between the private sector and the State sector. [NASA]
USPS vs FED EX
The list goes on and on. The State long ago became redundant.
This huge gorging parasite came up with a solution. It would tax the snot out of everybody [producers] and give this wealth to non-producers. These non-producers knowing where their bread was buttered would always go along with whatever the State desired. Hegel worked it out quite a while ago.
Communitarianism - Final Synthesis In Hegelian Dialectic
The redundant State buys the votes of the non-producers with the stolen wealth of the producers. The State is particularly useful to the parasites because it uses violence that is proscribed to the individual parasites.
In true parasitic fashion, the Grand Parasite has severely weakened the host.
The State has destroyed the Rule of Law to benefit the nexus of parasitism, the corporation. It is undying, untouchable and without morals.
Being eternal, it has no compunction against destroying the living.
It lives in a tight symbiosis with the State.
Corporations are given immunity and are very powerful. Power corrupts and attracts the already corrupt. 2 % of the populace are sociopaths. Sociopaths are attracted to the corporate structure because they need immunity to rise above the law and do what they do best.
The evil symbiotic triplets care not in the slightest what happens to man. They plan to never become ACTUALLY redundant.
They have a lock on control of resources.
The master resource is energy. They work hard to insure that energy is subject to CENTRAL distribution.
U.S. GOV has recently amended the Clean water Act to claim control of ALL water.
Central control of electricity is absolutely essential of the State is to avoid obsolescence and redundancy. GOV has installed a smart meter on your house so that they can cut off your resources any time that they feel it is necessary. The last thing that GOV wants is personal energy independence. That could lead to water and food independence.
If the People can't be artificially impoverished, how can they be forced to work supporting the non-producers?
The evil triplets have once again crashed the economy.
ALL government is socialist by definition. GOV takes from the producers and distributes it to the non-producers. We are often confronted with a choice between socialism and capitalism. This isn't anything but a lie. Capitalism is a production strategy and socialism is a DISTRIBUTION system.
Mankind uses saved energy and saved resources to accomplish projects that Man can not do on his own. These savings are capital. If we want to progress from being hunter-gatherers, we have to utilize capital.
Cooperation and capital are the foundation of society.
ALL government is socialist. GOV is always trying to promote democracy. Democracy is socialism-lite and eventually morphs into communism. No democracy has ever survived. Yes, Iceland is an exception. No democracy has ever worked for very long. Democracy worked in Athens because 1/3 of Athenians were slaves.
The average duration of a democracy is 150--200 years.
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government'
'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury'
'From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship'"
A democracy is always temporary in nature
America is a disaster-in-the-making. It too will join the graveyard of empires that over-reached. None of this is anything new, EXCEPT that this time, the whole world will be drug down.
America's downfall was set in motion with the ratification of the constitution. Created, September 17, 1787. Ratified, June 21, 1788.
The Articles of Confederation were a LOOSE agreement. The constitutional convention went ahead without Jefferson. They knew that he would try to stop the ratification.
America was to be put on the path of a bastard stepchild of the British empire. It had to be consolidated to be controlled. The bankers needed a nation not, a loose confederation.
Many years later, the bankers once again prevailed. They forced the dimwit Lincoln to invade the southern states. Even Lincoln admitted that he had NO authority to force the states to remain in the union. Why did he invade and kill 600,000 fellow Americans?
"I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and for America I fear the bankers most."
Abraham Lincoln.
It's been downhill ever since.
One of the the weak points of the constitution is the supreme court. It is a federal creation so it will always advocate increasing federal power. FED GOV was originally supposed to regulate interstate commerce and a few other things.
The constitution has allowed it to grow into a deadly weapon of the Anglo empire and the London bankers.
England over reached and couldn't afford it's empire. It handed off the baton of empire to America. America has now over reached and is bankrupt. We have 850---1,000 military bases all over the world. We start wars as a hobby. We kill millions on the flimsiest excuses. That is empire.
America started as a confederation. Then, with a constitution, it became a republic. The founding fathers knew that democracy had no future. Democracy is mob-rule and the bankers wanted a mob as it is easier to control. Universal suffrage and the 17th amendment insured that America would have mob rule. True to form, the populace has bankrupted the country.
49% of Americans receive direct assistance from GOV and 22% of children live in poverty.
34 Signs That America Is In Decline
For more information read;
Frank Chodorov "The Rise and Fall of Society"
Joseph Tainter, "The Collapse of Complex Societies".
Reinhart and Roghoff, "8 Centuries of Financial Foley"
Ludwig Von Mises. "Human Action"
"The market for Liberty"
"The End of Money and the Future of Civilization"
Ayn Rand
Murray Rothbard
Friedrich Hayek
Adam Smith
You can read much of their works online.
Famous Economists
We are offered a choice between fascism and Marxism. Neither plan includes personal or economic freedom. We will be free to work our tails off once again. Our children will be free to work like slaves to buy back that which was stolen from us. We can only hope that technology or violence will bring an end to the cycle.
The future desired by the state is pure socialism with the PTB in charge. The corporations are moving us to a fascist form of socialism. Given a chance, it will destroy America like it destroyed the U.S.S.R.
Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. Reagan warned us about socialism.
Commercial made 50 years ago by Ronald Reagan - YouTube
Reagan also proved by way of the Grace Commission that 1/3 of all tax money was wasted and NONE of the income tax collected went to GOV. ALL of it goes to the bankers.
The Grace Commission - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Financing wars
This is a quote from Ingo Bischoff. He knows way more than me and he states it very clearly.
"We are going to make profound change in this country not because we should but because we will have no choice. There will simply be no more money to finance the kind of insanity that we're engaged in right now, both overseas and at home. We're not going to be able to finance social security, Medicare, Medicaid or the defense establishment in the scale we have in the past."
We have always paid for our wars through a central bank created fiat currency. It was taxation by inflation which paid for the wars.
The War of Independence was paid with the "Continental", a fiat currency created by the Bank of North America chartered by the Continental Congress, and by a fiat U.S. currency created by the First Bank of the U.S. chartered by the Congress in 1791.
The War of 1812 was paid with U.S. fiat currency created by the Second Bank of the U.S. chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1816.
The Civil War was paid with the U.S. Greenback, a fiat currency issued by the U.S. Treasury Department on authorization of the U.S. Congress.
The cost of WW I was paid by inflating the Federal Reserve Note currency by engaging in illegal secondary market sales of U.S. government bonds. When these illegal Open Market Operations caused the collapse of the redeemable Federal Reserve Note in 1933, the Congress created a Federal Reserve central bank as an agency of the U.S. Government in 1935.
The cost of WW II, of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War in Europe were all paid through inflation of the irredeemable, legal tender Federal Reserve Note.
After the suspension of the redemption requirement in 1971, the value of the Federal Reserve Note was stabilized when the USD became the world reserve currency used by every country in the world to pay its oil bills.
The first Gulf War, the second Gulf War and to some extent the Afghan War was fought with hyper inflating the Federal Reserve Note through TARP, QE1, QE2... The irony is that the wars in Irag and Afghanistan are actions to maintain the value of the USD by securing the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. However, to try to rescue the value of the Federal Reserve Note is futile.
The only question is how will the value of the FRN collapse... .??? Will it be a slow death, or will it be a sudden death... ???
The preference should be a slow death which will come about by creating a redeemable parallel currency to allow people to rescue at least some of their wealth.
To turn the situation around, the monetary system in this country has to return to the RBD currency under the gold standard as its main currency. This will only happen, if the 16th and 17th amendments are to be repealed.
Once the states have to collect the money to pay for the federal government at the local level, there will not be a bloated U.S. government.
I guarantee it.
Gold and a netting currency
This is also from Bischoff where he talks about gold and a "netting currency".
Obviously, U.S. GOV doesn't want the huge restrictions that would be brought about by a currency that was gold backed TRUTHFULLY. No Fort Knox BB.
To treat GOLD as a commodity whose price goes up or down is missing the point. The point is that gold is MONEY. Therefore, GOLD has no price. What goes up or down is NOT the "price" of GOLD, but the irredeemable, government central bank created fiat currencies.
The question about confiscation of gold is also besides the point. Since there is no redeemable currency left in the world, the gold standard has been effectively expunged. Therefore, it matters little whether the estimated 160,000 tons of gold in above ground inventory are held by governments or by private individuals.
Gold as part of a monetary system is valuable only, if it supports the existence of a "netting" currency. Gold was confiscated, because it supported private "netting" currencies which competed with government central bank fiat currency. Governments can ONLY create "fiat" currency. They cannot create a "netting" currency. To have them confiscate gold when they already hold the monopoly on fiat money creation seems unnecessarily provocative. What do governments have to gain by confiscating gold at this point... ???
The dirty little secret is that it doesn't matter who holds the gold. It only matters whether a currency can be redeemed for gold, meaning that the "gold standard" is functioning. Only with the revival of a "netting" currency can gold again perform its proper function as MONEY. Until then, it doesn't matter who stores the GOLD.
The forty year long worldwide float of government central bank fiat currencies, ignoring the function of GOLD as MONEY, has proven unworkable. To talk about a "price" for GOLD in terms of fiat currency, or to talk about its confiscation is to ignore the only solution to the disasterous attempt to manage the world economy through the circulation of fiat currencies.
"Tier 1 capital" is just another scheme put forth to rescue the central bank currencies, now that the "gold leasing scheme" (Jamaica Accord of the late 1970s between central banks, bullion banks and low cost oil producers) is falling apart.
GOV and survival
Bankers and GOV are only worried about THEIR survival. This is the best description of GOV
The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. All States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin. A struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak. And since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against other States, it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. Mikhail Bakunin, The Immorality of the State, 1870
British feudalism and Anglo-Saxon political economy
This is Bischoff commenting on an article by Bill Bonner at the Daily Bell.
The Daily Bell - How Government 'Works'
BONNER: "Adam Smith thought the arm attached to the "invisible hand" was the arm of God.
BISCHOFF: Adam Smith was correct, if you equate "natural law" with "God" and you define "natural law" as that which works as brought about by nature.
BONNER: "... kings had a special role to play, that they were appointed... and anointed, by God (through his ministers in the church of St. Peter)... to rule."
BISCHOFF: Bill's explanation requires a broader perspective. Once humanoids passed the hunting and gathering stage of economic existence, and humans achieved surpluses through animal husbandry and agriculture by requiring other humans to expend energy in the process of those activities as an alternative to becoming food for the other humans, then the requirement for government arose.
Government must be looked upon as a necessity to require the check of detrimental human instincts for the survival of the species. On the other hand, government has been an instrument of force exercised by some humans to benefit from the "labor" of other humans, i.e. a force to protect the indulgence in detrimental human instincts which is the purpose of government to prevent. It was not until the time of the "Enlightenment" that this became clear to people at large. Much of the thinking of the scholars of the Enlightenment was based on thinking evolved from the Mesopotamian civilization, through Greece and Rome, through the Protestant Reformation until the implementation of the enlightenment thinking found its expression in the original U.S. Constitution.
Political economy is society organized to make possible the survival and procreation of families and other groups. The first well developed political economic system was "Slavery". It placed the primary emphasis on "Labor" as one of the three factors of production. This system found its end with the demise of Rome.
The Church of Rome (Church of St. Peter) inherited what was left of the Roman Empire. To teach the doctrine of Jesus Christ, it made common cause with regional rulers by sanctioning the "divine right of rulers" to govern over certain lands. This put the rulers in the position of having to provide for the physical survival of the population, but also using them as serfs to extract labor, while the Church of Rome reserved the right to look after the "spiritual" wellbeing of the population. With this arrangement of the Church of Rome and the rulers over lands on the European Continent, "Feudalism" as a political economic system was born by making "Land" the primary factor of production.
With the Angles, Saxons, Friesens and Jutes fleeing feudalism on the Continent for the English Isles, the political economy set up by the Anglo-Saxons in England was the complete opposite of the feudal system. This system was seriously damaged by the invasion of the Normans and the victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
The original American settlers are descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. The settlers of the Southern colonies are largely stock of impoverished British aristocracy which came to North America via the West Indies. They tried to import Englishmen as indentured servants to propagate feudalism in the New World. When this failed, their agents in England hit on the idea of "black slavery".
Thus, the battle between British feudalism and Anglo-Saxon political economy was transferred to the North American colonies. This time the Anglo-Saxons won at the Battle of Yorktown.
The U.S. Constitution by divine providence is a document which enshrines Anglo-Saxon political economy. However, this does not mean that the battle between the feudal thinking of a part of our society and the attempt to apply the Anglo-Saxon principles enshrine in the U.S. Constitution isn't as fierce as it was a thousand years ago. "
Central Banks and alternative systems
There was a system called "Real Bills"Doctrine" RBD. It worked perfectly but, did NOT allow banks to make much at all. Of course, the banks worked tirelessly to destroy it. Central banking started about 300 years ago. It has been a curse ever since then.
T: "The land value tax exclusivity concedes implicity that government owns all of the land."
B: It does no such thing. You are not familiar with the Anglo-Saxon principles which Sir Thomas Dale made part of his rules and regulations to save the Jamestown colony from demise.
The land value tax has nothing to do with ownership of land. Unimproved land cannot be "owned" in the first place. There have been dozens of lawsuits brought against states by individual "simple fee" title holders. No plaintiff has ever prevailed.
Because you do not understand the Anglo-Saxon principles embodied in the Constitutions of the fifty states, you fall prey to the propaganda put out by the real estate speculators which claims that ownership of land is protected by the U.S. Constitution. Such propaganda is total crock, and every court in the country will tell you so.
The land value tax is a natural phenomenon. It applies at the local level. It is nature's way of paying for the necessity to have government, while putting people in charge of how much government they want. The land value tax protects the earnings of labor and the return to capital. Depending on the states, California being the worst, the present system of collecting taxes shields real estate speculators from paying the land value tax. Instead, the payments of the costs of government are squarely socked to the individual income earner and to the investor in capital assets, leaving the real estate speculator walk away unscathed with the rent collected.
The present game of speculating in real estate is the same old game 150 years ago, only in a different disguise. However, you cannot see ...
It isn't difficult to undo the propaganda about "land ownership". Actually, if you study the history of settlement in North America, the current propaganda simply falls apart on the basis of the facts. Yet, ever generation has to learn these facts anew. The generation to which you belong has no idea about the history of this country nor of the U.S. Constitution when it comes to taxation.
I believe that they soon will develop and ardent interest... .
Ah... Excellent question. The reason why it is possible today, and why RBD currency was undermined before, is the fact that today we have computers and digital currency which we didn't have a 150 years ago.
The vast body of academic knowledge about Real Bills and RBD banking exists in the archives of the old line universities. The universities and business schools would have to teach Adam Smith and expose the theories of Keynes and Friedman to be unworkable.
There is no doubt that human nature will always drive people to "plunder" the wealth created by others. Bankers can be suspected to do so more than others. However, RBD currency is solid and viable in the long run, particularly when tied to the gold standard.
There is no doubt in my mind, that the creation of RBD currency under the gold standard would immediately eliminate the unemployment problem, provided all taxes are collected with the land value tax only.
Then paper currency under RBD is created at the local level and the taxes to run government at all levels is collected at the local level. Then, the saying that, "all politics is local", will again prove its truthfulness.
What banks were supposed to keep out of circulation was "idle" currency, which is currency over and above the value of Real Bills in their portfolio. Since Real Bills mature in 90 days, the currency created against them exspires in 90 days as well. Banks have to constantly discount Real Bills to keep currency in circulation. So, if there is currency, previously created when the volume of Real Bills was larger, the bankers were required to keep "excess" currency to the value of Real Bills out of circulation until value of Real Bills in their inventory again matched the overall amount of currency created.
Many banks violated their bank charters by using "idle" currency for real estate speculation. Real estate investments don't create inflation in the consumer products market. The influx of "idle" RBD currency into real estate amounted to "double drawing" Real Bills. It created a bubble in the real estate market over time.
These rogue acts by bankers were never really discovered until the real estate bubbles burst after a 18 to 20 year cycle. When that happend, people were anxious to exchange paper currency for gold. Bankers had to pay out their required gold reserves and had to rediscount their Real Bills for additional gold. However, they could not get enough gold because they actually had "double drawn" Real Bills when they put the RBD currency in real estate investments. Then the politics set when bankers were asked to explain why they didn't have enough gold after they rediscounted all their Real Bills.
J.P. Morgan was fully aware of what was going on with these banks using "idle" currency for real estate speculation. He tried to use his influence to curtail the worst excesses, but trying to reign in rogue bankers is like herding cats.
Unless there were manufactured bank runs to drive out competition, banks were never called upon to redeem large amount of paper currency. Only when the real estate speculation bubble burst did people become suspicious and demanded gold for their paper currency. It was then that bankers were exposed of having inflated the RBD currency, and they became liable to prosecution for fraud.
J.P. Morgan, more than any other American banker, understood the function of gold with regard to RBD currency creation. It was he who uttered, "Gold is money, and nothing else." By always keeping that in mind, Morgan was always situated in such a way as to whether the real estate speculation cycles. He gained control and influence by bailing out bankers who got themselves into trouble with speculating in real estate or natural resources.
DB: "This seems to have been a trigger for a massive rise in equity trading that turned railroads into the first big equity bubble. JP Morgan was one of the catalysts for this evolution, and the advent of the Federal Reserve in 1913 provided the fiat money fuel that rocketed the market into the Roaring 20s."
B: It "seems"... .??? Let me clue you in on a secret, so you won't have to "surmise".
1. The bubble in railroad equities had to do with "land speculation". It had nothing to do with an equity bubble in ownership of capital. Bankers used "idle", redeemable RBD currency, which they were required to keep in bank vault, to "invest" in real estate needed to build railroad tracks. The inflation of the RBD currency thus created could not be detected for several decades.
2. To stop this sort of RBD currency inflation, the states insisted that the federal government supervise the creation of RBD currency. That was the reason for the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Every other explanation is outright bovine excrement (BS). Were the rogue bankers happy about the states putting a leash om them with a national currency franchise... ??? Absolutely not. While the rogue bankers couldn't stop the Federal Reserve Act to come into existence, they had no trouble to soon find enough federal politicians ready to undermine "congressional oversight" of RBD currency creation. With help of those federal politicians by neglecting their oversight function, the rogue bankers soon felt no compunction to brazenly violate the FRA. None of the penalties provided in the FRA for violation of the act were ever applied against the rogue bankers.
3. As soon as federal politicians climbed into bed with rogue bankers, it was only a matter of time before the RBD redeemable currency system would be destroyed and exiled. The year in which it did happend was 1933. In 1935, federal politicians took over currency creation with the Banking Act by creating the "FED" as an "independent" agency of the federal government. With the National Banking Act of 1935, the federal politicians invited the banker to climb back into the bed with them again. That's where we are today. We have a monetary system with demonetized currency created against debt voted by federal politicians who through the FED use "prime dealers" in government bonds to sell this debt in secondary markets and use the big banks to distribute the proceeds according to "ear marks". The rest is just an attempt by the big banks to bamboozle the public in thinking that they are dealing with real banking. Real banking means "positive value" currency. What banks perpetrate is circulation of "negative value" currency.
As Lincold once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." I hope federal politicians and big bankers keep this wisdom of Lincoln in mind as the embark on TARP, QE1, QE2, QE3... ..
4. There is a world of difference in investing RBD currency under the gold standard, and investing a de-monetized currency created against sovereign debt. You cannot properly show the financial condition of a corporation, unless the accounting unit you use has a standard. Using a de-monetized, debt based currency, which has no standard, to account for the assets on your balance sheet must sooner or later destort equity values. It is inevitable that equity markets will catch on. That's exactly what led to the 1987 stock market crash. Enter Sir Alan Greespan as newly appointed chairman of the Fed in 1987. Instead of letting the investors absorb the equity (currency value) losses, he monetized them. An executive order by Ronald Reagan ex-post-facto legalized the intervention. It made it legal to intervene in the future without being guilty of collusion by instituting the Working Group on Markets. The Plunge Protection Team (Working Group on Markets) has been at it ever since.
5. The market goes down today, and tomorrow it is back up. Why... ??? PPT intervention. There is no trading, but the Dow stays up. How... ??? It's the PPT intervention in the equity markets through the options market to keep up equity prices. However, by monetizing the losses on the Dow, the PPT actually decreases the equity values. Thousands of pension funds, IRAs and 401Ks must invest de-monetized, debt based currency in equities to try an beat inflation. To let equity markets reveal the actual value of equities would cause a revolt among the savers. Therefore, all the equity losses are monetized by intervention of the PPT. The dirty little secret is that without a gold standard, "price" and "value" have no relationship to each other.
DB: "Conclusion: People have certainly lost faith in stocks - but this must be seen within the context of the larger bull market in money metals. This is what the paper money crowd is fighting against and why stocks are resistant to re-stimulation."
Your conclusion is somewhat contorted, but you have your finger on the problem.
Natural law and parasites
You can talk about the good guys but, much depends on where you stand. Patriots in Cork are traitors in Kent. The Redman was killed here by the millions. The British empire was very successful. They used India as a greenhouse to enslave China with opium.
The victors write the history books and it becomes very difficult to discern who is good and bad.
When one speaks of the law, one must differentiate between natural and man-made law.
Natural law was laid out by Mother Nature and Charles Darwin.
Mother Nature does not want the weak to survive.
Socialism demands that the weak survive.
Frederic Bastiat had a lot to say about man-made law.
GOV produces nothing so it can only give what it has taken from others.
GOV is a scheme to force the producers to support the non-producers.
Mao Zedong. "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun".
This pretty much sums it up.
Socialist GOV would see the negation of all Darwinian pressures. Sometimes referred to as "pissing in the gene pool".
Fascist GOV would see the elimination of all non-performing assets. Sometimes referred to as the "anthill society". Produce and die.
If you are a productive person, your enemies are the legions of parasites.
The banker, the bureaucrat and the beggar.
The honest man operates from a reference of honesty. The parasite, being a non-producer can't afford honesty. The honest man is always at a disadvantage to the parasite.
The moral man holds his standards. The parasite can't afford to be squeamish. He will kill and rob without hesitation.
The parasites will give the hard-working man just enough leash to keep him producing.
The moral man will never prevail because he won't do the requisite killing.
He will kill a dog or a predator that steal stock but, he won't kill his 2 legged predator.
The parasites are very big on pushing democracy. That is their ticket for a free ride.
Democracy has never worked with just a few exceptions. Iceland being one of them.
All democracies eventually get overloaded with parasites who just vote for support instead of working for it. Ancient Greece had democracy if you ignore the fact that 1/3 of the people were slaves.
That is why America was founded as a republic and not a democracy.
America will crash because it is a democracy fast on it's way to socialism. U.S.S.R. crashed for the same reason. The Eurozone will do the socialism swan dive onto the rocks.
Regardless of the crashes, the people at the top plan to stay at the top.
The Story of Your Enslavement - YouTube
Awesome posts Danny
Thanks very much jdodson.
We all have to keep in mind that the bankers own mass media. If it isn't an outright lie, it is a false paradigm. There is a recent movie out on Lincoln. How timely. Just when people are ASKING the FED GOV to secede.
The Daily Reckoning Presents
Lincoln, Uncensored
Jeffrey Tucker
To be sure, this was a mind-bending experience. I watched Steven Spielbergs movie Lincoln on the same weekend that I read Joseph Fallons Lincoln Uncensored, the recent e-book of the week released by the Laissez Faire Club. Worlds collided.
Fallons book, which is brilliant and the most useful Lincoln book Ive read, sticks to the facts by organizing material from the 10 volumes of collected writings and speeches of Lincoln. The reader is given Lincolns own words on subjects like slavery, secession, Fort Sumter, equality of blacks and Mexicans, habeas corpus, war power, free speech, tariffs, debt, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union, and vastly more.
Fallon (educated at American University and Columbias School of International and Public Affairs) is, obviously, a master researcher. His editorial notes take advantage of all modern scholarship and are carefully cited.
Lincoln emerges as the consummate politician, and I dont mean that as a compliment. Political power was his driving principle. All else was malleable, words and rhetoric formulated as means to an end, and that end was centralization of the state. This is sadly true of his late-life sympathies to the abolitionist cause. They served his purposes well.
Fallon has added to each section some background discussion of the core issues. Just as an example, he assembles Lincolns pro- secession statements, such as:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better... Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.
Its a great statement, one that summarizes the classical liberal position for right of self-determination. Can this possibly be the same war president who ruled during the appalling bloodbath that killed 620,000 soldiers and perhaps another 100,000-plus civilians in order to prevent secession and shore up a forced union? Yes, it is. The year was 1848. He was speaking on behalf of the Texas secession from Mexico.
At the same time, Lincolns liberally minded words do not pertain to human rights generally. He did not oppose slavery in general. He was opposed to the extension of slavery for political reasons. By his own account, he declared a thousand times that that government cannot rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.
Reading Fallons book, the contrast between the liberating demigod of the civic religion and the undeniable reality, as illustrated through Lincolns own words, could not be more stark.
Then you see the movie and all the portrayed events take on a completely new meaning. Instead of a charming humanitarian, you see a clever politician drunk on power. Instead of a liberator, you see how the language of liberation was used to support despotism. Parts of the movie hint at the truth. He suppressed free speech. He assumed dictatorial powers without legal justification. He jailed critics. In the name of union, he turned the land of the free into killing fields.
Reading Fallon, two great problems with Abraham Lincoln emerge: his means and his ends. The means were themselves horrifying, and the new new Lincoln provides only a hint of it with the piles of limbs and bodies that variously appear in battlefield and hospice scenes. This war was ghastly and unnecessary (Britain ended slavery peacefully just 30 years earlier, as Thomas DiLorenzo frequently points out). He ordered mass executions. He made the Bill of Rights a dead letter.
In order to understand Lincolns passion for preserving the Union, you have to put yourself into a different era of federal finance. There was but one source of revenue: the tariff. There were no internal taxes. There was no too big to fail, because there was no central bank capable of bailing out an entire industrial base. As Lincoln himself said by way of explanation, The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family (1861). The Souths ports collected 75% of all federal tax revenue. Without that revenue thats what secession meant the federal government would be starved.
So in one sense, Lincoln was doing only what weve come to expect of presidents. One only has to imagine how Bush or Obama or any modern American president would react to the prospect of a 75% cut in incoming revenue especially if there were no central bank to make up the difference. Would any modern president let the people go, just stand by, and let the federal government starve? Let every opportunity for graft, payoffs, spending on projects, and patronage just evaporate? No chance.
The controversy has raged for a long time about whether the Civil War was really about slavery. It depends on the meaning of about. In terms of Lincolns motivation, the Fallon book makes it indisputably clear that it was not the desire to end slavery that drove Lincolns prosecution of the war, but the need for national unity, which in turn comes down to enforcing the revenue stream. Anyone who knows anything about how politics operates can see this very clearly. In fact, I dont even know why this would be a controversial claim at all. Why does the head of any state put down rebellion? To liberate people or to enslave them?
As for the motivation of the South to secede, matters become more complex. The desire to shore up slavery and protect the territory from the abolitionists played a large and even decisive role, given that most everyone assumed that slavery was essential to the South. There was also the desire on the part of Southern elites to set up a new government that could form its own trading relationships with foreign nations. And though the demand for secession is an essential right of a free people, the new Confederate government drafted, taxed, and inflated in a way that contradicts every other principle of liberty.
The lesson here is that no government or power of any size or scale can be relied upon to defend liberty. And governments in wartime come into their own, stopping at nothing to protect their power at the peoples expense.
The movie ends with a sequence that is supposed to inspire, but only gave me chills. Thaddeus Stevens has his wife read him the text of the 13th Amendment. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. He breathes a great sigh of relief.
Slavery is gone, and thank God. But what about involuntary servitude? Ask the hundreds of thousands of people now locked up for nonviolent crimes like smoking pot. Ask those who are jailed for failing to fork over enough of their earnings to the government. Ask those who are jailed for sharing files online. Ask those who are jailed for creating alternative currencies or just trying to run a business but failing to adhere to every jot and tittle of the central plan.
In the film, Stevens believes liberty has won. Yet Im sitting in a theater full of involuntary servants. Indeed, involuntary servitude is the very essence of government. It is the very means by which government seizes control of society. A real 13th Amendment, one that actually got rid of involuntary servitude, would guarantee freedom in every sense. That is not what happened. How and why should be a concern of every citizen interested in the fate of liberty.
No one book and certainly no one movie can possibly capture the incredible complexities of this astonishing event in American history. But it seems reasonable to start with Lincolns own words as presented in his letters and speeches. This requires carefully going through 10 volumes of his collected works. Lincoln Uncensored has done the work for you.
Robots and automation
I'm writing these posts in pieces to try to organize my thoughts. This post is on automation.
Here is an article talking about he future of manufacturing.
New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry - NYTimes.com
Another good article;
How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs : NPR
Even the Chinese are buying robots;
Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots | Singularity Hub
Robots do jobs beyond the dexterity of humans;
Robot Domination – Look At The Making of a Memory Card | Singularity Hub
ABB's Super Fast Industrial Robots Impress [Videos] | Singularity Hub
Surgery robots can peel a grape. Robots can play a violin. Football robots play soccer. On and on.
Losing manufacturing jobs?
Robert B. Reich
America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin
America and
the rest of the developing world. Right?
Well, not quite.
It turns out that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing all over
the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management in New York took
a close look at employment trends in 20 large economies recently, and
found that since 1995 more than 22 million factory jobs have
In fact, the United States has not even been the biggest loser.
Between 1995 and 2002, we lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing
jobs. But over the same period, the Japanese lost 16 percent of
theirs. And get this: Many developing nations are losing factory jobs.
During those same years, Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline.
Here's the real surprise. China saw a 15 percent drop. China, which is
fast becoming the manufacturing capital of the world, has been losing
millions of factory jobs.
What's going on?
In two words: Higher productivity. All over the world, factories
becoming more efficient. They've installed new equipment and utilized
new technology. And that often means fewer jobs.
Market reforms have also played a role. In China, new modern factories
are replacing large, inefficient state-run plants. The result is that
even as China produces more goods than ever before, millions of
factory workers have been laid off.
Manufacturing is following the same path as agriculture. As
productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed.
In 1910, almost a third of adult Americans worked on farms. Now, fewer
than 3 percent do. But American agriculture is the most productive in
the world.
Similarly, global manufacturing output is rising-since the mid-'90s,
up 30 percent-even as worldwide manufacturing employment has been
dropping. The two trends are directly related.
So next time you hear a politician complain that American
manufacturing jobs are fleeing to low-cost countries like China or to
Latin America, watch your wallet. Everyone's losing factory jobs.
"Were entering unknown territory in the quest to reduce labor costs. The AI revolution is doing to white collar jobs what robotics did to blue collar jobs"
Race Against The Machine
The Industrial Revolution started out gradually at the bottom of the "ability ladder". First, it displaced draft animals. Then, it displaced stevedores
and others who did heavy manual labor. The industrial revolution NEVER stopped climbing the ability ladder. Mass production displaced artisans.
Over the decades, more and more job niches fell by the wayside.
The abbacus had always been there with simple machine logic. Then came the Babbage machine.
The Babbage Engine | Computer History Museum
Simple machine logic gradually improved. Then came the computer and CNC machines. Next, was robotics.
Pure free-market capitalism is pure competition. Competition demands efficiency. It is an inexorable march. As resources become harder to find, they are used more carefully and sparingly.
We are on an unstoppable march to efficiency. The search for free energy is just another quest for efficiency.
All productivity is done with an eye towards improving efficiency. All productivity is done with capital and true capital is limited.
Since capital is used up in productivity, it must be replaced. This is the source of greed,,, insufficient capital.
The industrial revolution will continue to work it's way up the ability ladder.
computers will get smarter ( Moore's law). There is even a claim that robots will follow Moore's law. Kurzweil will tell you all about it.
Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence
Production, consumption and Ned Ludd
Great Britain and Germany were the first to pass into the industrial revolution.
This gave them great leverage in manufacturing that closed down a lot of artisan jobs. Manufactured items became cheaper. The earlier that a country mechanized, the sooner that they raised everybody's standard of living.
Carbon energy replaced animal and human energy. This freed up more time for people to pursue an education. Mass production needed workers. Their wages were used for consumption. This was a big improvement over subsistence farming. The production-consumption cycle got moving big time.
This allowed an increase in the number of parasites who could be supported.
For many decades, production, consumption and parasites all grew together.
Slowly, but surely, automation began to appear. Artisans lost their jobs to machines. Ned Ludd tried to turn back the tide by destroying automated looms.
Luddite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Production was outsourced to low wage producers like India. Just the same, the change to automation never stopped. There is ALWAYS somebody who is hungrier than you and will work for lower wages than you will.
When jobs left to low-wage markets, there was an over supply of consumers who didn't have wages.
Slowly but surely the numbers of necessary producers were reduced. Increasing automation increased productivity with fewer workers. Huge numbers of people were jobless. Karl Marx said that workers should take over the means of production. That never worked out well.
As an alternative, Marx said that GOV should hire all the extra workers.
Hegel said that GOV should tax all the productive workers and hire the leftover people to work for GOV. people.
Hegel's idea was for GOV to tax so much and hire so many that eventually, everybody would work for GOV. That way, they would always vote for more tax and more GOV. Hegel taught that the state was ordained by God. He also was completely against any kind of individual liberty.
Industrialists failed to see that paying low wages was counter-productive. Sure, they had all the money but, economic activity is determined by the velocity of money, not just the quantity.
Henry Ford paid his workers extremely well so that they would eb able to buy his cars.
The modern industrialist competes like crazy and automates where he can.
He eliminates his producers ,,,, and then goes looking for solvent consumers.
Many countries worldwide are charging into the industrial revolution and building factories. The world aggregate productive capacity is rising all the time. Many jobs are moving to low-wage countries. The overall aggregate consumptive power in the West is falling like a stone. Wage competition really started to set in about the 70s. Should it be any surprise that American wages have been stagnant since then?
The perfection of containerized shipping threw all of our manufacturing into global competition. We still have mining and agriculture as value-added enterprises but, they are increasingly automated. What do you expect to happen to our standard of living when we face low-wage competition?
Things Are Spiraling Out Of Control In America: Households Hit 43-Year Low In Net Worth, A Staggering Collapse In Small Business Optimism Since The Election, $268 Billion In New ObamaCare Taxes Beginning January 1, 2013, And A New Law To Tax American
It doesn't help that Westerners buy all that stuff from low-wage markets.
After WW II, America had 3% of the population and 50% of the manufacturing capacity. Our resultant high standard of living gave way to low-wage competition. These are economic realities that won't be changed by politicians.
The best that GOV can come up with is to inflate the currency. This tends to raise commodity prices from speculators. Seen from ground level, this is actually a REDUCTION in wages. This is called a "race to the bottom." This is done to lower wages and preserve,,, or regain market sector in manufacturing. It lowers consumption at the same time so, it doesn't really gain.
This is where we are today. We've wiped ourselves out in the job market with too much efficiency. I do not know of a cure for efficiency.
Many of the people who have lost their job have nowhere to go. Their niche is gone. Existing niches are too crowded. GOV tries to fill the gap.
Illinois, I believe has ONE worker supporting 1.7 who are on benefits or GOV salary. 9 other states are almost as bad. 53% of Americans depend on a check from GOV.
The jobs aren't going to come back.
There is only ONE system for production by mankind. Man takes his stored capital and energy and builds infrastructure to improve his world. If man only produces the same as what he consumes, he has nothing left over to build infrastructure. Stored capital can be either energy or material.
The health of all societies is dependent on the surpluses they produce. There is no limit to demand. Everyone would live like a king if they could. There is a limit on supply. Free-market capitalism, in a general sense, tries to direct the most supply to those who are most productive.
Socialism is an alternative plan for directing the supply. A free market is more-or-less self-directing. You do your work and collect a check. Socialism requires your check to be partitioned to support those who consume more than they produce. Since demand is always infinite, the demands on your check are ever-increasing. Socialism requires a huge bureaucracy to enforce the partitioning and disbursement. Socialism requires a command-economy and ,eventually, a police state.
Those who produce less than they consume eventually eat up the surpluses.
The eventual outcome is an economic crash and a police state. We are on our way.
TedBits Newsletter: December 2012 - Volume 1
Wallace Klink
Since there are at least 2 sides to every story, I'll present another side.
Worldwide productivity is rising fast and most stuff is made or harvested by machines. There are claims that it is no longer correct to link reward to work performed. We should just turn on the machines and enjoy great bounty.
Wallace Kinck -- answering those who say the purpose of economic policy should be to "create jobs,"
The policy of creating "jobs" is by its fundamental nature retrogressive--a socialist, communist, fascist, labour--and finance-capitalist policy of sabotage of the rapidly growing productivity inherent in our vast Cultural Heritage. The policy of creating work increasingly for the mere sake of distributing financial incomes is totally irrational, destructive and specifically anti-Christian. Making an end of a means is a major sin within the boundaries of Christian morality. A formal State policy of full or near-full employment is based upon the Doctrine of Salvation through Works (known as the philosophy of "do ut des") which is diametrically opposed to the Christian Doctrine of Salvation through Grace. Our existing financial system is squarely based upon the Doctrine of Salvation through Works. That is why it issues money or effective demand in the first instance only for production and never for consumption. We could through technology eliminate virtually all need for human participation in production and the financial system, and the Puritanical influence behind it, would still demand that no one should eat because they had no job to justify drawing from the surfeit of goods produced through non-labour processes. The problem is not a lack of "jobs" but rather a lack of effective consumer demand due to a fundamental and intrinsic flaw in the costing methods used in the price-system. Production will naturally respond to effective consumer demand but demand is increasingly incapable of responding consequent to the evermore inadequate incomes distributed by the modern capital-intensifying economy. Need creates demand and effective consumer demand is a call upon produced goods which in an efficient economy will be increasingly provided with evermore diminishing need for human intervention. But effective demand in a money economy requires that consumers possess enough unattached financial income to claim the entire output of industry. We do not need more work but rather more real financial purchasing power. Increasing consumer debt does NOT qualify as genuine purchasing-power because it merely transfers financial costs as a charge against future production. Your barber should obtain some automated orbital hair cutters. Of course this would displace more labour and increase the need for sane and practical distributive reform of the existing defective financial price-system.
Real need does not decrease with inadequate financial income. Need decreases with satiation provided by adequate real wealth. If the financial system does not provide sufficient effective financial purchasing-power then this inadequacy requires to be investigated and rectified--a task that requires application of a certain amount of intellectual effort. Unfortunately, however, as one Social Credit author was moved to observe, it seems that most people would rather die than think.
Productivity and consumption
I've tried to show both sides to the argument on productivity and distribution.
Gandhi said "there is enough for everybody's need but not enough for everybody's greed".
EVERY attempt at disbursing wealth equally has failed dismally. Decades ago, a business owner made about 15 times what his workers earned. Today, that has grown to 50 or 60 times. Depends on the business. The income inequality is being twisted into class warfare.
Why The Haves Have So Much : NPR
Equality doesn't work. Runaway inequality doesn't work too well. What other option is there? There is Mondragon.
"At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between the worker-owners who do executive work and those who work in the field or factory and earn a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1."
Mondragon Corporation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mondragon has been around for a while. It seems to work pretty well.
The health and vitality of a society is dependent on the surpluses that it generates. Take a good look at North Korea and you can see what the productivity of a police state is. Socialism necessitates a police state and a command economy. Those two destroy all surpluses and any viable future.
What happens to the finance industry when surplus is destroyed? The parasites don't produce for themselves and must depend on SURPLUS production from the producers.
Socialism carries it's own destruction in it's game plan. Vladimir Putin warned obummer NOT to try socialism. Russia had it for 70 years and it was a colossal failure.
History runs in cycles. One name for the economic cycle is the Kondratieff cycle. Elloit waves is another area of study.
Strauss and Howe write about generational cycles.
StraussâHowe generational theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
We are at the fourth turning.
thank you for the interesting Thread and taking the time to share your Knowledge
are you familiar with :
History's Hidden Engine - Socionomics Institute
History's Hidden Engine - YouTube
also if you observe the rhythm of crisis has accelerated since the Asian Crisis ( 1997 Asian financial crisis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) ... each crisis preceded or followed by war .... today we are at a convergence point ..... knowing the "bright minds" on top .... they will try to dance to the same tune as usual when in fact as you so kindly shared ..... the whole rules of the games need to change ... as they seem to be the only ones still playing at fool the plebs when in fact everyone is seeing that the king is naked ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes )
Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws. -Confucius.
Last edited by MonsieurM; 12-07-2012 at 03:12 PM.
Monsieur M, thanks for the link. The vid is fascinating.
You should look at the noosphere.
Global Consciousness Project -- consciousness, group consciousness, mind
And the hundredth monkey
The Hundredth Monkey
Brian Josephson has plenty to say on the subject too.
Brian Josephson's home page
Banking and currency creation
10 characters
Last edited by Danny B; 12-30-2012 at 03:29 AM. Reason: Jumped the gun on posting
Banking and currency creation
Many decades ago, Howard Hughes built an empire based on aviation. He designed and built planes. He owned airlines. He became the first billionaire entrepreneur.
In 1992, George Soros created synthetic instruments to "short" the British pound. He kept attacking and finally broke through. He collapsed the pound and profited about $1 billion dollars.
Black Wednesday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This has been an increasing trend for decades. Rather than do anything productive, the financial industry bets back and forth and makes a killing.
Mergers and acquisitions, hostile takeovers followed by asset gutting of the target.
Often, there wasn't enough profit to be made legally. The S&L scandal is a perfect example. Power groups got the law changed and made off with $! trillion. About 1,000 went to jail. Fraud became endemic. It took the bankers 19 years to get rid of the Glass-Stegal law. That and a few other changes have made it very difficult to put anyone in jail for fraud.
This short vid explains the early genesis of banking.
The Goldsmiths Tale - YouTube
Banks originally started out as a safe place to store valuables. Today, they store very little of any intrinsic value. The only legitimate function of a bank is to allocate credit.
Since they have the power to create credit out of thin air, they naturally create lots of credit for them selves. As long as they invest it wisely, they can't lose. This is a great temptation to buy up everything in sight with all that free money. They profit in many ways. You and I have to work to produce currency. They just print it.
They have been getting away with it for quite some time.
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford
The trend is; more and more people invest money rather than actually do something productive.
Fewer and fewer people are actually employed in the productive sector.
Employment participation has been going down for decades.
Productivity has been going up but, that INCLUDES the financial sector. The financial sector accounts for about 9% of GDP.
The only possible way that it can do that is by printing. The banks have another way to gain money. They push credit on people they know can't pay. They foreclose on the property and sell it again. This is especially lucrative when GOV backs the loans. Now the banks are insolvent. GOV can't rescue them because GOV is insolvent.
Nobody actually wants to work.
"Cash settlement instruments are synthetic devices. They have no other purpose than to transfer cash from one entity to another by manipulating an underlying index number from
one moment to the next, one month to the next.
Nothing REAL is produced, created or even traded. On expiration, money is just transferred automatically into or out of accounts of those who have placed their bets. No more, no less."
Charleston Voice: The Role of Cash Settlement in Market Manipulation and in the Panic of 1987
GOV liabilities are at $211 trillion.
Kotlikoff Sees U.S. Fiscal Gap of $211 Trillion: Video - Bloomberg
The situation has been compared to; two drunks holding each other up.
Then there are the states. They've dug a big hole for them selves.
"In the West Contra Costa Schools' case, that $2.5 million bond will cost the district a whopping $34 million to repay."
Only In California: School Owes $1 Billion On $100 Million 'PayDay' Loan | ZeroHedge
Too much money borrowed too stupidly.
All that money and no wealth
In 2008, the bank of international settlements warned of a coming collapse.
They were one of the very few who spoke up.
Now they are warning of a collapse in the bond market.
Swiss-based BIS warns of another 2008-style credit bubble about to burst « ArabianMoney
The world economy is about $ 50 trillion a year.
The current total estimated notional value of all the derivatives is $1.5 quadrillion. There is an estimated 10 quadrillion worth of contracts denominated just in dollars.
The money supply in America rose at 6 times the rate that the GDP rose.
We see an enormous amount of currency and money-substitutes being created without underlying wealth.
The world is awash in paper instruments. These instruments have no intrinsic value. They can only be "vitiated" by wealth skimmed off in taxes and profit from the production-consumption cycle.
The various banks have had to extend credit farther and farther out to make up for the lost purchasing power in the West. We promised tomorrow's wages for today's luxuries.
The credit super-cycle is coming to an end. Consumers are using credit for survival. Wealth is moving from the West to the East.
The standard of living is dropping.
Too many people failed to save.
"#7 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#8 A different recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies."
15 Signs That The Economy Is Rapidly Getting Worse As We Head Into 2013
Manufacturing is the primary value-added industry. It moved East. Our standard of living will drop quite a bit.
GOV promoted itself as the ultimate security-blanket. That promise is soon to be proved a fraud and a lie. When the bond market blows, it will take EVERYTHING with it. It's hard to say whether the bond market or the derivatives market will blow first.
The Coming Derivatives Crisis That Could Destroy The Entire Global Financial System
Robert Wiedemer accurately predicted the crash. He is predicting the next crash. This is what he is predicting;
"In a recent interview for his newest book Aftershock, Wiedemer says, The data is clear, 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market drop, and 100% annual inflation . . . starting in 2012.
Faber: âMassive Wealth Destructionâ Coming, Well-to-Do âMay Lose 50%â | The Total Collapse
While it is more-or-less safe to predict economic events, it is very risky to set a timeline. Wiedemer is off by a bit.
A collapse in the bond market would make almost all paper assets worthless. There is a very good chance that U.S. dollars would still have good value. Keep cash at home.
This is an article on the current financial operating system.
Guest Post: The Economic Death Spiral Has Been Triggered | ZeroHedge
This is an excellent vid on the longer term forecast;
Bucky's Vision of the Coming Better World, Dollars and Sense Show 27 - YouTube
Keep in mind that a bond market collapse will cause a bank holiday.
During a bank holiday, NO credit transactions can be posted. That means no EBT cards, no credit.
Inflation, deflation and the 2 loop economy
Inflation only has one definition: an increase in the supply of currency and credit.
Deflation is, of course, a decrease. Price-inflation is an independent animal.
When GOV prints and banks lend, they must do so to create the currency to pay for both principle and interest. Keynesian economics demands a continuous increase. They need enough inflation to keep the system running.
This also serves to keep repayment easier. GOV debt is alleviated 50% on average by currency inflation.
As global wage competition lowered American wages, we still got price inflation commensurate with currency inflation but, we learned a new term.
Stagflation is a wage-price spiral without the wage part.
Currently, we learn another term, Biflation.
Everything you own goes down in value and everything that you buy goes up in cost.
When the housing bubble petered out, the consumer was no longer able to make the credit-and-money supply grow. The housing bubble was the jump-start to the economy after the tech bubble burst. The bond bubble is the jump start that was necessitated after the housing bubble burst. This is the last bubble. The FED admitted that it was doing things that it would have considered crazy 10 years ago.
To keep Keynesian credit growth going for the banks, GOV (you and me) gave them ABOUT $27 trillion. That didn't begin to fix things. The FED said that it is going to print an extra $ trillion.
Consider that unfunded GOV debt is at $ 202 trillion and grows by about $ 7 trillion a year. To put that in perspective, GOV claims that there is about $ 2 trillion in the SS fund. Actually, the SS fund holds that sum in NON-negotiable treasury debt. GOV needs to rollover about $ 2.8 trillion in debt. The FED is already printing about 80% of that and the percentage is expected to rise. It remains to be seen just how long this can go on.
One would think that with huge amounts of currency inflation, there would be dramatically higher price inflation. While the currency inflation is on a tear, there are 2 reasons why price inflation is muted.
Prices are influenced by the amount of money in circulation and also the velocity that this money changes hands. So, while supply is up, velocity is down. This dampens price inflation.
The financial people need inflation but, hyperinflation would destroy the currency and society. They have just the plan.
We live and operate in a 2-loop economy. GOV and banks move around
$ trillions every day. This moves in the upper loop. The PTB created about
$ 51 trillion worldwide for this crisis. GOV pisses and moans about $2 billion spent for food stamps. Bernanke promised to drop currency from helicopters. He did that alright. He dropped it to bankers.
The lower loop is starved out. Look at the austerity that is demanded by the bankers who lent imaginary money to the PIIGS. The job of a bankers is to convert imaginary money into tangible rewards. Since the imaginary money is ALWAYS deposited into a bank somewhere, it doesn't matter how much they create. The bankers get quite irate when the punters are no longer able to make the conversion. The bankers went overboard and created TOO much imaginary money.
The bankers are currently in the process of starving the goose that lays the golden eggs. They like to imagine themselves as being productive but, that is not the case. They would like to think that the trickle-down from their loop is enough to sustain the lower loop. This is no longer the case. Globalism took the wind out of the lower loop and it can no longer sustain the upper loop. Like a plane with shrinking wings (shrinking employment), it will no longer fly.
They got carried away in their greed and all their precious paper is in danger. Their cure is to create more paper. They certainly can't create wealth and they can't get us to create adequate wealth.
They have meetings and they announce that they have fixed the problems.
You're on your own.
Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws. -Confucius.
Insiders, outsiders and objectivity
MonsieurM, glad you like it.
Promises Will be Broken
By Bill Bonner
When wealth was easy to identify and easy to control that is, when it was mostly land a few insiders could do a fairly good job of keeping it for themselves. The feudal hierarchy gave everybody a place in the system, with the insiders at the top of the heap.
But come the industrial revolution and suddenly wealth was accumulating outside the feudal structure. Populations were growing too...and growing restless. The old regime tried to tax this new money, but the new bourgeoisie resisted.
No taxation without representation, was a popular slogan of the time. The outsiders wanted in. And there were advantages to opening the doors.
Rather than a small clique of insiders, the governments of the modern world count on the energy of the entire population. This was the real breakthrough of the French Revolution and its successors. They harnessed the energy of millions of citizens, who were ready to be taxed and to die, if necessary, for the mother country. This was Napoleons secret weapon big battalions, formed of citizen soldiers. These enthusiastic warriors gave him an edge in battle. But they also ushered him to his very own Waterloo.
Napoleon Bonaparte himself was an outsider. He was not French, but Corsican. He didnt even speak French when he arrived in Toulon as a boy. But there never is one fixed group of people who are always insiders. Instead, the insider group has a porous membrane separating it from the rest of the population. Some people enter. Some are expelled. The group swells. And shrinks. Potential rivals are brought in and bought off. Weak members are pushed out. Sometimes, a military defeat brings a whole new group of insiders into power. Elections, too, can change the make-up of the core group.
The genius of modern representative government is that it allows the masses to believe that they are insiders too. They are encouraged to vote...and to believe that their vote really matters. Of course, it matters not at all. Generally, the voters have no idea what or whom they are voting for. Often, they get the opposite of what they thought they had voted for anyway.
The common man likes the idea that he is running things. And he pays dearly for it. After the insiders brought him into the voting booth, his taxes soared. In America, taxation with representation proved far more costly than without it. Before the War of Independence, government spending was as little as 3% of GDP. Now, according to the figures above, US government expenditures tote to 38.9% of GDP. And if you live in a high-tax jurisdiction, such as Baltimore or New York, you will find your state, local and federal tax bill will run to nearly 45% of your income.
In short, the insiders pulled a fast one. They allowed the rube to feel that he had a solemn responsibility to set the course of government. And while the fellow was dazzled by his own power...they picked his pocket!
It didnt stop there. Under the kings and emperors, a soldier was a paid fighter. If he was lucky, his side would win and hed get to loot and rape in a captured town for three days. Relatively few people were soldiers, however, because sensible people despised them and societies were not rich enough to afford large, standing armies.
The industrial revolution changed that too. By the 20th century, developed countries could afford the cost of maintaining an expensive level of military preparedness, even when there was not really very much to be prepared for. But the common man was skinned again. Not only was he expected to pay for it, still under the delusion that he was in charge, he also was made to believe that he had a patriotic duty to defend the homeland insiders! That is the real reason that the modern democratic system has spread all over the world. It allows the insiders to mobilize more of the resources and energy of the country on their behalf. Nothing can compete with it.
You may wonder, though, why the real insiders would devote so much of national output to programs that benefit people other than themselves. The answer is obvious; because that is how they retain power. They must buy it. And since every vote is equal to every other one, they bid for votes on the basis of price, not quality. Everyone really knows his vote is not worth very much. That is why so many are cast on the basis of what seem to be cultural or symbolic issues of little material consequence such as gay marriage or abortion. But other voters use their votes to get the material benefits that they want. Naturally, the elites want to buy them at the cheapest prices, so they begin the bidding in poor neighborhoods. Trouble there is that poor people tend not to vote at all...so they have to aim a little higher and pay a little more, which ends up in the middle and lower-middle classes...where health and retirement benefits are key election issues. In order to win an election, all major political parties solemnly swear to do what none can do honestly...or reliably to keep the money flowing to these voters. The party that wins is the one that makes its promises most convincing...the one that seems most able to deliver.
But now the insiders are in trouble. The typical citizen is beginning to realize that hes been had. As long as the insiders could plausibly promise him more and more benefits, he was willing to go along. But now, growth has stalled. With more and more people retiring, social costs are rising faster than revenues. Public finances cant keep up. Democracies cant deliver. And since the recipients of social spending are also the deciders, the faux- insiders who vote for the candidates of their choice, the government cant adapt. It cant avoid its own suicide. It will continue spending, diverting energy from the people who produce to the people who consume, until the system collapses. The complexity of the system now strangles it.
Today, no major government in the developed world can make good on its promises. The US, for example, has committed itself to pay $86 trillion in debt as well as unfunded health and retirement benefits. In 2012, the feds added another $7 trillion to this figure. GDP, meanwhile, grew by about $320 billion. Financial obligations are now growing 21 times faster than the economy that will have to pay them.
Growth rates have trended down over the last half a century. It doesnt seem to matter who was in the White House, or what was the price of oil, or whether interest rates were high or low, or whether the government ran deficits or surpluses. The same thing happened in France as in the US. From GDP growth around 5% in the 1960s and 1970s, growth rates in the developed world have been cut in half.
Nor is the current financial crisis to blame. Growth rates began to decline at least 40 years ago. Todays rates are not extraordinarily low. And nobody really knows why this is happening. A steadily declining GDP growth rate seems to defy our assumptions about the way the world works.
The world now has more scientists, more accumulated knowledge, more money spent on research and development. These things should mean accelerated growth rates. They should allow people to get richer and richer at a faster and faster pace. Why has growth stagnated?
We dont know. But we dont have to know. The question is: wheres the downside? The US used a lot more energy in the period 1920-1980. Its GDP grew fast too. Now, energy use and GDP growth have both leveled out. So what?
This discussion might be merely inconsequential; instead, the future of the United States of America, Europe, Japan and the entire world economy hangs on it.
Growth more GDP...more jobs...more revenue...more people is also what every government in the developed world desperately needs. Without it, their deficit spending (all are running in the red) leads to growing debt and eventual disaster.
Growth over the last hundred years in population, GDP, wages, prices made it possible to expand government spending greatly, anticipating larger, richer generations that would support their smaller, poorer parents.
Without growth, we observed last week, this system of public financing is doomed to spectacular failure. More spending will not be better; it will be calamitous.
Western governments have bet heavily on high rates of growth. But those bets are starting to look like losing wagers. And it was not only government that bet heavily on high rates of growth. Private households bought bigger houses than they could really afford counting on growth to raise housing prices. They also went deeply into debt, expecting wage growth (and perhaps inflation) to bail them out.
Investors, too, were long growth. That is, they bought stocks in anticipation that growth would make their holdings more valuable. They took it for granted. Over the long run, they said to themselves, stocks always go up. Why? Because the economy always grows.
In a stagnant economy, stocks are only worth whatever their stream of dividend payments deserve. One company might become more valuable than others, thanks to luck or better management. But if the economy itself is not growing, a company can only grow by taking market share away from another company. Overall, investors will be even. But thats little comfort.
When youre headed for The Downside, you dont want to speed up.
A lot of what is happening is very strange and also difficult to understand.
Here is an example;
"Over the last 4 years the number of people on disability has risen more than 7 times faster than the number of people with jobs. The number of people on food stamps has increased by 17 million during Obamas term in office. From the beginning of Obamas first term to the end of it, approximately 4.6 million jobs disappeared. But the number of additions to food-stamp and disability roles jumped 21.2 million.
Why were so many more people suddenly disabled? Was there a plague that struck the nation? Were millions crippled in a nationwide auto pile-up? Of course not. Instead, in a low-growth economy, $1,000-a- month without working had begun to look pretty good."
The Entitlement Cliff
Here is another stat;
"#17 The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percentsince Barack Obama became president."
» Thanks Obama – Here Are 24 Stats That Show How Much You Have Royally Messed Up Our Economy Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!
This "strategy" is an outgrowth of the radical Chicago school of economics.
The ClowardPiven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward (19262001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty".
ClowardâPiven strategy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here is a pic from a SS office that doesn't include one single gray head.
It all fits very well. Crash the whole thing down and replace it with something fair, equitable and socialist.
Just to add more proof of the stupidity of these people, here is a quote from another of obummers pals.
"Barack Obamas science advisor John Holdren explains his plan to return the United States to nature, eliminate civilization, cooperate with global socialism, transfer our wealth to other countries."
Barack Obamas science adviser Holdrens plan to de-industrialize the U.S.
Holdren isn't the only crazy advisor. Goolsbee (now departed) said;
"Prof. Goolsbee has a bizarre idea that is promoted by many liberal Democratic economists. That idea in effect is that your money, all of it, every last penny, belongs to the federal government in the first instance and only if the government feels generous, it might let you keep some of your money "
The Crazy World of Prof. Goolsbee - Illinois Review
If the economy seems confusing, consider the source.
Currency war
Almost all of the central banks are printing like crazy,,,, and crazy it is.
Zimbabwe proved once again that you can't print your way to prosperity.
The FED has admitted that they are taking actions that they would have considered crazy just 10 years ago. They're doing it anyway.
Peter Schiff: The Federal Reserve is Now 100% Committed to the Destruction of the Dollar | munKNEE.com
The FED is on their way to printing an additional $ 1.02 trillion this year (2013)
2013 The Final Act | International Forecaster Weekly Bob Chapman The International Forcaster | Economy News | Investing | US Market Information | Gold | Silver | Wall Street Bailouts | Investment Trends | Money Resources | US and Worldwide Politics
Bank of Japan has gone off the deep end with printing.
The European central bank is doing the same.
They're crashing their currencies in unison so that investors won't notice or won't have any place to flee.
The exception is Russia. Russia is now circulating gold and silver coins that are denominated in Rubles.
Central Bank of Russia issues gold and silver legal tender | DGC
This is the equivalent of a thermonuclear attack on Western currencies.
Gresham's Law states that bad currencies will drive good currencies into hiding.
Gresham's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Since the Russian coins are stamped with a number, the Russian currency will never lose purchasing power,,, as long as it retains convertibility.
No fiat currency has ever survived for very long. The average lifespan is 30--40 years. The U.S. dollar is 42 years old as a non-convertibility currency.
Theoretically, people will hoard Russian currency to avoid losing "value" from inflation.
The Chinese have taken all those 400 ounce "good delivery bars" and recast them into 0ne kilo bars. It is expected that they will use them for trade rather than hoarding. China is also buying and selling enormous amounts of gold trying to position themselves as the main trader. They are doing the same with oil.
Western bankers are willing to kill the dollar to save the banking system.
It's possible that they have a plan where they will come out OK even after the dollar is destroyed.
I do not believe that they will survive. Banking and credit are, for the most part, just information services. In the information age, that doesn't require a big organization. This huge reduction was coming and the bankers tried to avoid it. They blew credit instruments up to the stratosphere.
OTC-Derivatives extrapolated estimates | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
There is no possibility that the producing economy can support the whole big mess.
Rise and fall of U.S. manufacturing
After WW II, America had a lock on manufacturing. Our standard of living rose way up. At one point, the U.S. treasury held 25,500 tons of gold.
All species expand their population commensurate with their perceived supply of resources. We doubled the size of the average house.
Size of Average American House Doubled Since 1950s
We had bigger families and bought more cars and STUFF.
By about 1970, the rest of the world had rebuilt much of their manufacturing capacity. U.S. wages froze to reflect low-wage arbitrage from emerging Western competition. We limped along on stagnant wages. We papered over the problem with an increase in credit.
We lost our lock on manufacturing but, we maintained our standard of living by borrowing 80% of the savings from foreigners.
Then came competition from the East. We didn't want to surrender our standard of living but, we lost 500,000 jobs a year just to China.. About 155,000 people try to enter the job market every month. Even schooling didn't seem to help.
55% of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.
#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
This page is loaded with statistics that illustrate that Western countries have simply lost their jobs.
Activist Post: 75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
There is no magic formula that brings back jobs to over-priced labor.
The Chinese make 1/10 what we do.
Average Cost Of A Factory Worker In The U.S., China And Germany [INFOGRAPHIC]
OK, so we lost our job decades ago. ALL residential real estate prices are determined by the wages in the same area. The average person has to be able to afford the average house. Unfortunately, house prices continued to inflate even after wages stagnated,,,, and then fell.
Residential RE has fallen but that has only helped those who still have a job.
Unemployment is up to 23%;
Alternate Unemployment Charts
2,273,392 jobs were outsourced in 2011.
Job Outsourcing Statistics | Statistic Brain
Even the R&D jobs are leaving in large numbers.
We lost our job and our standard of living is going to fall dramatically.
GOV has tried to hold back the tide by printing currency and over-paying people to work for GOV.
The B.I.S. says that the bond market is going to crash. That will take out treasury bonds and GOV won't be able to pay salaries and retirement to all those GOV workers and contractors.
Martin Armstrong and OZ
This doc is from Martin Armstrong. He had 240 people working for him worldwide. GOV wanted him to stop because he was TOO accurate. They threw him in prison for 7 years for contempt. He did a total of about 9 years and was never convicted of anything. He makes a very good explanation of current account deficits.
The other interesting thing is his explanation of double counting by GOV.
GOV prints currency and spends it into the economy. That counts for almost 40% of the GDP currently.
GOV counts the wages of GOV employees when figuring the GDP. GOV counts the money once when they print it and counts it again when they pay wages.
borrowing for consumption
Borrowing money for prudent investment is generally a good idea.
Borrowing money for basic consumption is never a good idea. That's why banks never loan money to those who desperately need it. GOV steps in to borrow money to give to those who desperately need it. Then, GOV takes up a collection (forced) from those who do have money.
Alternatively, GOV prints money and collects from EVERYBODY by way of currency inflation.
ALL of this money injected into the economy is debt. Many decades ago, when GOV injected a dollar of new debt money into the economy, it stimulated close to a dollar in new productivity. As time went on, these new dollars injected into the economy were used for consumption rather than for prudent investment. These new dollars carried an interest cost. This means that new debt is still a debt BUT, it has a declining return-of-investment.
In the early 60s, when a new dollar was created as debt, it resulted in about a dollar of GDP increase. In 1982, when a new dollar was injected into the economy, it created about 50 cents of increased productivity.
In the last several years, there has been NO INCREASE in productivity.
Every new dollar of debt created is pure debt that also carries an interest cost as well. We get a new dollar of debt plus a new interest burden so; every new dollar results in LESS wealth available for consumption.
GOV is printing about $ 85 billion a month. There is a fast-decreasing amount of wealth at the same time that there is a fast-increasing amount of currency. The productive economy is experiencing deflation and price deflation.
GOV is a different story.
"All political power comes from the barrel of a gun" chairman Mao
GOV continues to raise taxes and fees, You have no choice about paying.
Both GOV and banks can create currency from thin air. They have plenty of currency. This gives them an ever-increasing claim on an ever-decreasing amount of wealth. They can drive prices up with their wet-ink money.
Since they are the source of currency inflation, they CAN be the source of price inflation. The PTB prefer to keep price inflation low.
The natives get very irate when food gets too expensive. There are claims that food prices will continue to rise;
Watch: "The Global Food Crisis You Need To Prepare For Is Now Imminent"
The PTB need to inflate enough to rescue the financial system but, not so much that people starve. I don't trust them.
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