AS THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY SUGGESTS, A LOAN IS AN EXCHANGE OF WEALTH FOR INCOME. Like everything else in a free market (imagine happier days of yore), it is a voluntary trade.  Contrary to the endemic language of victimization, both parties regard themselves as gaining thereby, or else they would not enter into the transaction.

In a loan, one party is the borrower and the other is the lender. Mechanically, it is very simple. The lender gives the borrower money and the borrower agrees to pay interest on the outstanding balance and to repay the principle. As with many principles in economics, one can shed light on a trade by looking back in history to a time before the trade existed and considering how the trade developed.

It is part of the nature of being a human that one is born unable to work, living on the surplus produced by one’s parents. One grows up and then one can work for a time. And then one becomes old and infirm, living but not able to work. If one wishes not to starve to death in old age, one can have lots of children and hope that they will care for their parents in their old age. Or, one can produce more than one consumes and hoard the difference.

One discovers that certain goods are better for hoarding than others.  Beyond a little food for the next winter season, one cannot hoard very much.  One of the uses of the monetary commodity is to carry value over time.  So one uses a part of one’s weekly income to buy, for example, silver.  And over the years, one accumulates a pile of silver.  Then, when one is no longer able to work, one can sell the silver a little at a time to buy food, clothing, fuel, etc.

Like direct barter trade, this is inefficient. And there is the risk of outliving one’s hoard.  So at some point, a long time ago, they discovered lending.  Lending makes possible the concept of saving, as distinct from hoarding.  It is as significant a change as when people discovered money and solved the problem of “coincidence of wants”.  This is for the same reason: direct exchange is replaced by indirect exchange and thereby made much more efficient.

With this new innovation, one can lend one’s silver hoard in old age and get an income from the interest payments.  One can budget to live on the interest, with no risk of running out of money.  That is, one can exchange one’s wealth for income.

If there is a lender, there must also be a borrower or there is no trade. Who is the borrower? He is typically someone young, who has an income and an opportunity to grow his income. But the opportunity—for example, to build his own shop—requires capital that he does not have and does not want to spend half his working years accumulating. The trade is therefore mutually beneficial.  Neither is “exploiting” the other, and neither is a victim. Both gain from the deal, or else they would not agree to it. The lender needs the income and the borrower needs the wealth.  They agree on an interest rate, a term, and an amortization schedule and the deal is consummated.

I want to emphasize that we are still contemplating the world long before the advent of the bank. There is still the problem of “coincidence of wants” with regard to lending; the old man with the hoard must somehow come across the young man with the income and the opportunity.  The young man must have a need for an amount equal to what the old man wants to lend (or an amount much smaller so that the old man can lend the remainder to another young man). The old man cannot diversify easily, and therefore his credit risk is unduly concentrated in the one young man’s business. And bid-ask spreads on interest rates are very wide, and thus whichever party needs the other more urgently (typically the borrower) is at a large disadvantage.

Of course the very next innovation that they discovered is that one need not hoard silver one’s whole career and offer to lend it only when one retires. One can lend even while one is working to earn interest and let it compound. This innovation lead to the creation of banks.

But before we get to the bank, I want to drill a little more deeply into the structure of money and credit that develops.

Before the loan, we had only money (i.e. specie). After the loan, we have a more complex structure. The lender has a paper asset; he is the creditor of the young man and his business who must pay him specie in the future. But the lender does not have the money any more. The borrower has the money, but only temporarily. He will typically spend the money. In our example, he will hire the various laborers to clear a plot of land, build a building and he will buy tools and inventory.

What will those laborers and vendors do with the money? Likely they will keep some of it, spend some of it… and lend some of it. That’s right. The proceeds that come from what began as a loan from someone’s hoard have been disbursed into the economy and eventually land in the hands of someone who lends them again! The “same” money is being lent again!

And what will the next borrower do with it? Spend it. And what will those who earn it do? Spend some, keep some, and lend some. Again.

There is an expansion of credit! There is no particular limit to how far it can expand. In fact, it will develop iteratively into the same topology (mathematical structure) as one observes with fractional reserve banking under a proper, unadulterated gold standard!

Without banks, there are two concepts that are not applicable yet. First is “reserve ratio”. Each person is free to lend up to 100% of his money if he wishes, though most people would not do that in most circumstances.

And second is duration mismatch. Since each lender is lending his own money, by definition and by nature he is lending it for precisely as long as he means to. And if he makes a mistake, only he will bear the consequences. If one lends for 10 years duration, and a year later one realizes that one needs the money, one must go to the market to try to find someone who will buy the loan. And then discover the other side of that large bid-ask spread, as one may take a loss doing this.

Now, let’s fast forward to the advent of the investment bank. Like everyone else in the free market, the bank must do something to add value or else it will not find willing trading partners. What does the bank do?

As I hinted above, the bank is the market maker. The market maker narrows the bid-ask spread, which benefits everyone. The bank does this by standardizing loans into bonds, and the bank stands ready to buy or sell such bonds. The bank also aggregates bonds across multiple lenders and across multiple borrowers. This solves the problem of excessive credit risk concentration, coincidence of wants (i.e. size matching), and saves both lenders and borrowers enormous amounts of time. And of course if either needs to get out of a deal when circumstances change, the bank makes a liquid market.

The bank must be careful to protect its own solvency in case of credit risk greater than it assumed. This is the reason for keeping some of its capital in reserve! If the bank lent 100% of its funds, then it would be bankrupt if any loan ever defaulted.

What the bank must not do, what it has no right to do, is lend its depositors’ funds for longer than they expressly intended. If a depositor wants to lend for 5 years, it is not the right of the bank to lend that depositor’s money for ten! The bank has no right to declare, “well, we have a reserve ratio greater than our estimated credit risk and therefore we are safe to borrow short from our depositors to lend long”

Not only has the bank no way to know what reserve ratio will be proof against a run on the bank, but it is inevitable that a run will occur. This is because the depositors think they will be getting their money back, but the bank is concealing the fact that they won’t behind an opaque balance sheet and a large operation. So, sooner or later, depositors need their money for something and the bank cannot honor its obligations. So the bank must sell bonds in quantity. If other banks are in the same situation, the bond market suddenly goes “no bid”.

The bank has no legal right and no moral right to lend a demand deposit or to lend a time deposit for one day longer than its duration. And even then, the bank has no mathematical expectation that it can get away with it forever.

Like every other actor in the market (and more broadly, in civilization) the bank adds enormous value to everyone it transacts with, provided it acts honestly. If a bank chooses to act dishonestly (or there is a central bank that centrally plans money, credit, interest, and discount and forces all banks to play dirty) then it can destroy value rather than creating it.

Unfortunately, in 2012 the world is in this sorry state. It is not the nature of banks or banking per se, it is not the nature of borrowing and lending per se, it is not the nature of fractional reserves per se. It is duration mismatch, central planning, counterfeit credit, buyers of last/only resort, falling interest rates, and a lack of any extinguisher of debt that are the causes of our monetary ills.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=27063

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability –  problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning – 1997

IN DECEMBER 2010 I WROTE AN ARTICLE CALLED Will 2012 Be as Critical as 1860?, THAT PONDERED WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WITH THE 2012 presidential election and the possible scenarios that might play out based on that election. Well, 2012 has arrived and every blogger and mainstream media pundit is making their predictions for 2012. The benefit of delaying my predictions until the first week of 2012 is that I’ve been able to read the wise ponderings of Mike Shedlock, Jesse, Karl Denninger, and some other brilliant truth seeking analysts regarding what might happen during 2012. The passage above from Strauss & Howe was written fifteen years ago and captured the essence of what has happened since 2007 and what will drive all the events over the next decade. Predicting specific events is a futile human endeavour. The world is so complex and individual human beings so impulsive and driven by emotion, that the possible number of particular outcomes is almost infinite.

But, as Strauss and Howe point out, the core elements that created this Crisis and the reaction of generational cohorts to the implications of debt, civic decay and global disorder will drive all the events that will occur in 2012 and for as far as the eye can see. Linear thinkers in mega-corporations, mainstream media and Washington D.C. focus on retaining the status quo, their power and their wealth. They believe an economic recovery can be manufactured through monetary manipulation and Keynesian borrowing and spending. They are blind to the fact that history is cyclical, not linear. In order to have an understanding of what could happen in the coming year, it is essential to keep the big picture in focus. As we enter the fifth year of this twenty year Crisis period, there is absolutely no chance that 2012 will see an improvement in our economy, political atmosphere or world situation. Fourth Turnings never de-intensify. They exhaust themselves after years of chaos, conflict and turmoil. I can guarantee you that 2012 will see increased mayhem, riots, violent protests, recessions, bear markets, and a presidential election that will confound the establishment. All the episodes which will occur in 2012 will have at their core one of the three elements described by Strauss & Howe in 1997: Debt, Civic Decay, or Global Disorder.

Debt – On the Road to Serfdom

The world is awash in debt. Everyone is focused on the PIIGS with their debt to GDP ratios exceeding the Rogoff & Reinhart’s 90% point of no return. But, the supposedly fiscally responsible countries like Germany, France, U.K., and the U.S. have already breached the 90% level. Japan is off the charts, with debt exceeding 200% of GDP. These figures are just for the official government debt. If countries were required to report their debt like a corporation, their unfunded entitlement promises to future generations are four to six times more than their official government debt.

Any critical thinking person can look at the chart above and realize that creating more debt out of thin air to solve a debt problem is foolish, dangerous, and self serving to only bankers and politicians. The debt crisis took decades of terrible choices and bogus promises to produce. The world is now in the midst of a debt driven catastrophe. At best, the excessive levels of sovereign debt will slow economic growth to zero or below in 2012. At worst, interest rates will soar as counties attempt to rollover their debt and rolling defaults across Europe will plunge the continent into a depression. The largest banks in Europe are leveraged 40 to 1, therefore a 3% reduction in their capital will cause bankruptcy. Once you pass 90% debt to GDP, your fate is sealed.

“Those who remain unconvinced that rising debt levels pose a risk to growth should ask themselves why, historically, levels of debt of more than 90 percent of GDP are relatively rare and those exceeding 120 percent are extremely rare. Is it because generations of politicians failed to realize that they could have kept spending without risk? Or, more likely, is it because at some point, even advanced economies hit a ceiling where the pressure of rising borrowing costs forces policy makers to increase tax rates and cut government spending, sometimes precipitously, and sometimes in conjunction with inflation and financial repression (which is also a tax)?” – Rogoff & Reinhart

The ECB doubling their balance sheet and funnelling trillions to European banks will not solve anything. The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is the standard of living for every person in Europe, the United States and Japan will decline. The choice is whether the decline happens rapidly by accepting debt default and restructuring or methodically through central bank created inflation that devours the wealth of the middle class. Debt default would result in rich bankers losing vast sums of wealth and politicians accepting the consequences of their false promises. Bankers and politicians will choose inflation. They believe they can control the levers of inflation, but they have proven to be incompetent, hubristic, and myopic. The European Union will not survive 2012 in its current form. Countries are already preparing for the dissolution. Politicians and bankers will lie and print until the day they pull the plug on the doomed Euro experiment.

The false storyline of debt being paid down in the United States continues to be propagated by the mainstream press and decried by Paul Krugman. The age of austerity storyline gets full play on a daily basis. Total credit market debt in 2000 was $27 trillion. It skyrocket to $42 trillion by 2005 as George Bush and Alan Greenspan encouraged delusional Americans to defeat terrorism by leasing SUVs and live the American dream by putting zero down on a $600,000 McMansion, financing it with a negative amortization no doc loan. Paul Krugman got his wish as a housing bubble replaced the dotcom bubble. Debt accumulation went into hyper-speed in 2006 and 2007 as Wall Street sharks conducted a fraudulent feeding frenzy by peddling their derivatives of mass destruction around the globe. By the end of 2007, total credit market debt reached $51 trillion.

In a world inhabited by sincere sane leaders, willing to level with the citizens and disposed to allow financial institutions that took world crushing risks to fail through an orderly bankruptcy process, debt would have been written off and a sharp short contraction would have occurred. The stockholders, bondholders and executives of the Wall Street banks would have taken the losses they deserved. Instead Wall Street used their undue influence, wealth and power to force their politician puppets to funnel $5 trillion to the bankers that created the crisis while dumping the debt on taxpayers and unborn generations. The Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve provided risk free funding and took toxic mortgage assets off their balance sheets. The result is total credit market debt higher today than it was at the peak of the financial crisis in March 2009.

Our leaders have done the exact opposite of what needed to be done to address this debt crisis. The country is adding $3.7 billion per day to the National Debt. With the debt at $15.2 trillion, we have now surpassed the 100% to GDP mark. The National Debt will be $16.5 trillion when the next president takes office in January 2013. Ben Bernanke has been able to keep short term interest rates near zero and the non-existent U.S. economic growth and European disaster has resulted in keeping long-term rates near record lows. Despite these historic low rates, interest on the National Debt totalled $454 billion in 2011, an all-time high. The effective interest rate was approximately 3%. If rates stay at current levels, interest will be between $400 and $500 billion in 2012. Each 1% increase in rates would cost American taxpayers an additional $150 billion. A rapid increase in rates to the 7% level would ratchet interest expense above $1 trillion and destroy the last remaining vestiges of Bernanke’s credibility. It can’t possibly happen in 2012. Right? The world has total confidence in pieces of paper being produced at a rate of $3.7 billion per day.

Confidence in Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress is all that stands between continued stability and complete chaos. What could go wrong? Debt related issues that will likely rear their head in 2012 are as follows:

• A debt saturated society cannot grow. As debt servicing grows by the day, the economy losses steam. The excessive and increasing debt levels will lead to a renewed recession in 2012 as clearly detailed by ECRI, John Hussman and Hoisington Investment Management.

“Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications for both Main Street and Wall Street.” – ECRI 

At present, we observe agreement across a broad ensemble of models, even restricting data to indicators available since 1950 (broader data since 1970 imply virtual certainty of recession). The uniformity of recessionary evidence we observe today has never been seen except during or just prior to other historical recessions.-  John Hussman 

Negative economic growth will probably be registered in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2011, and in subsequent quarters in 2012. Though partially caused by monetary and fiscal actions and excessive indebtedness, this contraction has been further aggravated by three current cyclical developments: a) declining productivity, b) elevated inventory investment, and c) contracting real wage income. In summary, the case for an impending recession rests not only on cyclical precursors evident in productivity, real wages, and inventory investment, but also on the disfunctionality of monetary and fiscal policy. – Van Hoisington 

• The onrushing recession will send housing down for the count. With 2.2 million homes already in the foreclosure process and another 13 million homes with negative or near negative equity, the recession will push more people over the edge. As foreclosures rise a self reinforcing loop will develop. Home prices will fall as banks dump houses at lower prices, pushing millions more into a negative equity position. Home prices will fall another 5% to 10% in 2012, with a couple years to go before bottoming.
• The recession will result in companies laying off more workers. It won’t be as dramatic as 2008-2009 because companies have already shed 6 million jobs. The working age population will increase by 1.7 million, the number of people employed will go up by 1 million, but the official unemployment rate will drop to 7% as the BLS reveals that 10 million people decided to relax and leave the workforce. Surely I jest. The government manipulated unemployment rate will rise above 9%, while the real rate will surpass 25%.
• The American people rationally increased their savings rate to 6.2% in the 2nd Quarter of 2009. When you are over-indebted and the country heads into recession, spending less and saving more is a sane option. Consumer expenditures accounted for 69% of GDP in 2007, prior to the economic collapse. The “recovery” of 2010-2011 has been driven by Ben’s zero interest rate policy, the resumption of easy credit peddling by the Wall Street banks, and consumers convinced that going further into hock to attain the American dream is rational. Consumer spending as a percentage of GDP has actually risen to 71% and the savings rate has plunged to 3.6%. The 20% drop in gas prices since April bottomed in December. This decline temporarily boosted consumer spending, but prices are on the rise again. With the State and local governments reducing spending, do the Wall Street Ivy League economists really believe consumers will increase their consumption to 73% of GDP and reduce their savings rate to 1%? If you open your local newspaper you will see the master plan. Car dealers are offering 0% financing with nothing down for 60 months. The GMAC/Ditech/Ally Bank zombie lives as subprime auto loans are back. The “strong” auto sales are a debt financed illusion. Ashley Furniture is offering 0% financing for 50 months with no payments through Wells Fargo Bank. When the Federal Reserve provides the Wall Street banks with 0% funding, banks are willing to take big risks knowing that Uncle Ben and the naive American taxpayer will be there to bail them out when it blows up again.
  

• With recession a certainty as fiscal stimulus wears off, home prices fall, employment stagnates, and consumer spending grinds to a halt, what will happen to the stock market? The Wall Street shills paraded on CNBC and interviewed by the multi-millionaire talking head twits assure you that stocks are undervalued and the market will surely be up 10% to 15% by 2013. It’s a mortal lock, just as it has been for the last twelve years, with the S&P 500 at the same level as January 1999. The fact is the stock market drops 30% on average during a recession. The talking heads declare that corporate profits are at record levels and will continue higher. Not bloody likely. Corporate profit margins are at an all-time peak about 50% above their historical norms. Profits always revert to their mean. These profits are not sustainable as they were generated by firing millions of workers, zero interest rates for banks, fraudulent accounting by the banks, and trillions in handouts from the middle class taxpayers to corporate America.

In a true free market excess profits will draw more competitors and profits will fall due to competition. When corporate profits exceed the mean by such a large amount, you can conclude that crony capitalism has replaced the free market. Government bureaucrats have been picking the winners (Wall Street, War Industry, Big Media, Big Healthcare) and the American people are the losers. Corporate oligarchs prefer no competition so they can reap obscene risk free profits and reward themselves with king-like compensation. Mean reversion will eventually be a bitch. Real S&P earnings have reached the 2007 historic peak. To believe they will soar higher as we enter a recession takes the same kind of faith shown by Americans buying a $600,000 McMansion in Stockton with no money down in 2005. The result will be the same. Do you ever wonder how corporations are doing so well while the average American sinks further into debt, despair and poverty?

The brilliant John Hussman captures the gist of an investor’s dilemma in his latest article:

“With 10-year Treasury yields below 2%, 30-year yields below 3%, corporate bond yields below 4%, and S&P 500 projected 10-year total returns below 5%, we presently have one of the worst menus of prospective return that long-term investors have ever faced. The outcome of this situation will not be surprisingly pleasant for any sustained period of time, but promises to be difficult, volatile, and unrewarding. The proper response is to accept risk in proportion to the compensation available for taking that risk. Presently, that compensation is very thin. This will change, and much better opportunities to accept risk will emerge. The key is for investors to avoid the allure of excessive short-term speculation in a market that promises – bends to its knees, stares straight into investors’ eyes, and promises – to treat them terribly over the long-term.”

Ben Bernanke, Wall Street shysters and Barack Obama want you to be drawn in by the allure of short-term gains based on hopes of QE3. The stock market will be volatile in 2012 with stocks falling 20% when it becomes evident the country is going back into recession. Ben will try to ride to the rescue with QE3 as he buys up more toxic mortgage debt. Wall Street will do their usual touchdown dance celebration, but the bloom will fall off this rose fast, as quantitative easing has proven to be a failure in stimulating economic growth. Gridlock in Washington D.C., chaotic national conventions, and the implosion of Europe will contribute to the market finishing down by at least 15% for the year.

• Even though the U.S. economy has been stagnant for the past year and Europe is back in recession, oil is trading at $102 a barrel (Brent – $113 a barrel). This is a classic Catch-22 for Bernanke and his central banker buddies. The higher the price goes, the more recessionary economies become as energy and food costs rise. This would normally decrease demand and lower prices, but the massive money printing by the Fed and ECB artificially inflates the price of oil. The Canadian oil sands are only viable at $90 a barrel. Saudi Arabia needs $90 oil to balance their budgets. The onset of peak cheap oil, lack of Libyan supply, possible war with Iran, and increased demand from the developing world (China, India) will put a floor of $80 to $90 a barrel under oil. A shooting war with Iran would result in $150 a barrel of oil overnight. The trend in gasoline prices over the last three years is not your friend:

January 2009           $1.65

January 2010           $2.57

January 2011           $3.04

January 2012           $3.29

Gas prices are rising during the lowest usage time of the year. The average price of oil will exceed $100 during 2012 resulting in the highest average gas price in history for American drivers. These high prices, along with various weather related issues will keep food prices elevated, with 5% or higher increases likely. This should spur a few more peasant revolutions around the globe.

• The question of whether gold can keep its streak of 11 consecutive positive return years in a row intact is an easy one. Will Obama and Congress spend $1.3 trillion more than they bring in during 2012? Will Ben Bernanke and other central bankers around the globe keep printing pieces of paper and calling it currency? If the answer to these two questions is yes, then gold will finish the year higher. As always, it will be volatile and manipulated by the powers that be. A drop below $1,500 in the beginning of the year is possible, but when Ben announces QE3, it will be off to the races. I expect gold to reach $1,900 by year end. Silver will be more volatile, but will likely reach $40 by year end.

Civic Decay – Occupying, Plundering, Capturing

Civic decay revealed itself dramatically in 2011 as millions of young people across the country occupied parks and town squares in a fruitless effort to correctly point out how the ruthless oligarchs inhabiting Wall Street bank executive suites, Mega-corporation boardrooms, the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, and the hallways of Congress had pillaged the wealth of the middle class through inflation, taxation, fraud and outright thievery. The majority of over-medicated, lethargic, uninterested, ignorant Americans yawned at this selfless display of courage and civil disobedience as they chose to occupy lines for hours to get the latest iPad or $3 waffle-maker at Wal-Mart. Delusional, non-thinking dolts across the land watched on their 60 inch HDTVs as young protestors got clubbed, beaten, tear gassed, tasered, maced, and brutalized by paid mercenaries for the ruling oligarchy. They treated the horrific scenes of brutality as if it was just one of their 30 favourite reality TV shows like I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant or Toddlers & Tiaras. They thought this was a new show called Mace A Millennial.

Despite controlling the media, the money and the levers of power in Washington D.C., those in power cannot spin the reality of a middle class being systematically wiped out by the policies put in place by the corporate fascist oligarchs running this country. As Wall Street profits and bonuses flow like honey, the lines at food banks look like the lines at Best Buy on Black Friday and homeless shelters overflow with former members of the middle class. The ministry of propaganda (BLS, BEA) reports improving economic conditions while the number of Americans in the food stamp program has jumped from 38 million when the recession officially ended in late 2009 to 46.3 million today. Having 15% of the population surviving on food stamps is surely a sign of economic recovery. 

The mainstream media methodically spews misinformation and happy talk about increased consumer spending and retail sales above expectations as if Americans borrowing to buy another laptop, TV, Kindle, or Rolex proves we have a real recovery. Meanwhile, old line mall based retailers like Sears and J.C. Penney die a slow agonizing death as they stagger into the sunset like Montgomery Ward, Circuit City and thousands before them. There is a disconnect in society as high end retailers like Saks, Tiffany, and Neiman Marcus report record sales as the 1% feel confident and flush with cash. Meanwhile, real median income is lower than it was in 2001. It seems tax cuts didn’t lift all boats, just the yachts. The average Joe pays twice as much for a gallon of gas and 50% more for food since 2001 while taking home less pay. The ruling elite can’t figure out why the peasants are getting restless.

The wealthy elite have been out in force over the last few months broadcasting their storyline about 50% of Americans not paying taxes. They and their media mouthpieces pound this message home unceasingly. They portray themselves as job creators, when the facts prove they have destroyed jobs here in America. They successfully painted the Occupy Movement as a bunch of lazy good for nothing socialists who needed to get a job. Then they unleashed the full fury of their brute strength upon these citizens practicing their right to assembly and free speech by crushing them with their hired police thugs, while the ignorant by choice public looked away. Controlling the message is essential for the oligarchs to retain their wealth, power and control. Aldous Huxley’s understanding of the American people is as true today as it was eighty years ago:

 “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”

It is time to not choose ignorance. The storyline peddled to the masses is false. The ruling oligarchy will do everything in their power to obscure and manipulate the truth. It is true that 50% of American workers pay no Federal income tax. It is also true that 50% of American workers make less than $25,000 per year. If these workers are employed in Philadelphia they pay 4% city income tax, 3% state income tax, 7.65% Social Security and Medicare tax, 6% sales tax on everything they buy, 15% state and federal taxes on gasoline, and they pay city and county property taxes whether they own or rent. They also pay the various sewer, trash, and myriad of other fees inflicted on them by government drones. Maybe someone should inform multi-billionaire hedge fund guru Steve Schwarzman that lower income families actually have most of their skin in the game. They can’t hire hoards of high powered lawyers and tax accountants to minimize their tax burden while contributing millions to politicians who write the laws to protect the oligarchs. I wonder why hedge fund managers don’t pay taxes on their profits.

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

We are all part of the system, and the system is rigged. The middle class is systematically being obliterated as high paying jobs were shipped to low paying countries by mega-corporations. Their huge cost advantages have driven small domestic “job creating” firms out of business. The middle class has the majority of their wealth tied up in their homes, and they continue to see that wealth decline on a daily basis. The culprits in the housing collapse – the major Wall Street banks – have seen their profits skyrocket as they held the middle class hostage to a multi-trillion dollar banker bailout. Americans don’t hate the wealthy. Wealthy men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have been admired and emulated by Americans because they exhibited the true admirable traits of entrepreneurship, creativity, hard work, taking chances, and creating a better society. Wall Street shysters create nothing. They exhibit the worst traits of greed, avarice, and non-existent empathy for their fellow man.

Matt Taibbi summed up how the system is rigged rather succinctly in a recent article:

“And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air. The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.”

The wealth inequality in this country did not occur because half the population is lazy and stupid. It didn’t happen because the 1% is intellectually superior, more highly motivated, or more entrepreneurial than the 99%. If any of these statements were true, the inequality would be consistent across decades and centuries. But, as the chart below details, the phenomenon has happened since 1979. Interestingly, it also occurred just prior to the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression.  

The chart reflects the results of three decades of crony capitalism based upon phony tax canards; delusions of a debt based American dream peddled by bankers, politicians and the media; and complete capture of our economic and political system by a self selected wealthy few. Jesse captures the essence of how it happened in a recent article:

“Anyone who has seriously studied applied macroeconomics knows that crony capitalists hate free markets, with all the fairness and transparency that they imply. Competition is a serious drag on enormous profits and introduces significant uncertainty and risk. As soon as the game is underway, successful capitalists are constantly pushing the envelope of the rules, seeking to establish rents, monopolies, unfair advantages, and debt traps to snare the bulk of the players and stifle the profit-eroding tendency of real competition.

This is the basis of all aristocracies, which are merely the institutionalization of privilege.  Once they make it they bloody well want to change the rules to hang on to it, and take the risk out of their equation. They foster a culture of two sets of books, two sets of rules, and two systems of justice. They are given over in their personal and professional lives to the benefits of hypocrisy and cheating, with little conscience to restrain them. There is a predatory class that is nationless, without allegiance to anything, any principle, but their own greed and lust for power.”

What has happened over the last three decades is not particular to the United States. It is a flaw in all humanity. The majority of humans are inherently honest and if raised by good parents will do the right thing most of the time. When society allows psychopaths and evil men to attain high status in government and business through chosen ignorance, lack of vigilance, casting aside the rule of law, or admiration for wealth attained by any means, then wealth disparity reaches extreme levels. The fatal defect of the Wall Street psychopaths is their hubris. Too much is never enough. They are like sharks, always needing more to satiate their hunger. They will eventually go too far and collapse their crony capitalist system resulting in revolution and ultimately their demise. We are very close to the tipping point and 2012 is likely to reveal deep cracks in the foundation of our warped dysfunctional corporate fascist economic system. These are a few things I expect to happen in 2012:

• The Occupy Movement will become more extreme with more disruptions of the economic system with less warning so the authorities don’t have time to prepare. I expect more cyber hacking into Wall Street, government, and media computer networks, causing disarray and uncertainty regarding financial information. I expect the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions to be overrun by protestors. The authorities will respond with excessive force, resulting in further violent protests in other cities.
• Two simultaneous trends will eventually result in a domestic conflict. The Federal government grows ever more panicked by the knowledge that its ponzi scheme economy is going to collapse. This is why passage of the NDAA and the future passage of SOPA are so important to them. Imprisonment of citizens without charge and shutting down the only remaining means of truth – the Internet – are essential to retaining their power and control over the masses. At the same time, gun sales are at record levels. Critical thinking Americans can see the writing on the wall and no longer trust corrupt politicians of either party. Arming yourself and buying physical gold and silver is a prudent act in today’s world. If the financial system implodes in 2012 and an MF Global like stealing of customer funds from IRAs, 401ks, and bank accounts happens, all hell could break loose.
• The ruling elite hand-selected puppets for the 2012 presidential election are Obama and Romney. They are virtually interchangeable and both are acceptable to the Wall Street oligarchs. The monkey wrench in the gears is Ron Paul. His message of freedom, liberty, non-interventionism, living within our means, self reliance, and a sound currency are poison to the establishment. His message appeals to young people and a growing number of realists who understand we are already bankrupt. He will run as a third Party candidate and focus a light on the crony capitalism that passes for free markets in America today. He will be vilified by both parties and their media mouthpieces, but if he gains traction I fear an unfortunate accident will befall him. Either way, he will have a dramatic impact on the debate and the outcome of the 2012 election.

The question for 2012 is whether the gaping multitude will come to their senses and respond accordingly against the ruling oligarchy.

“Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quantity of contradictions and nonsense it pours down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.” – William Hazlitt

Global Disorder – War, Oil, Religion

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Disorder is an understatement when describing what is happening on the global scene. It seems like the inmates are running the insane asylum. The beauty of globalisation, sold to Americans by the corporate oligarchs, is being revealed for all to see. Besides seeing millions of jobs shipped overseas by mega-corporation executives and our industrial base gutted beyond repair, the other “benefits” are aplenty. The interconnectedness of the global economy insures that a recession in Europe and the U.S. will spread across the world. The producing countries will fall when the consuming countries run out of fiat currency to spur consumption. Federal Reserve created inflation in the United States instantaneously spreads around the world creating revolutions across the Middle East and social unrest in China as food and energy prices surge to levels of pain which cause the poor to revolt against the ruling establishment. People lose it when they have nothing to lose.

But, the biggest gift of globalisation has been provided by – whom else – the Wall Street banks and the large European banks. The European banks did their part by loaning hundreds of billions to PIIGS that could never pay them back. Next, they leveraged their balance sheets 40 to 1, insuring that a 3% loss on their capital wipes them out. When their losses clearly exceeded 40%, the bankers employed their politician puppets running the insolvent countries across the continent to dump the losses on the taxpayers through austerity measures that insure a deep European recession. Since derivatives of mass destruction link the insolvent Wall Street banks to the insolvent European banks, the Federal Reserve has now stepped into the breach with American taxpayer money by providing swap lines to European banks. The oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens across the globe to insure their wealth and power remains intact.

The other crucial component of global disorder is oil. The storyline currently being peddled to the masses is the return of energy independence for America. The political class and their lapdog media pundits blatantly lie to the American public with stories of 100 years of oil supply under our soil. GOP candidates declare we can be energy independent in two years if we just drill, drill, drill. Meanwhile, in the real world 33 billion barrels of oil are consumed every year, with the U.S. consuming 7 billion barrels per year, of which 3.3 billion barrels are imported. Total U.S. oil production continues its 40 year decline, despite the shale oil boom in the Dakotas and the massive fracking hype touted by the gas industry. If Americans used some critical thinking skills they would conclude that our oil dependent society is balanced on the head of a pin. The chart below paints a picture of current and future global disorder.

One look at this chart and you begin to understand the War on Terror cover story. The average person in these Muslim oil rich countries wants a chance for a better life, food, clothing, and hope for their children’s future. They are not the evil, freedom hating, religious fanatic terrorists portrayed by the neo-cons and war mongers like Santorum, Gingrich and Romney. American troops are stationed in or around the countries with the most oil. Any dictator that fails to play along with the U.S. and its oil demands isn’t around for long. Hussein and Gaddafi learned the hard way. It’s just a matter of time for Ahmadinejad. Expect the rhetoric about the dangerous Chavez to escalate in the near future. Controlling 300 billion barrels of oil will be essential to keeping our suburban sprawl society functioning. Soccer moms will become irate when they can’t fill up their GMC Yukon with 39 gallons of precious fuel. Our own military clearly documented why the War on Terror will never end in their 2010 Joint Operating Environment report:

A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest. By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

The likeliest global events which will make 2012 a year to remember include:

• The disintegration of the European Union with outright default by Greece and the exit from the Union by Italy, Spain, and Portugal. A default and currency devaluation would bankrupt banks across Europe and would guarantee a worldwide recession and possibly depression.
• It seems more likely by the day that someone will do something stupid in or around Iran and the Persian Gulf will explode into a virtual hell on earth. The unintended consequences of such a development will far outweigh the intended consequences.
• The revolutions, protests, and brewing civil wars in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iraq will flare up even if Iran doesn’t explode into a shooting war. The tensions in the Middle East will keep oil prices above $100, despite a world plunging into recession.
• China’s hard landing will arrive in 2012. Keynesianism on steroids has failed as they’ve built more than enough vacant malls, vacant cities, vacant condo towers, and bridges to nowhere. Property prices will plunge, exports will decline, and peasants will revolt as food and energy prices push them over the edge. Chinese leaders will look for a foreign bogeyman so they can rally their 1 billion peasants around the flag. With 11% of their oil supply coming from Iran, it could get very interesting.

Just as no one saw the most significant events of 2011 (Arab Spring, Mubarak & Gaddafi overthrown, Japanese earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, and Occupy Wall Street) in advance, 2012 will surely have some surprises. Possibilities include:

• An earthquake on the New Madrid fault or off the coast of California causing a tsunami to hit the west coast.
• One or more hurricanes entering the Gulf of Mexico causing widespread oil rig destruction and causing oil and natural gas prices to soar.
• A new bird flu or swine flu pandemic that spreads around the world.
• An actual terrorist attack in the United States in a mall, hotel or public venue that provokes a massive over response by our government could change this country forever.
• The assassination of political leaders and prominent bankers around the world as radicals take retribution into their own hands.

We have now entered the fifth year of this Fourth Turning Crisis. George Washington and his troops were barely holding on at Valley Forge during the fifth year of the American Revolution Fourth Turning. By year five of the Civil War Fourth Turning 700,000 Americans were dead, the South left in ruins, a President assassinated and a military victory attained that felt like defeat. By the fifth year of the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning, FDR’s New Deal was in place and Adolf Hitler had been democratically elected and was formulating big plans for his Third Reich. The insight from prior Fourth Turnings that applies to 2012 is that things will not improve. They call it a Crisis because the risk of calamity is constant. There is zero percent chance that 2012 will result in a recovery and return to normalcy. Not one of the issues that caused our economic collapse has been solved. The “solutions” implemented since 2008 have exacerbated the problems of debt, civic decay and global disorder. The choices we make as a nation in 2012 will determine the future course of this Fourth Turning. If we fail in our duty, this Fourth Turning could go catastrophically wrong. I pray we choose wisely. Have a great 2012.          

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe

THE PATHETIC STATE OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM WAS AGAIN ON DISPLAY THIS WEEK. Stocks around the world go up when a major central bank pumps money into the financial system. They go down when the flow of money slows and when the intoxicating influence of the latest money injection wears off. Can anybody really take this seriously? On Tuesday, the prospect of another gigantic cash infusion from the ECB’s printing press into Europe’s banking sector, which is in large part terminally ill but institutionally protected from dying, was enough to trigger the established Pavlovian reflexes among portfolio managers and traders.

None of this has anything to do with capitalism properly understood. None of this has anything to do with efficient capital allocation, with channelling savings into productive capital, or with evaluating entrepreneurship and rewarding innovation. This is the make-believe, get-rich-quick (or, increasingly, pretend-you-are-still-rich) world of state-managed fiat-money-socialism. The free market is dead. We just pretend it is still alive.

There are, of course those who are still under the illusion that this can go on forever. Or even that what we need is some shock-and-awe Über-money injection that will finally put an end to all that unhelpful worrying about excessive debt levels and overstretched balance sheets. Let’s print ourselves a merry little recovery.

How did Mr. Bernanke, the United States’ money-printer-in-chief put it in 2002? “Under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending…” (Italics mine.)

Well, I think governments and central banks will get even more determined in 2012. And it is going to end in a proper disaster.

Lender of all resorts

Last week in one of their articles on the euro-mess, the Wall Street Journal Europe repeated a widely shared myth about the ECB: “With Germany’s backing, the ECB has so far refused to become a lender of last resort, …” This is, of course, nonsense. Even the laziest of 2011 year-end reviews will show that the ECB is precisely that: A committed funder of states and banks. Like all other central banks, the ECB has one overriding objective: to create a constant flow of new fiat money and thus cheap credit to an overstretched banking sector and an out-of-control welfare state that can no longer be funded by the private sector. That is what the ECB’s role is. The ECB is lender of last resort, first resort, and soon every resort.

Let’s look at the facts. The ECB started 2011 with record low policy rates. In the spring it thought it appropriate to consider an exit strategy. The ECB conducted a number of moderate rate hikes that have by now all been reversed. By the beginning of 2012 the ECB’s policy rates are again where they were at the beginning of 2011, at record low levels.

So why was the springtime attempt at “rate normalization” aborted? Because of deflationary risks? Hardly. Inflation is at 3 percent and thus not only higher than at the start of the year but also above the ECB’s official target.

The reason was simply this: states and banks needed a lender of last resort. The private market had lost confidence in the ability (willingness?) of certain euro-zone governments to ever repay their massive and constantly growing debt load. Certain states were thus cut off from cheap funding. The resulting re-pricing of sovereign bonds hit the banks and made it more challenging for them to finance their excessive balance sheets with money from their usual sources, not least U.S. money market funds.

So, in true lender-of-last resort fashion, the ECB had to conduct a U-turn and put those printing presses into high gear to fund states and banks at more convenient rates. While in a free market, lending rates are the result of the bargaining between lenders and borrowers, in the state-managed fiat money system, politicians and bureaucrats define what constitutes “sustainable” and “appropriate” interest rates for states and banks. The central bank has to deliver.

The ECB has not only helped with lower rates. Its balance sheet has expanded over the year by at least €490 billion, and is thus 24% larger than at the start of the year. This does not even include this week’s cash binge. The ECB is funding ever more European banks and is accepting weaker collateral against its loans. Many of these banks would be bust by now were it not for the constant subsidy of cheap and unlimited ECB credit. If that does not define a lender of last resort, what does?

And as I pointed out recently, the ECB’s self-imposed limit of €20 billion in weekly government bond purchases (an exercise in market manipulation and subsidization of spendthrift governments but shamelessly masked as an operation to allow for smooth transmission of monetary policy) is hardly a severe restriction. It would allow the ECB to expand its balance sheet by another €1 trillion a year. (The ECB is presently keeping its bond purchases well below €20 billion per week.)

Deflation? What deflation?

It is noteworthy that there still seems to be a widespread belief that all this money-printing will not lead to higher inflation because of the offsetting deflationary forces emanating from private bank deleveraging and fiscal austerity.

This is an argument I came across a lot when I had the chance in recent weeks to present the ideas behind my book to investors and hedge fund managers in London, Edinburgh and Milan. Indeed, even some of the people who share my outlook about the endgame of the fiat money system do believe that we could go through a period of falling prices first, at least for certain financial assets and real estate, before central bankers open the flood-gates completely and implement the type of no holds barred policy I mentioned above. Then, and only then will we see a dramatic rise in inflation expectations, a rise in money velocity and a sharp rise in official inflation readings.

Maybe. But I don’t think so. I consider it more likely that we go straight to higher inflation.

The deleveraging in the banking sector is the equivalent of austerity in the public sector: it is an idea. A promise. The reflationary policy of the central bank is a fact. And that policy actively works against private bank deleveraging and public sector debt reduction.

Consider this: The present credit crisis started in 2007. Yet, none of the major economies registered deflation. All are experiencing inflation, often above target levels and often rising. In the euro-area, over the past twelve months, the official inflation rate increased from 2 percent to 3 percent. From the start of 2011 to the beginning of this month, the U.S. Federal Reserve boosted the monetary base by USD 560 billion, or 27 percent. So far this year, M1 increased by 17.5 percent and M2 by 9.5 percent. Below is the so-called “true money supply” for the U.S. calculated by the Mises Institute.

As the Mises-Institute’s Doug French pointed out, total assets held by the six biggest banks in the U.S. increased by 39% over the past 5 years. Maybe this is not surprising given that in our brave new world of limitless fiat money, credit contraction is strictly verboten.

In the UK the official inflation reading is at around 5 percent, but nevertheless in October the Bank of England embarked on another round of “quantitative easing”. It has so far expanded its balance sheet by another £50 billion in not even three months, which constitutes balance sheet growth of about 20 percent. What we have experienced in the UK in 2011 provides a good forecast in my view for the entire Western world for 2012: rising unemployment, weak or no growth, failure of the government to rein in spending, growing public debt, further expansion of the central bank’s balance sheet, rising inflation.

Death of a safe haven

And what about Switzerland? Here the central bank expanded its balance sheet by 40 percent over just the first three quarters of the year, and almost tripled the monetary base over the same period of time. Most of this even occurred before the 6th of September, the day on which Mr. Hildebrand, the President of the Swiss National Bank, told the world and his fellow Swiss countrymen and women that the whole safe-haven idea was rubbish and that Switzerland was now joining the global fiat money race to the bottom.

Deflation has become the bogeyman of the policy establishment. It must be avoided at all cost! Of course for most of us regular folks deflation would simply mean a tendency toward lower prices. It would mean that the capacity of the capitalist economy to increase the productivity of labour through the accumulation of capital and to thus make things more affordable over time (a true measure of rising general wealth) would accurately be reflected in falling nominal prices. The purchasing power of money would increase over time. This, however, would require a form of hard and apolitical money. Instead we are constantly told that our economy needs never-ending monetary debasement in order to function properly. We are constantly told to fear nothing more than deflation, which can only be averted by a determined government and a determined central bank. And the never-ending supply of new fiat money.

Appropriately, there is no talk of exit strategies any longer.

Given the size of the already accumulated imbalances I think a stop to this madness of fiat money creation would be painful at first but hugely beneficial in the long run. I am the last to say that no risk of a very painful deflationary correction exists. But a correction is now unavoidable in any case, and every other policy option will make the endgame only worse. Even if I am wrong on the near-term outlook on inflation and even if all this money-printing does not lead to higher inflation readings imminently, it will still be a hugely disruptive policy. Money injections obstruct the dissolution of imbalances and invariably add new imbalances to the economy, including new debt and capital misallocations, that will make even more aggressive money printing necessary in the future.

The nationalization of money and credit

Herein lies a fundamental contradiction in our present system: The desire for constant inflation and constant credit expansion requires that the banks be shielded from the effects of their own business errors. Allowing capitalism’s most efficient regulators, profit and loss, to do the regulating, would mean that banks could face the risk of bankruptcy – this is, of course, the ultimate disciplinary force in capitalism. This could then lead to balance sheet correction and thus periods of deflation. Ergo, banks cannot be capitalist enterprises at full risk of bankruptcy as long as constant credit growth and inflation are the overriding policy goals. The constant growth of the banking sector must be guaranteed by the state through the unlimited provision of bank reserves from a lender-of-last resort central bank.

That banks get ever bigger, that they routinely hand out multi-million dollar bonuses, and that they frequently get bailed out, is not a result of the greed of the bankers – a stupid explanation anyway, only satisfactory to the intellectually challenged and perennially envious – but is integral to the fiat money system.

Banking under state protection ultimately means banking under state control. In the end it means state banking. And this is where we are going.

Last week the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England announced plans to tighten the control over the balance sheet management and the risk-taking of private banks. This is just the beginning, believe me. The nationalization of money and credit will intensify in 2012 and beyond. More regulation, more restriction, more control. Not only in defence of the bankrupt banks but also the bankrupt state. We will see curbs on trading, short-selling restrictions and various forms of capital controls.

A system of state fiat money is incompatible with capitalism. As the end of the present fiat money system is fast approaching the political class and the policy bureaucracy will try and defend it with everything at their disposal. For the foreseeable future, capitalism will, sadly, be the loser.

The conclusion from everything we have seen in 2011 is unquestionably that the global monetary system is on thin ice. Whether the house of cards will come tumbling down in 2012 nobody can say. When concerns about the fundability of the state and the soundness of fiat money, fully justified albeit still strangely subdued, finally lead to demands for higher risk premiums, upward pressure on interest rates will build. This will threaten the overextended credit edifice and will probably be countered with more aggressive central bank intervention. That is when it will get really interesting.

We live in dangerous times. Stay safe and enjoy the holidays.

In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues.

THE EURODOLLARS ESTIMATE IN THE CHART BELOW IS BASED ON THE BIS BANKING ESTIMATES from Commercial Banks and may not include official reserves held by Central Banks. As you know the Federal Reserve stopped reporting Eurodollars some years ago, with the consequence that it also stopped reporting M3 money supply. I like to think of Eurodollars and banking system derivatives as the Fed’s off-balance-sheet method of monetization and policy implementation, with plausible deniability.

Swap lines are provided to other Central Banks, and they in turn make the loans to their member banks, and from there to their customers. So this eurodollar creation is made outside the real domestic economy, and therefore has no immediate effect on domestic money supply and prices at the end of the money chain. But the effect is there, and the smart money closer to the financial system sees it coming. I do not know if the Fed’s swap line activity actually shows up immediately in their Balance Sheet and therefore the Adjusted Monetary Base. But I think it is fairly obvious that if swaps are used to create dollars by foreign central banks, who in turn loan those dollars to their own members, the impact of that broader dollar creation will only be felt with a significant lag in the domestic US economy. But it will be felt at some point.

When the Fed was tracking Eurodollars, I believe that they were not counting certain assets, or liabilities from the banks point of view, as money.  What exactly those assets might be and how liquid they are is a open question.  How much of them were held in Agency debt, and how much in Treasury debt?  Is a liquid obligation held by a foreign source part of the broad money supply, or not?  Since it can be quickly converted into dollars, and then into another currency, leaves little question that it is potential money at least.

At least part of the problem being faced by Europe in this crisis is the sharp point of the deleveraging of US assets underlying dollar denominated debt.   And if foreign confidence in the US dollar debt breaks, the losses would be daunting for the holders of that debt, so there will first be a rush into Treasuries and away from Agency debt and CDOs.  This will be like the ocean retracting, causing people to flock to the shore in wonder at the cheapness of the debt.  But eventually the returning tsunami of US dollars may very well swamp the Fed’s Balance Sheet and the domestic US economy and the savings of many. The hyper-inflation of financial paper is happening quietly and  off the books. The growth rate in derivatives held by the Banks is mind boggling. And how this will manifest in the real world economy is not fully known. A good sized chunk of the financial system may simply vaporise.  And I suspect that the policy makers will heavily allocate the damage to the least powerful members of the private sector.

Ownership of the real economy will continue to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Stagflation is the most likely outcome because of this lack of reform and the rise of a self-serving oligarchy. As for the US Dollar, as I have said on numerous occasions, inflation and deflation are at the end of the day a policy decision. Period. Those who see a hyper-deflation or a hyper-inflation as inevitable elude my knowledge of the facts as they are. The Fed owns a printing press, and it uses it selectively.

Speaking of lags, I think the unusually long lag between the growth in Eurodollars and the price of Gold can be attributed to the gold sales programs by the Western Central Banks. Once those programs were suspended, and the Banks turned again into net buyers, the gold price rose dramatically. The most recent Eurodollar operation of the Central Banks in relieving the Dollar short squeeze in euro is not yet in the totals.

It should also be noted that there are other correlations one can use in determining the gold price, most notable ‘real interest rates.’ However, there are linkages amongst all the variables, given a non-organic increase in the money supply and artificially low interest rates for example being among them. So, when will the price of gold stop rising? Most likely when the Central Banks stop printing money, and return to transparently set market based interest rates and a productively reformed financial system. ‘Not on the horizon’ does come to mind.

I do not know if it will happen in gold or silver first, but the price management schemes that have been in place for a few decades now in the metals markets are reaching a tipping point. To paraphrase what Kyle Bass recently said, ‘There is $80 billion in open interest in gold futures and options, and there is $2.4 billion in deliverable gold at the exchange. The exchange is a fractional reserve system, and they plan for a one percent redemption. In the event of a greater demand for redemption, they assume that price will take care of it. The decision for a fiduciary is simple; take your billion in gold out now.’

And the situation in the silver market is even worse. It is a disaster waiting to happen. At some point a ‘black swan’ event, or perhaps something the classical world would have simply called ‘nemesis,’ is going to knock the US futures market off its foundations.  The government and exchanges will seek to force a solution on market participants through the de facto seizure of positions and accounts, with a settlement dictated by the Banks. MF Global looks like a dry run for that much larger default. They will say once again that ‘no one could see it coming.’  And the truth will fall into the same credibility trap that has swallowed all the other financial scandals, cover ups and bailouts since the S&L crisis.

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan of Cairo, Foreign Affairs wrote:

“Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable.

 It is no surprise that one hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the Middle East. The critical issue in both cases is the artificial suppression of volatility – the ups and downs of life – in the name of stability. It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability “tail risks” to disappear from policymakers’ fields of observation… 

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to “Black Swans” — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.”

It is not yet clear when, or exactly how, but it seems inevitable that this scheme of the Anglo-American banking cartel will founder on the hard rocks of gold, silver, and the will of the people to be free, if they have but the mind to use it.

In a nutshell: Corporatocracy has replaced capitalism

CAPITALISM FIXES PROBLEMS AND PRESERVES DEMOCRACY: Capitalism is what we should be relying on to fix our problems. Capitalism has it’s own ecosystem, just like biology’s ecosystem. An economic ecosystem that weeds out the weak, has parasites that eat the failures and new bacteria that evolves and grows replacements for that which failed. A system that keeps everything in balance.

The problem is we are no longer a capitalistic society. What we were taught in school is now utter and absolute nonsense. Capitalism is a thing of the past. As outlined in “It’s Not A Financial Crisis – It’s A Stupidity Crisis”, we created two back to back bubbles. The air out of the Tech Bubble was sucked up for fuel by our next stupidity crisis: The Housing Bubble.

Now, after the second Stupidity Crisis there isn’t a third bubble to inflate. If we still lived in a capitalistic environment the banks and financial institutions that created loans for folks who should have remained renters and then sold those loans as investments to pensions and countries would have been cleansed by capitalism’s ecosystem. But that isn’t what happened.

In a very anti-capitalistic move the government decided that stupidity and criminal activity should be rewarded. I’d say they took our money, but it is worse, we didn’t have that much money. So they borrowed the money in our name. The loan has a variable rate. They borrowed so much money that our kids cosigned the loan. In fact, our kid’s future kid’s signed on the dotted line.

That is unequivocally immoral. They gave that borrowed money to a bunch of morons as a reward for stupidity. Morons who created subprime loans, liar loans, no income, no documentation loans and other fraudulent instruments. Morons bundled that trash, got it rated AAA and then sold these turds or weapons of mass destruction that they had the audacity to name complex financial instruments or derivatives to pension funds, countries and other “investors”. Then it all blew up.

Big surprise. For blowing up the world’s economy this Stupidity Crisis was falsely named an Economic Crisis by CNBS and 535 morons on a hill in DC (Ron Paul and a few other fiscally responsible adults excluded). The idiots who created the mess were rewarded with a 700 billion dollar “bailout”. This “bailout” was anything but a bailout and had a price tag of anything but 700 billion. The actual price tag is closer to 11 trillion and puts us on the hook for another 13-17 trillion – not counting interest.

Think about that for a second. This stupidity crisis is the equivalent of our Federal Debt which took a generations of politicians over a hundred years to wrack-up. For anyone who still believes we live in a free country where capitalism reigns please show me one economic textbook which states that failure, and fraud get rewarded with borrowed taxpayer money. For anyone who believes we live in a democracy please show me a textbook that says the government will en-debt you and your kids and their kids to pay for a failed business. How is that democratic?

“Law of Morons”: Years ago, while serving on a committee I came to a sad realization. Like gravity, there is the another invisible force which I dubbed “The Law of Morons”. Put a group of very intelligent, well meaning people in a room together, put them on a committee or some governmental body that is devoid of guiding principles or merit-based decision making and “The Law of Morons” will prevail. The collective IQ will drop to the smallest shoe size in the room. And hope for loafers, because collectively this body won’t be able to tie anything together – not even a single shoelace.

Government Creates Problems: Basically our government is comprised of many well meaning intelligent people who for whatever reason, re-election, greed the “Law of Morons”, corporate puppet strings (read: lobbyist), self interest, corporatocracy or whatever else, do nothing but create massive problems. Lack of regulation, too much regulation.

And without any uncertainty – too much DEBT along with a deficit that will NEVER be paid. They have failed us. Terribly! With debt and a failed capitalistic society our democracy is now at risk. Serious risk.

A democratic society requires a stable and effectively functioning economy. I trust that we and our successors at the Federal Reserve will be important contributors to that end. – Alan Greenspan

Serious irony there unless he was talking about the end of a democratic society. Greenspan was primarily responsible for muzzling Brooksley Born’s attempt to regulate derivatives. 

Our deficit requires that we counterfeit “money” to service our debt payments. Forget about GDP, it is a bogus measure cooked by the BEA (US Bureau of Economic Analysis). GDP is so baked that it makes the folks who cooked Enron’s books look like saints. Let’s focus on what we take in and what we pay out. We take in about 2 trillion in taxes and other revenues. We borrow about 2 trillion of which about 1 trillion must be taken off for debt service, and we spend well over 4 trillion.

To deal with the 1.6 trillion plus dollar shortfall we just print/counterfeit it. This debases the value of every dollar we hold, stealing wealth from every hard working American. It causes the need for more dollars to be injected into the system, which increases the amount of taxes that Americans pay.

There are only two crimes listed in our Constitution: Treason and Counterfeiting.

“Solutions Create More Problems” ~ Al Bartlett (Worked on the Manhattan Project).

To the question, “Is there any intelligent life on earth to change our future to a sustainable one?” Dr. Bartlett replied, “the bigger question is there any intelligent life in Washington, DC?”

We have a Corporatocracy: Not capitalism.

Corporatocracy: A government that serves the interest of, and may de facto be run by, corporations.

Some states have government workers who have powerful unions that influence the government’s decisions. California has a massive pension mess, created in large part by government unions and elected officials who have catered to these unions.

“Too Big To Fail” is living proof that capitalism is dead. These TBTF institutions that blew up the economy in 2008 with their stupidity crisis, at the very least deserved to fail. They blew it. That is the definition of capitalism. You do well you are rewarded, you screw up you close shop. You commit fraud and you do time.

But with a Corporatocracy you have Hank Paulson – a former Goldman Sachs CEO worth about 700 million dollars who winds up becoming our past Secretary of the Treasury. There is a serious distinction between a civil servant and someone who serves a corporation, especially the last corporation he worked for. His salary was only six figures, but his benefit was that he got to cash out of his stocks and pay no taxes. He gave the morons who blew up the economy 700 billion dollars. He had another former Goldman Sachs employee disperse the funds while the current CEO of Goldman Sachs professed to be “Doing God’s work.”

The movie “The Corporation” can be viewed at NetFlix or online with Hulu.

In Summary: Our debt and our inability to revive capitalism and cut the waste in government will be our demise. Sadly, the only glimmer of hope I see is that Corporatocracy will destroy itself. I say sadly because it will destroy the average American citizen like some parasite that kills its host. Capitalism is dead and that is why we are totally screwed.

My faith in the 5Gs: (G*(religious edit)d, Gold, Guns, Grub and The Government Will Continue to Screw It Up) remains strong.

I STILL THINK THE MOST LIKELY SCENARIO IS THAT SOME AGREEMENT TO AGREE IS MADE AT THE SUMMIT, which is then followed up by increased printing from the ECB, coupled with new Fed policies and fresh IMF money.  Although that still seems the most likely, I am getting concerned that Europe is once again missing the point.

Many EU leaders seem to actually believe that the Treaty changes are important.  The reality is the market could care less about treaty changes.  The market cares about only one thing, that the ECB will announce new, bigger, more aggressive sovereign purchases.  That’s all the market cares about.  The market believes that the treaty changes provide an excuse for the ECB and IMF to ramp up their efforts.  The EU can do all the treaty changes it wants, but if it is not followed up with aggressive new printing policies, the markets will sell-off.

Not only are politicians acting as though the treaty changes mean much, there is even talk about being able to implement changes without national votes. That idea horrifies me on a personal level as it is yet again trashing any sense of democracy, but it is bad for the markets.  I have been assuming that the meeting will result in another agreement to agree. That is relatively easy to pull together. Since it doesn’t really mean much, any countries that aren’t really on board, can be cajoled into holding hands for the photo op and pretending they agree long enough for the ECB and IMF to throw more money at the problem.

Agreement is far less likely if real permanent changes are being implemented. It is one thing to agree to the plan on the condition that you have to go back and get approval. It is much more risky for someone to agree to permanent changes implemented using some backdoor legal technique. Talk of actually implementing policy action this week is actually a negative as it makes it less likely that they can announce a “successful” summit.

On a side note, my favorite part of the proposal is the fines for going over the approved limits. So countries that have the biggest deficits will be fined, adding to those deficits? Debtor’s prison never worked very well, so why this would accomplish much is beyond me and would likely be waived any time it could be used. But no one on Wall Street has bothered to read the treaty proposals because no one cares, all anyone cares about is that the ECB uses it as an excuse to print.

Yesterday’s FT rumor of ESM and EFSF working together was yet another reason to be afraid that Europe doesn’t get it. Not only would implementing both at the same time place the AAA rated countries at greater risk of downgrade, it ignores the fact that EFSF has been a total failure. I thought Europe had moved beyond floating yet another iteration of something that hasn’t worked. The fact that they haven’t is a potential indication that the printing presses aren’t going to be turned on as soon as the market would like.

Finally, there is more and more talk about what the national central banks can do. People are acting as though they were cleaning the living room, and found some money when they lifted up the cushions on the couch.  This is not “found” money. Participants and lenders are well aware of these reserves.  They can be used for example to fund loans to the IMF to lend back to some countries, though I don’t fully understand why they can’t just lend to the countries directly, but I assume there is some law that lending to the IMF lets them circumvent. But there will be a cost to these actions. There will be a consequence, and although it will later be viewed as “unintended” the consequences are actually foreseeable. The countries with large reserves at the national central bank level have a reduced cost of funds because of those reserves. Lenders are not always totally stupid. There is value that is being realized from having those reserves. Using them to create loans for the IMF will impact that country’s ability to borrow. Plain and simple.

The fact that many pundits are treating this as newfound money that can be used any which way, without consequences is absurd and is yet another example of why so many ideas have failed. Any plan that raids the national central banks for money for the PIIGS needs to be thought through more carefully and the potential costs need to be addressed. The cost/benefit analysis may be worth the risk, but I suspect serious analysis would show that it is a bad idea. The cost/benefit should be about zero since it is just shifting money from one place to another. There really is no obvious reason to believe that this is a net positive. In the real world it is likely negative because as we have seen time and again, these changes break the existing model and that causes confusion which more than offsets any potential benefit (not triggering CDS is a shining example).

So while we limp along towards the most likely outcome, the risk of disappointment or even outright failure continues to grow. The inability to hold yesterday’s rumor rally is a signal that the market has moved well past the short squeeze phase and is now trading long.

I CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL THAT WE ARE WATCHING A PERFORMANCE THIS WEEK. It feels like the actions, the meetings, and the statements are all very scripted. It seems reasonably clear which ending they are going for, but many of their actions also fit the “alternative” ending so it remains imperative to be cautious.

Roles for “bit” players have been cut

Last week, for the first time, the EU seemed to be able to muzzle the minor players and even limit the lines of the big players. The Finance minister summit was a failure. Nothing useful came out of it. EFSF was a total flop. The bank backstop plans are at a national level and revolve around the idea of getting banks to borrow even more in the short term and not extend their maturities.

In spite of the obvious failure, there were relatively few comments. Rather than getting headlines of disputes, or even headlines of bigger and better ways to leverage, they seemed to let it die a relatively calm death and move on. This was a chance for every finance minister to get their quotations in the news, but they seemed reasonably constrained. There were far fewer comments about the ECB or even from ECB members. To me, it seems that the big players (Merkozy and Draghi) have taken control of the play and are trying to get it to the ending they want.

The “Script”

Germany took great pains last week to distance themselves from ECB decisions. The speeches made it clear that the ECB should be “independent”.  This has been taken as a sign that Germany is relenting on letting the ECB print. By affirming the ECB’s independence, Germany can, in theory, explain that it wasn’t responsible for the printing. There is also a chance that this is a way to take the blame off of Germany if the ECB decides not to print.  That seems less likely, but not everyone, especially at the ECB, believes printing is a solution, so this could be a way for them to take the focus off of Germany’s “nein”.

According to the script, Merkel and Sarkozy will become the Merkozy again tonight so that they can ride into this week’s summit with a “renewed joint focus”, blah, blah, blah. There is no way that they don’t act as though they have some agreement (even if they don’t). We won’t know what is discussed, we won’t know how much time is spent working out plans for a summit failure, all we will get is another handholding moment meant to encourage the market. I suspect that more time “off screen” will be spent discussing preparations for a failed summit, but all we will see is smiling confident faces.

At this point, I will give the politicians some credit. For the first time in months they seem to be writing the script. They aren’t just taking whatever script Wall Street hands them, and trying to act that out. The Wall Street scripts haven’t worked and have been unbelievable. The  politicians are finally taking control and trying to develop their own plan, and selling Wall Street on how viable it is. Since they are politicians, they are actually trained at figuring out what can get done and selling it to the people.  It probably won’t work, but at least they are doing what they are good at, and it would be hard to do worse than listening to another round of self-serving Wall Street advice.  On a refreshing note, at least we have agreement on something, Wall Street and politicians now both think the other group doesn’t understand anything and has no sense of timing.

The “puppets” are pushing through austerity in Italy and Greece. They can be held up as shining examples to other countries of what needs to be done. They aren’t the heroes of the story, but are there so that the Merkozy can point them out and show that i) it can be done, and ii) when it is done, the EU and IMF will come through with additional funds.  The “it” they got done won’t be well defined (but this is a movie, not the real world anyways) but the reward those good countries receive will be highlighted.

So the meeting will have Merkozy telling the smaller and problematic countries what a great future lies ahead for the eurozone. They will talk about the sacrifices they are making to ensure the viability of the future. There will be no criticism of the plan as only “friends and family” reports will get the inside scoop, and the “trailer” will be played over and over as part of the advertising campaign. We, the audience, will suspect that all the best parts of the play are in the “trailer” but we won’t be able to dig deep enough to argue against it.

The puppets will tell the other countries how happy they are that they have finally adopted austerity with growth to move forward and that they are excited about this opportunity to be part of the renewed commitment to the eurozone. Anyone who tries to figure out how austerity and growth work together, or where the money is coming, or any other details, will be escorted from room, and will be Clockwork Oranged into reading “fringe blogging websites” until they accept that details are bad, and only vague notions and slogans can “solve” anything.

At the end of the day, any holdouts will get invited to special meetings with the Merkozy. This is where they will be asked what they want to get in order to support the agreement, and reminded, that it is only an agreement in principle so they might as well say yes now, and they can always reject it later. These dark little meetings where the bribes are given and the futility of the agreement are discussed will only be available on the director’s cut, but will make people cringe when they realize what went on.

So in the end, according to script, everyone will get a chance for a joint communiqué and photo up where they talk about their commitment to implement these progressive changes. Every person who truly thinks about it for more than a minute, will know that it is a sham. They will see what has gone on, but it won’t matter. The “critics” will fall all over themselves to proclaim the success of the summit and that we are witnessing the birth of a new and better Euro. For a few days at least, the airwaves will be filled with the excitement that the “great leadership” exhibited by the Merkozy, and the diligence of the puppets, has led to such a monumental agreement. The future will be so bright, some might even “wear shades” when they discuss what has been accomplished.  Tears wouldn’t even shock me.

Then before anyone can complain that the positive reviews were bought, or that the script is flimsy, we will see the next wave of activity. This will be like a giant publicity machine, trying to turn a horrible movie into an Oscar winner through the sheer strength of publicity and graft.

The ECB will cut rates by 50 bps. The ECB will announce further participation in the secondary markets and hint at the ability and willingness to print money. The IMF will announce some new programs. The EFSF will start participating in the primary market. Even the Fed might hint at future QE (if not actually doing anything).

Then the leaders can sit back and hope their magic works.  Hope that their story has been bought and that the markets can take off and that they won’t actually have to implement much.  Yes, I think this is the key here.  They know that the treaty agreement changes are unlikely to be implemented.  They know the ECB has limits, that the IMF is going to struggle to do what people seem to believe they can do, they just hope that this is enough to give the markets so much confidence that they don’t have to do anything.  A market that can swing 6% on a 50 bp rate cut, might be manipulated into going so high that confidence is regained, long enough to buy time.

The “alternative ending”

So far, the directors have rejected the alternative ending. They don’t think that America in particular is ready for a non Hollywood ending, but they are filming some scenes just in case.  Fortunately many of the scenes are exactly the same as in the preferred ending. In the alternative ending, Merkozy and the puppets can’t convince everyone to go along with the communiqué. They can’t convince them that it is really meaningless so there is no point to disagree. Somehow the summit ends without the decision to move forward.

If there is no agreement, then there will be no photo op, but the ECB will cut rates by 50 bps. The ECB will announce emergency actions to maintain stability in secondary markets while more discussions occur within the EU The IMF will announce some new programs. The EFSF will start providing capital to banks. The Fed will announce QE3 in an effort to fight deflation arising from the failure of the eurozone.

The alternative ending may actually be the right solution. Bank share prices would be hit hard. Countries will restructure their debt at the expense of banks and pension funds but could manage the new debtloads.  Pension funds, after the losses, will have no choice but to cut benefits to reasonable levels.  Somehow in this era where bank share price declines are equated with Armageddon, I don’t think we see the alternative ending yet.  Extend and pretend is just so much more appealing.

We will go through the motions of the planned scripts. Many will shake their heads as the markets respond, but sooner or later (probably sooner), even those who fell for the media blitz will realize nothing is resolved.  The problems are bigger than ever, and we will have to revert to a new plan.  A plan that will have far less ability to contain the problem than it would now, because too many resources will have been wasted again.

Some strange “sub-plots”

There are a couple of sub-plots, that so far seem to be more like loose ends rather than being incorporated into the main plot.  Neither fit in very well with the script as planned, but would take a prominent role in the alternative ending.

The Italian budget, which is helping today’s rally, includes provisions for Italy to guarantee new issues for its banks. So a plan that is meant to allow Italy to tap the market for its own, already large, needs is adding more potential debt?  Sooner or later, the fallacy that guarantees don’t count has to end. If we were on risk-off mode, or afraid that the ECB wouldn’t just print, this news would be distressing. How can Italy really guarantee debt for its banks when its ability to issue debt remains in question?  This is so unbelievable as to border on ludicrous, but it doesn’t fit into the main plot, so for the moment we are using the “suspension of belief” technique to move past this issue, but really, this is concerning, and shows how little true agreement there is amongst countries, and how willing they are to use words like guaranty as a “costless solution” to anything, in spite of the fact that a guaranty is neither costless nor a solution.

The other little side-plot is at the IIF. According to Bloomberg last week, Hung Tran, deputy managing director of the IIF said that a Greed deal “may be used as a prototype or a template for potential situations in other countries”.  This was at a presentation he was giving at a hedge fund’s offices (which seems weird to me).  Since no one on Wall Street with P&L responsibilities had ever heard of the IIF until a few months ago, we can only assume that most people view this as Tran’s attempt to extend his 15 minutes of fame into 17 minutes or a job offer.  That is reasonable, because in spite of the big sounding titles this is largely a lobbying group that carries no weight with the banks.  On the other hand, this little speech fits perfectly with the alternative ending theory.  As mentioned above, each country would restructure to a certain degree, and the banks would bear the brunt of their own bad decisions.  The comment that the Greek deal (which isn’t close to done, and I’m not sure the IIF is still involved in) could be used as a template, is very different than what Sarkozy said last week, but is truly scary if you think about it.  Right now it is a dangling loose end in the plot and is probably meaningless as the character who said it, is so minor, but….

Watch the movie, but don’t buy the ending

The play or movie will play out according to plan.  We may get some brief dips in the market before the finish, but you probably need to accept the plot for now and go along for the right.  Too many forces are pushing too hard for this not to play out according to the script.  At some point it will be time to short the rally, but so long as the words of politicians and actions of central banks can drive the market higher, it is still too early to short, because we will get words from politicians and actions from central banks.

Any sense that the photo op scene at the end of the week is going to be cut, then get ready for a huge sell-off.  If they cannot create the photo op at the end of this week, we will hit new lows.  Vol is down, options are cheaper than they have been in awhile, so deep out of the money puts is best way to play the unlikely, but realistic alternative ending.

THE EUROPEAN DEBT BUBBLE HAS BURST, AND THE REPRICING OF RISK AND DEBT CANNOT BE PUT BACK INTO THE BOTTLE. It’s really this simple, Europe: either rebel against the banks or accept decades of debt-serfdom. All the millions of words published about the European debt crisis can be distilled down a handful of simple dynamics. Once we understand those, then the choice between resistance and debt-serfdom is revealed as the only choice: the rest of the “options” are illusory.

The euro enabled a short-lived but extremely attractive fantasy: the more productive northern EU economies could mint profits in two ways: A) sell their goods and services to their less productive southern neighbors in quantity because these neighbors were now able to borrow vast sums of money at low (i.e. near-”German”) rates of interest, and B) loan these consumer nations these vast sums of money with stupendous leverage, i.e. 1 euro in capital supports 26 euros of lending/debt.

The less productive nations also had a very attractive fantasy: that their present level of productivity (that is, the output of goods and services created by their economies) could be leveraged up via low-interest debt to support a much higher level of consumption and malinvestment in things like villas and luxury autos.

According to Europe’s Currency Road to Nowhere (WSJ.com):

Northern Europe has fueled its growth through exports. It has run huge trade imbalances, the most extreme of which with these same Southern European countries now in peril. Productivity rose dramatically compared to the South, but the currency did not.

This explains at least part of the German export and manufacturing miracle of the last 12 years. In 1999, exports were 29% of German gross domestic product. By 2008, they were 47%—an increase vastly larger than in Italy, Spain and Greece, where the ratios increased modestly or even fell. Germany’s net export contribution to GDP (exports minus imports as a share of the economy) rose by nearly a factor of eight. Unlike almost every other high-income country, where manufacturing’s share of the economy fell significantly, in Germany it actually rose as the price of German goods grew more and more attractive compared to those of other countries. In a key sense, Germany’s currency has been to Southern Europe what China’s has been to the U.S.

Flush with profits from exports and loans, Germany and its mercantilist (exporting nations) also ramped up their own borrowing – why not, when growth was so strong?

But the whole set-up was a doomed financial fantasy. The euro seemed to be magic: it enabled importing nations to buy more and borrow more, while also enabling exporting nations to reap immense profits from rising exports and lending.

Put another way: risk and debt were both massively mispriced by the illusion that the endless growth of debt-based consumption could continue forever. The euro was in a sense a scam that served the interests of everyone involved: with risk considered near-zero, interest rates were near-zero, too, and more debt could be leveraged from a small base of productivity and capital.

But now reality has repriced risk and debt, and the clueless leadership of the EU is attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. Alas, the debt loads are too crushing, and the productivity too weak, to support the fantasy of zero risk and low rates of return.

The Credit Bubble Bulletin’s Doug Nolan summarized the reality succinctly: “The European debt Bubble has burst.” Nolan explains the basic mechanisms thusly: The Mythical “Great Moderation”:

For years, European debt was being mispriced in the (over-liquefied, over-leveraged and over-speculated global) marketplace. Countries such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy benefitted immeasurably from the market perception that European monetary integration ensured debt, economic and policymaking stability.

Similar to the U.S. mortgage/Wall Street finance Bubble, the marketplace was for years content to ignore Credit excesses and festering system fragilities, choosing instead to price debt obligations based on the expectation for zero defaults, abundant liquidity, readily available hedging instruments, and a policymaking regime that would ensure market stability.

Importantly, this backdrop created the perfect market environment for financial leveraging and rampant speculation in a global financial backdrop unsurpassed for its capacity for excess. The arbitrage of European bond yields was likely one of history’s most lucrative speculative endeavors. (link via U. Doran)

In simple terms, this is the stark reality: now that debt and risk have been repriced, Europe’s debts are completely, totally unpayable. There is no way to keep adding to the Matterhorn of debt at the old cheap rate of interest, and there is no way to roll over the trillions of euros in debt that are coming due at the old near-zero rates.

Never mind actually paying down debt, sovereign, corporate and private – the repricing of risk and debt mean even the interest payments are unpayable. Consider this chart of one tiny slice of total EU debt:

There is no way to push the repricing genie back in the bottle, and so there is no way to roll over this debt and add to it – and to support the high-cost structure of Euroland’s welfare-state governments and their astounding debt, then debt must be added, and in staggering quantities.

Austerity won’t put the repricing/bubble burst genie back in the bottle. A funny thing happens when more of the national income is diverted to debt service (making interest payments and rolling over existing debt into new higher-interest debt): there is less surplus available for investment and consumption, which means that both productivity based on investment and consumption based on debt will plummet.

This leaves the nation with lower productivity and lower GDP, which means there is also less tax revenues being collected and more bankruptcies as companies and individuals accept the reality that their debts cannot be paid.

The repricing genie responds to this decline in national income, surplus and taxes by repricing risk of default even higher, and so the interest rate is also repriced higher. This makes servicing the mountain of existing debt even more costly, and so even less national income is available for consumption, investment and taxes.

This is called a positive feedback loop: each action reinforces the other, i.e. a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Debt and risk are repriced higher, the burden of debt service reduces national income available for investment, consumption and taxes, which further reprices risk higher, and so on.

So you see, Europe, there is only one choice: either accept the endless debt serfdom of ever-rising interest payments and lower income and productivity, or rebel against your pathetic lackey leadership and renounce the entire mountain of unpayable debt. Grasp the nettle and renounce the euro as the fundamental cause of your fantasy and collapse, and revert to national currencies which enable the market to discover the price of your underlying productivity and ability to borrow money.

Renouncing the euro does not mean renouncing the freedoms of the European Union: the two are only bound at the hip in the minds of your enfeebled leadership, who are in thrall to the leveraged-26-to-1 banks that are poised on the edge of insolvency.

Let the banks implode in bankruptcy, clear the worthless “assets” of debt from the books, and let the market price currencies and everything else. The only other choice is debt-serfdom.

All the other schemes and proposals are simply variations of one single fantasy: that the feckless leadership can fool the repricing genie with parlor tricks. They can’t. Everybody with any understanding of the situation knows that the debt bubble has already burst, and risk and debt cannot be repriced back to fantasy levels.

That repricing has already occurred, and cannot be revoked or shoved back in the bottle. The Great European Debt Bubble has already burst, and so now it boils down to a simple choice: debt serfom or open rebellion against the banks that profited so handsomely from the euro-fantasy.

There is no middle ground, as the debt cannot be repaid, not now and not in the future. It cannot be reshuffled, masked, or hidden; it can only be renounced.

It’s your choice, Europe; choose wisely. If you want a model for sanity and growth, look to Iceland. They renounced their unpayable debts and debt-serfdom, and let the market reprice their currency, debt and risk. The nightmare is past for them; they chose wisely. Now it’s your turn to choose.

The debt-serfdom will fall to you, not the banks or your Elites.

BEEN LOTS OF TALK AROUND LATELY REGARDING THE COLLAPSE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR AND WHAT THAT WOULD MEAN FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE WORLD. There has also been a lot of talk about the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America and how unhappy the people of the US are getting with this largely unknown organization.

These two forces are converging together in what could be a very serious and detrimental way as it relates to the average US citizen. This article will rely heavily on flawed analogies to help the lay person understand the inner workings of both the IMF and the Federal Reserve Bank. This is not to be taken as an academic piece and I would ask that it not be judged as such. This is meant to help those people that have recently woken up to the reality that their country has been hi-jacked and those that are desperate to get up to speed as quickly as possible. So let’s jump right into the thick of it shall we? First we need to start with what I hope are simple lessons so that you can take what I am about to teach you and apply it to the real world.

There is one thing that bankers and computer people love to do and that is to use big scary acronyms to scare off the simple folk. So here is your first lesson.

IMF and the SDR

So right off the bat we are using acronyms that mean absolutely NOTHING to the lay person and yet that is an actual sentence believe it or not… IMF stands for the International Monetary Fund. The SDR is short for Special Drawing Rights and is the currency of the IMF. The International Monetary Fund is a private bank that is used to help sovereign nations engage in international commerce. Just like if you owned a company and you used bank A, and your supplier used Bank B, the IMF would be the bank that both banks A and B used to transfer payments and credits back and forth to each other. To Company A and B (using Bank A and B) it would be seamless.

But the IMF does a whole lot more for the global economy. They are the creditor of last resort for a lot of countries. For if you want to engage in international commerce in the free world (meaning the world now) you must be a part of the IMF system. Should a country that is part of this system become over leveraged because of mismanagement and debt accumulation, the IMF stands ready to come to the rescue. To understand how this relationship has worked in the past (and the present); I MUST go into some history. I will keep it brief I promise.

To understand how the global monetary/commercial world works you have to go back to the end of World War II. Following the war the United States was alone as a major industrial power. The rest of the industrial countries were in shambles. The United States was also nearly alone as a producer of oil. It is this later point that needs to be highlighted.

The United States used its vast oil reserves and coupled it with a highly trained industrial labor force and put it to work in its vast expanse of industrial capacity to re-build the rest of the world. It is this fact that is at the very center of our current monetary system some 60 years later. So I will start with my first analogy…

The US Corp could be seen as a huge company like General Motors. Following WWII US Corp was the only company left with the capacity to make things and it had the working capital and energy to do what it wanted. US Corp went out into the world and started to acquire other businesses. First was Japan Corp which US Corp had beaten into a pulp during the war. US Corp decided that it was in its own best interest to build Japan Corp back up but it needed to make sure that it never again could threaten US Corp the way it did in WWII.  Japan Corp used its own currency called the YEN and US Corp obviously used the Dollar. So to make this all work, US Corp had to make sure that the workers at Japan Corp didn’t feel like the last of their country was being taken from them. To keep them vested in the viability of their own country it was very important to let them keep their own currency and their own political structure, albeit greatly modified under the surface. We allowed Japan Corp to keep their figurehead CEO (the Emperor) and we installed a new board of directors (Democratic institutions). We linked the Bank of Japan to US Corp’s bank the Federal Reserve Bank through a new institution called the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

If we were to compare this to General Motors this would be like GM buying another company and bringing it under the umbrella of the GM brand. So in this case Japan is like Pontiac and they are given free rein to run their subsidiary the way they see fit, SO LONG as they abide by the parent companies rules.

This setup worked wonderfully and within a decade Japan Corp was back on its feet and was supplying cheap labor and products for US Corp and with every single barrel of oil Japan Corp bought on the international market it further linked them with our monetary system.  To keep the Japanese citizens from feeling that it was the US Corp in charge of everything we came up with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Of course these institutions were funded initially by the United States and Great Britain and as such they were just pseudo US institutions. But it worked and the Japanese subsidiary of US Corp gladly bought oil and products from the United States in its own currency (the Yen) but it was linked via the IMF to the US Dollar. For you see US Corp linked everything that the industrial world needed to the US Dollar. All gold/oil/silver/food/etc were priced first in US Dollars and depending upon the relative “strength” of your currency to the US Dollar, this would dictate how much of your currency it would take to purchase a barrel of oil or an ounce of gold. This gave US Corp a huge advantage in the world as we produced almost everything anyways. We had most of the world’s oil supply and a very large portion of the food supply. We were the largest producer of the big complex things the world needed to rebuild. We allowed the smaller subsidiaries to produce the little stuff we needed or wanted. Japan Corp was great at the later, supplying us with small radios and other cool electronic gadgets.

US Corp built a company with dozens and dozens of subsidiaries, each one of them bringing something to the table either large or small. And as the world re-built, other countries wanted to get in on the good times and they voluntarily sold themselves to US Corp. Other countries were very reluctant to join our big happy company. Those countries fell into two groups. Either they were affiliated with Russia Corp or they wanted to stay neutral. But in a world that was moving fast towards globalization it became apparent that each country would have to choose a side lest they be shut out of the global market. For remember that the only way to gain access to US Corp’s vast array of markets and supplies is to be a part of the IMF/World Bank. It was the only way to convert your currency to other currencies (like the US Dollar to buy OIL!!).

I will end this history lesson there as I could get sucked in for hours explaining how US Corp and Russia Corp went to economic(and sometimes real) war with each other and how Russia Corp tried to have it both ways by linking themselves partially to the IMF to gain access to US Corps vast supplies and labor.

I will leave that to YOU to go out and study on your own as it is a story to rival any fictional book you have ever read. The important thing to take away here is that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are institutions that were created by the United States and Great Britain. It is a global system that allows countries using different currencies to exchange their goods and services with each other almost seamlessly. Remember also that the system was setup INITIALLY to allow US Corp to control the world’s most important supplies. Things like FOOD, OIL, COMMODITIES (gold,silver,etc) and the rest. At the time this system was created it was the United States that was supplying the lion’s share of these items. But as the decades have come and gone, these items have increasingly come from other parts of the world.  And a good portion of these countries are ones that were FORCED into our system either out of necessity or by direct manipulation of their country by forces outside their borders(meaning the US and the IMF).

CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HITMAN

This next part of our story is centered on how the US has maintained its spot at the top of the economic order even in the face of massive budget deficits and seemingly unending debt loads. The title of this section is called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, as I give a nod to a book of the same name written by a man named John Perkins. Mr. Perkins is a trained economists and his specialty was international finance. His job was to go out into the world and sell foreign leaders on US Corp and to convince them to get on board with our system. Or more importantly, it was his job to make sure that they were forever caught up in our system and that they did not attempt to leave our company.

For you see, there came a time when US Corp was no longer the biggest oil producer, so it was paramount that we lock up as many oil producing nations under the US Corp banner as possible. It was Mr. Perkins’ job to go out to these nations, most of which were considered very backwards by modern western standards, and convince them that we had something they needed. He made promises of vast loans of money from the IMF to help them modernise their economy and to help them fully exploit the vast resources that they controlled within their borders.

In many cases these were simple men who did not fully understand the deals that were being laid down before them. In fewer cases the leaders of these countries understood all too well the consequences of joining up with this new company. Mr. Perkins (and those like him) approached these leaders and promised them the world. They offered them access to US Corp’s vast array of weapons and industry. Were they to get on board they would be given access to weapons that would give them a huge advantage against countries they were enemies with. And to make sure we covered our bases we made the same deals with their enemies.

A few men stood up and tried to warn these countries that they were being played or they tried to rally these countries to stand against US Corp. These men to a one were assassinated or overthrown. When US Corp ran into stubborn leaders, they had a strange habit of being eliminated by “rival political forces”. These rivals almost always were sympathetic to US Corp.

And once these leaders signed up for the IMF loans, there was no turning back. In exchange for the Damns and bridges and schools and weapons, they only needed to agree to denominate their resources (chiefly oil) in US Dollars. This made the leaders of these countries fabulously wealthy beyond anything they could have imagined.

So after they were brought on as a US Corp subsidiary, every time they sold their oil to another country, it further entrenched them in the IMF system. When they wanted to build a lavish palace, they would sell oil on the markets and in return they would get US Dollars. They were simple people and there was little they could do with all these US Dollars. It did them no good to convert it back to their own currency as leaving it in US Dollars was much more lucrative. So they bought US Debt with this money as a long term savings plan or they used it to buy US weapons to protect their growing economy from their enemies.

And of course US Corp was no dummy; they were making the same deals with the enemies of these leaders.  As an example we were in bed very early with Iran Corp. Iran Corp showed great promise as being a large oil exporter. A man stood up against this system named Mohammad Mosaddegh.  He was western educated and understood all too well what the IMF was after. The economic hit men tried to get him on board with their plans but he refused. In 1953 a  coup d’état was initiated against his democratically elected government and he was successfully arrested and put under house arrest until his death some years later. Of course the “rival faction” was solidly in favor of linking their oil industry with the IMF and the United States.

This new government was brutal and ruled Iran with an iron fist. It was able to maintain control for many years until a new leader emerged in the late 1970’s by the name of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was decidedly against the plans of US Corp. So to counter this man’s ambitions of ruling the Middle East we got into bed with another leader. A man who was in charge of Iran’s chief enemy, a man named Saddam Hussein, who was the president of Iraq. We got Saddam on board with US Corp just as Iran fell to the Ayatollah and we supplied him with all the weapons he needed to stop Iran from expanding its power. He stayed in our good graces until the late 1980’s when he decided that HE wanted to break free of US Corps clutches. This time US Corp had to do its own dirty work and we stepped in to break Saddam’s back after he foolishly invaded Kuwait a rather small but incredibly important subsidiary of US Corp.

And it didn’t stop at oil. These economic hit men were active in South America and even Africa. All with the sole purpose of getting and keeping these countries entrenched in a system that placed the US Dollar at the center of the global economy with the IMF acting as the intermediary between US Corp and the rest of the modern economic world. It didn’t matter that US Corp was running huge deficits and spending money way in excess of what it really produced.  Because US Corp had its subsidiaries working overtime to make up the shortfall.

Because at all times and in almost every market, the US Dollar was always in demand, and because at all times the IMF was imposing its will upon the rest of the world, because without the IMF acting as an intermediary, global commerce could not happen. Every time a rival would rise up to usurp the US centric system they were quickly and usually efficiently eliminated.  So as we engaged in expensive wars and as we continued to lavish our citizens with ever more extravagant programs the rest of the world kept working to provide our shortfalls. Even when the US no longer could provide for its own oil usage and became an importer nation, the rest of the world played along. Even when in 1971 we ceased to be a nation that exported more than we imported, the rest of the world played along.

For over 40 years the world has played along with the US centric monetary system for one reason and one reason only. No one has come up with a better system and no one has had the balls to stand toe to toe with US Corp and knock us off our pedestal.  That is until now.

THE IMF CUTS US CORP LOOSE

I would like to go back to my US Corp as General Motors analogy once again. US Corp has become so large and with so many competing subsidiaries that it has become completely unmanageable. US Corp has bled so many of its most valuable brands dry that something must be done, because US Corp is going to drive the entire world into the gutter. So a creation that was started by US Corp is going to be used to dismantle the parent company (Corporate Office) in an attempt to salvage what is left of the productive subsidiaries.

US Corp has dug itself in so deep with its debts that there is no way it can ever be paid back. US Corp consumes so much of the world’s energy and resources for completely unproductive reasons that it must be sold off and reorganized.  And this is where the IMF and the SDR come into play.  The same men who organized and put into place the IMF are once again hard at work planning for the next big thing.

Following WWII it became apparent that if there was not some global order enforced on the world that World War III would likely be the result. These monetary elites decided that it was better to have economic wars, rather than global hot wars that killed millions and destroyed entire nations. These elites were even willing to allow for small, local and controllable wars to allow steam to be blown off. Why would they want these small wars? Simple, because war is the ULTIMATE cure for runaway inflation. War is the ultimate “creative destruction” in the economic world. War eliminates old and wasteful factories and pushes technologic advancement. And most important of all, a world always on the “VERGE” of war is a world that needs these financial elites to keep the peace and to fund massive and lucrative arms sales.

A culmination of problems has surfaced over the past 10 to 20 years that threatens the global economic order that these men put into place over 60 years ago. The first is that the United States is no longer an exporter nation, which in and of itself is not a deal breaker. The elites were actually able to use this as a positive as the average US Corp citizen is extended massive amounts of credit and encouraged to go out into the world and BUY BUY BUY!! This keeps the subsidiaries busy and their factories humming. We use our US Dollars to buy their stuff, they use those US Dollars to buy oil from IMF connected countries like Saudi Arabia, whom you remember ONLY accept US Dollars as payment for their oil.

They buy the oil from Saudi Arabia who is already awash in palaces and wealth so they only have one option. They use these excess US Dollars and they buy US Debt with it, which in turn allows US Corp to continue to overspend at will. This is called Petro (oil) Dollar (US) Recycling. It is the very base of the economic order of the planet.

But problems started to surface some decades ago (even as far back as Jimmy Carter) that oil production on the planet was starting to slow down and the growth needed to keep the US Petro Dollar System moving was starting to slow down.

To put the problem into context I will give you some startling numbers. The world on any given day produces approximately 82 Million Barrels of Oil per Day. This is abbreviated as MBPD. Nearly all of this oil is sold using US Dollars. On any given day the world consumes close to 79 or 80 Mbpd of oil. On any given day US Corp produces almost 7 Mbpd of oil. But here is the real problem, US Corp CONSUMES close to 22 Million Barrels of Oil every single day of the year. And every year we consume a little more and every year we produce a little less. This imbalance cannot go on forever and the question you should be asking yourself at this point is when? When will the world finally stand up to US Corp and save themselves?

Which leads me finally to point of this article, how will the IMF be used to stop US Corp from sinking the entire global economy into another Great Depression, which would likely lead to another global war?

First we must make some distinctions. First is that the US Federal Reserve Bank has absolutely no allegiance to this country. The financial elites who are brokering these deals (some of them are direct offspring of the men who created the financial world order following World War II) have NO ALLEGIANCE to this country. Their only allegiance is to ensure the viability of their economic world order. And it is becoming increasingly apparent to them that the workers of US Corp have grown far too complacent and far too demanding and are utilizing FAR TOO MUCH of the world’s increasingly scarce energy supplies.

Again to show you how big the inequalities are. US Corp consumes close to 22Mbpd of oil, which is close to 20 percent of the global supply, yet we only represent around 6% of the global population. The next biggest user of oil on the planet is China. They currently consume around 8Mbpd of oil and yet they have a population nearly double ours.

These inequalities were not a problem to the elites in the past because they don’t deal in equality; they deal in growth and ensuring that the economic order keeps them at the top. So when the US was using way more oil and resources on the planet than anyone else, they didn’t care. Because things were still growing and their economic order was never threatened.

That has changed and they are moving to adapt their economic order to this seismic change that is about to occur.

So if you have actually read this far, I congratulate you. That was a lot of history and bad analogies to finally get to the ultimate point of this article. Everything I have written above is verifiably true. Though I have glossed over a lot of facts and embellished a little bit for entertainment’s sake, the basic truth is that the United States has and IS ruling the economic world. The United States decades ago stopped being the top exporter nation and stopped being the top energy exporting nation. Since 1971 the United States has been a net DRAW on the world, as we continue to consume more and more, it is coming (as I have CLEARLY SHOWN) increasingly on the backs of third world nations who are sitting on resources that WE want and need to continue to grow our economy.

But there is a hard wall that we are hitting and that is a dramatic and irreversible slowing and/or halt of global energy supply growth. Without the energy to grow, the economic system that these elites have created will halt and quickly reverse. For you see GROWTH is not an option in the economic order they created. It is absolutely imperative that the global economy continues to grow.

But the global elites are up against a wall here. The United States has the largest supply of atomic and conventional weapons on the planet. Its citizens are completely oblivious to everything I spelled out above and then some. They are increasingly electing IDIOTS to run their country and it is only a matter of time before some person stands up before the people of this country and riding a gigantic wave of POPUPULISM, decides to throw the IMF and the Federal Reserve out of this country and retake it for ourselves. So these elites must act and with some sense of great urgency.

Unbeknownst to most in this country, the IMF has been increasing its monetary base though the use of SDR’s… Remember they are known as Special Drawing Rights. This is the currency of the IMF. If an IMF member gets into trouble and needs to be bailed out, they get loans in the form of SDR’s to use to restructure their economy. Well, the IMF has been busily running around the world buying gold and vastly increasing its supply of SDR’s.

What possible reason would the IMF need that much gold to back that many SDR’s? I feel it is beyond obvious that as the US Dollar enters its end game, that the IMF will step in and use the same tactics it has used over and over again against other nations over the decades. The United States is nearing the point of no return. In just 4 short years our government went from a budget deficit of only 230 billion, to a staggering 1.5 trillion dollar PER YEAR. We have added 4 trillion dollars to the national debt in less than 3 years. States and localities are finding it harder and harder to keep their massive payroll paid and business’ are getting squeezed from every angle as we need to increase taxes or slash spending or likely BOTH to keep the economic system rolling over each month.

But the debt is JUST PAPER!! What if the IMF stepped in and said they could help us out. That they would work with the Federal Reserve to link the SDR to the US Dollar and that they could take all that debt away? All we would have to do is break the link between the US Dollar and commodities and give that function up to the IMF. They would even weight the US Dollar very heavily in this IMF mixed basket of currency. For the IMF is suggesting that the SDR be comprised of a combination of the strongest economies in the world, along with oil and gold and a few other commodities.

What if they took away our debt and in its place the world traded SDR’s in order to maintain global commerce. Inside the United States it would be no different at first. In fact it would probably be pretty nice as our debt load would be greatly reduced. And with a heavily US Dollar weighted SDR currency at the IMF, we would still have an advantage over other countries as the US Dollar would still be worth more in the mix than the Yen or the Euro.

But the devil is in the details. Once the link between the US Dollar and Oil is broken the ability of the United States to print debt at will is gone forever. From that moment on it is up to the financial elites at the IMF to decide what the relative worth of the US Dollar is in comparison to the other parts of the basket.

And seeing as that the ultimate goal of the financial elites(IMHO)  is to greatly reduce the energy demand that the United States places upon the global economy for unproductive ends, it would stand to reason that they would embark upon a slow but steady reduction of the relative worth of the US Dollar. This would result in a reduction in the US standard of living to the point where we would be just like Italy or France or any number of other countries.

If you don’t think very deeply about it, it is only fair right? We don’t produce like we used to, it only stands to reason that we should be taken down a few levels. On the surface this argument holds a lot of water. And what I am proposing in response would ultimately lead the United States to a similar standard of living, possibly even lower. But what the IMF is moving towards is a continuation of a system the United States used for decades(and England used for centuries before us) to extract the wealth of the people of this earth to enrich themselves and to ensure that this new economic world order is never threatened.

If it is true that world energy levels have stalled out, it could be decades before any real increase in our way of life is achieved. In the mean time the financial elites will slowly bleed off all consumption in an attempt to keep the financial world functioning and to keep them at the top of the economic order.

I would propose a different route. It is a route that requires a large number of our countrymen to wake up and growth the hell up. I am not hopeful that this is even possible, but I am an optimist at my core. What if we just accept reality? What if we in the United States just broke free of this parasitic system that only exists to enrich a very few at the expense of BILLIONS of people? For at it very heart that is what our current system is all about.

The elites use the United States and all her power and influence to enforce a system that sucks all the wealth of the world to THEM. Sure we get some pretty tasty crumbs here in the United States, but in the grand scheme of things are we really that much better off than we were just 110 years ago in this country? Back then we were a largely agrarian country and though the work was back breaking at times, the TOTAL amount of time we spent working in those days as compared to now is not even close. We work months longer per year than we did back then.

Some people in this country are forced to work 50, 60 even 80 hours per week just to meet their basic “needs”. What if we threw off this parasitic system and learned to live within the energy footprint that we currently have? At 7 million barrels of oil per day and the large (but likely short lived) supply of Natural Gas and Coal and our technologic knowhow in the areas of Solar and wind, we could break free of this suicidal dependence upon the Global elites and their debt/growth machine.

EITHER WAY WE WILL END UP WITH A GREATLY REDUCED WAY OF LIFE. One way we do it from a place of strength and forethought. In the other it is thrust upon us likely for the next 6 or 7 decades with absolutely no chance for a relative recovery. Last time I checked, countries like Afghanistan and Libya and Turkey and Italy have never recovered at the hands of the IMF…  Why would we expect anything different?